Psycho-Politics:  What Kind of Party Is This, Anyway?

By Joe Conason
(With Research Assistance by Barbara Turk)

Village Voice, 1982

A friend says she was riding the subway last September when two young women boarded, carrying a stack of newspapers.  As the train left Times Square, the women stood in the center of the car and began to address the other passengers, in clear, pleasant voices.  At first, people lowered their eyes reflexively, but as the political import of the spiel--anti-Koch and pro-Barbaro--became plain, most began to listen.

Their talk done, the women started handing out the newspapers and white-on-black DUMP KOCH buttons, which both wore.  Thinking they were simply Barbaro campaign workers, my friend said hello and took the proffered paper.  She glanced at it, noticed the name New York Alliance, and, after leaving the train, threw it away without reading much further.

She, like many other New Yorkers, had just unwittingly met the New Alliance Party.

Since the New Alliance Party first appeared here in 1979, local activists have wondered about its origins, goals, leadership, and tactics.  A zealous, highly motivated, and often sectarian approach--not to mention NAP's habit of suing its critics--has sown feelings of distrust and disquietude.  NAP has been confronted, whispered about, avoided, and sometimes excluded amid conjecture that it's a cult a split-off (or creation) of Lyndon LaRouche's fascist organization, a therapy collective, or even a nest of police agents.

Meanwhile, the party and its various affiliated or front organizations keep recruiting, a handful at a time, from among disillusioned Democrats, the gay, women's, and minority communities--and from the New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research, a private clinic which is also NAP's theoretical, training, and therapeutic center.

As the party opens its membership convention next week, it is appropriate to examine some of the questions raised during the past few years, not only about NAP's origins and practices, but about the appeal of its peculiar combination of therapy, politics, and culture.

Political activists who've observed the New Alliance Party in its earlier incarnations often call its members "the Newmanites"--after Dr. Fred Newman, who has led, organized, and theorized for a core of leading NAP members for more than a decade.

Because Newman is the oldest and wisest in the NAP leadership; because he has determined their political direction at every turn; because he has written their tracts and invented their "social therapy"--indeed, has treated most of the NAP leaders--let us begin with him.

Newman is 47 years old, an ingratiating, heavyset man with a penetrating gaze.  He describes himself as having been "born in the middle of the Depression (1935), the youngest of five in a working-class family."  He served in the U.S. Army in Korea for three years, and then worked his way through college with help from the GI Bill.  In 1963 he received a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Stanford, and went from there to a series of teaching jobs at Antioch, Western Reserve University, and CCNY.  His first published work was Explanation by Description, a weighty work on historical methodology in which Newman analyzes the work of pragmatic philosophers Carl Hempel and W.V.O. Quine; in the preface he declares himself a "Hempelian;" a term devoid of political content.  But even then Newman's work could have had political uses, because it delved deeply into why we believe what we believe.  Years later, reborn a Marxist, Newman came to regard Quine as a "fascist pig" whose worldview formed the philosophical basis for capitalist domination in America.

That book was written in 1966 and was published by Mouton, a French academic house, in 1968; Newman acknowledged help from his wife, from whom he has long since been divorced, and from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, "which covered some of the expenses incurred in the preparation of the manuscript."  According to Newman, this meant that a friend with an air force grant had used some of the money to pay for Newman's typist.

But by the time his book came out, Fred Newman had already cut his earlier philosophical moorings.  He was teaching at CCNY and hanging out at Alternative U., the hip free university where Lyndon LaRouche, among others, was giving courses to New Leftists from all over the city.  A sociologist who taught at Alternative U. in those days recalls Newman and recognized his picture immediately; this teacher says then was no way Newman could have been "unaware" of LaRouche from that time forward.  Indeed, one former member of the CCNY philosophy department recalls vividly that several of the students in the department were moving into LaRouche's orbit while Newman was teaching there, and that everyone was aware of it.

Though described by a former colleague as a "conventional, competent philosophy teacher" up until around 1968, Newman suddenly became alienated from campus community life.  What he now calls his developing interest in "alternative education," his colleague recalls as Newman becoming "a guru . the Reverend Mono of CCNY."  He was not, as some of his published material implies, fired from his teaching job for activism.  Instead, he resigned to pursue his own strange brand of off-campus activism, as outlined in a pamphlet put out by Newman and his followers in 1972:

"IF ... THEN (the first Newmanite grouplet) was the first organization which all the rest grew out of.  It was an attempt to get the so-called college activists ... to do something other than sit in cafeterias.  The modality of IF ... THEN was obscenity.  It prided itself on putting out the most obscene brochures and pamphlets in the whole city--Filthy--incredibly offensive....  IF ... THEN was a kind of political encounter group.  The attempt was to try to produce encounter workshops between [ILLEGIBLE] activists and what we labeled at the time as white middle class people....  The overt attempt of the IF ... THEN people was to be sufficiently provocative to get an angry response.  We had the understanding at that point that national intellectual dialogue was not where it was at but then was not the understanding yet of the complicated dynamic of group therapy ... primarily it was a self-growth experience."

