The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  Whoever doesn’t accept the hidden relationship of war—the bourgeoisie against the people—as a natural state of affairs, as the only possible reality—will be ground down in chains in the system’s prison camps. Those who can be resocialized, that is to say, those who can be stripped of their will to resist and adapted to the capitalist production process, will be spit back out—those who can’t will be destroyed.

  Amongst them are the prisoners who serve as the system’s alibi: the white-collar criminals and a few convicted SS pigs.

  The more the people’s revolt shakes the system’s morale and its concept of property rights, the greater the existing crisis, the more the people’s dreams for the future are replaced with desires for material rewards… the more important prisons will be for a system that has always candidly recognized the need to terrorize and destroy a section of the proletariat—Treblinka, Maidanek and Sobibór are extreme examples—to break the resistance against the exploitation of a large majority of the people—prisons and extermination camps as the next-tofinal and final measures against all forms of resistance—as effectively, systematically, and intentionally as ever.

  The pigs have the prisons firmly in their grip. With every reform the prison system is made more extensive.

  They have everything necessary: violence, isolation, transfers, corruption, privileges, partially open, two-thirds open, and fully open prisons, infiltrators, torture, clemency—and the closed structure: justice/police/prisons/psychiatry/media (newspapers, TV, radio); for greater efficiency: disgusting conditions and toilet-size cells; against prison breakdown: murder/“suicide”; for less grotesque coercion: clubs/bread and water/bondage/silent cells; for friendly brainwashing: psychiatry/police therapists/valium; for slicker and blander structural violence: removing the prisoners’ remaining contact with reality (e.g., the exercise cages on the 5th and 7th floors of the new building at Frankfurt-Preungesheim)—in lieu of the terrible screams of broken prisoners.

  The pigs’ humanism in a word: hygiene.

  The Social Democrat’s reform program in a sentence: nip revolt in the bud through flexible measures.

  The political prisoners, those who have developed a political understanding of their reality and have acted upon it and embraced it—who understand the inhumanity of their situation and of the system—who feel hate and outrage—who, in this all out war, resist the pigs, the prison authorities, the social ideologues, the dilettantes and jerk-offs, the green fascists1—who act in solidarity and ask for solidarity in return: they are kept in isolation, which is to say, they are socially exterminated.

  On the other side, the entire justice system talks endless shit about human rights and the Constitution—and to the degree that those can’t be manipulated, don’t count out the shot to the back of the head.

  Resocialization means manipulation and training. Prisoners are obliged to live with walls, cops, regulations, compulsion, threats, fear, hope, and restricted movement until they have internalized this shit and are only capable of behaving as if they are behind bars.

  That is the training.

  The prisoners’ cooperation is obviously desirable—it shortens the process and makes it irreversible. There is one thing the prisoners completely forget about in this process, in fact, they must forget about it: self-esteem.

  That is the manipulation.

  The more liberal the approach taken to this shit—the more discreet—the more casual—the more pleasant—the more underhanded—the more slick—in short, the more psychological—the more effective and the more profound the destruction of the prisoner’s personality.

  The political prisoners are the deadly enemies of the psycho-cops—because the psycho-pigs don’t want the prisoners to see through it all—through the therapeutic and helpful facade, past the little shits, the piglets, to the thugs—and the political prisoners do see through it all.

  The central point in modern imprisonment is: a political and psychological orientation to prisons—our isolation now and concentration camps later—whether administered by green or white2 terror troops—the end result: extermination camps—reform Treblinkas—reform Buchenwalds—the “final solution.” That’s what’s happening.

  We demand free access to political information for all prisoners, because consciousness is necessary for politicization. We’re not demanding anything from them that is not already available in prison—standardized wages for work, education/training, protection for families, autonomy—because this is not some prisoner-organized reformist claptrap that can be demobilized and politically neutralized with promises of reform, that is integrated into the prison pigs’ dictatorship and made into a kind of “Kraft durch Freude.”3 What we want is political solidarity—not just ideas, but real solidarity.

  Our hunger strike is simply our only option for collective resistance in isolation. Without power, the violence of the streets, without the mobilization of antifascist citizens to intercede for human rights and against torture, presuming they have not already sworn allegiance to the pigs—our hunger strike will not be enough to break through our powerlessness.

  Our demands are as such an appeal to you, comrades.

  The pigs only win if one of us eventually buys the farm. We are depending on you to support our demands and to force them through—now while you still can: before you yourselves become prisoners.

  And comrades: simply talking about torture without struggling will serve neither our interests nor your own—meaning: you will only be helping the pigs to build up their defenses.

  Your actions in January/February4—the demonstration in Karlsruhe, attacking Jessel, the go-ins at Norddeutschen Rundfunk5 and at the offices of a few pigs from the justice system, a few examples of stone throwing—good. No teach-in, no go-in at the PEN Club,6 nothing at the writers’ union, nothing addressing the churches, which have since taken up the question of torture and human rights, no demonstrations in Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, no sign of militant actions—bad.

  We are confronting the pigs with their own laws—we are rubbing their noses in the contradiction between what they say: defense of humanity—and what they do: extermination.

  Every moment hangs between life and death—us or them—they for themselves or us for ourselves.

  On February 22, 1973, the federal Attorney General Pig Martin1 stated that there was no solution to this contradiction, which could only end in death:

  “Prison conditions will be adjusted to the specific physical and psychological needs of the various prisoners!”—that’s for sure. Oxygen levels will be automatically adjusted—there’s food three times a day—and there’s the tactic of allowing visits from relatives when one has reached a point of ice-cold clarity, to throw sand in one’s eyes. The final word from the highest level of the oppressive authority clique: extermination.

  Everything is clear. The program is in motion.

  Pressure the pigs from the outside, and we will pressure them from the inside.

  Solidarity will determine the balance of power.

  ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

  UNITED PEOPLE’S POWER AGAINST THE SYSTEM BASED ON

  PROFIT/POWER/VIOLENCE

  FAMILY/SCHOL/FACTORY/OFFICE

  PRISON/REFORM SCHOOL/THE PSYCHIATRIC ASYLUM

  60 political prisoners on hunger strike! May 8, 1973

  Provisional Program of Struggle for the Political Rights of Imprisoned Workers

  WHOSE FAULT IS IT IF OPPRESSION CONTINUES? OURS!

  WHOSE FAULT IS IT IF OPPRESSION IS NOT SMASHED? OURS AS WELL!2

  Prisons, the military, and the police are the basic tools of the imperialist state. They are the basic tools of the state with which the bourgeoisie asserts, protects, and achieves its ruling class power—and they always have been. Without its monopoly of violence, its armed structures—the cops, the prisons, the army—the ruling class is nothing. Its historical role was played out long ago. We represent the step that will bring down this house of cards and
the facade that is holding the system together. They can no longer make us—we socialists, communists, workers chained to the assembly line, offices, schools, universities—believe that the time is not ripe for the struggle until victory, the struggle to free the proletariat from exploitation, oppression, alienation, and from material and psychological deprivation—the struggle until victory and liberation from imperialism and capitalism.

  The problem in the metropole is that, although the system is politically and economically ripe for abolition, the revolutionary strength of the people remains weak. There is more resignation, lethargy, depression, agony, more illness and suicide, more people who are ready to lie down and die—because one can no longer live with this system—than there are people who are ready to stand up and fight. Although imperialism is only a paper tiger, many only see that at this moment it remains a man-eating monster, and they say, “We’ll never get what we want.” However, that is incorrect—it is nondialectical thinking. The darker the night that we believe we have sunk into, the closer the morning is.

  Nowhere is it clearer than in prison, in the very way it operates, that the pig system and its very structure—forced labor, pressure to perform, alienation—is at an end. In 1865, Marx wrote,

  The blunt force of the economic conditions assures the rule of capitalism over the working class. As well as economic means, unlimited violence will admittedly always be applied, but only exceptionally. For the normal unfolding of events, the workers need only remain subject to the ‘the natural laws of production.’

  Today, the system can no longer rely on the “blunt force of these conditions.” And in prison, they can no longer simply rely on “unlimited violence.” To enforce the loyalty of the people, to maintain it, to discourage them from struggling against the system, the pigs coerce them with prison, tricks, and manipulation. With sales pitches and psychological warfare, they make the prisoners go along with it: they win their collaboration, their cooperation in their own destruction through psychiatry, through brainwashing, which results in the destruction of their consciousness. They do this because they can no longer see any other way to get the unrest in the prisons back under control.

  The system can no longer survive without its weapons, its riot squads, its bunkers and alarms, its punishments—without its material tools. The militarization of the state and the psychological aspects of its functioning are two aspects of the same pervasive reality. The cops use the media to develop their psychological warfare on the outside. This is accompanied on the inside by the development of managerial methods based on new, widespread security measures; the construction of dead wings, grates on the cell windows, isolation units and special wings in every prison, guards in watchtowers armed with semiautomatic handguns, close circuit cameras and monitors.

  The costs that imperialism obliges its ruling class to bear: a military alliance that encompasses the world, the extension of police power in each individual state, the psychological programs, the bullshit reforms in the prisons, the attempts to extend strategic aspects of the deterrent and destructive capacity of its prisons, the fortified villages in Third World countries where anti-imperialist wars of liberation are being waged. These costs express the need to develop the pig system’s strength. All of these measures also show their fear, their hollowness, their corruption, their stagnation, the very fact that they have nothing more to offer—beyond violence, fascism, oppression, manipulation—that they have no future besides barbarism. They have nothing left to offer except destruction, fragmentation, pathology, counterinsurgency—and for billions of people in the countries of the Third World: hunger, hardship, illness, illiteracy, and death.

  WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?

  Numerically and intellectually, the people are superior to the fascists. What cripples us is the fact that all the resistance in the prisons that has occurred so far has occurred in isolation. There was no communication, no plan, no cooperation, and those on the outside who were prepared to support us in our struggle against the imperialist structures were also muddling along with no idea of how to proceed.

