... In April 1992, the Red Army Faction (RAF) took the step of unilaterally calling off its campaign of assassinations of key members of the political and economic apparatus as a first step towards a negotiated settlement with the state, a settlement which they insisted must include the release of prisoners, particularly those, such as Bernd Roessner and Ali Jansen, who were in poor health and those who were amongst the longest held such as Irmgard Moeller, who after 21 years had spent close to half of her life in prison, as well as an agreement which would allow those who were underground to surface. The reactions both amongst the prisoners and within the broader anti-imperialist and autonomist movement was predictable. All hell broke loose. To some, if not most, the decision was treason. The decision was portrayed as a betrayal of 23 years of history. And in the spirit of the German left, a hot and heavy debate, much of which was immortalized on paper, has followed … ( from A Brief History Of The RAF ) …
… we did publish a fair amount of this debate in the last couple of issues of Arm The Spirit …
… what follows below is one critique of the RAF ceasefire, written by the comrades of the Italian political prisoners collective Wotta Sitta … “The Collectivo Communisti Prigionieri Wotta Sitta (Wotta Sitta Imprisoned Communists Collective) consists of comrades imprisoned in various special prisons and coming from the different Italian guerrilla experiences ( Red Brigades, NAP – Armed Proletarian Units, Red Brigades -Guerrilla Party, COLP – Communists Organized for Proletarian Liberation, Resistance) …
… translated by Arm The Spirit, but, to the best of my knowledge, not published …
A Communist Critique
Of The RAF
by the Italian political prisoners collective “Wotta Sitta”
The following remarks represent the position of our collective regarding the behavior of the RAF since April 1992, as well as our position on certain questions which are of relevance to the revolutionary initiative of communists in Europe.
These remarks are drawn up from notes whose fundamental ideas we have been reflecting on for some time now. We will now briefly explain the simple reasons why we are only now sharing our ideas with these comrades and calling on them to begin a discussion.
First, we would like to make it clear that the change which the RAF made was, from the beginning, an indication of a political crisis, behind which were lurking dangerous and destructive disintegrating processes. By making public their reasons for making a “pause”, the prisoners did not offer those members still living in illegality, namely those that still make up the RAF, any useful proposals for a new perspective, but rather they got stuck in a heavy, populist, Great German morass, and they displayed their willingness to play along with Kinkel’s game, imperialism pure and simple.
For us, it wasn’t really that important to either distance ourselves from this or to swear high and low because of holy principles being violated.
The RAF drove a wedge right through the middle of Europe’s militant resistance movement and worsened the already bad problem regarding a lack of perspective. The problem was and still is the need to strategically restore revolutionary politics, and this is achieved by advancing the struggle and by having discussions which deal with important matters. The RAF destroyed this opportunity, which had only been kept alive with great difficulty after the silence which followed the experiences with the Front up until 1988, in so far as they caused considerable portions of the movement (particularly in Germany) to focus their attention and energies on false and secondary questions and away from others, namely those people (particularly in Italy) most affected by the European dimension of the struggle.
The crisis first had to reach its peak. Many things had to first develop into a greater clarity.
In fact, the attack on Weiterstadt showed just how nebulous the decision “to take back the escalation, to begin a pause in order to think” really was, because all the thinking really resulted in was making public how terribly atrocious a high-technology prison is, a show of force to convince some of those in power in the new “Reich” to open up a new round in the game which Kinkel began. But the bourgeoisie always plays with a loaded deck, and the game is never really what it appears to be.
And so Wolfgang was murdered. Thanks to a dirty spy who came to life in the morass of false militant politics, which, as it presents itself, is without an offensive perspective. And 
when Kohl fired von Stahl, he did this because he wanted all of the RAF to be captured, so that they would beg for forgiveness and make a spectacle of the physical and political death of the resistance, thus enhancing Germany’s glory.
And after Bad Kleinen made all of this perfectly clear to all comrades in Germany and across Europe, then the last veil was dropped, which had concealed the last dead end where the illegal RAF-members could hide. Their silence – which amounted to approval, or at least an attempt to make it possible that the prisoners in Celle, who were prepared to negotiate, become. the spokesmen for the left during Kohl’s politics of pacification – violated the boundary which separates revolution from imperialism. It was a real stab in the back for those prisoners who had always made it clear that their lives could not be dealt with at a table with Kinkel or Schnarrenberger, but rather their fate would be decided by the advance of the revolution. But it’s not merely the RAF’s lack of political direction which has lead to communists becoming disoriented. When you think about the conditions under which many other comrades, at quite another level, have to try and overcome the objective difficulties of this phase of history, then you are left with a divided impression of experiences and discussions, and three different forms of conduct regarding the guerrilla and revolutionary strategy become visible.
There are those that stress the necessity of coming out of the social struggles – the movement -and who feel it is impossible to agitate at a complex political level if this does not come about as a natural development from the movement. But this only leads to one’s own horizons becoming specifically limited as well as characterized by a merely idealized reference to general political struggle.
There are those that place a priority on the consideration of the strategic decisions from which the guerrilla developed; a step backwards which only consists of demoralizing and disarming ideological revisionism, thereby moving away from an offensive attitude towards the struggle.
There are those who have followed the guerrilla over the past ten years, and who consider the continuity of this project to be the most important concern, and who feel it cannot be changed, and who think that both the defeats and the lack of initiative are simply organizational problems which can be immediately solved by once again carrying out attacks.
But the defeats always come about (although not exclusively) due to unqualified political assumptions, and when no clarification is found, then the mistakes get repeated and they have a negative effect on the general political situation, because the gap between the desire for revolutionary consciousness and the development of objective political confrontations simply increases.
