Memo from Alice Roth calling on NCLC members to resign
January 22, 1981
It was by no means an accident that on the same day that Costas Kalimtgis was maliciously slandered at a national office briefing, a memo was also issued by Lyndon H. LaRouche on the "Riemannian" model project. I viewed that memo as a deliberate insult not only to myself but to the entire modeling staff and especially to the leader of that project, Uwe Henke.
LaRouche said, "First, it should be reemphasized to all members that every fundamental 'discovery' to be presented through the vehicle of the LaRouche-Riemann 'model' was effected decades ago by me, and was either elaborated or efficiently identified in such sources as Dialectical Economics. Nothing is being done currently but to translate those relatively long-standing discoveries into appropriate Riemannian terms of mathematical physics."
If I had thought that there were no fundamental discoveries to be made in economic science, I would never have undertaken the project. Indeed, as I learned in plunging myself into this work, there is much that is yet to be properly understood in this area and there are few, if any, "pat answers." What was particularly annoying to me was LaRouche's pettiness in claiming that no one could possibly surpass his "1952" accomplishment and that all we mere model staffers had to do was to put it into the correct mathematical form. It's clear that there is a great deal of difference between the initial formulation of an approach for tackling a problem and the actual process of solving that problem. We may have important insights and clues concerning how nuclear fusion may ultimately be realized based on an advanced epistemological viewpoint but we have not yet succeeded in achieving fusion power. I will certainly applaud the person or group of persons who accomplish that feat, and would never dream of denigrating that accomplishment because "LaRouche already made all the fundamental breakthroughs in 1952."
The second point I would like to make is that for many months I was struck by the fact that there was a serious flaw in the model work—namely that there was no room in our model for the "subjective" side of the economic process. Many years ago I was impressed by Rosa Luxemburg's point that this "subjective" side—that is, the credit system or fictitious capital—is just as ontologically real as the so-called objective, tangible side. Was that not the whole point of her devastating critique of Marx's attempt to construct a mathematical model of the economic process? Essentially, the credit system and its development reflects the "creativity" of society's ruling public and private institutions in their efforts to either facilitate or sabotage the development of the productive ("objective") forces. Of course, this is something which evades mathematical formulation just as it is impossible to model individual creative breakthroughs in basic science and technology.
Because our so-called Riemannian model ignored the credit system, it was utterly useless for any kind of work involving short-run developments—i.e., the "quarterly forecast." Yet it was demanded that we constantly produce such projections at a moment's notice for EIR [LaRouche's magazine Executive Intelligence Review]. The best the staff could do would be to first figure out what seemed to be going on politically in the business community and among policy circles and then attempt to generate computer graphs that matched our already-arrived-at assessment. I found this degrading and intellectually dishonest. We were representing ourselves as one more "delphic oracle" among other competing "delphic oracles." But the tools we were using were even less sophisticated than the Keynesian-Friedmanite rubbish we claimed to be replacing. The only thing that saved the project was that our political intuition occasionally was more on target than that of the competition.
What was most significant about LaRouche's memo, however, was his insistence that "morality" was the key to the model staff's problems. Yes, morality is the keystone of any scientific endeavor. But LaRouche issued this memo at the same time that he flew into a psychopathic rage against Costas Kalimtgis just because Costas hubristically took LaRouche on concerning the severe financial crisis which was threatening to collapse the organization and demanded an international financial plan.
Last weekend, LaRouche's rage against Costas became homocidal as evidenced by the charge that Costas was a "KGB pawn."
This is evil which cannot be compromised with. At the moment I read that memo, I decided to resign and I urge all others to do so.