2018 CAMPAIGN DEMANDS PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZERS

How Lyndon LaRouche Built a Political Organization from Scratch

by Barbara Boyd

[Print version of this article]

May 19—LaRouche PAC, the political action committee founded in 2004 by Lyndon LaRouche, has launched a national campaign in the context of the 2018 midterm elections, to secure the future of the United States. That campaign centers on three pledges that any candidate for Congress must endorse before receiving endorsement by the PAC. LaRouche PAC is taking this campaign to as many Congressional Districts as possible, seeking out the constituency leaders in those districts whom Congressional candidates will have to recruit in order to win the vote in those November 2018 elections.

The Political Action Committee is targeting and building a movement of the economy’s producers: skilled workers, farmers, scientists, engineers, manufacturers, builders, police, fire fighters, other first responders, doctors and nurses, teachers, trade unionists, and civil rights organization leaders. This new movement will insist that candidates pledge to work to stop the illegal and unconstitutional coup against President Trump, to secure U.S. participation in China’s “One Belt, One Road” great development initiative for the world’s economies, and to implement LaRouche’s Four Laws for Economic Recovery of the United States.

This requires a great and uncompromising educational effort, designed to immerse volunteers to the campaign in the unique discoveries found in Lyndon LaRouche’s science of political economy and the accompanying philosophical, historical, and scientific issues which flow from those discoveries. At the center of the campaign is the new pamphlet, “LaRouche’s Four Laws for Economic Recovery—A New Paradigm for Mankind,” just released by LaRouche PAC, elaborating the three pledges and their necessity in the mission to rescue the citizens of the United States from the despair and economic devastation produced by the Wall Street/City of London monstrosity known as the “post-industrial society.”

Fortunately, this campaign has a model to build from. That model is Lyndon LaRouche’s original building of the National Caucus of Labor Committees, a political organization he built from scratch in the period 1968-1974, based on a series of classes featuring a thorough and devastating epistemological critique of Karl Marx and which successfully challenged class participants to assimilate and employ the philosophical conceptions of Plato, Kepler, Leibniz, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Bernhard Riemann and others in mobilizing their own mental powers and creativity to change the world.

On May 14, Barbara Boyd, LaRouche PAC’s treasurer, spoke to the regular Manhattan Project meeting of LaRouche PAC about LaRouche PAC’s 2018 campaign. We thought it important to bring this perspective to EIR’s readers. What follows is an edited transcript of that Manhattan event.

Boyd: The image I’d like you to think about to begin this presentation is what John F. Kennedy said before a large audience at Rice University on September 12, 1962. He said to that audience, and to the American people as a whole, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” We were going to go to the Moon because it was a necessary thing we had to do as a population at that point in history. And he proceeded to lay out that grand vision.

Did he know at that particular point in time, when he laid out that mission, that the Moon mission was going to return ten-to-one in terms of advanced technological spin-offs resulting from that investment, which would increase the productivity of the population and the economy as a whole? Did he know that for a fact? Did he know each step in the process by which we would get to the Moon? In other words, did he have a map in front of him that said “Step A in my plan for going to Moon is the following, and it’s to be funded at such and such a level”? Or rather, wasn’t it that he had an idea of the direction in which he wanted to go, the direction in which it could be funded? And he set the country off on a mission which stimulated the creativity of the entire population, a mission with the stipulation and constraint of his insisting that we cannot fail in this mission. It is absolutely necessary. We have to do this. This is what has to happen at this point if this country is going to survive as a nation. We have to take a great journey to the Moon.

Think about that in contradistinction to today. If a President Trump, for example, stands up and says, “I want to go back to the Moon,” the first thing that happens is, everybody says, “OK, where’s your plan for the Moon? How much is it going to cost for each step? And where are we going to get the money from?” We seem to have lost the ability which President Kennedy had to deliver an open-ended invitation to the citizens of the United States to engage in a great journey, a great adventure, challenging fundamental conceptions about man, nature, and how things work, in which everybody has a stake in a mission which seems almost impossible at the point you actually start to talk about it. I say that any creative and necessary mission involves a directed passion, the idea that I have to do this and I cannot fail. You really don’t know how to break it down into those kinds of steps and details or anything else. You’re simply challenged. You stay up at night, you burn the candles. You talk to people; you come up with ideas, you try them, you experiment. You figure out whether it works or doesn’t work, or what happens. Think about that in terms of the small number of people who think like that today in our country after years of living in a de-industrialized economy.

