Formation The NCLC had it origins in the 1968 convention of the
Students for a Democratic Society. It comprised people who had been expelled from the
Maoist Progressive Labor Party, an SDS faction, and students from
Columbia University in New York City. It called itself the "
SDS Labor Committee" or the "National Caucus of SDS Labor Committees". Led by LaRouche, it included "New Left lieutenants" Ed Spannaus, Nancy Spannaus, and Tony Papert, as well as Paul Milkman, Paul Gallagher, Leif Johnson,
Tony Chaitkin, and Steve Fraser. The Labor Committee was known for promoting a "socialist re-industrialization" of the economy, combined with confiscatory taxes on what it saw as wasteful and parasitic investment. It was expelled from SDS for taking the side of the teachers' union in the
Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike. as well as those of other
Marxists such as
Rosa Luxemburg, but opposed other New Left organizations which LaRouche said were dominated by the
Ford Foundation,
Institute for Policy Studies and
Herbert Marcuse. The organization became the NCLC in January 1969. According to the
Los Angeles Times, LaRouche writes in his autobiography that in 1971 the NCLC formed "intelligence units", and the following year started training members in paramilitary tactics.
Operation Mop Up According to
The Village Voice and
The Washington Post, the NCLC became embroiled in the early 1970s in conflicts with other leftist groups, culminating in "Operation Mop-Up," which consisted of a series of physical attacks on members of rival left wing groups. letter recommended that the FBI provide anonymous aid to a background investigation by the
Communist Party USA. During "Operation Mop-Up," LaRouche's
New Solidarity reported NCLC confrontations with members of the
Communist Party and
Socialist Workers Party. One incident took place April 23, 1973 at a debate featuring Labor Committee mayoral candidate
Tony Chaitkin. The meeting erupted in a brawl, with chairs flying. Six people were treated for injuries at a local hospital. Following this incident,
New Solidarity warned: The clown show is over. The Labor Committee warns the Socialist Workers Party and its comrades-in-hysteria: when you did all the fighting for the Communist Party 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 Communist Party. In November 1973, the FBI issued an internal memorandum that was later released under the
Freedom of Information Act. Jeffrey Steinberg, LaRouche spokesperson and NCLC "director of counterintelligence", described it as the "
COINTELPRO memo", which he says showed "that the FBI was considering supporting an assassination attempt against LaRouche by the Communist Party USA." LaRouche wrote in 1998: The U.S. Communist Party was committed to putting the Labor Committees out of existence physically... Local law enforcement was curiously uncooperative, as they had been during prior physical attacks on myself and my friends. We knew that a 'fix' was in somewhere, probably from the FBI... We were left to our own resources. Tired of the beatings, we decided we had better prepare to defend ourselves if necessary.
1974–1986 By the mid-1970s, the NCLC had abandoned Marxism altogether, in favor of what its members described as an
American System approach. Press accounts describe shift to the right, with the NCLC establishing ties to the
Ku Klux Klan and the
Liberty Lobby. The conservative
Heritage Foundation issued a report which states that "neither the Left nor the Right has a thoroughly-documented explanation of the organization's nature or purposes." According to the
Los Angeles Times, LaRouche said he met with representatives of the
Soviet Union at the
United Nations in 1974 and 1975 in order to discuss attacks by the
Communist Party USA on the NCLC, and to propose that the CPUSA should be merged into the NCLC. He denied receiving any assistance from the Soviets. The NCLC established a paramilitary "officers training camp" in
Argyle, New York in 1974, according to an FBI report. Members learned about "small unit tactics and strategy", and trained with
nunchaku. The FBI documents reportedly also mention "beatings" and "
brainwashings", claim that the group moved from far-left to far-right, and complain that NCLC sent in tips about wild conspiracies. In 1974, NCLC members admitted they had been harassing FBI agents for years. According to LaRouche in 1995, during the period 1976-1978 the NCLC ceased being a dues-paying membership organization, and made the transition to a "purely philosophical-legal organization," whose principal activities were either philosophical or in connection with legal cases against the
COINTELPRO and related offenses of the FBI and associated agencies. In 1977, Costas Axios, NCLC chief of staff for New York, said of the NCLC: "We are socialist, but first we must establish an industrialist capitalist republic and rid this country of the Rockefeller anti-industrial, antitechnology monetarist dictatorship of today." According to
The Washington Post, FBI memoranda of the time described the NCLC as a "clandestinely oriented group of political schizophrenics who have a paranoid preoccupation with Nelson Rockefeller and the CIA", and as a "violence-oriented Marxist revolutionary organization." The
Los Angeles Times reported that by 1981, the NCLC was overseeing a network of companies and organizations that were budgeted to bring in $11.7 million in gross receipts annually. One company, Campaigner Publications Inc., was reported to have grossed $4.5 million in a four-month period. In a purported internal memo from 1981 LaRouche explained his position within the organization by saying, "I do not wish to hear, ever again, that I must wait until our legal council (sic) has assessed the wisdom of one of my decisions or that some members personal sensitivities must be taken into account...I promise you that I shall function, unrestrained, as a commanding general of a combat organization. Anyone who opposes my orders will, in the moral sense, be shot on the spot for insubordination." In 1984 the headquarters were moved from Manhattan to
Leesburg, Virginia, a suburb of
Washington D.C. The NCLC was indicted on charges of
obstruction of justice in 1986 and its offices were searched. Federal prosecutors alleged that LaRouche "dominates and controls" the NCLC. A U.S. government memo reportedly said that "the primary purpose" of the NCLC is to support LaRouche in a lavish lifestyle and to "courier large sums of cash to secret depositories." Over a dozen NCLC members, including LaRouche himself, were eventually indicted. (See also
LaRouche criminal trials) ==Electoral politics==