Last week’s article and blog entry from Scott McLemee (which I passed right on over over here) had me taking another gander at the strange review from Bronfenbrenner — which (shrug) I can send off to anyone who asks, in pdf form — as well that book Dialectical Economics. Bronfenbrenner wrote the only review of a Lyndon Larouche book to appear in an academic journal. The story behind this happenstance appears to have been given in one of the comments at McLemee’s blog:

Bronfenbrenner’s essay is, quite simply, a joke from beginning to end. The Journal of Political Economy does not often publish long review essays even about books its editors would consider important, but it often does (or at any rate did then) publish something funny or of quaint historical interest – usually much shorter than this one – as an end-piece. The JPE is, in addition to being one of the leading economics journals in the world, the house organ of the Chicago school of economics. In the early 1970s, Marxian economics was taken seriously by small but significant minorities in many leading American economics departments – but not, ever, in the Economics Department at the University of Chicago. Bronfenbrenner notes LaRouche’s dismissal of several leading contemporary Marxian economists, but it is not such serious contenders Bronfenbrenner has come to discuss: it is LaRouche, a clown, for the entertainment of the Chicago faithful. The nature of his audience is clear when Bronfenbrenner finds that he must drop his light tone to do serious business in one footnote, because LaRouche has actually landed a blow on hometown favorite Milton Friedman’s simplistic view of deregulated markets; the professor parries with Friedman and Schwartz’s rather more sophisticated Monetary History of the United States – a cheap move, for reasons that Paul Krugman spelled out well in his obituary of Friedman in the New York Review.

One footnote, however, does not a review make. That may leave the number of serious independent assessments of LaRouche’s theories at exactly zero, which would be evidence either of a previously unfathomed lower bound for standards in the diverse community of academic editors and referees (barring that one mercifully unnamed commissioning editor from DC Heath), or a supremely powerful conspiracy, I’m not sure which.

Just as well, it still stands there, confoundedly, for people like me and Scott McLemee, and probably Avi Klein and Dennis King, to pull up when engaging in relatively rudimentary research. A paragraph from that piece:
Marcus has apparently had the advantage of more private-business experience than the great majority of academic economists. One can guess that, blackballed by his radicalism from academia and civil service, he has turned to business in something like like desperation — and been rather good at it. Certainly the range of his experience, as reported here, is broader than the ordinary economist’s — including specifically mine. It is accordingly interesting to notice triple interactions between Marcus’ business experience, his philosophical background, and his policy conflusions.

I now accept this paragraph as dripping in sarcasm, a reading that suddenly allows it to make sense. But then comes this, and I am startled that I did not recognize the implications of what this is telling me.

Much of Marcus’s business experience, as he reports it, has been at the exploitative frontier of “white collar crime,” bordering on fraud both in the inducement and in the factum — a circumstance that I should imagine pushes one to one or the other end of the ideological spectrum.

Any other self-described Marxist and I could pass this off easily as someone regarding all of Capitalism as defacto exploitative “white collar crime”. Indeed I did when I read this. But Larouche is no ordinary Marxist, so now I’m stuck at a subject I once professed to be through with (and to a large extent am) — the life and times of Lyndon Larouche. His biography gets a little hazy up to 1967 or thereabouts, and I had assumed everything was on the up and up, Larouche was an erstwhile Marxist as he pursued business opportunities in a couple of fields, and then sometime just shortly before 1967 developed a more active interest in his politics and started haranging the Trotskyite bulletin boards with his loud, angry polemics. I note for the record that The Nation published a letter from a Lyndon Larouche in 1959, or thereabouts. Out of left field, there is this. I am weary of because I am infringing copyrights left and right by popping up. But one may do with that whatever one may.

Marcus’s experience extends to the speculative overcapitalization of capital values, creating “fictitious capitals” which cannot later justify themselves by earning capacity in the normal course of events. Observation of the overcapitalization process confirms Marcus in an overcapitalization theory of depression of the sort associated in America with [blah blah blah] Marcus has also been involved with inudustrial engineering and management science, including “rule-of-thumb” decision rules which appear to have soured him against bourgiois economics generally and reinforced his methodological biases. On the technical side again, Marcus claims to argue from the inside as well as the outside that the “US economy, viewed with some knowledge of the ABCs of technology, is one horrendous mess of waste, redundancy, obsolescense, and managerial incopetence.” Likewise, he believes the living standard of the representative fully employed US worker has fallen since the end of World War II.