The IF . THEN group, a collective of a down or so students and ex-students, moved off camps in May '68 to a storefront near Broadway and 176th Street.  They wanted to interact with the community, but had no idea who or why, and eventually local youth gangs broke up the storefront and drove them away.  By late summer, IF ... THEN had turned into a kind of communal school called Encounter House, located in various people's apartments uptown, with "heavy therapeutic input."

It was, says the 1972 pamphlet, an "anarchic" construct, "but characteristic of our kind of anarchistic structure, it was ruled by a benevolent despot"--Fred Newman.

By the winter of 1969 Encounter How had moved downtown, incorporated itself, and turned into Centers for Change.  Still "ruled by a benevolent despot," it rented a building on West 21st Street.  Though the Sloan House YMCA co-sponsored a program with CFC called "Urban Confrontation, " there was "still an enormous sense of trying to figure out what we were doing."  The members pooled their money, and other CFC communes began to spring up as people drifted in and out of 21st Street.

But although by their own account, most of the members of CFC had no idea what they were up to, two momentous things happened between 1969 and 1970.  Fred Newman started his private therapy practice, and CFC tried to make money from running sensitivity groups under the name Robin Hood Relearning Company.  This latter effort failed, but it was the harbinger of later success.

By the spring of 1971, Newman and "a number of Centers people who had been in therapy themselves and had been receiving training to do therapy" opened a clinic at 84th Street and West End Avenue and called it Centers Clinic.  A year later, CFC proclaimed the clinic "a smashing success" with some 85 patients in individual and group therapy, and an annual budget of more than $150,000.  CFC also encompassed a press, a dental and therapeutic clinic in the Rochambeau section of the Bronx, and a school for young children.  With a staff of 28, CFC was run by an executive body of four who still dominate much of NAP's activities:  Newman, Hazel Daren, Gail Elberg, and Ann Green.  And while the 1972 CFC pamphlet listed 29 staffers, the only recognizable photographs are of director Newman.

Among CFC's first therapy patients was Nancy Ross, NAP's coordinator and at-large candidate for City Council from Manhattan last year.  She was then a former schoolteacher from Queens who had just left her husband and moved with her baby daughter to the Upper West Side.

Newman describes CFC at that time as a "radical health collective," doing some tenant organizing, and "Maoist" in orientation.  But internal CFC documents from November 1972 through February 1973 show that "therapy;" sometimes in week-long marathon sessions, was the top priority of the group, which had already set up offices as the New York Institute.  Though many of the CFC members were "doing" therapy by this point, they were under the supervision of Newman, Green, Daren, and Sema Salit, the mother of Jacqueline Salit, now the editor of the weekly NAP organ, the New York Alliance.

In addition to income from the therapy practices, the collective was beginning to raise money on the street by selling CFC publications.  Additional funds cams from donations by people treated at the Bronx dental and therapeutic center.

In one of their internal bulletins, CFC staffers interviewed each other, using a question formulated by Newman:  what do you think CFC will look like five years from now?  Fred himself saw it this way:  "In five years there'll be four branches of CFC with 50 workers in each branch....  My guess is that each of the other places will be servicing 400 to 500 people and each will include a school, a community in-patient medical, dental clinic and a training institute....  My guess is that in five years we'll be much more overtly involved in revolutionary politics....  In five years we'll be a rather famous organization."

But first, in the fall of 1973, the CFC met Lyndon LaRouche and the National Caucus of Labor Committees, which had just concluded a series of violent rampages against the rest of the sectarian left.

Newman and his comrades have had to face continuing questions about their merger into the LaRouche cult in the summer of 1974.

In a recent interview with the Voice, Newman recalled that after CFC opened its brownstone at 314 West 91st Street in the summer of 1973, "what had been decided by the collective was that we wanted to get to know the U.S. left.  We hadn't had many dealings with the left, virtually none, so we began to meet with left organizations."

Because CFC had a building and a few dozen dedicated members, they were "courted by left groupings," Newman said.  The key thing to remember, he insists, is that CFC members were "naive" about the left.

According to Newman, their initial contact with the NCLC occurred one evening when they were hosting a support meeting for the United for the Farm Workers at the CFC brownstone, in October 1978.  An NCLC member named Mitchell Hirsh showed up at the meeting and, says Newman, "almost got himself killed, because he started doing this outlandish provocateur stuff.  The meeting begins, the UFW did a presentation, and he got up and began to raise a whole host of questions about Chavez."

Hirsh's behavior "seemed crazy" to the CFCers, and they made him quiet down.  "He stayed afterwards," Newman remembers, "and we talked for a very, very long time."  Hirsh explained that the NCLC was pursuing two particular projects at the time, which appeared interesting to the Newmanites.  The first was called National Unemployed and Welfare Rights Organization (NUWRO), an unsubtle attempt to take over or bust up the National Welfare Rights Organization headed by the late George Wiley.  Wiley's legitimate movement, whose veterans became the key organizers of citizen groups across the country, was castigated by LaRouche as a plot of the Rockefellers and the CIA.  The second project was "Operation Nuremberg," a campaign against what LaRouche claimed was massive brainwashing by the CIA through the use of drugs.

