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Chapter one

FROM FUNY BUSINESS TO “TOKEN” RESISTANCE

New York: July 1966 – January 1968

In this period of rising radical ferment among youth and minorities . . . our first task is to train a cadre of organizers, of Leninist "boomers," who can take to the boondocks of U.S. society to explain the current economic situation, to present the strategic world and national prospects for socialism, to penetrate every facet of radical ferment in student, minority and working-class movements.

Lyndon LaRouche: The Coming American Socialist Revolution (SWP Internal Discussion Bulletin, 1965)

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After officially breaking with the organized Trotskyist movement in July 1966, Lyndon

LaRouche (who now took the pen-name “Lyn Marcus”) first began teaching his

“Elementary Course in Marxist Economics” at the Free University of New York. FUNY

was two big rooms, divided into five classrooms, in a loft at 20 East 14th Street, just off

Union Square.1 Founded a year earlier, FUNY opened its doors for its second summer

session on 5 July 1966. Besides LaRouche’s class, students could attend “Mao for

Beginners,” “Marxism and American Decadence,” “The Russian Revolution in

Literature,” “History of the Left in the United States,” “Perspectives for Revolutionary

Change,” “Psychoanalysis and Marxism,” “Introduction to Marxism,” “Vietnam National

Liberation Fronts,” and “Theatre against the War in Vietnam.” FUNY’s catalog describes

LaRouche’s “Elementary Course in Marxist Economics” this way:

This course is designed to equip the beginner, with or without previous economic training, with working mastery of the basic method, concepts and practical applications of Marxist economics. The latter part of the course includes a research project by the student on the main features of U. S. economic history, with treatment of the interrelationship between economics and politics in recent U.S. history, including the “Negro Question” and “New Left.” Tuesdays at 8:30. L. Marcus.

A few months shy of his 44th birthday, LaRouche was a tall, thin man with a beard, thick

glasses, and a New England-Brahman accent. His classes on Marx were nothing if not

original. Along with Capital and the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, LaRouche covered the

ideas of the “young Marx” as expressed in texts like The German Ideology, Feuerbach’s

The Essence of Christianity, and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. LaRouche also

incorporated Emile Durkheim’s books Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and

Suicide, the mathematical ideas of Kurt Gödel, Lawrence Kubie’s Neurotic Distortions of

the Creative Process, and arguments about the impact of cybernetics on the future

composition of the work force – all as part of a course on Marxism. Just as his first class

started, LaRouche (“L. Marcus”) received additional notice when a polemical exchange

about Marx between himself and the well-known Marx expert Sidney Hook appeared in

the pages of the 10 July 1966 New York Times.2

Years later a future Labor Committee leader named Steve Fraser recalled the impact

that LaRouche’s FUNY class had on him:

He [LaRouche] ranged over the widest imaginable intellectual landscape. . . . He would show how the tool-making capacity of monkeys was supposedly connected to the falling rate of profit. It was mind-boggling and thrilling. It also demanded a higher intellectual effort than I had ever faced, and a certain moral rigor . . . LaRouche challenged you existentially.3

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LaRouche soon developed a following. An August 1966 HUAC investigation of FUNY

supporters, for example, includes the names of Anton (Tony) Chaitkin, and Robert (Bob)

Dillon, both of whom would help LaRouche and his partner Carol Schnitzer Larrabee

launch the West Village CIPA (Committee for Independent Political Action) and later the

Labor Committee.

Born in 1943, Chaitkin first became radicalized as a California teenager over the issue

of the death penalty and the 1960 execution of Caryl Chessman. He later recalled: “In

New York about two years after the JFK assassination, I saw a poster on the street for

an ad hoc ‘Free University’ conducted in a loft on 14th Street. I attended an economics

class taught by Lyndon LaRouche.”4 As for Bob Dillon, he was a radical anthropology

student at Columbia, who would later spend time in Iran working on his doctoral thesis.5

Ed Spannaus, a Columbia School of Social Work graduate student and a veteran of the

Civil Rights movement, first heard LaRouche lecture at FUNY in the fall 1966 term.6

In both his class and in West Village CIPA, LaRouche advanced his own ideas for mass

organizing.7 One of the most compelling arguments he offered to radical students

involved mass organizing of different groups of the population into united efforts rather

than on a “single-issue” basis. In so doing, LaRouche echoed the ideals of the radical

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Rosa Luxemburg’s writings on the “Mass Strike”

were particularly influential; LaRouche’s partner Carol’s later use of the pen name

“Carol La Rosa” was quite possibly homage to her. The mass organizing perspective

meant in practice that any idea of dividing the working class along racial, ethnic, craft, or

other lines so that one section of the working class could benefit only at the expense of

another was fundamentally flawed as a radical strategy. LaRouche argued that such

“constituency” organizing was naïve, in that it accepted the idea that the postwar

capitalist economy had now entered into some new kind of crisis-free “post-industrial

age” and that poverty could be solved simply by redirecting already existing resources

through social pressure tactics. LaRouche argued that this view was fundamentally “Left

Keynesian” and not Marxist.

At its core, Marxism believed in capitalism’s structural inability to escape repeated

economic crisis. During the mid-1960s, the post-war boom fueled by U.S. economic

dominance of Europe in particular inevitably drew to a close. Capitalism’s more

sophisticated ideologues were therefore now trying to recycle old Malthusian notions of

“limits to growth” and the idea that everyone had to fight over a “fixed pie.” LaRouche

argued that just as Marx had opposed Malthus in the 1840s, radicals today had to

attack “limits to growth” arguments. Instead, there had to be a common push for

expanded investment in things like infrastructure, education, and housing that would

benefit “the class as a whole” and not just capitalist speculators.