The 2018 Elections and the Lessons of 2016

So, when you look at the 2018 midterms, it’s very clear that in terms of the coup, its plan of attack is, “Let’s round up a lot of politicians, be they Democrats or Republicans or independents. The only thing they have to do to be qualified is, they have to pledge, ‘I’m going to impeach Donald Trump.’ ” Their plan is to go back to the type of imperial framework implicit in the Clinton and Obama campaign operations, and most certainly in the Bush administration—what we’ll call the casino economy, the post-industrial society that has driven most of the United States into what was really a foreseeable degradation of the entire population.

Take out an electoral map of the results of the 2016 election. This is normally done in terms of red colors for where Trump was triumphant and blue colors for where Clinton won. What you see is almost the entirety of the spatial United States of America is red, except for the coasts.

When we began to look at this issue of what’s going to happen in the 2018 elections, we asked ourselves, “OK, how do you actually put together a nationwide coalition which is not only going to stop the coup, but is actually going to be enforcing the promises Trump made in the election, the promises which caused all of those people to vote for him?” They didn’t vote for him because of immigration, and they didn’t vote for him because of racial dog whistles. His own campaign analysis of the so-called Rust Belt or Midwestern states, was that the real messages that resonated with people, that absolutely made them turn out to vote, were his promises to rebuild the infrastructure of the United States, to rebuild the United States economy; and to stop being the world’s policeman, to stop intervening in the affairs of other nations all over the world. Those were the two promises that his own campaign data says won him the election. The coup has actually been a huge impediment to the very urgent discussion which we need to have with citizens to enforce the promises upon which he was elected.

Three Pledges

I am going to focus on one of the three pledges in LaRouche PAC’s 2018 campaign platform. I think everyone in this room has had ample opportunity to understand what China is doing and what this New Paradigm is, in the world. What I want to concentrate on here is the United States of America, and what we do here today. Therefore, I really want to focus a lot more than anything else on what the pamphlet has to say about LaRouche’s Four Laws for Economic Recovery.

When we wrote the new pamphlet, we were aware of various problems people have in thinking about this. People tend to say, “OK, let’s go on a big campaign for Glass-Steagall, and maybe we can do something on that, and that’ll work. OK?” The obverse is the thing which is currently going on at least as I hear it in various organizers’ discussions of the Four Laws: “Well, really the most important thing is the Fourth Law. That’s what we should really be focussing on.” All of that is just fundamentally incorrect; it’s an incorrect perception of what Lyndon LaRouche laid out in the Four Laws. It’s a unitary conception there. All of it has to happen at once to actually achieve the type of economic breakthroughs he is presenting. I find particularly telling, in a lot of the discussions I have had, how much we skip over the third of the four laws. I will just read his formulation of it, to remind you of what it says:

The purpose of the use of a Federal Credit-system, is to generate high-productivity trends in improvements of employment, with the accompanying intention, to increase the physical-economic productivity and the standard of living of the persons and households of the United States.

The reason why I emphasize that, is that you can portray the Fourth Law, the demand for a crash program to develop fusion power and its consequences for space exploration, as a kind of dreamy, wonderful concept. You can say, we’ll get a fusion economy, or the Chinese will come in and build things, or we build big infrastructure, and everything will, as a result, automatically improve. That’s not necessarily true if you are not employing the measurement which Lyndon LaRouche discovered and talked about over his entire career in economics, which is called “potential relative population density.”

That is, how do you invest your funds once Glass-Steagall stops the hot-money flows, once a national bank or similar mechanism concentrates credit? The constraints he applies in the third law, govern what kind of investment you must make: Investments that increase potential relative population density, which follows in the wake of high productivity trends in employment, increases in physical economic productivity, and increases in the standard of living of persons and households—the capacity for a society to actually reproduce itself at a higher level of productivity than that which existed before. That’s what the Third Law imposes as a constraint on how you’re investing your money. It involves “soft infrastructure” such as healthcare and education. It’s not just railroads, it’s not just high-speed trains. It’s what’s going on in a population; what’s going on in education; what’s going on with culture, which results in the fostering of creative individuals. What are the constraints you have to create within the living standards of the population of the United States, so that you can self-consciously create people who are going to be creative? The Fourth Law, the crash program to develop fusion, allows you to create a whole new economic platform based on a transformative energy source, guaranteeing that you can sustain the economic productivity and standards of living of the Third Law far into the future.