"We were interested is both of those things," says Newman, "because we had been working with welfare recipients, and we were interested in taking that a step beyond service work and advocacy, and the concept of a welfare union sounded good, sounded right politically."  CFC was unaware "until much later," he claims, of the NWRO-NUWRO conflict.  "We were very interested in psychological abuse, since we had been doing psychotherapy."

Newman and the CFCers began to sponsor joint forums with the NCLC, although he adds that "we were publicly critical of a lot of stuff that they did.  Some elements of the left were still relating to Labor Committees, the Trotskyist movement, for example....  It seemed different, but not shockingly different, from the rest of left sectarian politics."

During that winter, CFC members began chapters of the NUWRO in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, but the relationship with NCLC members, Newman says, was "difficult ... increasingly hostile."  On the other hand, "We were studying a lot of their materials collectively, and found the economic analysis to be exciting.  Their material on psychology was in my opinion not very good."  Yet Newman did find that LaRouche, then known as Lyn Marcus, had at least engaged the "subjective" problems of being a socialist in capitalist socialist in capitalist society and the emotional handicaps faced by left organizers.  Like Newman, LaRouche was experimenting with amateur therapy on his followers in hopes of creating a more advanced and capable cohort.

The success of LaRouche's methods was evident.  Proclaiming NCLC's "hegemony" over the rest of the American left, the NCLC cadre had undertaken a violent campaign in the spring of 1973 to "mop-up" the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and any other outfit that dared to stand in its way.  Literally dozens of members of the CP and SWP were physically assaulted--and some hospitalized--by NCLC goon squads throughout 1973.  This notorious operation ended in 1974, as NCLC began a separate campaign against the United Auto Workers--yet another CIA/Rockefeller front--which disrupted organizing efforts and union locals across the country.

Whether the CFC group took part in any of this madness is unclear, but they were certainly around the NCLC while it was happening.  Newman, referring to a "freak-out" in late '74 when LaRouche claimed that the CIA had programmed one his own members to assassinate him, now says, "We were sort of trying to figure out if we could do anything about their madness in working with them politically..  It was clear to a lot of people that it was crazy, but a lot of people saw it [the craziness] as a kind of tactic."

Newman's rationalization doesn't hold up too well in light of his own writings at the time, particularly a 130-page book entitled Power and Authority, which announced CFC's ideological unity with LaRouche under a "United Front Vanguard."  The book's foreword, dated June 1, 1974, contains a long, murky quotation from LaRouche-"Lyre Marcus," which said in part: 

"Socialist organizing is directed to the mobilization of workers around a new sense of social identity replacing the 'little me, a new sense of identity which the propagandist and organizer must synthesize [italics in original].  What is to be done is, in effect, to realize to the extent possible the possibility for reconstructing an actually human individual from an adult accultured by capitalist society.  The partial stripping away of the persona is at best merely a precondition for the positive work."

Newman added, "The former workers of CFC will organize in the spirit outlined by Marcus."

The Book noted that NCLC's analysis of brainwashing by the Rockefellers and CIA was "sound" and that as those forces rapidly moved the world toward fascism, of the vanguard represented by NCLC and CFC was the last hope of humanity.  But Power and Authority also revealed some of the aspects of Newman's developing "theory of proletarian psychotherapy."

Succinctly stated, Newman's theory went as follows.  Capitalism controls people through the false ideology of rational self-interest, with the bourgeois individual ego as the locus of control.  By forbidding an experience of awareness with others, the bourgeois ego thus keeps workers separated from the "mass mind," and renders them socially impotent.  Only with the help of a revolutionary therapist can the worker be led from the bourgeois to the proletarian ego--through an act of violent personal insurrection.

After CFC officially joined the NCLC, the latter began to use the West 91st Street building for events, forums, meetings, and training.  A sample of what it was up to during the summer of 1974 can be gleaned from a leaflet headlined "ZOMBIE KILLERS OUT OF CONTROL" which attacked the Lincoln Hospital Detox Center as a brainwashing center and headquarters of the Black Liberation Army.  It warned: 

"This summer you will be walking down the street with your family and a cruising car will pull up beside you.  A group of young black men will jump out of the car and surround you.

"As they claw in on you, you may notice that their eyes show no emotion, their pupils are pinpoints.  Your throat will be slashed, your wife will be stabbed, your children's heads will be smashed against the pavement.  The attackers will be grinning or laughing."

At the bottom of this hysterical message, a forum on "The Emergence of a Worldwide Fourth Reich" was announced for Sunday, June 23, at "CFC, 314 West 91st Street, NYC."

Newman now says that he and his followers intended to enter NCLC to "change it from the inside," although Power and Authority explicitly identifies NCLC as the rightful leader of the left.  Within a month or two after the two groups merged, it was obvious that there wasn't room in the same organization for Newman and LaRouche.  In late July, Newman resigned and began work on a "split document."  Of the 30 other CFCers who had joined NCLC with him, 25 resigned a month later.