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Factnet contributor and former Labor Committee member “LaRouche Truth” recalled

LaRouche’s argument this way:

I think that Lyn’s position was, at the time, greatly superior to any of the others [on the left], and recognized the sociological limitations of workers as unripe for any kind of radical, much less revolutionary, psychology if limited to “base” level ordinary shop floor-type struggles.

The adoption of Luxemburg’s mass strike perspective, plausible at the time if the economy really was about to tank, provided a mechanism (in thought) to “get from here to there,” to provide a way to envision the possibility of a workers’ government ever coming about, which no other theory did. And sociologically, the notion that only if workers were united in a common struggle for a broader-than-a-trade-union program, a program that proposed to increase the size of the pie, rather than just claim a larger share of a fixed economic pie, would they ever expand their consciousness, was correct. Lyn’s emphasis on program, along with the notion of what he later (or perhaps even then) called “the class for itself” were two central features of what he preached at the time that I, and which I’m certain most other members who joined prior to 1973, found so compelling.

LaRouche’s ideas seemed especially meaningful to a small band of radical graduate

students at the Columbia School of Social Work. They argued that the organization of

welfare mothers in particular for decent living standards should be part of a broader

effort that involved improving mass transit, building new housing, opening new schools

with high teaching standards to prepare students for a modern economy, and

preventing subway fare increases that would hurt working-class families. They also

studied how the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s had tried to organize tenant

unions and other groups around broader progressive political demands. The idea was

that endorsing a general demand for productive investment could overcome the “ruling-

class” tactics of divide-and-conquer, which pitted “lazy black welfare mothers” against

“greedy white racist trade unionists” to marginalize all forms of social protest.

This was a core idea from the very beginnings of the Labor Committee: that socialist

forms of organization should not reinforce limited “pluralist” beliefs, which were

themselves seen as merely “alienated” or “parochial” expressions of a false capitalist

identity shared not just by greedy capitalists but by the population as a whole, as

specific reflections of the dominant capitalist ideology. For that reason, LaRouche and

those he gathered around him strongly opposed “student syndicalist” arguments that

students were “a new class.”

The group that eventually coalesced into the Labor Committee wanted to employ a

“class-wide organizing” perspective to overcome such “alienated” forms of existence.

But others on the left argued that the Labor Committee downplayed the particular

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concerns of blacks, women, and other groups and acted more as an arrogant group of

white super-intellectual elitists who refused to deal meaningfully with oppressed people

over immediate issues that in the real world actually mattered most to those people’s

own lives. For its part, the Labor Committee argued that those “immediate issues” could

never be solved without some larger programmatic class unity. For example, the Labor

Committee insisted that it was impossible to truly transform ghetto schools if the

students in those schools knew that no matter how hard they tried, they were still going

to be confronting mass unemployment once they graduated.

Using terminology taken from Marx, the Labor Committee contended that the real task

of revolutionaries was to help change the narrow “class-in-itself” idea of bourgeois

identity that “fetishized” one’s job, skin color, or sex as self-defining into a “class-in-and-

for-itself” world view that saw each individual struggle as contributing to an overall mass

revolutionary movement. At the same time, the idea of “Marxist expanded reproduction”

led the Labor Committee to stress Marx’s opposition to all forms of Malthusian ideology.

As a result, from very early on the organization took a highly critical view of the

arguments about “limits to growth” that had taken root in sections of the new ecology

movement.8 The Labor Committee instead stressed the crucial role of scientific

innovation in aiding human population growth. The Labor Committee’s rejection of New

Left hostility to science led the organization from as early as 1969-70 to actively

promote the development of nuclear fusion technology. But all this still lay several years

in the future.

WEST VILLAGE CIPA

In that same summer of 1966, when LaRouche was teaching his first course at FUNY,

the West Side Committee for Independent Political Action (West Side CIPA) was

launched to try to elect an openly Socialist candidate, James Weinstein, to the 19th

Congressional District centered in Manhattan’s largely liberal Upper West Side. An ex-

CPer who left the party in 1956, Weinstein – a former editor of Studies on the Left with

an M.A. in history from Columbia – was the author of a study of the U.S. Socialist Party

from 1912 to 1925 when the Socialist Party ran serious electoral campaigns. Through

West Side CIPA, he hoped to reinvigorate the idea of Socialists running for elections.

West Side CIPA published a newsletter entitled 19 – named after the 19th

Congressional District – out of its headquarters at 388 Amsterdam Avenue. The 9

September 1966 issue of 19 includes a lead article by Leif Johnson, a longtime SDS

activist and future Labor Committee leader, who at the time was a member of 19’s

editorial board. Johnson’s page-one article, “The Subway Shell-Game,” is a very early

example of proto-Labor Committee attempts to organize against proposed transit fare

hikes.

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West Side CIPA was part of a larger national project inspired by some former CP

members and other older independent radicals, who had been influenced by the 1948

Henry Wallace campaign, to try to re-launch left-wing electoral politics in the wake of

postwar anti-Communist witch hunts. National CIPA was established in a meeting held

in Chicago in 1966, with the Rev. James Bevel playing a prominent role in its founding.