A Unitary Concept

So, the idea here, once we get that correction into it, is that the Four Laws present a unitary concept which has to be grasped as such by the individual citizen. How do we create an educational campaign which can ensure that that happens?

Some of you have been around us for a long, long time; some of you have been around us for a very short period of time. But I went way, way back when I was thinking about this in terms of our present situation as an organization in the United States, and what’s actually going on with the population which we saw manifested in the vote for Trump in the 2016 election. I looked at the phenomenon of the pivot counties in the electoral map. That is, those places where they voted for Obama in 2008, they voted for Obama in 2012; but they voted for Trump in 2016. No matter how much else you might sociologically characterize it—and these people have been interviewed as if they are archaeological specimens of some type by innumerable reporters—essentially, they voted for change.

They said, “My life sucks at this point. I’m ready to do anything to change this. I don’t care if you say that Donald Trump shot 40 people on Wall Street. If he’s going to shake up this horrible situation I’m in, I’m for him. I want change.” And they still want change! Their whole world has been completely shaken up.

People were not simply responding to the slogan “Make America Great Again” as a simple form of nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s, when there was some social stability, steady jobs, and the ability to buy a house and raise a family. Greatness requires a great leader, like Kennedy, inviting the American people’s participation in a large and great mission like the Space Program. Most people, then, embraced it, most having gone through World War II, another great national endeavor in which the result was not obvious from the beginning. But those positive developments did not prevent the catastrophe we have lived through subsequently. Our program, the LaRouche Program, has to be to “Make America great, in a self-sustaining way, so that we don’t repeat the nonsense that we’ve gone through over the past 20 years.”

Intellectual Toughness: A Producer’s Coalition

So, I went back and read—and I recommend that people willing to lead, re-read—a little piece which Lyndon LaRouche published in The Campaigner magazine of October 1974, a piece titled, “The Conceptual History of the National Caucus of Labor Committees.” In Section III of that piece, “How to Start a New Movement,” LaRouche discusses how to build a socialist organization (or a political organization, I would say it today) from scratch. I will refer to certain excerpts, because it reflects exactly the idea that I had in thinking about what we call in the pamphlet “the producers’ coalition.” That is, that the people who voted for Trump and are most prone to become what we used to call “worker intellectuals,” the leaders or the constituency leaders of whole sections of society—are more or less exactly what the Trump voter in the Midwest, for example, actually is.

The people who work in production, or who are responsible for running a business which produces a certain type of product, if they’re more astute and they’re in areas such as machine tools and other places, they are also fairly astute in terms of international relations. They understand what has to happen with their product in terms of selling it in the world at this point. Farmers understand a lot about economics already, because they’ve have to run an agricultural enterprise. They have to understand all sorts of things about how to invest in certain seed cycles; they have to understand a whole lot about fundamental science in order to run that farm.

In that piece, LaRouche says, Think of it this way: You have people who we’ll call “trained professional organizers.” Those are the people who are full-time in the developing organization. In order to qualify to be that professional organizer, you have to qualify yourself deeply in my economics. At that time, by that, he meant literally taking his Dialectical Economics (DE) course, which was, if people go back and actually are interested, and think about it in terms of today, when we’re meeting with the Chinese, or we’re interacting with the Russians, or we’re interacting with those who call themselves socialists, DE is the best possible epistemological organizing vehicle, because it’s a critique of Marxism from inside Marx, and inside a conception which we will call LaRouche’s conception of the American System. Which is a fundamental advance, by the way, on the work of Alexander Hamilton.

It goes back to the emphasis I’m placing on the Third Law and Fourth Law. In fact, a group of Russian scientists and economists said that Lyndon LaRouche’s fundamental discovery was discovering this measurement called “potential relative population density.” In fact, they have a name for it in Russia; it’s called the “La” for LaRouche. When we skip over the Third Law, we’re missing the “LaRouche.” In Lyndon LaRouche’s 1987 article about this in the EIR magazine, “In Defense of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton,” he says, “Were Alexander Hamilton alive today, he would smile as he accused me of ‘stealing his program.’ Then Hamilton would ask, ‘Show me how you worked out the methods for measuring the connection between rates of technological progress and rates of increase of productive powers of labor.’ We wouldn’t talk about much else, since on everything else we would agree automatically.”