Newman's document, written with the assistance of Hazel Daren, was a 64-page booklet called A Manifesto on Method.  It admitted the failure of the effort to improve NCLC, and announced the formation of the "International Workers Party," a new organization which retained a substantial portion of LaRouche's ideology--including the Rockefeller/CIA road-to-fascism analysis.  Indeed, Manifesto shows that even after leaving NCLC, Newman and company were still focused on LaRouche, despite public attacks emanating from NCLC accusing the IWP group of psychotic sexual practices and bestiality.

Looking back on those days, Newman and other NAP members are quick to denounce LaRouche and the NCLC, claiming they recognized its proto-fascist tendencies before anyone else did.  But they are understandably defensive about their NCLC connection, and Newman sees no reason why it should still be an issue eight years later.  "That makes one slightly paranoid," he complains.

But the NAP leaders have never come clean about what happened during 1973-74, attempting instead to obscure it.  Such obfuscation reached a new level last year during Nancy Ross's City Council campaign, when NAP published leaflets and newspapers "exposing" a "whisper campaign" by reform Democrats.  The essence of this was that Ross "is a sexual pervert who sleeps with Lyndon LaRouche."  Obviously, the publication of this "rumor"--which was unlikely to have reached the vast majority of voters--by NAP was intended to discredit all discussions of the past affiliations of Ross and NAP.  Ross continued in the same vein when she appeared on a radio program and insisted that she and other NAP leaders had been in NCLC "for only a month or two"--hardly the case--and that she personally had been "out of town" for half that period.

Newman's argument that CFC members were "naive" is no more credible, since Newman is remembered by others as a presence around the Alternative U., the Free University, and the '68 Columbia strike, all places when he would have encountered LaRouche long before "meeting up" with the NCLC in 1973.  The alibis do little more than feed continuing suspicions and thus reinforce NAP's paranoia.

As the newly formed International Workers Party took shape in late 1974, Newman--now chairman of the IWP--and his comrades gradually dropped their obsession with the NCLC, although their rhetoric and style still reflected their recent experiences.  They began to put out a newspaper, the International Worker, and dispatched members to cities as far away as San Jose, Atlanta, and Detroit to set up IWP locals, with the well-worn mission of leading the working class to revolution.  They still considered themselves the proletarian vanguard, and, although the 1976 elections were two years away, tried to preempt LaRouche's presidential ambitions by announcing their own candidates:  Sema Foxx (Salit) for president, and Lew Hart for vice-president.

The IWP initially turned its organizing attentions to other group on the sectarian left and almost immediately drew the attention of the FBI, which compiled a thick file of information on the party between 1975 and 1976.  That file, released under the Freedom of Information Act; reveals nothing startling about the IWP's politics or its relationship with other groups.  The bureau's informants considered the IWP "inept," "financially insecure," and not prone to physical violence.

Politically, the group's character at that point can be understood from an FBI account of an IWP-sponsored "United Front Conference" held in Detroit on March 28, 1975.  Attended by members of the Revolutionary Communist League and the Spartacist League, the meeting was chaired by Hazel Daren and addressed by Fred Newman.  Though the conference was ostensibly about building a Nationwide Unemployment League, the topic exciting most debate on the left in those days was school busing in Boston and the violent resistance it had encountered among white residents.  The IWP was "opposed to busing because it divides the classes," a position adopted at the time by a wide variety of left sects, although the report given by Joyce Dattner, another NAP stalwart, may have had a unique perspective:  "The Decaying School System, Brainwashing and the History Around Bussing (sic)."  By the end of 1975 the party had about 100 members, mostly in New York.  They spent much of their time selling party literature on the subways, at factory gates, and at meetings of other like-minded groups.  By early 1976 the IWP had undergone a factional split which left it with about 50 members.

During 1976, according to Newman, the IWP disbanded and its former members--the survivors of three splits in two years--put their energy into constructing a new organization which still exists as a NAP adjunct, the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council (NYCUWC).  "We essentially dropped the parties and vanguards and the pretentiousness of left grandiosity," he explains, "and moved instead toward relating to community struggles.  The council grew by leap and bounds, and I consider that the point at which our work became effective."  Disbanding the IWP would also have meant leaving behind the forms and content of sectarianism, particularly the CFC-NCLC-IWP propensity for labeling liberals, radicals, and the traditional left as "liberal fascists" and tools of the Rockefeller-CIA apparatus.

But it isn't at all clear precisely when the IWP did cease operating.  The internal bulletin of the IWP, Party Building, was still being published as late as March 1977, and was being distributed only to party members--not to the welfare mothers who paid $1 a year to join the NYCUWC.  The latter were referred to, a bit condescendingly, as "organic" members (i.e., black or Latin), contrasted to "fractional" (or "white and educated") leaders like Newman and Joyce Dattner, the NYCUWC president.  The secret IWP members were by then trying to take over the New York Working and Poor People's Party, a local arm of the People's Party.  The December 26, 1976, bulletin outlined how this could be accomplished:  "We need to exercise to a greater extent and develop further within our party our existing expertise in the area of social psychological techniques, i.e., the psychology of propagandizing."

