The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  It is a fact that with the increasing division of labor, there has been a tremendous intensification and spread of exploitation in the area of production, and work has become a greater burden, both physically and psychologically.

  It is also a fact that with the introduction of the 8-hour workday—the precondition for increasing the intensity of work—the system usurped all of the free time people had. To physical exploitation in the factory was added the exploitation of their feelings and thoughts, wishes, and utopian dreams—to capitalist despotism in the factory was added capitalist despotism in all areas of life, through mass consumption and the mass media.

  With the introduction of the 8-hour workday, the system’s 24-hour-a-day domination of the working class began its triumphal march—with the establishment of mass purchasing power and “peak income” the system began its triumphal march over the plans, desires, alternatives, fantasies, and spontaneity of the people; in short, over the people themselves!

  The system in the metropole has managed to drag the masses so far down into their own dirt that they seem to have largely lost any sense of the oppressive and exploitative nature of their situation, of their situation as objects of the imperialist system. So that for a car, a pair of jeans, life insurance, and a loan, they will easily accept any outrage on the part of the system. In fact, they can no longer imagine or wish for anything beyond a car, a vacation, and a tiled bathroom.

  It follows, however, that the revolutionary subject is anyone that breaks free from these compulsions and refuses to take part in this system’s crimes. All those who find their identity in the liberation struggles of the people of the Third World, all those who refuse, all those who no longer participate; these are all revolutionary subjects—comrades.

  This is the reason we have analyzed the 24-hour-a-day imperialist system, why we have addressed all of the living and working conditions in this society, the role that the production of surplus value plays in each of them and the connection to factory exploitation, which in any case is really the point. With the supposition: the revolutionary subject in the imperialist metropole is the person who recognizes that a life under the mandatory 24-hour-day is a life under the system’s control— here we have only sketched the outline of the parameters necessary for a class analysis—we are not claiming that this supposition constitutes such an analysis.

  The fact is that neither Marx nor Lenin nor Rosa Luxemburg nor Mao had to deal with Bild readers, television viewers, car drivers, the psychological conditioning of young students, high school reforms, advertising, the radio, mail order sales, loan contracts, “quality of life,” etc. The fact is that the system in the metropole reproduces itself through an ongoing offensive against the people’s psyche, not in an openly fascist way, but rather through the market.

  Therefore, to write off entire sections of the population as an impediment to anti-imperialist struggle, simply because they don’t fit into Marx’s analysis of capitalism, is as insane and sectarian as it is un-Marxist.

  Only by integrating the 24-hour workday into our understanding of imperialism and anti-imperialism can we get a picture of the actual problems facing the people, so that they will not only understand our actions—and thereby understand the RAF—but also our propaganda, our speech, our words. Serve the people!

  If the people of the Third World are the vanguard of the anti-imperialist revolution, then that means that they objectively represent the greatest hope for people in the metropole to achieve their own freedom. If this is the case, then it is our duty to establish a connection between the liberation struggle of the peoples of the Third World and the longing for freedom in the metropole wherever it emerges. This means in grade schools, in high schools, in factories, in families, in prisons, in office cubicles, in hospitals, in head offices, in political parties, in unions—wherever. Against everything that openly negates, suppresses, and destroys this connection: consumerism, the media, comanagement, opportunism, dogmatism, authority, paternalism, brutality, and alienation.

  “This means us!” We are revolutionary subjects.

  Whoever begins to struggle and to resist is one of us.

  The answer to the question of how and at what level to struggle against the system, where best to apply pressure when one is at one’s weakest point—we’ve answered this question—is not to be found in a stream of slogans, but rather in the dialectic of theory and practice.

  3. FASCISM

  The Black September action was antifascist.

  They established the connection between Nazi fascism and the direction in which imperialism is developing.

  The Olympic Games

  They clearly established this connection by attacking the Olympic Games, from which all reminders of 1936, Auschwitz, and Kristallnacht1 were to be excluded. The games were meant to serve as a spectacle distracting attention from what is currently going on in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Israel’s prisons, in Turkey, in Uruguay, in Brazil, in Greece, and in Persia. Insofar as these grueling contests have only winners and losers, they are the opposite of liberation struggles, of acts of solidarity. Instead they are competitions/struggles to reinforce imperialist consciousness in the industrialized nations—games of aggression.

  Bild

  “GOLD-GOLD-GOLD,” Bild panted, badgered, wheezed, and nagged during the first days of the Olympic Games. “I saw you fade away at 11:00 PM—how will the games continue,” was Bild’s headline on September 7.

  Do you want total victory—Yesssss!

  The Athletes

  This is not directed against the athletes. Those who hope to win the competitions have trained for years. They are not the ones who give the Olympic Games the character of an imperialist event. They are connected to the games like a wage laborer to capitalism—without them nothing happens, but they are objects in a spectacle, objects of Neckermann’s Sporthilfe. 2 That the athletes enjoy what they’re doing changes nothing.

  National Socialism

  National Socialism was nothing other than the political and military precursor to the imperialist system of the multinational corporations.

