Fred Newman's Cult

By Ken Lawrence

The Jackson Advocate, June 6-12, 1985

Long before now, people on the Left were asking questions about Fred Newman and his organization. For a man who presents himself as a Marxist leader and theoretician, Newman has had some pretty strange connections.

Back in 1968, when protests against the U.S. military and the war in Vietnam were reaching their height, Newman's book “Explanation by Description: an Essay on Historical Methodology,” appeared. In the preface he wrote, “I wish to acknowledge the United States Air Force Office Scientific Research (Grant No. AFOSR-529-65) which covered some of the expenses incurred in the preparation of the manuscript.”

It is hard to know which aspect is the strangest: an academic leftist seeking funds from the U.S. military, the military giving him the money, or, if the grant somehow “slipped past” the vast military intelligence network that was spying on anti-war activists, the lack of the subsequent outcry by the right.

Naturally an obscure book by an obscure Marxist didn't draw much attention among activists, so Newman's organization, Center to Change (CFC) was initially accepted as legitimate, even if a bit odd, among New York leftists who would have asked sharp questions had they know about this episode from Newman's past.

All that changed when CFC pulled the first major provocation. The headline story in a 1973 issue of the CFC paper “Right on Time” read, “A Message to the Masses of the People: Beware of the Movement.”

Especially coming from someone who had previously been financed by the U.S. Air Force, it made some pretty incredible charges against the movement: “This mass group of groups functions as a CIA watchdog.”

“The Movement, as has often been pointed out by working people, is a group of rejects. This group of rejects, the Movement, is not a response to economic-social crisis. It is a response to the CIA's response to economic social crisis”

What precipitated this broadside?

The movement organizations that had initially agreed to work jointly with Newman and CFC objected when Newman's group started co-sponsoring events with Lyndon LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committee (NCLC). According to the “Right on Time” article, activists had warned Newman and CFC that LaRouche and NCLC were either “cops or crazy.”

CFC responded by attacking the rest of the left as puppets of the CIA and declared, “Yet it is important that we state here for all to see, that the NCLC is the vanguard party.” It called upon others to follow the NCLC's leadership. “More particularly, CFC functions as revolutionary rearguard. For we recognize that proper leadership requires both a vanguard and a rear guard.”

Jim Retherford, a member of CFC, quit because he could not go along with NCLC's “Operation Mop-Up”—violent attacks on other leftists. CFC joined NCLC shortly afterward, and Newman adopted a tactic that NCLS had made famous. Previously, when Retherford challenged CFC policy, he was smeared as a “cop” by Newman. But next Newman had documents prepared naming Retherford as a former member of the Weather Underground, which were turned over to the FBI and the United States Attorney.

Newman has tried to keep this FBI connection a secret, but it came out in public after he and his followers quit NCLC, formed the International Workers Party (IWP), and the IWP then split. One of those who left IWP was one of the people Newman had instructed to prepare the report for the FBI, and he confessed his involvement in the incident in 1976 at a public meeting in New York, according to investigative reporter Dennis King.

Activists in New York are aware of this history. Some think it helps explain why, in his 1974 book, “Power and Authority: The Inside View of Class Struggle,” Fred Newman could attack Black nationalism, feminism, and gay pride as “concepts devised by fascists to locate a group's identity in something other than the working class,” and then, a year later, reversed his field completely.