LaRouche Takes Hamilton to New Heights

So Lyndon LaRouche fundamentally advances Hamilton, and that’s really implicit in the Third and Fourth Laws. When reading the Four Laws, the way people have tended to look at it, is, “Well, he’s got this whole piece at the end of the Four Laws as he wrote them, about the nature of man, and the nature of mind. That’s really all a part of the Fourth Law.” I would say, “No, it’s not.” The last piece is typical of Lyndon LaRouche’s writing, which is like Beethoven or someone else who writes a wonderful musical composition, and in fact, that last piece is really a principled recapitulation of why he wrote everything he did in all Four Laws. And the Four Laws themselves are a unitary concept.

Again, you can’t do one without doing them all, if we’re going to take the United States to the economic level we need at this point, to actually be a leading force in the world again for the good.

When LaRouche speaks about the type of educational class required to qualify someone to be a professional organizer, it is a little bit different than the way we talk about education today. He wrote, “The first and most obvious purpose is to begin turning potential recruits into qualified professional organizers. The second purpose is to present the class material on a sufficiently high level of quality as to drive away a majority of radicalized university students.”

So, what is he talking about? We say, we want to recruit people to us based on some “agreement.” He says, no, I’m going to design a class which is of sufficiently high level to drive all but the most serious people away. Not only that, the level of the class and the struggle people have with it is going to change the person, so that they can stand on their own two feet and think originally, creatively. For those people that professional organizers go out to organize, are in the productive and skilled sectors of the population.

He says, “Look, these guys are living their everyday lives. They have jobs, they have families, and they have all of these other things tugging on them.” It’s the job of the professional organizer to develop the successful program for intervening in society so that those who are best situated to understand and act on it can do so.

Those in productive layers of society have an inherent understanding of what we’re talking about when we talk about economics. If they’re running a plant, they know what a process sheet is, they know what a bill of materials is, and they know what a bill of consumption is. They know about input/output tables in terms of what they’re putting in and what they’re getting out. What they don’t understand, is what the professional organizer then gives them. In this case, it’s the Third and Fourth Laws. We take the producers’ knowledge of the plant and how it is run and we build on it the notion of how to build a platform for the entire economy which will last at least two generations into the future.

The professional organizers can prove to those he or she is organizing exactly why the Four Laws program is, as LaRouche specifies, not an option currently, but an urgent necessity. He or she can inspire, as Kennedy did, the great mission orientation in this population to bring this program into being. We will restore to this population the fundamental notion of social progress, where we can say to the next generation, I did better than the previous generation by this amount. Hopefully, I started a new renaissance, and I set the template for you, and the new generation will respond in turn. It’s my responsibility, therefore, not to go off and smoke dope, not to sit in a room and look at social media, not to do this and do that. It’s my responsibility to do exactly what I just said for the next generation that comes after me.

Passion To Build an Organization and Be an Organizer

So, the idea Lyndon LaRouche presented, as to how to build an organization, was two-fold. One is to set up an organizing process in which we are capable of having classes and rapidly identifying those people who fit into the realm of, “I’ve got this passion; I want to do it, I want to be a professional organizer in the Labor Committee.” The second is to broadly give the program to those sectors of the population that can actually rapidly assimilate that program and help us turn it into reality. That’s the whole secret sauce here, and I stole it entirely from Lyndon LaRouche’s paper called, “The Conceptual History of the Labor Committee,” particularly his writings there on how to create a political organization from scratch.

In conceptualizing the new pamphlet, we went back to Lyndon LaRouche’s 90th birthday speech to set the fundamental tone and agenda. In that speech, he said the political parties are both completely corrupt. They will be gotten rid of, because they are corrupt. They have no new ideas; they have no direction for the country; they have no place they’re taking people to; they have no imagination. They’re completely dominated by Wall Street, and their basic model of an economy is a British imperial model. But when the parties are destroyed, as they were in the 2016 election, the real power has been placed in the hands of the individual citizen, the republican citizen envisioned in the U.S. Constitution. How do you educate that individual citizen to take responsibility, and do so rapidly?

The most rapid way by which people get educated about fundamental concepts is when they have to teach them, when they have to go out and present them to somebody else. When they have to go out and stick their foot in that water, and go meet with the mayor and say, “Look, I want you to back this program, and here’s why.” You have to prove it to him; you have to get it across. Sometimes, you’ll go and stick your foot in the water, and you realize that you really didn’t have it, and you screwed up and you didn’t do it right.

