Views of Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouche movement

Lyndon LaRouche (1922–2019) and the LaRouche movement have expressed controversial views on a wide variety of topics. The LaRouche movement is made up of activists who follow LaRouche's views.

Economics and politics

According to Matko Meštrović, emeritus senior research fellow at the Institute of Economics of Zagreb, Croatia, LaRouche's economic policies call for a program modeled on the economic-recovery program of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, including fixed exchange rates, capital controls, exchange controls, currency controls, and protectionist price and trade agreements among partner-nations, although Roosevelt generally pursued trade liberalization. LaRouche also calls for a reorganization of debt world-wide, and a global plan for large-scale, continental infrastructure projects. He rejects free trade, deregulation, and globalization.

Marxist roots

Lyndon LaRouche began his political career as a Trotskyist and praised Marxism, but he and the National Caucus of Labor Committees abandoned this ideology in the late 1970s. From then on, LaRouche no longer opposed private ownership of the means of production, and his analysis of political events is no longer phrased in terms of class.

According to Tim Wohlforth, during and after his break with Trotskyism, LaRouche's theory was influenced by what he called his "Theory of Hegemony" derived from Vladimir Lenin's view of the role of intellectuals in being a vanguard helping workers develop their consciousness and realize their leading role in society. He was influenced by Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony as an intellectual and cultural elite which directs social thought. LaRouche's theory saw himself and his followers as becoming such a hegemonic force. He rejected Gramsci's notion of "organic intellectuals" being developed by the working class itself. Rather, the working class would be led by elite intellectuals such as himself.

LaRouche was influenced by his readings of Rosa Luxemburg's ''The Accumulation of Capital'' and Karl Marx's '' Capital'' developing his own "theory of reindustrialization", saying that the West would attempt to industrialize the Third World, particularly India, and attempt to solve the economic crisis both by developing new markets in the Third World and using its cheap and surplus labor to increase profits and minimize costs (see neocolonialism.) To oppose this, LaRouche argued for a "reindustrialization" of the United States with himself at the vanguard of the effort allowing him to personally resolve the crisis of capitalism. Though his arguments have since been stripped of their quasi-Marxist language and citations, his core theories have remained essentially the same since the late 1960s.

''Dialectical Economics''

In the book ''Dialectical Economics: An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy'', which was published in 1975 by D. C. Heath and Company under the pen name Lyn Marcus, LaRouche tried to show that numerous Marxists—ranging from the '' Monthly Review'' group to Ernest Mandel, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and the "Soviet economists"—had failed to understand and to interpret correctly Marx's writing. Marxists he admired—apart from Marx himself—were Rosa Luxemburg and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky.

According to a review by Martin Bronfenbrenner in ''The Journal of Political Economy'', about half of the book was devoted to dialectical philosophy, "with a strong epistemological stress", with the other half devoted to discussions of economic and general history, anthropology and sociology, and actual economics, including a surprisingly large helping of business administration—Bronfenbrenner noted that LaRouche seemed to have "more private-business experience than the great majority of academic economists", including a familiarity with the way speculative overcapitalization, operating at the borders of white-collar crime, creates "fictitious capitals" that later do not match their actual earning power. Like Thorstein Veblen, LaRouche subscribed to an overcapitalization theory of economic depression.

According to Bronfenbrenner, LaRouche viewed conventional economics as a "withered arm of philosophy", which had taken a wrong turn toward reductionism under the influence of British empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume. LaRouche's definition of reductionism was as follows:

The fundamental fallacy of ordinary understanding is the delusion that the universe is reducible to simple substance, or—the more Hume-like view—that the content of human knowledge is limited to simple-substance-like, self-evident sense perceptions. This discredited outlook—whether it takes the naive mechanistic ormor the equivalent mechanistic outlook of empiricism—is termed ''reductionism''. All varieties of reductionism are formally premised on the fallacious assumption of formal logic, that the universe can be represented as discrete points interconnected by formal relations.

From this it followed, Bronfenbrenner said, that LaRouche viewed bourgeois economists' concern with ''prices'' as reductionism, versus the Marxian concern with ''values''. The reductionist fallacy then lies in adjusting a value theory like labor theory to fit in with price theory; in LaRouche's view, economists should work in the opposite direction.

According to Bronfenbrenner, LaRouche viewed capitalist America as headed for a kind of fascism not much better than that of the Nazis; but he noted that LaRouche's own vision of socialism, and the trade-off between necessity and freedom in a centrally planned economy, seemed apt to result in the justification of a different kind of dictatorship:

Judging from his controversial manner, aRoucheimpresses at least one reader as a Me-for-Dictator type to whom it would be dangerous to entrust the task of drawing any boundary between the domain of freedom and that of necessity or order.

