U.S. Labor Party - Party Objectives and Ideology

Party Objectives and Ideology

The USLP is described in LaRouche's résumé as "an independent political association committed to the tradition of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Henry C. Carey, and President Abraham Lincoln." LaRouche describes it in another location as "a new Whig association," adding that an important objective of the party was to fight against "the attempted revival of the 'preventive nuclear war' organization, the revived Committee on the Present Danger." A state leader described the aims of the party and its organ, New Solidarity, as supporting the working class against capitalism, Nelson Rockefeller, and Leonard Woodcock, head of the United Auto Workers.

The USLP and NCLC have been variously characterized as "Marxist", "left wing", "right wing", and "far right". Outside of the political spectrum the group has also been called a "radical and cult-like group". Milton Copulos, of the Heritage Foundation, described the USLP as "a virulently anti-Semitic outgrowth of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)" which used the Fusion Energy Foundation as a front to "win the confidence of unsuspecting businessmen." Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote that the USLP began "on the political left but has since gone so far in the opposite direction that to call it politically right is to slander the entire conservative movement." Labor union journalist Victor Riesel, while writing of "anti-capitalistic movements, ranging all the way from the Communist Party U.S.A. to the Trotskyite Socialist Workers' Party," said in 1976, "the most extreme activists in this sprawling radicalism are the youthful U.S. Labor Party." Civil Rights activist Julian Bond called the party "a group of leftwing fascists".

LaRouche critic and biographer Dennis King says that when the USLP sponsored LaRouche's 1976 campaign, the NCLC was still in transition from a far-left to far-right ideology but by 1977-78 both organizations (which were really one and the same for all essential purposes) were advocating extreme-right positions. King described a typical post-transition USLP campaign in Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (Doubleday, 1989):

In Baltimore, USLP candidate Debra Freeman appealed openly to racist and anti-Semitic sentiments in her 1978 campaign against incumbent Congressman Parren Mitchell, chairman of the Black Congressional Caucus. Freeman, who is white, described Mitchell as a 'house nigger' for Baltimore's 'Zionists' and an example of 'bestiality' in politics....She won more than 11 percent of the vote, doing especially well in several white precincts.

Similar language had been used by the NCLC as early as 1974, when an alderman in Madison, Wisconsin, was called a "house nigger" at a city council meeting. According to Dennis King, the USLP chairman advocated launching ABC (atomic, biological and chemical) warfare against the Soviet Union as well as the military crushing of Britain (which his newspaper described as the headquarters of the "Zionist-British organism").

The USLP predicted collapse of the monetary system by November 1976 and thermonuclear war by 1977. It was opposed to the Rockefeller family and had a reputation for harassing the Communist Party, the United Auto Workers, and other political foes. In a 1974 interview, the USLP candidate for Governor of Michigan said that the Watergate scandal was a "deliberate attempt" to discredit Richard Nixon and weaken the presidency.