But then you go back. Just like in any educational experience, you say to yourself, “OK, what did I do wrong? How did I present this wrong? How do I actually do it better?” And you go back. In this way, very quickly, you assimilate the fundamental concepts. Whereas, if you’re sitting on the sidelines, and you’re not doing stuff with us, and you’re not part of actually going out and doing this organizing, what happens is, you’re very disconnected from some very profound concepts which you have to get in your head—concepts you have to play with, you have to exploit, you have to teach with, to actually really begin to understand.

Defeating Hopelessness and Despair

The other thing I’ll reference for just a second, because I can’t get a certain book out of my head. This week I read Dreamland by Sam Quinones, which is mentioned in the Four Laws pamphlet. If you haven’t read it, or haven’t read Paul Gallagher’s review of it in the May 11, 2018 EIR, titled “How a Nation Is Destroyed, and How It Can Save Itself,” I think it’s very important to do so. It shows us an essential obstacle to what it is we’re talking about here that can only be overcome if we implement LaRouche’s Four Laws. Sam Quinones discusses how the opioid epidemic has spread in the United States to the extent that, between that and the counterculture and everything we’ve been attacking for years, we’re about to lose an entire generation or two.

For example, a figure that was given to me last week: 85% of young people in and around Buffalo, New York who apply for any job up there have a drug problem. When you look at the labor force that you’re trying to bring into the idea of a crash fusion program, and you must say to yourself, wait a second, where’s our labor force? That’s who we’re supposed to be talking to here, that’s who is going to do all of this. We’ve got a really, really big problem.

Quinones parallels what we’ve been saying in many respects. His work is known within the Trump administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has read Dreamland. In paragraph one of Gallagher’s review, he quotes from a May 1 interview of Sessions by the Washington Post. Sessions asked his interviewer: “Have you read Dreamland? For the first time, you get a glimpse of how it [the American opioid addiction epidemic] really developed.” Quinones tells how this happened. Well, he does and he doesn’t. He tells you certain things about how it happened, which is very remarkable and a very good journalistic feat. He gives you the mechanisms by which the crisis was spread by the drug companies basically hooking people on pills; he exposes a very systematic brainwashing operation of the entirety of society, assisted by doctors who essentially prescribe many more pills than any population could possibly consume.

Then he describes how a retail drug operation in one state in Mexico, out of one small town, actually came in following the trail of the opioid epidemic and hooked people on a very strong form of heroin, which was sold and delivered almost like pizzas are. People could just dial up when they wanted a delivery. The whole idea was, first get the customer drugged, then give them better stuff, etc.

Drugs Are Destroying Every Class and Ethnicity

The result is, that all across the de-industrialized section of the United States, it’s not just black people and Hispanics who are buying drugs; it’s also white folks. It’s middle class Republicans, whose kids are dying with a needle in their arm. I’m telling you, this thing is going to change, if we use it right in a good way, if people actually think about it.

At the very end of Quinones’ book, all these people in Ohio, for example, come to the realization that under Obama, nothing was going to change. In fact, Obama is in favor of drugs; he’s in favor of total legalization. He’s in favor of this whole crazy thing which is going on where we take a whole, huge part of the United States, except the coasts, and say, “OK, you’re de-industrialized. There’s nothing for you here. You’ve got a Wal-Mart, that’s what you get. The rest of it is, you get on SSI (Supplemental Security Income) and you trade in pills, and you hook yourself to dope and that’s your future.” It was the outright revolt against this situation—being turned into vassals, essentially, in a plantation economy—that determined the 2016 election, and this revolt is still going on.

We have the unique perspective in our movement for showing people how an economy can work, and that can help reverse the otherwise hopeless despair that has swept through the former industrial powerhouse called the United States. I hope I have presented some form of challenge to the way you may have been thinking about all this. The idea is for you here to quickly figure out how you fit into this matrix that Lyndon LaRouche laid out in that old, old, but still young paper. Are you a professional organizer? Well then, you’ve got to really get steeped a lot more in Lyndon LaRouche’s economics and meet his standards. You’re free to do that, and we will support you in that endeavor.

Are you, on the other hand, that valuable person who actually understands something about productivity, but can’t be a full-time organizer for whatever reasons, but would do anything to turn this country in the right direction? Will you help us do this? Will you volunteer whatever time you have, along with your passion and creativity? We really are throwing out a challenge here, very similar to the one that John F. Kennedy threw out to the entire American population, with his challenge to build a space program and get to the Moon. We have to do this; this nation has to survive. We’re an essential part of any four-power agreement that you can think about. We have a unique history, most of which we’ve lost, but which is essential for the world. And failure is not an option here.

