International Workers Party - Origins

Origins

The history of the IWP is itself controversial. The article below reflects both critics and supporters of Fred Newman, Lenora Fulani and the many organizations they have built over the years.

The IWP has its roots in Centers for Change, a radical community organizing project led by Newman in New York City in the early 1970s. Newman led the CFC into a brief alliance (1973–74) and even briefer merger (three months in 1974) with Lyndon LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC); the association began shortly after the conclusion of LaRouche's infamous "Operation Mop Up," a series of violent NCLC attacks on leftist groups. Even before bringing CFC members into the NCLC, Newman had written articles supporting LaRouche's theories and techniques, especially LaRouche's use of psychoanalytical concepts in political organizing and recruitment efforts.

The reason Fred Newman and his colleagues provided for leaving the NCLC was a disagreement between LaRouche and Newman over what to do with the National Unemployed and Welfare Rights Organization (NUWRO), which the LaRouchians had founded the previous year (Newman wanted to build it up, while LaRouche wanted to concentrate on more rarefied issues). However, the differences in life style between LaRouchians and Newmanites were equally important in triggering the split, with the notably puritanical LaRouche writing that there was no room in the NCLC for the CFC's unconventional (by LaRouchian standards) sexual practices.

Newman and 38 of his followers issued an open letter (August 1974) in which they announced they were leaving the NCLC and forming the IWP. The latter, they proclaimed, would be the true vanguard party that would lead the supposedly impending (within months) revolution of the working class against Rockefeller fascism.

They also claim to have been the first to decry LaRouche's move to the Right. In fact, however, the Communist Party, Workers World Party, the Socialist Workers Party and the independent "Movement" left had all condemned the LaRouche organization as fascistic during Operation Mop Up. Newman's Centers for Change not only did not join in this condemnation (or in the self-defense coalition that protected leftist meetings at the height of the violence) but they began working enthusiastically with LaRouche. This was after Mop Up was over, but while the LaRouche organization was still engaging in physical intimidation against black activists and West Coast leftists. Furthermore, Newman and his closest associates expelled and harassed members of Centers for Change, such as Jim Retherford and David Socholitsky, who opposed the alliance with LaRouche. Newman then fulsomely praised LaRouche in the introduction to "Power and Authority" (1974) published almost one year after most of the Left had denounced LaRouche's move to the Right. Nevertheless, the Newman group, after their split from LaRouche, did denounce him and continued to do so over the years.

In 1975, the IWP was joined by four Trotskyists who had previously constituted themselves as the Class Unity Faction within the Workers World Party but had been forced out as a result of their opposition to the WWP leadership's supposed reformism. The members of Class Unity hoped to convert the former CFC members to their own brand of revolutionary communism but soon found that their polemical style, which emphasized ideological principles, clashed with Newman's emotionally-based psychotherapeutic approach to leftwing politics. The Trotskyists and a handful of disillusioned former CFCers then split away in 1976 to form the short-lived "Communist Cadre" organization. In a dramatic public confrontation at a forum on New York's Upper West Side and in a series of mimeographed broadsides, they accused Newman of running a psychotherapy cult and of encouraging his followers to provide the FBI with false information on a dissident member of the former CFC, Jim Retherford, who had denounced Newman's alliance with LaRouche. Newman admitted that the approach to the FBI had been made but said that his followers had done it without his knowledge or consent. The ComCads retorted that no one in the Newman collective did anything without checking with Fred first.

Later that year, Newman announced the IWP was being abolished so that he and his associates could concentrate on community organizing. But a Manhattan newspaper, Heights and Valley News, published quotes in 1977 from IWP internal bulletins indicating that the party still existed as an underground formation. Since then, a steady stream of evidence—including many more internal documents, statements from former members, statements from psychotherapy clients who were the targets of unsuccessful recruitment as late as 2002, and sworn court deposition testimony—has indicated that the IWP continues as the core organization of a community that includes electoral third-party activists, actors, therapists, youth programs, and cultural entities that openly follow Newman's philosophy.