Book review by Christoph Fringeli
Helge Lehmann: Die Todesnacht in Stammheim – Eine Untersuchung. Indizienprozess gegen die staatsoffizielle Darstellung und das Todesermittlungsverfahren. 2nd printing 2012, Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne.
On October 18, 1977 at 8:53 am, the German news agency dpa sent out a news bulletin announcing “Baader and Ensslin have committed suicide.”
What had happened? [Read more →]
Extended book review of:
Jens Benicke: Von Adorno zu Mao – über die schlechte
Aufhebung der antiautoritären Bewegung (ça ira, Freiburg im
Breisgau 2010)
Jens Benicke describes in his book the development of the German far left in the years around 1968 from positions strongly influenced and informed by the Critical Theory of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse to the neo-leninist cadre organisations, which became in the 1970’s the strongest formation on the far left. In this article I’m using the book as a starting point to elaborate on some topics I touched upon in the text Hedonism and Revolution in datacide eleven.
The situation of the German Left after the War until 1967
The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School provided an intellectual pole of critical Marxism amidst the general post-war West German anti-communist consensus. After the war, the holocaust, the eventual defeat of fascism and the ensuing occupation which produced two German states, the Institute for Social Research, originally founded in 1923 and exiled in 1933, finally returned to Frankfurt at the beginning of the 50’s, and took a unique place in the development of the left.
In terms of left wing organisations and parties which had reformed/ returned from exile after 1945, there were two key dates eventually leading to the student movement of the 60’s. In 1956, the Communist Party (KPD) was made illegal in West Germany.
In 1959, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) declared its transition from a workers party to a “people’s party” in its Godesberg Program. The more radical student organisation associated with the SPD, the SDS, didn’t go along with this move towards the political center. The SPD banned dual membership with the SDS and thus effectively expelled its members.
Far from being delivered to political oblivion, the SDS became the driving organizational force for the “extra-parliamentary opposition” (APO) in the 60’s. [Read more →]
… And more charts: these were the 10 most read articles on this web site during 2011:
1. From Subculture to Hegemony: Transversal Strategies of the New Right in Neofolk and Martial Industrial by Christoph Fringeli
2. Shaking The Foundations: Reggae soundsystem meets ‘Big Ben British values’ downtown by John Eden
3. Tortugan tower blocks? Pirate signals from the margins by Alexis Wolton
4. We Mean It Man: Punk Rock and Anti-Racism – or, Death In June Not Mysterious by Stewart Home
5.COIL – Interview from 1986 plus Introduction by Christoph Fringeli/John Balance
6. Dance Before The Police Come by Neil Transpontine
7. What The Fuck – Operation Spanner by Jo Burzynska
8. The Brain of Ulrike Meinhof by Christoph Fringeli
9. Dope smuggling, LSD manufacture, organised crime & the law in 1960s London by Stewart Home
10. Battlenoise! Review by Christoph Fringeli
Spanish translation of
You Cannot Blow Up Social Relations
published in the zine accompanying Bogotrax Festival in Bogota, Colombia, Feb 11-21, 2010
Este es el texto de una charla presentada en Berlin el 12 de septiembre del 2009 en el Samacafé para el festival Bogotrax-Berlin. Fue parte de una tarde de discusión y documentación relativa a la situación en Colombia. El texto, traducido del ingles, lo reproducimos acá sin ninguna alteración y guardando algunos de los giros coloquiales relativos a una texto destinado como soporte de una conferencia. La mayoría de las citas fueron primero retraducidas del alemán por el autor y a su vez retraducidas por nosotros al castellano.
El Autor : Christoph Fringeli es desde 1997 el editor de Datacide, la revista subterránea sobre “ruido y política” (datacide-magazine.com, donde pueden encontrar la versión original del siguiente texto). Es también desde principios de los 90′s el motor de Praxis (praxis.c8.com) el primer sello de música electrónica radical, vanguardia de los ritmos rotos, del “breakcore” avant-la-lettre y del compromiso sónico con la revolución. Bogotrax lo vuelve a convocar como el singular ejemplo de uno de los más dicientes compromisos tácticos entre la teoría y la práctica.
LOS LAZOS SOCIALES NO PUEDEN DINAMITARSE !
You cannot blow up social relations !!!
Para una crítica real de la lucha armada
[Read more →]
A Critique of Armed Struggle
(Talk at Bogotrax festival in Berlin, Sept.10, 2009)
1.
In this short critical talk I will briefly outline a view of particular strains of the communist movement of the 20th century and in particular the guerilla movements purporting to be communist and their historical role.
Central to my argument is the transformation of Marxism as a critical method and communism as a movement into an ideology of so called Marxism-Leninism.
Therefore this is not a critique of revolutionary violence as such, but of its particular manifestation in the form of traditional Marxist-Leninist guerilla movements, both of the rural and urban types. [Read more →]