The continuing thread through all these changes was the New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research, although Newman says the institute wasn't founded until late 1978.  Even the institute and the party were closely intertwined, as another note from the December 26 bulletin makes clear.  Comrade Fred N., as the bulletin called him, had given the final lecture of the "Marxism and Mental Illness" series at the New York Institute, an annual event which continues under NAP's aegis.  "Approximately 80 people attended," the bulletin reported, "four signed up for the NYI open therapy group ... and 15 copies of the NYI booklet containing excerpts from Fred's writings were sold."

Perhaps the IWP's continuing existence needs to be kept secret because its members were moving toward electoral politics on the West Side, an arena in which the IWP link to NCLC could prove devastating.  In 1976 Joyce Dattner ran for the assembly in the 69th A.D. against reform Democratic incumbent Jerrold Nalder.  She lost big, but the IWP was encouraged by the 2,000 votes she received on the Poor and Working Peoples Party line.  The next move was to run Nancy Ross, who'd become president of the P.S. 75 Parents Association, for a seat on Community School Board 3.

Euphoria over the Ross election victory didn't last long among her supporter, because again their past returned to embarrass them.  The Heights and Valley News, a monthly paper put out by the Columbia Tenants Union, began to run a lengthy series on the Newman group in November 1977.  The pieces were written by Dennis King, then a CTU organizer.  Kings stories were carefully researched.  He concluded that the Newmanites were a "therapy cult" whose members were manipulated in a controlled environment by guru Fred.  King brought to light their relationship with LaRouche, their amateur therapy practices, and their intensive use of loyal members to solicit funds on West Side streets, unlicensed, on behalf of the Unemployed and Welfare Council.

But by far the most explosive revelation was an account of how two leading members of the Newman group--who remain highly active in NAP today--became FBI informants.

Back when the CFC members were preparing to join the LaRouche organization in the spring of 1974, a member named Jim Retherford rebelled against the merger.  A veteran movement activist, Retherford knew LaRouche as an enemy of SDS from years earlier.  He particularly didn't want the child he had fathered with Ann Green, a longtime Newman follower, to be raised under cult-like conditions; so he left, taking the boy Jesse.  According to Dattner, who wrote a rebuttal to King's charges, Newman follower and attorney Harry Kresky filed an action in state court seeking the child's return.  Kresky says Retherford then filed an affidavit with the court explaining why CFC's merger with NCLC had forced him to take custody of Jesse.  According to Kresky, Retherford's affidavit also made the "wild" allegation that Fred Newman exercised "mind control" over Ann Green.

On June 16, two weeks after CFC dissolved into NCLC, Retherford and his son left town.  From that point on, the Newmanites say their own actions were dictated by "NCLC discipline."  Ten days after receiving a telegram from Retherford explaining his actions, Kresky and another lawyer associated with Newman prepared an affidavit naming Retherford as a former Weatherman, and in early July made contact with the FBI.  They told the bureau agents that Retherford had harbored Weather fugitives and had been in contact with Jane Alpert about six months earlier, hoping that in exchange the FBI would look for Retherford and the child.  Kresky also met with lawyers from the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York "to get them to pressure the FBI to act," according to an IWP statement.  But nothing happened.  On August 14, Kresky wrote a letter to the U.S. Attorney's office to complain about their inaction.  Eleven days later, Kresky, Green, and nearly all the other ex-CFC members quit the NCLC to rejoin Newman and form the IWP.  Kresky now says that he and Green regret the incident, and wouldn't do the same thing again.

Much of the IWP's reply to these charges, which were first raised by ex-members at a public meeting in May 1976, consisted of absolving Fred Newman.  Thus, Green and Kresky always insisted the rubric of that the NCLC's legal and security staff had directed them to snitch on Retherford.

But this directly contradicts Newman's contention that they had entered NCLC with independent minds, seeking to change it from within.  And the fact that Kresky wrote his final letter to the feds on August 14, less than two weeks before he resigned from NCLC, further discredits that plea.

Despite such setbacks, the ambition of the Newman inner circle led them several times over the following you into conflicts with other groups. NYCUWC fought competitively with another, more legitimate welfare rights organization, and ended up suing the National Congress of Neighborhood Women over its refusal to grant NYCUWC some of its CETA slots.  Majority Report, the feminist newspaper, accused the Coalition of Grass Roots Women, yet another Newmanite front, of attempting to "trash" an international women's conference.  Along with the front organizations, a Newmanite press emerged--Don't Mourn Organize, the Cry for Freedom, the Union Works, the Independent Organizer, Matter Over Mind (a social therapy journal), most or all under United Struggle Press, which shared offices at 1133 Broadway with NFIU.

Simultaneously, the New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research had its official opening, at 865 West End Avenue in a ground-floor suite, and NYCUWC began operating out of separate offices in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Harlem, and downtown Manhattan.  Then in the first few months of 1979, a Newmanite umbrella group called the Labor Community Alliance for Change announced that it had become the New Alliance Party.