LaRouche's campaign platforms

The campaign platforms of LaRouche and his followers have included these elements:
* A return to a gold-based national and world monetary system, and fixed exchange rates; and replacement of the central bank system, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, with a national bank;
* A war on drug trafficking and prosecution of banks involved in money laundering;
* An emphasis on large-scale economic infrastructure, including the building of a world land bridge of railroads and a tunnel under the Bering Strait, the building of nuclear power plants, accelerating research on fusion energy, the North American Water and Power Alliance, and rebuilding or nationalizing the country's steel industry;
*A crash program to build particle-beam weapons and lasers, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI);
*Opposition to the USSR and support for a military buildup to prepare for imminent war;
*Growth in food production and a farm debt moratorium;
*Low interest rates and opposition to the Gramm–Rudman balanced-budget law;

Later orientation

According to '' China Youth Daily Online'', LaRouche was once a Marxist, but later supported heavily regulated capitalism. He supported public control of financial capital and low-interest loans.

LaRouche said banks should not be bailed out, but be placed in receivership by the state. He said that a "firewall" should prevent state aid from being diverted to speculative entities, which should be allowed to fail, and that such failures would clean up the financial markets.

LaRouche believes in the principles of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and favors state intervention in the economy. LaRouche also said that he supported the approach of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who established a banking system geared to develop production.

Italian Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti said that he had encountered LaRouche at a debate held in 2007 in Rome, and that he appreciates LaRouche's writings. According to an article by Ivo Caizzi in '' Corriere della Sera'', a group of Italian Senators led by Oskar Peterlini asked the Berlusconi government to tackle the financial crisis using legislation developed by LaRouche in 2007. The legislation proposed that public money should save only the commercial infrastructure required for the financing of productive enterprises.

The "Triple Curve", or "typical collapse function", is an economic model developed by LaRouche which tries to illustrate the growth of financial aggregates at the expense of the physical economy and how this leads to an inevitably collapsing bubble economy. According to the ''China Youth Daily Online'' interview, LaRouche's main point is that the real economy (production) is dropping while the nominal economy (money and financial instruments) is going up. As the nominal economy greatly overreaches the real economy, an unavoidable economic crisis ensues.

Since 2000, the LaRouche movement has:
*Called for a moratorium on Third World debt.
*Opposed deregulation. According to LaRouche's publications, "LaRouche has consistently called for reregulation of utilities, transportation, health care (under the "Hill-Burton" standard), the financial (especially the speculative markets) and other sectors ..." They support the renewal of Glass–Steagall Act regulations on banks.
*In 2007, LaRouche proposed a "Homeowners and Bank Protection Act". This called for the establishment of a federal agency that would "place federal- and state-chartered banks under protection, freeze all existing home mortgages for a period of time, adjust mortgage values to fair prices, restructure existing mortgages at appropriate interest rates, and write off speculative debt obligations of mortgage-backed securities". The bill envisioned a foreclosure moratorium, allowing homeowners to make the equivalent of rental payments for an interim period, and an end to bank bail-outs, forcing banks to reorganize under bankruptcy laws. A LaRouche spokesman said that bank bail-outs "reward corrupt swindlers with taxpayer money". The proposal attracted support from Democrats at city council and state legislature level. Pennsylvania Democrat Paul Kanjorski opposed the bill, stating it would involve government seizure of "every American bank". Mike Colpitts of ''Housing Predictor'' stated that LaRouche's economic forecasts had been correct, and that he might have received more mainstream credibility had it not been for his controversial history.

Neoplatonism

LaRouche's philosophy references an old dispute between Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle believed in knowledge through empirical observation and experience. Plato believed in The Forms.
According to LaRouche, history has always been a battle between Platonists—rationalists, idealists and utopians who believe in absolute truth and the primacy of ideas—and Aristotelians—relativists who rely on empirical data and sensory perception. Platonists in LaRouche's worldview include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz. LaRouche states that many of the world's ills are due to the fact that Aristotelianism, as embraced by British philosophers like Locke, Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham and represented by "oligarchs", foremost among them wealthy British families, has dominated, leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical, embraces moral relativism, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed. LaRouche frames this struggle as an ancient one, and sees himself and his movement in the tradition of the philosopher-kings in Plato's '' Republic''.

