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The National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) is a political cadre organization in the United States founded and controlled by political activist Lyndon LaRouche, who has sometimes described it as a "philosophical association." It originated as the Labor Caucus of the radical student organization Students for a Democratic Society, and became the NCLC in January 1969 after the group was expelled from SDS. By 1972 the NCLC had approximately 1,000 members.
LaRouche is the NCLC's founder and, since the expulsion of oppositional factions in 1973-74, the political views of the NCLC are virtually indistinguishable from those of LaRouche. For more information on these views see the article "Political views of Lyndon LaRouche" as well as the main article titled "Lyndon LaRouche".
The NCLC was originally a New Left organization influenced by Trotskyist ideas as well as those of other Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg. The NCLC became embroiled in conflicts with other leftist groups, culminating in "Operation Mop-Up" which, according to the Village Voice, the Washington Post and various former members of the NCLC, consisted of a series of physical attacks on members of rival left wing groups.
According to Chip Berlet, the New York Committee to Stop Terrorist Attacks issued a "Chronology of Labor Committee Attacks" in 1973, after the attack at Columbia, that quoted LaRouche's New Solidarity, (4/3-5/5, 1973) as saying:
- The clown show is over. The NCLC warns the SWP and its comrades-in-hysteria: when you did all the fighting for the CP at the Mayoral forum, we held back - we gave you a mild warning, though several of your members were bloodied and broken. But should you repeat as goons for the CP, we will put all of you in the hospital: we will deal with you as we are dealing with the CP.
As a result of these attacks and other factors, during the 1970s, a number of leftist groups ridiculed the NCLC and its devotion to the views of LaRouche. One group, the Red Hornets, sent members in 1975 to a political caucus and elected one of their members as mayoral candidate in Charlotte, North Carolina running on LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party ticket--at the time, the electoral arm of the NCLC. The campaign promise was pianos on public buses. Red Hornets campaigned wearing the T-shirts which included a small Nazi swastika and the acronymn NCLC.
By the late 1970s, the NCLC had abandoned Marxism altogether, in favor of what its members described as an American System approach. Critics such as Chip Berlet, Russ Bellant and Dennis King accused it of adopting an essentially neo-fascist world view.
Electoral politics
The NCLC launched the U.S. Labor Party (USLP), a registered political party, as its electoral arm and ran LaRouche for President of the United States on the Labor Party ticket in 1976. The USLP was described by its founders as "an independent political association committed to the tradition of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Henry C. Carey, and President Abraham Lincoln."
In 1979 LaRouche changed his political strategy to one of running in Democratic primaries rather than as a third party candidate. This resulted in the USLP being disbanded.
International work
The International Caucus of Labor Committees (ICLC) was founded as the philosophical nucleus for LaRouche movement operations worldwide.
For a number of years the ICLC operated in Canada as first the North American Labour Party and then the Party for the Commonwealth of Canada. The ICLC has affiliates in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Denmark, and Sweden, along with Mexico and several South American countries. In Australia LaRouche operatives took over an older extreme-right group (formally Australian League of Rights), the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC), introducing traditional left ideals such as; repeal of anti-union laws and establishment Banks loans at 2% or less for family farms and now they regularly contest elections. The most recent significant addition to the network of active ICLC affiliates is in the Philippines. Until 2007, the LaRouche organisation published a weekly newspaper, The New Federalist. Its weekly newsmagazine, Executive Intelligence Review, has been converted mostly into a web publication although continuing to print a small number of copies per issue. The real membership of LaRouche's organisation is not known.
References
- http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/Mop-Up.html
- "LaRouche Backers Of Old Stung By Hornets," The Seattle Times, April 3, 1986.
External links
- The Moral Obligation to the Virginia Prisoners provides a statement of the philosophical principles of the NCLC
- Lyndon Larouche: Fascism wrapped in an American flag tracks the evolution of the NCLC in the 1970s
- Dennis King's LaRouche Watch site includes full text of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism with history of NCLC/ICLC through late 1980s.