Recapturing Faith in Humanity

Question: Thank you so much. The world has changed. Not just that we’re in another millennium with a 21st Century. This is not where it was 50 years ago when I was growing up, or 60 years ago, or 70. More people are educated; there are more professionals out there. More people are literate. There’s something that has changed in the world per se that seems to offer a launch pad for changes which LaRouche is promoting—going back to what the American republic once stood for.

So, I was trying to think of using maybe the world almanac to identify those changes, but I think a lot of people see, a lot of liberals see the world as America, America in the history of post-World War II. But they don’t see the world that LaRouche organizers have the capacity to see. I know we’re not the only ones, but it does seem like most people have somehow lost the sense of mutuality, or faith in humanity that characterizes the values of LaRouche. It seems it might be useful to frame the need for change and renewal, or rediscovering values and so on, from that angle. Or, could you suggest something that LaRouche has written that I could look to, to help me frame something?

Boyd: Well, fundamentally, what LaRouche talks about, is creating that passion in every human being for the idea of immortality, if you will—the idea of living up to that God-given talent which we all have, called the creative spirit. That’s his really most fundamental conception—inducing in other people the passion for discovery, for creativity, and for learning about other individuals, about other cultures, about all the other things that go with simple curiosity. I would submit to you that in many respects, Americans have lost curiosity; just pure curiosity. The idea of thinking about, wow, you’re from another country; I’m really interested in that. What do you think? What do you believe? How do you interact with the world? What’s your premise in terms of how you run your economy? What’s your premise in terms of the social relations in your country?

If you recall, during periods of optimism in our country, during the space period for example, when I was growing up, there was a lot of interest in other areas of the world. People would get out their maps, they’d look at other countries. You’d be saying, what is that all about? I’m really interested in that, let’s explore it.

I think Helga LaRouche’s idea that you should adopt another country and make it sort of your own, is an excellent idea. Because then you can compare and think about how our culture differs from their culture. Is there a superior culture or are they all equivalent? I think LaRouche’s answer to that would be, no, they’re not all equivalent. In many respects, we here have lost that which made us unique in the first place. Which is the reason why we had a revolution against the British here, the scientifically advance, anti-oligarchical Western European culture, which our Constitution is founded on—all of those things which actually make America great, if you will, not some nostalgic idea about the 1950s, but that history which makes us great, we’ve lost touch with.

And with that history comes the notion of President John Quincy Adams that our role is not to go out and be the world’s policeman. Our role is to lead by example as to the highest forms of civilization which ever existed. That doesn’t mean sitting there and chanting out, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” like mannequins. It was a highly intellectual culture which brought us the Constitution. The Constitution remains, probably, the highest instrument of law, more in line with natural law, than is found in any other place in the world.

I think if you want to read something LaRouche wrote which reflects the question you are asking, you should read or re-read “The Coming Eurasian World,” published in EIR, November 29, 2004. There he talks there about the relationships between cultures and what the role of the United States actually should be, based on our history, in the present international framework.

China As a Mirror of the United States

Question: Hello, Barbara. I want to report on an upstate tour that I was on with three other organizers. It was a lot of fun. There was a high degree of recognition of Mr. LaRouche; a lot of the blue-collar folks up there could easily see the need to join the Belt and Road Initiative. When people could get their minds around the three pledges, and LaRouche’s Four Laws, we saw great response from that; people signing up.

It was a lot of fun. The pamphlet was critically important in moving people and getting them signed up and at least initially thinking about what they could do to help this happen.

Boyd: I think you’re going to find exactly that kind of response at this point in all of these places which are sort of the pivot counties. Most people recognize that the anti-Trump coup has really had a terrible, terrible, terrible impact, and has stalled and paralyzed all discussion. It is urgent that we communicate that this is for real, we can stop the coup, with the mid-term elections this year. But more fundamental than stopping the coup, is getting the economic program implemented which will actually result in the 2016 vote being realized.

People are desperate out there, as you encountered. They see our solutions. What Lyndon LaRouche said in 2012 at his 90th birthday celebration was really quite remarkable. Go back and read it; he said that you have to get citizens to be citizens. They have to be able to take responsibility for the entire economy. There aren’t these people in between the people and the government so you can play spectator sports with politics any more.