Jim Weinstein never expected to win the 19th Congressional District, but his campaign

was one of the first attempts by an avowed Socialist to reenter the electoral arena in the

post-McCarthyism era. Another prominent New York New leftist named Stanley

Aronowitz likewise played a leading role in CIPA.9

West Side CIPA soon inspired other CIPA groups across New York’s 19th

Congressional District, including Aronowitz’s Lower East Side and the West Village-

Chelsea CIPA chapter, where LaRouche now established his own independent

presence in the New Left. As a radical intellectual, LaRouche had been active in

meetings of the Socialist Scholars Conference and other leftist gatherings, circles where

he had encountered Weinstein and Aronowitz. In his 1974 Conceptual History of the

Labor Committee, LaRouche (referring to himself in the third person) describes what

happened next:

Marcus’ main tactical problem during the early summer of 1966 was selecting some organizational framework within which selected graduates of his course could be held together and developed as a working group. His immediate objective was to move in on the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) . . . . At that moment, the largest visible concentration of such candidates was being drawn by default toward the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) . . . . The raid on PLP was Marcus’ immediate target, but it would not be possible to go after that objective directly. What was needed was some small fixed organizational base from which to launch and coordinate maneuvers into SDS and PLP ranks. The instrument for this was unintentionally provided by a pair of ambiguous characters, James Weinstein and Stanley Aronowitz, both of whom have undoubtedly cursed the day during years since. Weinstein was the fund-raiser and therefore the virtual controller of a group that had taken over Studies on the Left, and was linked to a layer of ex-Communists deeply buried within the New York City Manhattan West Side reform Democratic Party organization. Aronowitz was an [Saul] Alinsky-school community organizer working his way out of the Oil, Atomic and Chemical Workers union toward a career in OEO-type counterinsurgency projects.10 These two had met as a result of Aronowitz’s appointed leadership position in national SDS and association with Studies on the Left.

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Appealing to Weinstein’s fascination with the pre-World War I Socialist Party of America, Aronowitz had used Weinstein’s fund-raising resources and West Side connections to instigate the establishment of an organization styled as the Committee for Independent Political Action (CIPA). Aronowitz’s ambitions for this project caused him to offer Marcus and his sole collaborator of that time [Carol] a “franchise” for lower West Side Manhattan. . . . [N]either Marcus nor Aronowitz wished to be a captive of the other’s immediate organization. However, a broader base was urgently needed for Weinstein's Independent Socialist congressional campaign, and Weinstein was almost fanatical about building a broad organization on the basis of a diversified federation of right to left socialists like the old SP. Marcus and his collaborator wanted an organizational framework through which to establish . . . a “foot in the door,” for launching a movement on the basis of a Marxian program of expanded reproduction, and with a convenient proximity to SDS for the immediate future phases of this work. Thus was established the West Village-Chelsea Committee for Independent Political Action, generally more conveniently identified as “Lower West Side CIPA” or “West Village CIPA.”11

LaRouche, who lived with Carol in an apartment at 65 Morton Street in the heart of the

West Village, would be so organizationally identified with West Village CIPA that he kept

it in operation well after the end of the Weinstein campaign. In an early New Solidarity

series on the early history of the Labor Committee, LaRouche described the creation of

West Village CIPA and then recalled:

The major recruiter for CIPA was Bob Dillon. The first publication of CIPA was a mimeographed document called “A Second Front against the War in Vietnam” oriented towards housing and related issues. Third Stage of Imperialism appeared in April 1967 by Marcus and – published at the initial instigation of Robert Dillon – Third Stage became an essential founding document of the NCLC.12

THE DEBATE OVER “CLOWARD/PIVEN”

One of the most important arguments that LaRouche advanced – namely, that

American society was actually decaying and that the Left had to push for massive

rebuilding of modern schools and affordable apartments for working people – flew in the

face of the dominant radical strategy for welfare organizing at the Columbia School of

Social Work. That strategy was embodied in the ideas of Professor Richard Cloward

and his wife, Professor Frances Fox Piven, both of whom taught at the School of Social

Work. Cloward and Piven helped design the National Welfare Rights Organization

(NWRO), which they hoped would deliberately “bankrupt” the welfare system. Cloward

and Piven announced their new monkey-wrenching strategy in an article in the 2 May

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1966 issue of the Nation entitled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.”

They argued that welfare activists using extremely militant and confrontational tactics

should try to dramatically increase the number of people on welfare, which would then

bankrupt local governments. The federal government would have to replace all the

bankrupt local welfare agencies with a new federal income redistribution plan that would

guarantee a living income for all Americans, employed or not.

To CIPA’s network of social work grad students like Ed and Nancy Spannaus, the

“Cloward/Piven strategy” sounded unworkable. In their view, Cloward and Piven saw

the Great Society programs in fundamentally “reformist” “Left Keynesian” terms,

adhering to the idea that the basic crisis in American capitalism involved structural

inequality and unfair income redistribution rather than long-term economic decay.13 Did

Cloward and Piven really believe that the federal government could somehow rearrange

the budget and pay for the new “living income” plan without seeking additional tax

revenue that would inevitably come out of the pockets of working people? The key issue

was that any kind of revenue raised for massive infrastructure development should

come from “non-productive” capitalist speculators and real estate interests, not the

working class. Only in this way could there develop a larger “class-wide” coalition

capable of uniting white male workers with black female welfare mothers. LaRouche’s

arguments now provided them what seemed like a viable radical alternative to the

Cloward/Piven plan for “bankrupting the welfare system.”