LaRouche and his followers use Neoplatonism as the basis for an economic model that posits "the absolute necessity of progress". Economies evolve in stages as humanity devises new technologies, stages that LaRouche compares to the hierarchical spheres in Kepler's model of the solar system based on the Platonic solids. The purpose of science, technology and business must be to assist this progress, enabling the Earth to support an ever-growing humanity. Human life is the supreme value in LaRouche's world view; environmentalism and population control are seen as retrogressive steps, promoting a return to the Dark Ages. Rather than curtailing progress, because of dwindling resources, LaRouche advocates using nuclear technology to make more energy available to humanity, freeing humanity to enjoy music and art.

In LaRouche's view, the people opposing this vision are part of the Aristotelian conspiracy. They may not necessarily be in contact with one another: "From their standpoint, he conspiratorsare proceeding by instinct", LaRouche has said. "If you're asking how their policy is developed—if there is an inside group sitting down and making plans—no, it doesn't work that way ... History doesn't function quite that consciously." Left and right are false distinctions for LaRouche; what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook, a position that has led LaRouche to form relationships with groups as disparate as farmers, nuclear engineers, Black Muslims, Teamsters, pro-lifers, and followers of the Ku Klux Klan—even though LaRouche counts the Klan itself among his foes.

George Johnson, in ''Architects of Fear'' (1983), has described LaRouche's Neoplatonist conspiracy theory as a "distortion of a real philosophical distinction". He has written that the resulting philosophy can be applied to any number of situations in a manner that becomes plausible once one accepts its basic premise. In his view, it forms the foundation of a conspiracy theory that rationalizes paranoid thinking, an opinion echoed by John George and Laird Wilcox in ''American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists & Others'' (1996)., p. 2.

, p. 187ff.



Also see . Discussing LaRouche's view of history, they write: "We have found no person who has developed a more complex, or more ingenious, paranoid theory than Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr."

For the relationships LaRouche has formed, including with Klan followers, see .

For the list of friends and foes, see , pp. 22, 188, 192–193. See p. 22 for inclusion of the Klan among his foes.

For LaRouche on his philosophy, see Writing in ''The New York Times'' in 1989, Johnson described LaRouche as "a kind of Allan Bloom gone mad" who seems to "believe the nonsense he spouts", a view of the world in which Aristotelians use "sex, drugs and rock-and-roll" and "environmentalism and quantum theory" to support wealthy oligarchs and create a civilization-destroying "new Dark Age".

Conspiracies

LaRouche wrote that conspiracy was natural in human beings. In 1998, he responded to critics of his conspiracism, such as Daniel Pipes and said that Pipes wrongly believed that all reports of conspiracy are axiomatically false.

LaRouche's critics, particularly Dennis King and Chip Berlet, characterize his current orientation as being a conspiracist worldview. They say the Marxist concept of the ruling class was converted by LaRouche into a conspiracy theory, in which world capitalism was controlled by a cabal including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Daniel Pipes said that LaRouche personalizes his conspiracy theories, and associates "all of his adversaries with the forces of darkness."

The ''Executive Intelligence Review'' (EIR), a LaRouche publication, ran an "investigative report" titled "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy At It Again, With a New Twist" in 2007. The article states:

In 2001, LaRouche said that rogue elements within the American military took part in, or planned, the September 11, 2001, attacks as part of a ''coup d'état''.

The "British" conspiracy

LaRouche is known for alleging conspiracies by the British. LaRouche has said that the dominant imperialist strategic force acting on the planet today is not the United States, but the "Anglo-Dutch liberal system" of the British Empire, which he asserts is an oligarchic financial consortium like that of medieval Venice, more like a "financial slime-mold" than a nation. According to this theory, London financial circles protect themselves from competition by using techniques of "controlled conflict" first developed in Venice, and LaRouche attributes many wars in recent memory to this alleged activity by the British.

According to Chip Berlet and Dennis King, LaRouche has always been stridently anti-British and has included Queen Elizabeth II, the British Royal Family, and others, in his list of conspirators who are said to control the world's political economy and the international drug trade. According to Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen, LaRouche is the "most illustrious" Anglophobe. These views are reflected in three books authored by members of his organization:

*''Dope, Inc.'' by David P. Goldman, Konstandinos Kalimtgis and Jeffrey Steinberg, 1978 (): this book discusses the history of narcotics trafficking, beginning with the Opium War, and alleges that British interests have continued to dominate the field up to the modern era, for example through money laundering in British offshore banking colonies. The heart of the conspiracy, according to LaRouche, is the financial elite of the City of London.
*''The Civil War and the American System'' by Allen Salisbury, 1979 (): alleges that British interests encouraged and financed the secession movement and supported the Confederacy against the Union in the American Civil War, because they preferred North America to be a primitive agrarian economy that they could dominate through policies of free trade.
*''The New Dark Ages Conspiracy'' by Carol White, 1980 (): alleges that a group of British intellectuals led by Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells