The International Workers Party

After leaving the NCLC, Newman formed the International Workers Party (IWP). The Newmanite document issued upon their leaving NCLC and establishing the International Workers Party re-affirms a commitment to carry out current and future joint work with the LaRouche organization. The charge of a direct and ongoing LaRouche connection to the Newmanites, however, appears to be speculation--no credible reports of a direct connection between Newman and LaRouche since the mid-1970's have been documented, and it is unlikely that any such relationship exists today.

Manipulative and Confrontational Style

In many ways the theory, ideology, strategy, tactics, and internal organizing practices of the LaRouchites and the Newmanites are very similar:

• A methodological link between the psychological and the political which forms both a theoretical world-view and a justification for indoctrinating members through so-called "therapy".
• Psychologically coercive techniques to manipulate members' views and actions.
• Organizing strategies that target according to stratas or sectors rather than social class.
• Attempts to establish hegemonic relationships with other similar political groups, and, failing that, attempts to undermine the group and establish parallel organizations.
• Virulent and unprincipled attacks on critics, including insults, agent-baiting, threats by attorneys and defamation lawsuits.
• A shared political strategy (vanguardism with roots in Trotskyist political theory).
• Re-writing of the group's political and organizational history to meet current needs.
• A closed and covert hierarchical internal structure that is not necessarily congruent with the public organizational structure.
• Differentiation between internal in-group and external out-group reality, use of propaganda, and implementation of a "secretsociety" style--all markedly similar to that of a totalitarian movement.

These similarities do not change the fact that LaRouchite philosophy is apparently neofascist while Newmanite philosophy is apparently left-progressive, but it does mean that internally both groups have an authoritarian hierarchy whose existence is denied, and both groups rely on psychologically-manipulative theories to control core members. Both groups match a cult paradigm and are far from democratic, despite outward claims and appearances.

It is crucial to note the relationship of LaRouche, Parente, and Newman during the early 1970's in light of their subsequent activities. All three white male political leaders saw Marxist revolution through the prism of ego-mania, and used psychologically manipulative techniques to enforce obedience in the institutions they have built-institutions which sought political hegemony over other groups.

All three groups share many elements of a totalitarian movement as outlined by Hanna Arendt in <The Origins of Totalitarianism>. In recent years there has been a revisionist interpretation of Arendt's work, linking nazism and communism as two sides of the same ideological coin, or claiming that all communist or Marxist movements are totalitarian, or that only nazi and communist ideologies can become totalitarian. Arendt specifically repudiates this simplistic interpretation of her work when she writes "...ideologies of the nineteenth century are not in themselves totalitarian," and that although fascism and communism became "the decisive ideologies of the twentieth century they were not, in principle, any `more totalitarian' than others." According to

Arendt, the ideological victory of fascism and communism over other twentieth century belief structures was "decided before the totalitarian movements took hold of precisely these ideologies" as a vehicle for seizing and holding state power.

A totalitarian movement is correctly defined by its style, structure and methods not by its stated or apparent ideology.

The Intellectual Vanguard

The early theoretical writings of LaRouche and the early and current theoretical writings of Newman reflect a derivative (and heretical) form of Trotskyist Marxism that is both unusual and virtually unique on the American Left. This shared theory is best described as an aberrant "Messianic" form of Trotskyism with an ego-centric view of the importance of the individual leader in shaping history, coupled with a patronizing "noblesse oblige" approach to organizing the working class and people of color that reflects a political colonialist mentality.

Journalist Dennis King has studied numerous internal documents from the Newmanites and concluded that in terms of their political theory of organizing, they make a crucial distinction between the core cadre (primarily white intellectuals) and the "organic" members (primarily people of color). According to King, the primarily-white intellectual vanguard trained by Newman through "therapy" is in the process of using "therapy" to raise the consciousness of the primarily Black and Latino recruits so that some day in the future they will have the wherewithal to actually lead the organization...but not yet. King has described this as "paternalistic racism."