THE WEST SIDE TENANTS UNION

Around the time they first met LaRouche, Ed and Nancy Spannaus were living at 14

West 82nd Street between Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue. In the summer

of 1967, the Spannauses and Tom Karp – another School of Social Work grad who

went on to become an early Labor Committee member – helped launch the West Side

Tenants Union (WSTU), whose headquarters was located at 73 West 83rd Street.14 A

New York-based radical named Paul Gallagher now became active in WSTU organizing

as well.15

In a 4 January 1971 issue of New Solidarity, LaRouche described the WSTU this way:

The West Side Tenants’ Union (WSTU) was formed in the late summer of 1967 by members of West Village CIPA (including Robert Dillon) and recent graduates from the Columbia School of Social Work (including Ed Spannaus and Tom Karp). The original conception was that of Tom Karp’s, developed while he and Spannaus were graduate students at Columbia. Karp’s ideas about community organizing were combined with the tax-the-landlords program of West Village CIPA in the Tenant Union project.

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Karp’s original idea was based on his reading of the history of tenant organizing in New York City, as well as experience he and Spannaus had had while working in the Community Action Program of Local 1199 [of the Hospital Workers’ Union – HH] during 1966-67. They (naively) believed that the combination of the tax program, organizing skills, and some fancy gimmicks dreamed up about rent strikes would enable the Tenant Union to put together a city-wide tenant organization within a year and pull off a city-wide rent strike.

The West Side Tenant Union was certainly not successful in its own terms of assembling a large coalition of housing organizers, partly because it did not take cognizance of the fact that at the time it was entering the housing field, most housing organizers were dropping out. But it was important in effecting another level of organizers, with whom (particularly) Spannaus and Dillon had worked in 1966-67; the Tenant Union program was a significant factor in the development of the Fraser-Papert faction in PLP [Progressive Labor Party], and was discussed at considerable length in the first version of Economism or Socialism, the Fraser-Papert document presented to PLP.

The role the WSTU played as a “Marcusite project” is noted in Rick Rhoads’ article “Len

[sic] Marcus: Guru of Non-Struggle” in the autumn 1968 issue of PLP‘s theoretical

magazine Progressive Labor. According to Rhoads: “An item in the [1 January 1968]

newsletter of the West Side Tenants Union, a Marcusite group, reads in its entirety, ‘An

Interview with City Councilman Ted Weiss is also planned for next month. A number of

stewards [building reps in the tenants union] volunteered to work on this.” Rhoads then

comments: “Weiss is a Reform Democrat, elected with the energetic support of the

Communist Party, and he is the darling of New York’s ‘left liberals.’ To set up an

‘interview’ between this phony and tenants, while in no way discussing who he is and

what he stands for, is the job of reformists, not revolutionaries.” What is most interesting

for our purpose, however, is the fact that CIPA arguments were now entering the Upper

West Side through the WSTU.

THE RETURN OF RED ROSA

Inside the larger Left, the new CIPA network was frequently (and somewhat aptly)

described as “Luxemburgist” because of the group’s positive view of Rosa Luxemburg’s

economic views in The Accumulation of Capital as well as her writings on “the mass

strike.”16 Greatly influenced by the 1905 Russian Revolution, Luxemburg combined her

argument that capitalism had not escaped breakdown economic crises with her belief in

the importance of the mass strike against the SPD “right,” which was centered largely in

the trade union movement.

Once CIPA organizers later became active inside SDS, the “Luxemburgist” label helped

distinguished it from more traditional “Leninist” party formations. In a Factnet post,

10

Dennis King – who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at the time – recalls how

other radicals viewed the early Labor Committee’s politics:

I recall that when the LC was part of SDS, the other SDS factions as well as the Old Left parties were concentrating on the war in Vietnam, but the LC seemed to be interested more in localized economic issues, having to do with banks, real estate and the subways. They had what at the time some people thought was a kind of municipal socialism approach. Then they started talking about a mass strike either as a form of protest or as a means of revolution – it was unclear to me which.

Most left groups would have regarded the mass strike (if intended as a means of revolution) as an illusion, as not serious. After all, didn’t EVERYONE know that the way you make a revolution is through a mass armed uprising of the working class (or, depending on your taste, an exemplary uprising of ex-students that would trigger an uprising of people of color)? So the LC was looked down on for that. When they started quoting Rosa Luxemburg, this raised brows – you were supposed to quote Lenin, Stalin and Mao, not some obscure woman who never wielded power. The view of the LC’s Red Rosa fixation would have been far more negative if people on the left had known that she had fiercely opposed Lenin and was in favor of a kind of democratic socialism, and that she had been less than enthusiastic about the Spartacist uprising that resulted in her assassination by the Freikorps.

THE NY SDS TRANSIT PROJECT/ SDS LABOR COMMITTEE

The formation of the CIPA network coincided with the rise of SDS as an organized

presence on campuses throughout the region. Radical groups of all kinds now

concentrated on getting their message heard inside SDS and winning new recruits.

A valuable profile of the proto-Labor Committee’s early involvement with SDS appeared

in a series of articles that began on 18 December 1970 in New Solidarity. Article one

was co-written by Steve Komm and Tony Papert, both of whom played leading roles in

Columbia SDS.17 From their text:

The formal inauguration of the Labor Committee faction occurred at a meeting of Students for Democratic Society’s New York-New Jersey region in Princeton, New Jersey, in late November 1967.

Two Columbia SDS members, Tony Papert and Steve Komm, had come to the meeting independently to present the same proposal: the formation of a New York SDS Transit Project to support a possible subway strike and oppose a possible transit fare increase, both being threatened for January 1968. . . .

Around the cited immediate and longer-range goals of the SDS Transit Project there coalesced three distinct groupings from within the New York radical movement: first, the Village-Chelsea Committee for Independent Political Action,

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represented in the early Transit Project by Robert Dillon, an anthropology graduate student at Columbia; second, the future “Fraser-Papert faction” of Progressive Labor, represented by Tony Papert, chairman of Columbia’s PLP chapter, or “club”; third, an independent SDS stratum represented by Steve Komm, a Columbia sophomore, and Leif Johnson, an SDS activist since Port Huron.

In Conceptual History, LaRouche writes about this early period: “The first Labor

Committee was formed at Columbia University during early November, 1967, as a

coalition between the CIPA members of Columbia SDS and the majority of the PLP

members of that same SDS chapter.”

The proto-Labor Committee’s attempts to get SDS involved in a coalition against transit

fare hikes includes an announcement from the “Committee to Stop the Fare Increase,”

which listed its headquarters at 2035-7 Fifth Avenue in New York City. The Committee

Chairman was Joe Carnegie, a black transit worker and the head of the “Transit

Workers Union Rank and File Committee for a Democratic Union.” The Executive

Secretary of the Committee to Stop the Fare Increase was none other than “Lyn

Marcus.” Kim Moody from International Socialists (IS) was listed as a Secretary of the

group, as was Jim Haughton, a long-time Harlem community activist and head of

Harlem Fight Back, an organization devoted to securing jobs for black workers on

construction sites.

The idea of organizing around a possible subway strike may sound odd, but in reality

the transit issue was highly politicized. As soon as Mayor Lindsay took power in January

1966, the Mike Quill-led Transit Workers Union (TWU) hit the city with a crippling 12-day

strike. The strike marked the beginning of a long struggle between Lindsay and the

major New York unions that culminated in the fall 1968 United Federation of Teachers

(UFT) strike. In the winter of 1967, then, it seemed possible that a new subway strike

might break out sometime in January 1968. The CIPA-allied Committee to Stop the

Fare Increase and the NY SDS Transit Project were preparing for just that possibility.

Additional print evidence of the proto-Labor Committee’s role in SDS comes from this

period. In the 5 February 1968 issue of New Left Notes, for example, longtime SDS and

West Side CIPA member Leif Johnson wrote an article entitled “NY SDS to Organize

against Transit Fare Increase.” It opens: “During the spring term, people from Columbia,

City [CUNY], Brooklyn, and Queens College SDS and other chapters in the region are

undertaking a campaign to block a fare increase on the New York City buses and

subways.” The first major leafleting “took place in December 1967.” In his New Left

Notes article, Johnson adds that in Boston a similar fare campaign was being waged,

although he gives no details. Presumably, however, this campaign had some

connection to Progressive Labor, since Tony Papert, at the time the head of Columbia’s

PL chapter, had lobbied at the November 1967 Princeton SDS meeting for what would

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become the Transit Project. PL leaders such as Jeff Gordon were active in meetings of

the SDS Transit Project until sometime in March 1968, when PL became increasingly

concerned about the LaRouche network’s growing influence in the Transit Project. From

LaRouche’s Conceptual History of the Labor Committee:

There were four major developments for this CIPA organization during 1967. The first was the initiative of the Columbia members of the organization in organizing and leading a Winter, 1967, SDS campaign to throw the CIA recruiters off that campus. That incident played an important part in enabling the Labor Committee to propose and lead the Columbia strike of April, 1968. The second was the establishment of the West Side Tenants’ Union as a probing of possibility for organizing around the program for housing. The third development was the printing of 3,000 copies of Marcus’ The Third Stage of Imperialism during the spring of 1967. The fourth development was the cumulative outcome of the first three.

The first Labor Committee was formed at Columbia University during early November, 1967, as a coalition between the CIPA members of Columbia SDS and the majority of the PLP members of that same SDS chapter. Since the issuance of the initial mimeographed publication [almost certainly Second Front – HH] of “Lower West Side CIPA,” in October, 1966, the New York PLP student clubs had been in a perpetual state of ferment concerning the conception of socialist program and tactics embedded in that writing. By early Fall of 1967, a handful of Manhattan PLP members working within SDS began to attend secretly Marcus’ Free School course.18 The proposal to SDS to form a support action for the impending January 1, 1968, transit workers’ strike gave CIPA and its factional PLP allies in SDS the means for forming the Columbia SDS Labor Committee. They then pushed PLP and others to join them to effect a temporary takeover of New York regional SDS a short time later, around support of the transit workers and defense of the subway fare against proposed increases [the “NY SDS Transit Project” – HH].

By late January, two developments emerged from the establishment of the Labor Committee. After a couple months, even the thick-headed leadership of national PLP began to realize that they had a potentially powerful socialist faction moving in on their peripheries and membership. A factional struggle erupted between SDS PLPers linked to the national PLP leadership and the CIPA members and their allies. By March, national PLP had lost that fight and withdrew from the Labor Committees. Meanwhile, the Labor Committee faction had moved toward a majority control of Columbia SDS.19

CONCLUSION: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

A useful summary of the way early Labor Committee members viewed organizing

comes from Vin Berg, a Swarthmore College student who once had been close to PL. In

a New Solidarity article, Berg argued that the standard radical method of organizing

remained rooted in “the anarcho-syndicalist conception of a society composed of local,

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properly autonomous self-interest groups which must each conduct their independent

struggles, federating only on temporary ad hoc bases.”20

In contrast:

in bringing forces together into such class-wide formations for the purpose of common struggle against a common enemy, it is also necessary that they be brought together consciously – i.e., around a program representative of the interests of all of the actually and potentially allied forces. It is the urgent task of a socialist leadership to provide a competent program defining the tasks of socialist reconstruction of the economy under a working class government, and also to provide transitional expressions of that program – demands appropriate to working peoples’ day-to-day struggles as an organic part of the process leading to the act of establishment of socialist government.21

Against Old Left groups like PL, the Labor Committee argued that there was no need to

spend decades buried away in some obscure local trade union local. The looming

intertwined economic and social crisis would force some new form of mass organization

of the working class, much as the mass strikes in the auto and trucking industries in the

1930s helped build the CIO. Revolutionaries could help to guide these movements in a

“class for itself” direction. For this reason, the Labor Committee viewed itself as a

“caucus” formation inside a much larger “mass strike” process and deliberately rejected

the “Leninist” “vanguard party” model as hopelessly obsolete.

LaRouche had first developed that new view of organizing in his FUNY classes. For two

years – from the summer of 1966 to the spring of 1968 – he pulled together a core

group of experienced New Left activists out of those classes into the proto-Labor

Committee. He convinced less by intellectual razzle-dazzle than by presenting an

organizing perspective that, he argued, was rooted in his conceptualization of basic

Marxist theory. In short, his strength came most from his ability to present his

interpretation of Marx’s views and their current relevance for leftists looking for new

ways to organize. His real genius was not that he was more esoteric than the next egg-

head but that he managed in his classes to unite “thought” and “action” in a very

powerful presentation. In just this way he challenged his students “existentially” as well

as academically. If he were just another left academic, he never would have been able

to exert the kind of influence that he now began to enjoy.22

The openness of some activists to LaRouche’s “mass strike” views also reflected

deeper changes inside the New Left, as many radicals now increasingly abandoned

more reformist politics. Leif Johnson expressed the increasing sense of alienation many

radicals felt in a 26 June 1967 article for New Left Notes. Johnson downplayed

“Vietnam Summer,” a 1967 anti-war effort described by the historian Kirkpatrick Sale as

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a “liberal bell-ringing campaign” to mobilize grass-roots support for opposition to the

war. According to Johnson:

Vietnam summer is a liberal protest. It was initiated by top liberals, it acts upon liberal assumptions, it proceeds on liberal undemocratic methods of organization and leadership. The underlying purpose of this liberal strategy is to recapture leadership of the peace and civil rights movement, to blunt the awakening of our radical, anti-liberal identity, and finally to lay the groundwork for leading us into a coalitionist liberal-progressive third party movement.23

Yet the truly critical events that shaped the early Labor Committee did not just involve in

seemingly arcane arguments over competing Marxist interpretations of capitalism.

Instead, the organization would be molded by two key events in New York in the

summer and fall of 1968. They were the Columbia strike in April 1968 and the New York

City teachers strike that began early that fall. In both these crises, the tiny Labor

Committee network would play a remarkable – and remarkably controversial – role.

1 For LaRouche’s background in the Trotskyist movement, see Smiling Man from a Dead Planet, particularly the

chapter “The Many Theories of L. Marcus” available at http://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Library.ManyTheoriesofLMarcus. For the history of LaRouche’s use of pseudonyms, see the appendix in this book on PL’s “History Gurus.”

For a brief description of FUNY, see Edward Grossman, “New York’s Schoolhouse for the Left,” in the April 1966 issue of Harper’s. For a detailed look at FUNY, see The Investigative Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities House of Representatives Eighty-Ninth Congress Second Session August 16-19, 1966 and available on the web. FUNY had been largely created by PL cadre close to the May Second Movement. It was later known as the Free School of New York. See http://www.fermentmagazine.org/Bio/newleft3.html.

2 The fact that the Times published LaRouche’s letter must have made him ecstatic. He had just begun teaching his

first class at FUNY, and now “L. Marcus” was on the pages of the New York Times clanging swords with a famous Marx expert. The exchange of letters in the New York Times was provoked by Sidney Hook’s article in the 22 May 1966 issue of the Times entitled “Speaking of Books: Karl Marx’s Second Coming.” At the time he wrote it, Hook was teaching philosophy at NYU. It is a long article that basically attacks the “New Left” notion of Marx, which Hook believed exaggerated the importance of Marx’s early writings, such as his 1844 Paris manuscripts. In the exchange with “L. Marcus,” Hook’s comments reflect his contempt for people like Fromm and Sartre, whom he believes distort what is central to Marx, and that is his theory of economic determinism. Hook’s critique of the New Left reading of early Marx is very much in line with “Old Left” views – not to mention the position of Soviet Marxist scholars. They, like Hook, read the 1844 Manuscripts as a juvenile attempt to develop a theory which only really came to full ripeness in later works like The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto. Hook’s fundamental point is that the theory of economic determinism remains at the heart of Marxism. He rejects that theory, but argues that it is central to the mature Marx. Marx's youthful writings are therefore best read as part of his evolution from Young Hegelian abstraction to his mature position. One of the ironies of Hook’s position is that it was Hook who first brought the writings of the young Marx to the attention of an English-language audience, with his early 1930s book From Hegel to Marx, which was reissued in 1962 as a University of Michigan paperback.

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In the late 1920s Hook was living in Berlin studying Marx’s ideas and working with the Institute for Social Research ("the Frankfurt School"). The ISR helped arrange the copying of Marx’s rare manuscripts from the SPD archives in Berlin and the delivery of them to Moscow’s Marx-Engels Institute (MEI). Hook received an invitation from the great Russian Marx scholar David Riazanov to spend a summer at the Marx-Engels Institute in 1929. While there, Hook was able to read for the first time Marx’s early unpublished writings, which Riazanov was preparing for the first edition of the collection of Marx and Engels’ writings known as the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). However, Marx’s early work remained almost entirely ignored until the late 1950s, when the Russians began translating these texts into English. They then caught the imagination of the early New Left in the United States as well as in Western and (importantly) Eastern Europe. They became even better known after the Frankfurt School’s Eric Fromm wrote about the texts as well. From the 10 July 1966 Letters to the Editor Page in the Times: KARL MARX To the Editor: The very least one should demand from Sidney Hook is scholarly competence. Such expectations have special merit when Hook turns to subjects such as Marxist philosophy, on which he has essayed to write ex cathedra for several decades. Unfortunately, just that merit is lacking in his “Karl Marx’s Second Coming.” Mr. Hook asserts that the events of World War I, workers’ support for their own governments’ military policies, and the Soviet “dictatorship of the proletariat,” disprove the cardinal Marxist principle that economics determines politics. In attributing such simplistic economic determinism to Marx, Hook relinquishes all claims to scholarly authority in this field. In reply to similar bad scholarship by Paul Barth, Engels wrote in a frequently cited 1890 letter to Conrad Schmidt: “If therefore Barth supposes that we deny any and every reaction of the political, etc., reflexes of the economic movement upon the movement itself, he is simply tilting at windmills. He has only got to look at Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, which deals almost exclusively with the particular part played by political struggles and events; of course, within their general dependence upon economic conditions. . . . Or why do we fight for the political dictatorship of the proletariat if political power is economically impotent? Force (that is state power) is also an economic power.” Mr. Hook gets off to a very bad start with his “defense” of “Marxist orthodoxy” against such “neo-Marxists” as Sartre and Fromm. He lifts a phrase from Engels concerning The German Ideology and applies it, with a reckless misinterpretation, to the Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts. On the basis of this display of scholarship he asserts that the “mature Marx” rejected the conception of alienation developed by the “young Marx.” To support this false assertion, Hook alludes to Marx’s polemics against Max Stirner, Moses Hess and others. However, Hook’s point is refuted by referring to those very polemics. It is in The German Ideology, for example, that Marx and Engels present their finished conception of alienation. In the same location, Marx introduces his conception of economic reproduction, the whole basis for capital. In the same place, on the basis of his conception of alienation, Marx introduces the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary step toward humanity’s realization of its own self-activity, its liberation from alienation. This is a very bad error on Hook’s part, since the concepts of self-consciousness, self-activity and alienation are fundamental to German philosophy from Kant through Marx; apart from these no scholarly criticism of Marx or his dialectical method is possible. L. Marcus

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New York City Mr. Hook replies: The only errors involved are Mr. Marcus’s understanding of the subjects discussed. He is unaware that Engels’s letters to Schmidt and others, which I translated some 35 years ago into English, are a transparent dodge. Although admitting the influence of other factors in history, Engels asserts that “in the last analysis” the economic factor is always decisive. But if it is not decisive in such major events as World War I or the October Russian Revolution, then the theory is either false or non-empirical, and therefore non-refutable by experience. No matter what happens, the claim can always be made that economics is decisive “in the last analysis.” But there is no “last analysis” in science. Mr. Marcus will find a simple discussion of this in my The Ambiguous Legacy: Marx and the Marxists in which I argue that the theory of historical materialism can still serve as a fruitful research tool. The scornful reference to the metaphysical rubbish about “alienation” is in the Communist Manifesto. Marx’s distinctive contribution to scientific sociology obviously cannot be found in a confused, unpublished youthful manuscript according to which “alienation” is the cause of the existence of private property. This is as “Marxist” as saying that selfishness is the cause of capitalism. Notwithstanding some brilliant phrases and insights, the Economical and Philosophical Manuscripts are a mélange of Hegelian, Feuerbachian and Young-Hegelian (not Kantian) notions. It may be hard for true believers to understand that Marx was not born a Marxist. Nor, despite neo-Marxists like Fromm or Sartre, was he a forerunner of Zen-Buddhism (which sounds more like Zen-Judaism) or of the “totalitarianized” culture of Stalinism. The fetish of the young Marx is as scientifically untenable and as morally objectionable as the icon of the old one. 3 Dennis King, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (NY: Doubleday, 1989), 14.

4 See http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6834.

5 Dillon bitterly broke with the LaRouche organization in 1973 and his contributions to the early group have largely

been forgotten. 6 For more on Ed and Nancy Spannaus and their role in CIPA, see the appendix on CIPA and the Columbia School of

Social Work. 7 Perhaps one of the most important articles LaRouche wrote during his sojourn in Tim Wohlforth’s American

Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI), an article that helped form the programmatic basis for West Village CIPA, appeared in the 14 February 1966 issue of the Bulletin under the title “Tax Landlords, Not People! An Alternative to Lindsay‘s Anti-Labor Program.” In it, LaRouche writes: “From Wall Street‘s point of view, New York City is merely a money-farm, its people so much livestock, to be milked, shorn and flayed to the limits of long-suffering popular endurance.” Yet what is most striking is the article‘s attempt to translate LaRouche‘s grand economic ideas into programmatic actions over tax policy, which he sees as key to future radical organizing in an urban setting:

This is not a proposal to establish “socialism in one city.” This is the kind of demand a united city labor movement, with the support of students, minorities and middle-income people, can advance on the same basis as a trade-union struggle with an employer over wages and working conditions. It is also more than a trade-union struggle. A united ad hoc organization of trade unionists, students, and middle-income people on such a vital issue is, in practice, a “shadow” city government, a potential Labor party.

