Jacques Cheminade

Lyndon LaRouche’s Method of Physical Economy in Coincidence with France’s Republican Humanism

Jacques Cheminade is the Founder and President of the Solidarité et Progrès political party in France and a former Presidential candidate. This is an edited transcript of his presentation to the second panel, “Earth’s Next Fifty Years,” of the August 14, LaRouche Legacy Foundation seminar, “On the 50th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Stunning Forecast of August 15, 1971: So, Are You Finally Willing To Learn Economics?”

Obviously, you cannot speak about Lyndon LaRouche in fifteen or twenty minutes. To tell something about him would be meaningless except for inspiring [people] to read his collected works, listen, and view his speeches and associate with his life-long commitment to human creativity. Therefore, what I am trying to do now is merely to give you an idea of his scientific method of physical economy through the way he changed my life and responded in France to our best republican humanist tradition.

My Discovery of Lyndon LaRouche

When I first heard him, that day in New York’s West End, it is not what he formally said that attracted so deeply my full attention, but his relentless approach to the economic and political state of the world: he was not there delivering a speech, but sharing “live” his deep commitment to truth, inspiring to move, and not imparting, like other politicians would do. Then, despite my age and official position, I decided to investigate what was behind his way to raise the challenge, to discover the source of what I had felt. I knew what it meant: something fundamental was added to my life, not from outside but steering into me something that, as a human being, was inside my mind but that I had missed or mostly misunderstood.

When you say such things nowadays, such emotions are either buried under the surface or misguided into irrationality. I realized then that it was the absolute opposite; it was the emotional source of true creative reason.

I then learned that at the very moment of August 15, 1971, LaRouche had warned against the destructive long-term effects of President Nixon’s and John Connally’s abandonment of the Bretton Woods system, which, he then forecasted, either would lead to a new depression, a universal fascism, and create the conditions for global pandemics; or to a new and just world economic order—a New Bretton Woods, under which development will be the new name for peace, as Pope Paul VI had said in his Populorum Progressio encyclical.

As I was reading and listening to Lyndon LaRouche on the weeks following, on a Sunday morning, January 5, 1975, I got, in the place where I was staying, the weekly supplement of The New York Times. The cover page showed French soldiers in the trenches of World War I, with the following legend: “Once again triage—Who is going to die, who is going to live?” On page 10, an Ethiopian mother and her two children [were shown with] their skin literally floating on their bones, and the legend was: “Who is going to be fed? Who is going to die for hunger?” There was an elaboration on the necessity of a “lifeboat ethics” in an “overcrowded world.” I was then hit in the face. I had images before my own eyes showing that the world was run by a bunch of Malthusian criminals. I then got acquainted with Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s interventions in Bucharest, denouncing John D. Rockefeller III, this fascist; and then I also learned, that Lyndon LaRouche [had] responded to the 1972 report of the Club of Rome, according to which “There are limits to growth,” by his polemical “There are no limits to growth,” later published as a book in 1983.

I then understood LaRouche’s absolute commitment and confidence in the human capacity to create, beyond all existing formal limitations or threats. His capacity to always invite people to participate in something they did not know about the day before. “There is no single issue, there is no other issue,” he always said, than to unleash such a human capacity against the oligarchy committed to prevent it, to kill it.

LaRouche’s Insights and Forecasts

LaRouche had the best insight, the best historical knowledge of the embodiment of such an oligarchy: from Zeus to the Queen of England, from the Roman Empire and Venice to the British Empire. The reason for that insight, I realized, is that he fights the oligarchy because it prevents creation, through the downsizing of the minds and the control of money issuance, eventually deploying military and police units against any power committed to the good. Lyndon LaRouche never fought from the standpoint of a given power or a geopolitical position against another power, but he always fought from the standpoint of the higher order of creation. LaRouche rejected oligarchy because it destroys the human mind and reduces people to beasts. He embodies the commitment to the immortality of creation. When I understood it, I told myself: “These are my people, even if to join them may have to be paid with a dear price.”

Soon, I knew that I had to understand much more. LaRouche had many times forecasted—mainly nine times, but in reality, even more—what was going to happen, as he did in August 1971. Let me mention here three of his main forecasts: in 1984, he forecast the fall of the Soviet Union within five years; in October 1988, he foresaw the coming reunification of Germany; in July 2007, he announced the collapse of the world financial system.

What was his secret?

He forecast things that nobody else, mostly nobody involved in politics, had forecast. The secret was not a secret, I realized; it was his personal courage and his joyful commitment to the common good, to the General Welfare of the people, that inspired his scientific method of physical economy. It is often mentioned as LaRouche’s Four Laws, but we have to be aware not to fall into a reductionist approach, like with the three laws of Kepler, for example. To be for a Glass-Steagall banking separation, for a National banking principle, for national credit system issuance against monetarist financial economics, and to invest in the most advanced forms of technology. Thermonuclear energy and space exploration as a One, is good and fine, but it is absolutely opposed to the thinking of LaRouche to consider them as a useful toolbox to be applied “as such.” It is the reflection of a higher method of thinking, based on the continual flow of human discoveries generated by a platform: the Four Laws define the conditions for the platform, but never in a mechanistic, linear way.

In a LaRouche speech or writing, it is the generating principle that requires the conditions, but not the conditions that by and in themselves would generate the motion. It is the continual improvement of human creativity, generating discoveries of new physical principles beyond the limits of deduction and induction, the power of human minds to “jump” into the future and see the present with the eyes of the future, and then submit their discoveries to the proof of principle of crucial experiments to “see if it works,” to validate them.

So, like we should do with Kepler to understand his discoveries, following step by step how he proceeded to discover the principle of universal gravitation, including of course his insights into geometrical and musical compositions in the universe, we should not only “listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche,” but to follow how he proceeded, minimally, through studying his So, You Wish To Learn All About Economics, published in his collected works by our LaRouche Legacy Foundation.

Not for a personal enjoyment—which of course is the nicest byproduct—but to be able to participate as a renewed source in the political, social chain providing to the people the means to free themselves from submission to the imperialist way of thinking, to free themselves with the right method from the chains of a British Empire, an Empire of which its servants are not necessarily “ethnically,” as they say, British, but much worse: British, as an imperial principle of absolute opposition to humanity.

Some Quotes from LaRouche on Economics

Let me now quote—and it is of course far from being enough, but I have to resist my temptation to quote more for reasons of time—LaRouche in Chapter 1 of So, You Wish To Learn…:

The significant feature of the heat-powered machine is the functional relationship between increase of the power supplied to such machines and the increase of the operatives’ power to accomplish work. From the examination of this functional relationship, Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) defined the notions of power, work, and technology within physical science.

This means that “economy,” I stress, has nothing to do with commerce (buying cheap and selling dear), money issuance, or land, or even industry as such; it is the association of human beings (workers) and machines producing more and more per person, per unit of surface and per unit of matter needed for the process. The “free energy” supplied by the machine embodies the effect of human creativity in the physical principle employed for the very design of the machine. It is from that standpoint that fission and then thermonuclear fusion nuclear power, with the highest energy-flux density of presently known forms of power generation, define a “progress” to “produce more with less”—the principle of least action.

Fundamentally, it means for human beings to rise above sense certainty, mere perception of things, and address their potential for creative reason, the innate capacity to create, which is in each human being, in coherence with the fundamental laws of development of the physical universe. It is this relation of each human being with the natural law of the Universe that defines “humanity,” reflected in the continual improvement of machines, and of machines producing machines: the machine-tool principle. It is not magic; you cannot decide suddenly to replace all forms of energy by fusion; it is a process like a musical composition.

And, precisely, if you lack insight into artistic composition—poetry and music in particular but not only—you cannot be a good physical economist because you would lack the best human quality of imaginative insight to “see” beyond deduction and induction. LaRouche’s work on Beethoven’s compositions was commented on by Norbert Brainin, a friend of his and first violin of the Amadeus Quartet, as the most profound understanding of the intention of the composer.

We have then the concept of energy and technology flux-densities as expressions of human creativity for the common good.

Let me now quote Chapter 4 of LaRouche’s So, You Wish to Learn…:

Hence for the society (economy) as a whole, economic value is restricted to that quality of activities within a society which increases the potential relative population-density through the mediation of technological progress. In other words, economic value properly defined measures the negentropy of the economic process.

Economic value, so defined, and work have the same meaning.

Why “potential”?

It defines what is required for a society—the platform of development with an array of new physical principles and applied technologies—to produce so as to maintain the existing quantity and quality of population and its further increases, necessary to secure higher forms of future developments. This is the measure of today’s tragedy. As LaRouche first established, since the 1970s, we have entered in an accelerated way into a world which is not generating even enough to maintain our existing population at the present level of development, except in China and [other] parts of Asia. Worse, the average medium rate of birth by women of child-bearing age, is 1.56 worldwide, well under the rate of mere reproduction, adding to this the terrible collapse of a creative education.

Therefore, we have to change our way of thinking, our axioms and our structures of decision.