  The ruling class—and especially the German ruling class—is so rapacious that, lead by the Flick, Thyssen, Krupp, and IG Farben corporations,3 it hoped to achieve, in conditions that were not yet ripe, that which they managed to achieve later anyway. They formed an uneasy alliance with the old, declining petit bourgeoisie, and they bought into the irrational and deadly antisemitism. Instead of relying on their shareholders, as should have been the case, they developed the imperialist middle class to meet the corporations’ extreme demand for capital—they formed an alliance with the retrograde and ideologically backwards Nazi Party. Instead of waiting to grow strong enough to subjugate peoples and countries without military adventures, they started the Second World War. Antisemitism and war compromised German fascism in the long run, once again completely unmasking the ruling class in the eyes of the masses—and making possible an antifascist alliance between communists and a section of the bourgeoisie.

  Antifascism

  It was this domestic and foreign antifascism that effectively prevented the expansion of West German imperialism. It is antifascist sensitivity to injustice, transgression, state brutality and executive arrogance that has forced this state to maintain a constitutional form.

  Just as imperialism has a fascist tendency, antifascism has an antiimperialist tendency.

  For a section of antifascist sympathizers, the RAF has brought the anti-imperialist struggle up to date. The §129 trials at the beginning of the 50s and the ban on the KPD had the effect of separating the KP from their own antifascism and of dismantling their alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie. Liquidating what remained of antifascism in the SPD and amongst the intelligentsia was a significant challenge for the Brandt/Scheel/Heinemann administration. Antifascism was still a part of the 1967-1968 APO, and was supported by the student movement, in the Republican Clubs, at Vietnam demonstrations, and in the movement against
the Emergency Powers legislation and police terror.

  The Antiauthoritarian Position

  That the leaders of the student movement are themselves shying away from their anti-imperialist consciousness is a reflection of their revisionism. The positions of the antiauthoritarian movement were clearly anti-imperialist: June 2, Vietnam, Springer, and opposition to the development of West German imperialism, of which the final step in the postwar FRG was the formation of the Grand Coalition.

  This movement proved itself to be primarily petit bourgeois when it stripped its political theory of anti-imperialist consciousness, as soon as the first shots were fired. Shots which were not just fired by a single private fascist (Kurras), but rather were the result of systematic imperialist terror—directed at Dutschke, cheered on by Springer.1

  They began to compensate for their obvious powerlessness through organizational fetishism—their decline into a dogmatic and pathologically competitive closed circle that only reproduced the structures of the ruling system, alienation, a know-it-all attitude, and indifference to oppression. They express a hatred of spontaneity equal to that of the system itself, and with their “party chairmen”—Marxism’s guardians of the grail—they turn the proletariat into an object of their leadership aspirations. They see in the masses nothing but what the system has made them: Bild readers, television viewers, car nuts, tourists, SPD voters, Germans—as the squares (already a classic) always ask: “What do the people say?”

  The narrow-minded nation-state perspective of the opportunist left is petit bourgeois. It fails to recognize or acknowledge that the people of the Third World are the vanguard and that the struggle in the metropole is the struggle of international brigades of the people’s war in Quang Tri and Hue,2 Palestine, Lebanon, Angola, Mozambique, and Turkey, without which no advances will be made. It is also petit bourgeois and un-Marxist to not recognize that the masses here will eventually find their political identity on the side of the liberation struggles, and will eventually free themselves from the grip of the system, with its lies, its glitziness, its election promises, and its lotteries.

  Petit bourgeois impatience led to them giving up their anti-imperialist position after one disappointing year in which the student movement failed to win the support of the proletariat and discovered that Springer could not be expropriated quickly and without further ado.

  Anarchism—A Reproach

  Some dismiss the antiauthoritarian movement as anarchist and the international anti-imperialist struggle as anarchist internationalism. In so doing the system’s only objective is denunciation—when people mount this sort of dogmatic argument, they are not drawing their conclusions from an analysis of the system and its process of development, but from a chemical analysis of explosives—from historical analogies based on nothing—a case in point: Harich.3

  Neither the actual socio-economic conditions nor the conception of the state held by earlier anarchists—from Blanqui to Kropotkin—(the Makhno movement4 and Spanish anarcho-syndicalism are not targeted as such in this critique) have the slightest thing to do with the objective conditions or subjective positions of the antiauthoritarian movement or the RAF. And this is equally true in the case of comrades who refer to themselves as anarchists. They are clearly anti-imperialist—overflowing with distrust for all the “Marxists” who patronize them and hope to subjugate them on the basis of nothing more than bourgeois educational advantages. Their antiauthoritarian characteristics allow them to keep their distance from this paternalism.

  The old anarchist concepts are no longer useful—not in the form they had when Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg purged them from the Social Democratic movement—and correctly so. Not in the form that Blanqui, Bakunin, Most, and Kropotkin developed them—immature ideas in an unripe situation.

  The legal left completely lacks any critical self-awareness if it compares its tiny mass base to the mass base behind the anti-imperialist struggle. No progress can be made this way. They hope to force us into a discussion by raising the issue of anarchism, but with the problems we have before us, this is just a distraction.