The burst of activity which led up to the founding of NAP left many observers puzzled, particularly about the sources of funding for all of the offices, salaries, printing, telephone, and other, ancillary costs of the party's octopus apparatus.  Much of it seemed more impressive than it really was--a set of paper organizations with overlapping memberships and few activists outside the original Newmanite core.  According to Nancy Ross, the party's monthly expenses now average about $4000, with $2500 of that coming from sustainers," or private donations.  That doesn't include the cost of publishing the New York Alliance, NAP's weekly newspaper, or the expenses of NYCUWC, which has received a "monthly sustainer" of $1500 from the New York Institute ever since the end of 1978.  Aside from fundraisers, party dues, and other irregular sources of income, it appears that the largest single prop for the party and its affiliates is the New York Institute, which now has more than 200 patients paying for weekly therapy in group, couple, or individual sessions.

NAP's political history since its appearance has been one of conflict with progressive groups and individuals, while providing a "left" cover to several of the city's most compromised politicians and hustlers.

The first sign that something was seriously amiss was NAP's entry into Bronx electoral politics via the Joseph Galiber campaign for borough president, in 1979.  Galiber's record as a Bronx state senator was undistinguished to say the least; he was and is the most conservative member of the legislative Black Caucus, and had always been a regular party hack.  But he was "progressive" enough to deserve NAP's line.

Even worse, perhaps, were his business connections with organized crime figures and poverty-program exploiters.  In August 1977, after a lengthy investigation, Galiber was indicted by a federal grand jury as part of a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government through a real estate manipulation.  Indicted along with Galiber was Robert Munoz, the one-time director of a notorious drug rehabilitation agency known as SERA.  Neither Galiber nor his attorney, Murray Richman, who was also indicted, was convicted.

The Galiber campaign was financed, in large part, by his business partner William Pellegrini Masselli, who together with Galiber owns Jopel, Inc., a building contracting firm.  Federal authorities believed for years that Masselli, a Bronx meat wholesaler, belonged to the Genovese crime family, and in the spring of 1981 he was indicted, along with three confederates, for conspiring to sell synthetic cocaine and hijacked lobsters.  Masselli's mob lawyer pleaded him guilty.

Among the largest contributors to Galiber's 1979 Democratic primary campaign was Schiavone Construction, the mob-linked firm of Reagan's secretary of labor, Ray Donovan, which had awarded Jopel various subcontracts over the years as a "minority business enterprise."  And the biggest single donor was Cambridge Drywall Inc., another mob construction company whose owner, Vincent DiNapoli, pleaded guilty this year to federal labor racketeering charges.  DiNapoli's best-known co-defendant, carpenters union boss Ted Maritas, disappeared after their first trial ended in a hung jury, and is presumed dead.  DiNapoli's lawyer was Roy Cohn, and among the witnesses he called to testify on behalf of his client was another NAP candidate:  Moses Harris, head of the scandal-ridden construction worker outfit Black Economic Survival.

Harris, who ran for Congress against Representative Fred Richmond of Brooklyn on the NAP line in 1980, testified at the DiNapoli trial that in the fall of 1979 he and William Wright, another Black Economic Survival leader, had gotten $15,000 cash from the defendant to "coordinate" minority employment on a job site in Long Island City.  Apparently Harris, who never saw the site, needed to be paid off even though the primary contractor for the site was a minority firm employing black and Latin workers.  Harris testified that he was in the habit of taking cash from contractors on the sites where he served as "coordinator."

Harris--whose Black Economic Survival attorney, Murray Richman, was indicted along with Galiber in the Bronx case--never filed any financial statements with the Federal Elections Commission for his congressional race.  He got 5000 votes.  Since then, Harris has joined OMI, a construction management firm, as vice-president for labor and community relations although he is still associated with Black Economic Survival.

Among other politicians listed as supporters by NAP at various times are Assemblyman Roger Green of Brooklyn who endorsed Ross but has kept his distance since last year, and Councilman Gilberto Gerena-Valentin of the Bronx.  The latter ostensibly serves as NAP's co-chairman, and he has certainly been active in the party; he has also endorsed the work of the New York Institute.  But even Gerena Valentin, whose lack of a real base in the South Bronx necessitated his alliance with NAP, maintains some independence of them.  For example, he recently joined other Latin officials in urging the Liberal Party--a NAP enemy--to back Mario Cuomo for governor.  Ironically, it's doubtful that NAP will endorse Cuomo if he runs as a Liberal candidate.

Equally strange, for a group professing to want to dump the "Democratic machine," is NAP's liaison with State Senator Vander Beatty of Brooklyn, that borough's most subservient black Democratic drone.  Beatty is the only elected official in the city who has run successfully, notwithstanding his appearance on the NAP line, and his party affiliation is listed in public directories as Democrat-Liberal-New Alliance Party.  Early in 1980, NAP and Beatty seized on growing black anger with City Hall and announced the "Dump Koch" campaign, beginning with a recall petition drive which eventually went nowhere.  NAP sold thousands of DUMP KOCH buttons at $1 apiece, but Beatty soon disappeared from the movement and, by primary day 1981, nobody even knew whether he was supporting challenger Frank Barbaro or not.