In Coincidence with France’s Republican Humanism

In 1981, Lyndon LaRouche co-authored with me a book titled La France aprés de Gaulle (France after de Gaulle). He wrote most of it, of course, expecting us to achieve the best contribution to free our country from the grip of the oligarchy. Why did he choose France at that moment, at that point? LaRouche always spoke and wrote to respond to a challenge; his method is to provide a creative answer when reality demands to break from “the rules of the game.” There, he knew that what was at stake in my country was either to lose the valuable and heroic contribution of [Charles] de Gaulle to face the challenge of this historical moment, or to proceed further, in a higher form. And he located the basis for this continued improvement in the history of France’s republican humanism.

This means: Jean Bodin’s Six Books of the Republic, the “politiques” policies of Louis XI and Henri IV, the Colbert-Leibniz-Huyghens French Academy of Sciences, Lazare Carnot’s and Gaspard Monge’s Polytechnique—which inspired the American Republic, supported by Lafayette’s and Rochambeau’s French forces. My friend Pierre Bonnefoy has written a [French language] book explaining this intervention of LaRouche, called Non-Mathematical Principles of Science, showing on its cover a young girl blowing into a square-shaped wire and producing a spheric bubble, one of the proverbial experiments ironically commented on by LaRouche. This quality of transformation is the first effort that he required from us.

The only French Nobel prize winner in Economics, Maurice Allais, did understand LaRouche’s call to “save the world economy,” and he sent me a letter on November 27, 2009,” fully associating himself to LaRouche’s efforts to generate a wide public debate to radically rebuild the credit system and the international monetary system,” authorizing us to make public his support. This expresses the coincidence of the French nation-state economics with LaRouche’s higher discovery.

Former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, even under pressure from the media to abjure his connection with LaRouche, not only maintained his interest in meeting LaRouche but he also told me that he thought that all three of us would agree to bring Milton Friedman before a Nuremberg tribunal for his crimes.

In 1983, the same year when President Reagan gave his famous SDI speech, inspired by the contributions from Lyndon LaRouche and his associates, LaRouche was in France with his wife at an event of the Club of Life (founded by her against the Club of Rome criminal Malthusianism). It was a very successful event in Paris, attended by the world-famous oncologist Georges Mathé, anti-Nazi Resistance heroine Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and de Gaulle’s Compagnon de la Libération, Gen. Jean-Gabriel Revault d’Allonnes (one of the 1,065 distinguished for their exceptional heroism).

All three of them participated later [in the world-wide mobilization] to free LaRouche when he was jailed after the infamous “rocket-docket” Virginia trial. In earlier times, also Georges Cogniot, from the research sector of the French Communist Party, and Marcel Paul, his colleague hero [survivor] of the Buchenwald concentration camp and Communist Party expert on energy, were involved in discussions about LaRouche’s ideas. On the other side of the political spectrum, LaRouche also met in France Senator Pierre-Christian Taittinger, a close follower of then French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

So, this is to show how LaRouche could attract very different types of persons in key positions, on the basis of what I tried to explain before: his creativity, giving birth to a coincidence of the opposites, from the best of the French tradition.

Exonerate LaRouche and His Ideas!

But then we met in France a wave of opposition and slanders, due to the intervention of American services and media against LaRouche and against myself. We have actual proof of those FBI interventions, got through the Freedom of Information Act. This happened with the active complicity of French financial feudal forces, associated with the worst of pro-NATO, pro-Wall Street and City of London “Atlanticists,” as they are called in France. In all of my presidential campaigns, a sewer of slanders and disinformation was thrown against me because I was seen as a “dangerous introducer of LaRouche’s ideas in France.” All the slanders crossed the Ocean, blurring and misleading people, portraying LaRouche as a “convicted felon.”

I have to stop here, but I want to convey once again from the shores of my country, why it is so key to exonerate Lyndon LaRouche, to give access to his works. I have here next to me Volume 1 of his collected works, which includes most of his important and influential works on the subject of physical economy, the point of my presentation. Some are already translated in French, and sometimes more read in French-speaking Africa than on the European continent. We now expect the next volumes on classical culture, physical science, historiography, and philosophy, to provide the capacity for all to have a deep insight, a deeper and deeper insight, into the mind of the most slandered and persecuted homo universalis [universal person] of our times. Much more than a well-deserved mark of personal admiration, much more than that, it is a matter of public safety.

Lyndon LaRouche is definitely “a bad guy” for the oligarchy, un sâle type in French. And it is a good reason to [decide to] learn why such a tribute is paid from vice, to virtue. And it is a good reason for each of us to draw the consequences, and to be more and more creative, for the advantage of a much-needed better world. It is a matter of life and death. Life, or death.