  Many also failed to understand the political prisoners’ struggle against isolation, that is to say, the struggle of those prisoners taken in the armed struggle against the imperialist state—the corporations, the cops, the military, the justice system, the prison system—and the prisoners who have begun to struggle collectively against prison conditions. Isolation is the weapon the system uses to finish off the so-called disruptive elements—i.e., the rebels—to physically and psychologically destroy them, thereby removing the “political” from the flow of things—to nip every expression of autonomous organization in the bud, to liquidate from the outset the struggle for prisoners’ collective power and for their basic political and human rights, to use isolation against spokesmen, cadre, and those who have something organizational and political to offer and who have already decided to use all of their power in the service of the people’s liberation, the anti-imperialist struggle, and the initiation of a revolutionary prisoners’ movement.

  The struggle of the political prisoners being held in isolation—isolation from the outside and from others on the inside—is about the revolutionary prisoners’ movement achieving the conditions necessary for survival. As long as the pigs can isolate every combatant, everyone who begins to organize resistance, who opens his yap—and not only them, but also all those who work for prisoners’ autonomous organization—it will be difficult to develop continuity in the work for autonomous organization and collective counterpower in the prisons.

  If the political prisoners take advantage of the publicity around their trials, that only means they are using the market value that exists in many comrades’ bewildered minds as a weapon. In reality, you won’t find us in the media that spews out headlines against us; instead, you’ll find us downstairs in the prison, in the cell, in the special wings, in the bunkers, in isolation. And we’re not struggling for privileges, but for the IMPROVEMENT OF THE CONDITIONS OF STRUGGLE FOR A REVOLUTIONARY PRISONERS’ MOVEMENT WITHIN THE PRISONS! Anything else amounts to standing things on their head, ass backwards, seeing things from the outside through the eyes of the pig media, and thereby overlooking the simple, real, undeniable facts. To again explain what we’re struggling for, what we’re struggling against, and why we struggle:

  We are struggling for PRISONER AUTONOMY, for the elementary rights of imprisoned workers, and for the strengthening of prisoners’ collective power. In this sense, the action program is more than the material contents of a prison survival program; it is also an instrument—one that allows everyone to understand what’s going on, because the imperialist state will not be able to fulfill these simple demands, which according to their own dishonest propaganda they obviously must fulfill. In spite of the immense sums of tax money, which they extract from the people to funnel into their oppressive apparatus, our own need to struggle to get these points put on the agenda means nothing other than the struggle for social revolution, through which our needs will be placed on the agenda. And if the pigs give in on one or another point—all the better. Our hunger for freedom will only grow as a result. What we’re struggling against is the imperialist system’s prison system, against the psychiatric and psychological programs, against the way we are treated, against the brainwashing techniques which are sold as reform, against the complete disenfranchisement of prisoners in the metropole’s prison camps, against all of the system’s efforts to play prisoners off against each other, using increased repression or perks to drive a wedge between the different initiatives undertaken by imprisoned workers.

  We are also struggling against the reformist organizations that attempt to skim the cream on the outside, while they try to establish themselves on the inside by hindering our capacity to struggle. They do this through paternalism, tactical maneuvers, splits, factional bickering, dogmatism, and pacifism—taking control of everyone who is struggling in the prisons, because they are colonialist pigs who hope to colonize
every step towards a revolutionary prisoners’ movement—for their own goals that have nothing to do with us. Through their appeals to the imperialist media and through their demands that one character mask replace another as Minster of Justice, these reformists make the class state socially acceptable, trustworthy, and once again credible in the eyes of the people—and they do this at a point in time when every prisoner can now see that nothing is to be expected from this class, that we can only achieve what we want by our own means—in the struggle against the ruling class and class justice. These reformists propagate and practice class conciliation and collaboration with the imperialist state at a time when the imperialist state’s main problem is that its legitimacy is crumbling and its authority—its apparent role as a peacekeeping force between the classes, although it has always been an instrument of the ruling class against the people—is in tatters. It can only be maintained through the massive use of psychological warfare against the people. Instead of escalating the class struggle, instead of supporting the prison struggle against the structural apparatus and the justice system, instead of supporting the collective power of autonomously organized prisoners, they cobble together arguments for a more efficient reorganization of the repressive apparatus.

  The most important point overall—the abolition of prisons—can’t be a demand. We’re the only ones who can achieve that. Only the revolution—e.g., the destruction of the capitalist state apparatus—can bring about the abolition of prisons. In other words, the liberation of imprisoned workers can only be won through the liberation of all workers. Whoever advances such a demand either hasn’t thought it through or else only wants to pull one over on us, giving the struggle a realistic scope by discrediting unrealistic demands.

  We call on all prisoners to organize around this program of action both openly and conspiratorially. All those who have nothing left to lose but their chains—take up, organize and lead the struggle in the prisons.