The NAP people did support Barbaro very early on, and despite some friction with the other left and minority groups in the ad hoc anti-Koch coalition, played a constructive role as individuals in the Barbaro campaign.  The key strategists in that effort, including Barbaro himself, refused to give NAP an official role as an organization because of their own suspicions about the party, and because so many of Barbaro's other supporters would have balked at NAP's participation.

Even more frustrating, from the NAP perspective, was Barbaro's refusal to endorse Nancy Ross for Manhattan Council-at-Large, though she had endorsed him and was campaigning from a purple school bus plastered with Barbaro-Ross placards.  Since Rosa's chief accusation against her progressive Democratic opponent, incumbent Ed Wallace, was that he had remained neutral in the Koch-Barbaro contest, Barbaro's aloof attitude posed an embarrassing problem.

When the council elections were canceled, the NAP leadership saw another opportunity in the upcoming Barbaro race against Democratic victor Koch on the Unity Party line, a chance to wield real influence in an independent formation through sheer force of numbers.  But those dreams evaporated within weeks after the general election, as it became clear that the labor unions which had backed Barbaro, somewhat cautiously, on the Unity Line, were unwilling to abandon the Democratic Party.  Barbaro himself, after working in Bensonhurst for 10 years to keep his assembly seat, was unwilling to risk everything he had--including the chairmanship of the assembly labor committee-to make the Unity Party his vocation.  As a result, the Unity Party became the Unity Coalition, and the non-NAP forces who remained were satisfied to wait for another chance to battle their enemies in the Liberal Party, which had sold out to Koch by nominating Councilwoman Mary Codd instead of Barbaro.

Many observers believe that if Barbaro had expelled the NAP element from his electoral coalition, the Liberal Party would have faced more pressure to give him its nomination.  Yet Barbaro refused to do so, explaining to many people that he felt such an exclusion might be construed as "red-baiting."  His principled refusal to kick NAP out was rewarded, post-election, by a vicious attack in the New York Alliance which labeled his return to the Democrats a "sell-out" and sneered at the exhausted candidate for taking a vacation in the Caribbean.

Other members of the Unity Coalition, who were still reluctantly meeting and talking with NAP representatives, were enraged by this assault on their friend and standard-bearer; not long after, NAP published several attacks on other Unity Coalition members, thus violating what many considered a matter of coalition principle.  The coalition's Lower East Side chapter voted to expel its NAP-affiliated members, and the question of dual loyalties has remained a divisive problem for the coalition ever since.

The belligerence of the New York Alliance, edited by Jacqueline Salit, a Newman follower for many years, has always been the most visible manifestation of what troubles progressives around the city about NAP.  Members of Democratic reform clubs, whatever their feelings about NAP's politics, are disturbed when NAP members join their clubs even as the Alliance warns its readers against the Democratic Party and the "do-nothing" formers.

Underlying those concerns is the growing awareness of the key role played in NAP by "social therapy," specifically the New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research (see box) and its leading ideologist Fled Newman.  For when all is said and done, Newman remains the most important figure in NAP--the manager of the Ross campaign, the founder of the NFIU, the institute's top political educator, and executive board member of the party.  Few among NAP's inner circle have been outside Newman's orbit during the past 10 years.

Newman's reply is that these stated concerns are no more than a mask for redbaiting by liberals worried about NAP competition.  Yet the same questions are raised by people across the spectrum from liberal to -radical, from black nationalists, trade unionists, and other third-party proponents.  While finding individual NAP members likable and hard working, these activists worry about the messianic quality of NAP and where it comes from.

Rejecting NAP, even with its tainted history, doesn't entirely answer these questions, because the other aide of the party's messianism is a peculiar vitality lacked by most local activism.  The emotional and cultural aridity of the democratic left must be faced by NAP's critics, for only in that context can the appeal of sects and cults be understood.  And only then will there be not just organizations, but a movement as well. 

Poli Psych

The political history of the New Alliance Party, its precursors, and its affiliates may be summarized charitably as a series of temporary, and bizarre, aberrations.  Perhaps such errors should no longer be held against the people who made them.

The most disturbing aspect of NAP, however, has remained consistent from the beginning:  the total integration, under Fred Newman s guidance, of psychotherapy and political recruitment.  The place where political activity and emotional catharsis are combined is the New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research.

In New York State, it's legal to practice psychotherapy without a license or degree of any kind, so long as the practitioner doesn't pretend to any unearned professional status.  Fred Newman, the inventor of "social therapy" and the man who has done therapeutic work" with practically all of NAP's leading members--and trained most of them to practice therapy, too--has no formal psychological training.  Yet, he has made his living, and his political livelihood, primarily as a therapist since 1969.

The stage upon which Newman emerged was set perfectly in time and space.  The Upper West Side, where most of the Newmanites still reside, has for decades hospitable to all sorts of sects, especially psychiatric and psychological ones--the Reichians and Solitarians being among the best known.  The end of the 60s saw therapies of all kinds, from Laingian to Janovian to EST, Lifestream, feminist psychotherapy, and literally dozen of others, flourishing alongside religious and quasi-religious cults.  And finally, as the New Left shattered, a substantial fragment hurtled into ultra-left cults of personality.