  Whether the old anarchists’ understanding of the authority structure anticipated capital’s rule over the people that first developed with imperialism—their understanding of work certainly anticipated the concept of freedom put forward in the anti-imperialist struggle—should be subject to analysis—it could be the case.

  Integration

  To integrate the KP, it was necessary only to ban them, and for the integration of the bourgeois antifascists, the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties sufficed—the student movement required only an amnesty—a cheap bribe.

  The Foolishness of the Left

  The petit bourgeois, spiteful, nit-picking blather that comrades are engaging in about Munich is an example of this foolishness, and Genscher will turn it against them. So it goes. What is expressed here is not the political consciousness of Marxists, but rather the pique of bit players—“It’s all about me!”

  Fürstenfeldbruck and the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties

  The Fürstenfeldbruck massacre would not have been possible without the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties, without the complete demoralization of the old antifascists and extreme opportunism in those sections of the New Left that let themselves be sidetracked by the ML and AO1 deviation—completely blind now, as compared to their terrible clarity in 1967/68.

  Not even Strauß, but only Schmidt,2 could have committed the crimes at Fürstenfeldbruck: sending the fire brigade of West German imperialism onto an American NATO base to offer Israel support—for their torture, their murders, the oppression, the napalm, the land stolen from the Palestinian people.

  Not even Dregger, but only Scheel’s party comrade Genscher,3 could arrange for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the FRG; Palestinians who are here because of the nationalist extermination policy, which has become the Israeli extermination policy. A public policy couldn’t be more clearly morally bankrupt, devoid as it is of historical content, acquiescing without once reflecting upon how extreme the hate will be on the part of those who once again must suffer the retaliation.

  The Social-Liberal Coalition and Strauß

  Since the SPD entered the government coalition in 1966, more elements of “democracy” have been eliminated than under all of the CDU governments of the previous 17 years; the Emergency Powers Act, the Hand Grenade Law, the Verfassungsschutzgesetz, 4 the Presidential Decree,5 Federal Labor Court rulings against strikes, and the Federal Border Patrol Law.

  Disoriented by their fear of Strauß, a section of the left will only realize that they have already had their vocal cords—which they require for whining—ripped out should Strauß take over these instruments which have in fact been crafted by the Social-Liberal coalition.

  But Strauß couldn’t knock off more people than the comrades6 have: McLeod’s liquidation, the deportation of Arabs, Prinzregentenstraße,7 Löwenthal, Bild, show trials, police operations. The policies of the Social-Liberal Coalition are the policies of the corporations; their opinion is the opinion of the Springer corporation; their foreign policy is the foreign policy of Wolff von Amerongen, Beitz, Messerschmidt, Bölkow-Blohm, Siemens, Hochtief, Schickedanz, and Gelsenberg AG; their domestic policy is the domestic policy of Daimler-Benz, Glanzstoff, Klöckner, Bayer in Leverkusen; their high school education policy comes from BASF.1

  It’s not a question of parliamentary democracy (Brandt) on one side and fascism (Strauß) on the other, but rather it is a question of the imperialist centre on one side and on the other side the revolutionary liberation struggle of the people of the Third World along with the antiimperialist struggle in the metropole—not to give this or any other government a kick in the ass, but rather to serve the people.

  Acceptable Imperialism

  The Social-Liberal Coalition has made West German imperialism acceptable for the bourgeois left, with its obsession with form—they see the application of imperialist policy as responding to the people’s wis
hes—they work within “reasonable parameters,” they speak the national language, they make use of parliamentary debate in the same way that they make use of BGS terror troops—they use constitutional means in the same way that they use fascism.

  The anti-imperialist left had it easier with Strauß. He at least wore the disconcerting garb of colonial and Nazi imperialism, not the friendly mask of the corporate manager. He had the fucked relationship to power of Thyssen, Flick, and Krupp in 1933,2 not the evolved self-consciousness of a multinational corporation. He would have been heckled had he entered the factories. He not only sowed hatred, he reaped it.

  THE “RIGHT-WING TAKEOVER”

  The “right-wing takeover” is a bugaboo created out of thin air by the left of the SPD, the chant of brainless opportunists devoid of theory, directed against the anti-imperialist left—their way of covering up the fact that Brandt and Strauß are simply two different masks on the same imperialist system.

  The flipside of this is the ideology that considers the masses to be hopeless and stupid—the best example being the filthy journalism of the Springer corporation and the organization of the newsstands, which is to say, the concentration of the media.

  4. ANTI-IMPERIALIST ACTION

  The Massacre

  Brandt, Genscher, Merck, Schreiber, Vogel, Daume, Brundage,3 and all the others who make up imperialism’s cast of characters didn’t pause for a moment to consider agreeing to the revolutionaries’ demand for the release of prisoners. Even before Golda Meir was informed and had taken a position, they had already on their own considered how best to massacre the revolutionaries—with gas or storm troopers or a precision strike or whatever else.4

  All delays to the ultimatum, reached through lies and false promises, served to allow them to reach their sole objective, to win time to plan the massacre. They had only one goal, not to prove in any way inferior to the fascism of Moshe Dayan—Israel’s Himmler.