At this point, we pause and reflect on every meaning of “Fictitious Capital” that one possibly could conjure, up to and including that which leads to a Felony Prison Sentence. Simply put, in other hands I would consider it a fair enough interpretation of economics. But, here, after scrambling in vein to find relevant material from his 500 page book on what he had to say about his past on the edge of “white collar crime”, we come to a question posed briefly on the FACTNet board: SO JUST WHAT WAS LYNDON LAROUCHE UP TO IN THE SHOE INDUSTRY?

As for the idea of being “inside” and “outside” of the US economy, flipping through Dialectical Economics, and right at the beginning, right there in 1974, he claims something he still claims today:

In fact, to a considerable extent, it is the exceptional efficiency of this dialectical mode that has enabled the author to become, alternatively, influential or bitterly vilified among most leading governmental and labor circles in North America and Europe today.

The component memes of his cult have always been in place. Back to the review, and one can check off just about everything.:

Marcus recaptures neither the confidence of the Communist Manifesto in a socialist future the day after tomorrow nor the confidence of the pre-1914 Social Democrat that socialism in itself would be a step forward whenever and wherever it came. His vision of the immediate future in America is of fascism not significantly more appetizing than the Nazi variety. His vision of socialism however, includes along with social ownership of the means of production a regime where most […] He appears to be what my late Wisconsin colleague Selig Perlman called an “efficiency intellectual.” That is to say, Marcus believes all rational men of goodwill accept his own technocratic design for the planned economy with minimal need for repression. All this is relatively standard, and Marcus also accepts a standard radical view that freedom today (in economic matters) is less than we believe it is because we have been narcotized by advertising, by salesmanship, and by the planned unavailabliity of goods we really want at prices we really can afford. In addition, like any other dialectic philosophers, Marcus sets off freedom against necessity in a fashion well adapted to rationalize almost any measure of dictatorship. Admitting that freedom requires the recognition of necessity, who is to draw the institutional frontier between the two domains? Judging perhaps unfairly from controversial manner, Marcus impresses at least one reader as a Me-for-Dictator type to whom it would be dangerous to entrust the task of drawing any boundary between the domain of freedom and that of necessity of order.

The criticism of consumer culture as giving one a false free will has struck me as a particularly powerful force in the realm of why a few hundred youths have joined up with LYM. I do not see the sense of rambling through the 500 page Dialectical Economics book (the body is 400 pages, but the footnotes and glossary are clearly just as self-important), densely written and with pseudo-knowledge that does not enlighten human thought in any way. One can leaf through it easily, and pick out items — the pooh-poohing of Adolf Hitler’s “peculiar psychology” as to why he set up those “work camps” (and what, pray tell, is this “peculiar psychology”, and what, pray tell, are these “work camps”?). Otherwise, I discussed matters on the book here and here.
Bronfenbrenner has a short wikipedia entry of some note, but I notice a new Larouche-feed entry includes the phrase: the notoriously unreliable, LaRouche-hating Wikipedia. ‘Tis a closed circuit, a cult.

Stumbling through the comments:

His Executive Intelligence Review developed a fixation on my dad at one point, thus resulting in the headline – ‘Martin Palmer: High Priest of Evil.’ (My dad was Prince Philip’s religious adviser at the time.) Such paragraphs as –
One of the more revealing expressions of the oligarchical strategy is the unwholesome symbiosis between Britain’s Prince Philip (Duke of Edinburgh) and his satanic religious adviser, Martin Palmer. Out of his oligarch’s pure hatred of Christianity and the modern nation-state, Prince Philip has resurrected the ancient satanic cult of Gaea, and has proposed to eradicate Christianity by means of superseding it with a mish-mash “world religion,” the latter incorporating all those degraded features of sundry religions which are consistent with Olympian hostility to science and do not promote the dignity of the individual person as “made in the image of God.”

used to give my family great amusement,

Actually I just find hilarious the sentence “His Executive Intelligence Review developed a fixation on my dad at one point”, which probably any number of people can claim.
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moderate update: Stupdified am I: Leftists describe the factional sectarian conflicts Larouche traveled through the 1960s. What amuses me most is that Larouche still today finds the 1957-1958 Recession a watershed moment in American economic history, that it has all been downhill since then — and one can pull this out of his literature still today, in the year 2007.
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Another update: Phil Ossifur sez: This is unbelievable idiocy. It’s why the good aspects of Bucky Fuller and Lyndon Larouche are not being employed to turn the world around. It’s unbelievable idiocy. Sheer idiocy. Idiotic idiocy.  UM.  Urm.  Huh.  Bucky Fuller and Lyndon Larouche are not particularly compatible in any measure.  Start with what one does with the environment and go on from there.

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