Our goal here is citizens, ready with pitchforks, demanding, “This is the program we want.” That must be done with great passion. I have used the example of the space program, Kennedy’s challenge to the American people. This is your mission at this point, to turn the United States back to our revolutionary foundations, if you will: Back to Hamilton, back to LaRouche, back to what we once were in the world. And that’s really,— I think what you’re going to find all over the place, as you go into these places, because these are the forgotten men and women of the United States, that they’re ready to act.

Question: People were shocked, during our upstate tour, when we pointed their attention to the fact that China has developed very rapidly over the last 15 years. More than 800 million of their poorest people have been brought up out of dire poverty in the last 30 or so years. From 2013 to 2016, more than 55 million rural people were lifted out of poverty in China. At the same time, the United States has been engaged more and more in regime changes and bailouts: The juxtaposition of those two ideas really shocked people, in a good way.

Boyd: We’ve got to make the point to people that the same people who are running the coup against Trump, are the people who caused the deindustrialization of the United States, who sold us this bill of goods that Wall Street is where everything happens. We’ve got to get it so that whenever people hear that “ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,” which is the constant background noise on the radio and everyplace else—announcing “this is how Wall Street did today”—they essentially say, “That’s all bullshit, I don’t want to hear it! I want to hear about the rising productivity levels in our population today; I want to hear about how we’re actually creating systems of education which turn out responsible citizens. I want to hear about the level of scientific education in our population”—all of the standards that are implicit in what Lyndon LaRouche is talking about in the Four Laws.

That’s what we’ve got to create in our population. When they hear that “ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,” they should automatically react, “That’s the ring of my funeral. I don’t want to hear that anymore! I want to live!” And that’s basically what we’ve got to do here.

LaRouche’s Keen Insights in the 1970s

Question: I want to bring up a couple things from what Barbara was saying and my reflections on that.

In 1974 through 1975, approximately an 18-month period, Lyndon LaRouche created the Fusion Energy Foundation. In 1975 he wrote a pamphlet called How the International Development Bank Will Work. That same year he wrote a paper called “The Emergency Employment Act” of 1975. What’s relevant was not what he was writing, but what we were doing at the time, because that period saw the most extensive expansion of our organization in our history.

We went from being an almost entirely campus-based organization to being a street-based organization, which was organizing at plant gates and at unemployment centers and at intersections, and eventually at airports and things like that; but we did it over a period of basically 18 months. We went from having maybe 9 or 10 centers in the United States, to being active in over 50 cities in the United States. We were actually at one point publishing our newspaper, New Solidarity, not once a week, not twice a week, but even three times a week. That was only for a short period of time, but we did it. We had an idea about what we called “multiplier factors.” We talked about the idea that if you had a newspaper that went out to somebody, the multiplier factor of the number of people reading a copy was about 7 or 8.

At that time in the United States, you could actually find plant gates and you could go to shift changes, and you could talk to 5,000 workers at Chevy Gear and Axle in Detroit, and then hit the Dodge Main plant which was down the road; and you didn’t have to do much except pick up your bundle of papers and walk over to it. You sometimes would get chased away from the plant gates, and had to somehow do some other things—it was not all an entirely benign environment.

But the important point is, this idea of a small force suddenly creating a turmoil, an intellectual turmoil in the United States that could create hegemony for an idea that had not been known before. In other words, you just seize a moment, you take an idea that people had never heard before, but within a period of months, they have been caused to confront it. But that’s not just by a shock effect. You have to educate. You said a few things earlier about the idea of this. And I just want for you, Barbara, to say a few more things about this idea.

I don’t know if you have any reflections on the particulars of what I said, but I think this area of discussion that you introduced is an important one to go back to, because what we’re talking about here is the idea of cadre organization, meaning, centralized, professional organizers, and then the larger phase.

Boyd: Sure. I think there’s a certain point at which that whole, what I’ll call a standard, within our organization suffered. Back then, LaRouche insisted that our professional organizers had to be able to function as epistemological warriors. And that means they had to take on the very personal responsibility of really thinking through his Dialectical Economics course, which was a much tougher course in most respects than anything we are presenting today. Before you even started talking to others about his economic concepts, Lyndon LaRouche expected you to read through the works of German critical philosophy, to study Plato, and to read through the great thinkers in human history.

In his view, it was through that exercise that he could prove to you that his economic concepts were a fundamental advance not only in economics, but also in the overall epistemology of how thinking and mind are understood by human beings.

