International Workers Party - Ideas and Practices

Ideas and Practices

The IWP considers itself a revolutionary organization which fuses Leninist vanguardism with Newman's theories. Newman believes that everyday psychological ills are brought about by the same bourgeois social order that supposedly is the cause of poverty and wars. In Power and Authority (1974) he argues that each person in capitalist society has a "dictatorship of the bourgeois ego" in his or her head, which should be replaced by a "dictatorship of the proletarian ego." This personal transformation, Newman suggested, could be brought about by the therapist functioning as political organizer, and by the power of the collective. This philosophy later came to be known as "social therapy" and was developed and elaborated in relation to various political and psychological themes. Those who adhere to Newman's philosophy, whether members of the IWP or not, are sometimes referred to by critics as "Newmanites."

Newman and his followers are among the many who claim to have been influenced by the work of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky (who died in the 1930s) was a developmental psychologist who pioneered the notion that the intellectual development of children is a function of human culture as mediated through the family and the larger community. Vygotsky's powerful and seminal contributions to modern thought have been adopted (and adapted) by a wide range of contemporary thinkers, some of whom resent their use in the controversial context of Social Therapy (Vygotsky himself never practiced, wrote about or conducted research on the subject of psychotherapy).

Over the years, critics have suggested that Newman's proletarian ego dictatorship is really the "cult-rule" of Newman's own ego, while some former members have described in articles and web postings how the "collective" (both in therapy and in political work) serves to browbeat, guilt-trip and intimidate individual members. Among the scores of former members, however, are some who say they benefited from the experience and are only mildly critical of Newman and other party leaders, as well as many individuals whose current opinions are unknown since they do not post Internet messages on the subject or communicate with other ex-IWPers or the media.

In the middle and late 1970s, the IWP was reportedly made up of fragmented "cell" groups that carried out party directives. Each cell had a leader, who would meet with Newman and other leaders in a group called "The Secretariat." Former members describe various levels of play-acting and various devices for squeezing more money and longer hours of work out of them having been added during the following years.