Understanding "social therapy" from reading the works of Fred Newman and his various collaborators isn't a simple undertaking. Newman began his professional life as a philosopher of history, and the dense jargon he learned to write in graduate has scarcely become more comprehensible since. Even people who say they've been helped by Newman's therapy are unable to explain the underlying ideas in more than superficial ways.  "Reading Fred's booklets isn't any way to understand what he does," laughed one patient.

Yet the half a dozen booklets and pamphlets Newman has self-published over the past 10 years do offer some clues about what he calls the "practice of method"--which be regards as the best way to teach Marxism.

In Power and Authority, published simultaneously with Newman's entry into NCLC, he stressed "proletarian therapy" in which the therapist led his charges from "bourgeois impotency" to the "overthrow of the bourgeois ego."  Part of this process involved recognition of one's feelings as "bourgeois love, bourgeois sadness," and so on; if one became angry at his therapist for pointing this out, it was only "bourgeois anger."  Much of the theory involved mechanistic analogies with Marxist terms, with "state of mind" equivalent to the capitalist nation-state, and in the distant future, the "withering away of the ego."

By June 1979, Newman and his associates--mostly therapists, trained and "cured" by him--had toned down their rhetoric, removing all references to Lyndon LaRouche, and published an introduction to the foundation of social therapy" entitled The Practice of Method.  This 130-page document, written by the institute staff and edited by Newman and Lois Hood, a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia, is the main published explanation of what happens at the New York Institute.

"The fundamental issue in social therapy" the booklet says, is the patient's current mode of explanation and the transformation of it into a new mode of explanation."  In other words, how do we describe our feelings--which are "social" and never "private"--is a key to why we feel they way we do.  Because there are no private feelings, only social relationships, the institute strives toward "treating the society by curing the individual."  The end result, when a cure is achieved, is that "the patient is organized . [cure] must result in the patient performing revolutionary acts . acting in ways which reject (to the extent materially possible) the mode of understanding, explaining and meaning authoritarianly identified with bourgeois ideology."

This may sound like a formula for indoctrinating patients into NAP, and vice versa--especially because the institute funnels money into NAP organizations seeks members at NAP events, and teaches current and prospective ... example ... by joining NAP's New York City Union of Lesbian and Gay Men is admission to special group sessions at the institute.

But Newman--and several of his patients who agreed to be interviewed--insist that's not how it works.  One businessman, the only patient interviewed who isn't involved in NAP activity, said that after years of therapy he still considered himself "not political."  He and his fiancé have undergone social therapy as a couple, in groups (twice a week), and individually, finding Newman "incredibly perceptive ... charming ... more human than the other therapist I used to see."  The therapy was not "dogmatic or domineering," and there was no trace of Marxism that he could detect.

But of the other four patients who contacted me for an interview, all had become involved with NAP since therapy at the institute.  Indeed, one has become a party official.  The others held meetings and fundraisers at their homes, and donated money to the Nancy Ross campaign.  Yet all attested to the help they had derived from the therapy, and insisted that they were in no way pressured to become involved with NAP.

Despite such denials, serious questions about the institute's fusion with NAP remain.  Because the institute is organized as a partnership of its staff, with Newman as a "consultant," there is no public filing or annual report of its finances.  With about 800 patients, at least half of whom are NAP members and many of whom pay around $40 an hour for group sessions, the institute's annual cash flow may be above $500,000 a year.  A substantial part of that sum finds its way into NAP and its satellites, but there is no way of knowing how much.

Beyond the matter of money is an ethical problem:  at what point does the patient's need for the therapist's approval make him or her vulnerable to abuse by subtle political urgings?  Most psychologists, psychiatrists, and reputable therapists, whom Newman accuses of making their bourgeois politics behind neutrality," would probably say that the institute has violated its patients' autonomy.  To ask that a "fundraiser" be held in a patient's home is, for instance, a blatantly unethical practice.

While the institute staff has acquired a number of certified social workers over the past several years, its approach is still dominated by Newman.  His response to the "cult" accusation is that such charges are really a form of "red-baiting."  "It's degrading of people to suppose that they mindlessly follow NAP" after "doing therapy" at the institute, says Newman, adding that "transference, influence, and dependency grow in all human relationships."  At the institute, he claims, such dependencies are not encouraged, but "challenged from beginning to end."

But how much does that really mean when patients feel, as they told me, that Newman's therapy had changed their lives completely, and that its benefits were worth $100 a week or more?

Perhaps the problem lies with Newman's definition of "cult," for he refuses to call the NCLC a cult, although it has all the mind-control trappings and exploitative practices of the Unification Church and other cults.  "I think it's obscurantist to call them a cult," explained Newman, "because it denies what is most pernicious about them.  See, I don't think what's most pernicious is that you have a bunch of people following LaRouche. I think what's most pernicious is what they're following him in, and what they're doing."  He disparages the stories of cultism by ex-NCLC members, saying that such charges are "a way of not admitting their political error."

Though Newman says he protested "abusive, quasi-therapeutic stuff" in NCLC, he seems to believe that if the political ends are just, even cult-like practice are justifiable in pursuit of those ends.