Today, we have to think about this business of education a little bit differently in some respects. We’re not necessarily looking for the person who agrees with us right away; the person that we may be looking for is the person who may disagree with us right away. When you engage people in political dialogue, you are looking for that person who shows a certain toughness of mind, if you will, a certain healthy skepticism, an individuality, a person who says, “OK, if you can convince me, I’ll be on your side, but you’ve got to prove it.” That’s a tough mind.

Lyndon LaRouche’s view is that if you actually understand what he’s talking about in terms of economics, if you really, really get it, then you have become someone who can withstand any kind of political battle and won’t fall apart. Should somebody come at you and try to disorganize you or whatever, you’re going to stand by what you believe and what you know. And the most important thing is, don’t say something you don’t know.

So much of what goes on in the United States today is based on opinion: “I have this opinion,” or “I have this shtick, or “I have that shtick.” If you’re really rooted in what LaRouche is talking about, you’ve got to actually understand that you don’t go out and talk about things which you can’t really know. You stick to what you know, and then you basically expand from there into things you don’t know, out of this wonderful thing which I’ll call creative discovery or curiosity, a lot of which we’ve lost in our dumbed-down society.

And sometimes, you are not able to get across a lot of what we’re talking about by simplifying it. Sometimes simplification is a very elegant way to actually express something. But most of the time, you have to be patient enough and strong enough to put people through the full ropes of grappling with the ideas that Lyndon LaRouche laid out.

What always happens when you are in a room, waiting to meet with Lyndon LaRouche? You know you aren’t going to have an easy ride during the conversation—ever! Many times he starts out by punning you to death, giving you a whole bunch of puns, to see if your mind is loose enough to actually think creatively. A lot of his puns are really bad. You tolerate that. But it certainly does loosen you up, and you find yourself thinking in a different way.

That is his personality: He views political organizing essentially as dialogue with somebody, having a dialogue with you. And the purpose of the dialogue is to lift your mind to a place where you haven’t been before. It’s not to roll around in your prejudices or play them, or manipulate them. He wants to take you to a place which is called being human. It’s called actually having the highest level of thinking. And if I can get you to that place, then we’re off and running in terms of getting you to act on these principles.

Take No One for Granted, Think Like Beethoven

If you reflect on how LaRouche organizes, he never takes anybody for granted.

Everyone’s unique; and LaRouche is in there, when he’s organizing to say, “How is your mind working? I want to find that out. And then I want to figure out how I can elevate your mind.” Now that takes skill; that takes all of the things we do in the LaRouche movement today. If you’re good at music and understand Beethoven, then you understand the central concepts of organizing, you understand the freedom/necessity paradox, which Lyndon LaRouche talked about endlessly, in terms of creativity.

And that’s the reason he had us all listen to and study Beethoven in the first place—to get us to understand how that works at the deepest levels of the human soul. You need to use every single tool that you can pull in. You use choral work, you use poetry, you use science, to lift yourself up and lift up that human being before you. Then you—and the person with whom you are engaged—can think differently than when your encounter began. That’s your purpose, that’s what’s called polemical organizing.

It’s very easy to fall into a different type of organizing which is called pragmatism, i.e., you and I agree, and we have the same thoughts about X, and therefore, you’re going to agree to do something for me, or I’m going to agree to do something for you. It doesn’t change the person. LaRouche’s fundamental orientation in building this organization is, I want to change how people think. And the inherently creative person, the one I’m looking for—the ones and twos—who have this idea and passion in them already, I’m going to take and turn them into the type of tough intellectuals who will be able to carry forward this program to others by having that core mission-orientation of: I’m going to do this no matter what, no matter what comes in my way, I’m going to get it done.

LaRouche often talked about the educational process he set in motion in creating an organization from scratch, saying that the criteria for leadership in his organization have to include having done something fundamentally new, as a contribution to some intellectual field, something truly creative—that leadership requires that. That’s what he holds up as the quality that a leader has to have—an active, fruitful creative orientation.

He was very tough in building this organization, and his emphasis was on education and on something I’ll call “polemical education,” that is, the idea is to go in, figure out what the governing axioms are of somebody, in terms of how they’re looking at the world, and if their axioms are wrong, figure out how to get underneath their skin and cause them to change. That’s the challenge of everything I was talking about before: how to create an organization, how to forge a group of organizers who are capable of doing that. And the only model I know of, that’s ever been done successfully in recent history, is Lyndon LaRouche’s creation of the National Caucus of Labor Committees.