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It was just this “practical” attempt that Wohlforth later mocked in his “Many Theories of L. Marcus” article published in the Bulletin on 16 December 1968 (Vol. 5, No. 8-9). Here Wohlforth comments that after LaRouche left the formal Trotskyist movement in the summer of 1966, “he happily threw himself into the construction of a student intellectual circle which transforms the Transitional Program into liberal reformist tax proposals, denies Leninism on the question of the party, and refuses at any time to assess historically the question of the Fourth International.” 8 One of the most popular books in the early Labor Committee was Ronald Meek’s work, Marx on Malthus, first

published in England in 1953. In 1973 Ramparts Press issued a new edition entitled Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb. 9 For Aronowitz’s memoirs of this time, see “When the New Left Was New” in Social Text, 9/10 (Spring-Summer

1984). 10

Aronowitz was also on the editorial board of West Side CIPA’s publication 19, along with Leif Johnson. 11

The full text of Conceptual History is available at http://laroucheplanet.info/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Library.ConceptualHistoryLC

During 1967 and 1968, LaRouche and Carol ran “West Village CIPA” largely out of their West Village apartment. In February 1968, for example, West Village CIPA issued a leaflet that announces a five-session seminar on “the revolutionary method in American history.” For session one examining the early U.S. socialist movement, students were asked to read Theodore Draper‘s Roots of American Communism. The leaflet continued:

Session Two: World War One and the Russian Revolution. – Students should read [Isaac] Deutscher‘s The Prophet Armed.

Session Three: The rise of Stalinism: Read Theodore Draper‘s American Communism and Soviet Russia.

Session Four: The New Deal and the Rise of Fascism: Read Daniel Guerin‘s Fascism and Big Business.

Session Five “on the current economic and social structure” came with no reading assignment. The first class began on 23 February 1968 at 65 Morton Street. The instructor was Carol LaRouche (although, in a foreshadowing of the later minimizing of Carol‘s important role in the LC‘s early history, her name was misprinted as “Corole LaRouche”).

The first issue of The Campaigner – which appeared in February 1968 – was published by “The Campaigner Association,” which, not surprisingly, was located at 65 Morton Street. The first issue was devoted to transit issues and entitled “N.Y. Transit Crisis.” The first editorial board was listed as: Gary Nickerson (editor), Joe Carnegie (TWU), Phyllis and Bob Dillon, Paul Gallagher, Ed Spannaus, Jim Haughton (of Harlem Fightback), Carol LaRouche, L. Marcus, Tony Chaitkin and Tom Wodetzki. The second issue of the Campaigner came out in March 1968 and was advertised as “Election 68.” (I have not seen this issue.)

12 See the 4 January 1971 issue of New Solidarity. A member of West Village CIPA named Phyllis Hipwell designed

the cover for Third Stage. Third Stage was later excerpted in Donald C. Hodges, Readings in U.S. Imperialism (Boston: Porter Sergeant, 1971). For an analysis of Third Stage, see Smiling Man from a Dead Planet. 13

The early Labor Committee arguments against Cloward/Piven would later inspire Ed and Nancy Spannaus and other NCLC social work professionals in the early 1970s to organize the National Unemployed and Welfare Rights Organization (NUWRO) as the Labor Committee alternative to a then-collapsing NWRO. 14

Karp later moved to San Francisco, where he served as an early Labor Committee organizer there before disappearing from the organization.

18

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One WSTU publication was listed in a collection on New Left writings: “SPANNAUS, ED AND PAUL GALLAGHER: Who Pays for Poverty? Boston: New England Free Press, ca. 1968. 8 1/2 x 11 in. Four-page leaflet. (The authors, identified here as "community organizers of the West Side Tenants Union," were followers of Lyndon LaRouche. This essay appeared originally in Viet-Report.)” 16

A key leader in the left-wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the early 1900s, Luxemburg strongly opposed Eduard Bernstein’s arguments that capitalism had freed itself from major economic crises and that the SPD should now turn to a reformist or “evolutionary” road to socialism that stressed coalitions with other groups and an active SPD role in the parliament. 17

At the time Komm was an independent member of Columbia SDS. Papert led the Progressive Labor Party faction in Columbia SDS. 18

After being threatened with being sued over its name, the Free University changed its name to the Free School. 19

What happened at Columbia will be examined in the next chapter of this book. 20

Vin Berg, “The History of the Labor Committee (Part Seven): From U. of Penn. Sit-In to Bomb-Plot Arrest,” in New Solidarity, 12-16 April 1971. 21

Vin Berg, “The History of the Labor Committee (Part Six): The Making and Breaking of the Penn Strike,” in New Solidarity, 29 March-2 April 1971. 22

LaRouche became a better teacher over time. At FUNY, Carol would discuss with him how to make some of his arguments clearer to his audience. LaRouche took innovative ideas from some of his students and incorporated them into his own presentation both to increase the intellectual heft of his argument and also to explore subjects and issues that his audience members saw as important and raised in the question period. LaRouche’s agility in folding ideas and research from others into his own arguments offers one key to his growing success. 23

Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, 345.