But it would be short-sighted, given the actual situation of revolutionary experiences, to see only these boundaries to strategic initiatives, which underestimate communist subjectivity against the development of the confrontation, without taking other factors into account.
In any case, the necessity of a comprehensive political concept is made quite clear by this situation, as is the possibility of its formulation.
And not only this: Those things that become clear are also useful hints at what fundamental steps are necessary to reach the goal. In the eyes of everyone, the widening of the social struggles are an undisputed fact. Just as undisputed is that these make it necessary to establish the political terrain on which the development of the power relations are to be decided.
It is quite clear that the main obstacle which causes the mass struggles of workers and proletarians to be pushed back or to be forced into negotiations is the impossibility of these struggles immediately reaching an international, particularly a European, dimension, beyond the established borders and political terrains of individual states. Many comrades, who have worked for progress and politicization in the struggles, have concerned themselves, even if only to a limited degree, with the necessity of having these struggles break outside of their national surroundings.
The other fundamental fact is that those who are part of the most advanced sectors of the guerrilla and revolutionary movement, albeit with differing evaluations, make it clear that no strategic advances can be achieved these days without the class struggle reaching an international dimension. This consciousness is the basis for a united and constructive discussion.
From both of these facts, it is possible to overcome the difficulty of having a broad view while keeping an eye on the actual state of the struggle, which refers to one form of weakness which is closely connected to the identity and tasks of communists.
That which always characterizes the communists in the various phases of the confrontations between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is the ability “to bring forward the goals of the movement in their entirety” (Marx).
Therefore, communists, in their praxis, namely organization and struggle, deem it necessary to possess a consciousness and a comprehensive vision, a strategy which represents the interests of the proletariat and which weakens the bourgeoisie.
The task of communists is not to remind the workers of how destructive life in bourgeois society is, or how many massacres stem from the wealth of “big business”. They already know all that. The primary task is to take on the responsibility of saying how it’s possible to make changes, both big and small, given the current situation.
With respect to this point, it could seem useless to assess the RAF’s analysis on which their shift was based.
But that’s not true. This analysis involves the core of their experiences and concepts, and these are certainly not private matters for the RAF alone. While rejecting the RAF’s contradictory relationship to the state’s politics, many comrades today feel that the RAF’s analysis is a correct answer to the questions of initiative and perspective which affect the entire structure of European communism. In any case, this analysis represents the point at which they have arrived after 20 years of revolutionary experience. And all comrades need to concern themselves with this, if they wish to carry on with the RAF or something similar. And it is to those persons that we are directing this paper.
We will now begin with a critique of statements of general importance which have come out of the RAF’s discussion papers. This will allow us to focus on certain fundamental political points which affect the progress of the revolutionary process and also to correctly set forth some things which affect the foundations of the political consciousness propagated by the European guerrilla, things which must not be lost.
1. The RAF says: “Due to changes in the international balance of power, the idea of revolutionary development by means of a joint international struggle has failed.”
This analysis is as clear as it is superficial, because it lacks any analysis of the actual world-wide status of the confrontation.
According to the RAF’s position, there are at present no revolutionary struggles taking place in the world, nor are there any violent social conflicts taking place from Europe to Asia, nor in the USA, nor in the East, nor are there any internal contradictions within the bourgeoisie which get expressed in various forms of war, and finally, the USA is not waging a global war to defend its increasingly threatened global political and economic dominance.
The RAF only orients itself towards the past.
The most important conclusion to be drawn from this is that the RAF has never freed itself from a strategic evaluation of the struggle based on the contradiction between “socialist and imperialist camps”.
Each successive change in their project due to experiences in the international struggle – first with the Palestinian guerrilla, then with the European – came, in substance, from the same point of view regarding the contradiction between the subject and the possibilities for developing a global struggle.
And it is exactly this point of view which “is over”. But it didn’t just end today!
In other words, the possibility of opening free spaces for revolutionary perspectives which based themselves on the East-West conflict did not first come to end with the collapse of the USSR in 1989! After the Second World War, the “defence of the USSR” was the central theme by which the progress of the communist perspective was measured.
The concept which this assumption was the foundation of was that the development of a communist perspective was to be achieved by the (more or less mechanical) expansion of Soviet experiences throughout the entire world. In this sense, the struggle for socialism in one’s own country was tied to and strengthened by the anti-imperialist struggle on the side of the USSR.
This concept – even though it is based on a revisionist mistake, namely reducing the global movement and communist change to the mere expansion of Soviet experiences – nevertheless possessed a strategic importance during a particular phase of the international confrontation, because it drew the most important lines for the revolutionary development:
– The emancipation of the working class, for which the experiences of socialism and national liberation were of genuine material significance;
– The resistance to the counter-revolutionary anti-communism of the counter insurgency, which internally affected the revolutionary initiatives in the Western countries and in the Three Continents;
– The expansion of the political and ideological struggle against the bourgeoisie everywhere with the same global lines of development, which characterized themselves as the international communist movement and in advances of the communist perspective.
In increasing degrees, the splintering of the socialist camp as a united and homogenous formation (this began in the 1960s with the Maoist critique of the USSR), the impossibility of revolutionary changes in the Western economic formations according to the socialist model, and the changing nature of the contradictions between East and West as a confrontation – in a global sense – between two imperialist systems (although very different from one another), all of these factors completely eroded the socialist camp’s importance to the revolutionary development.
In this sense, the development of a communist perspective required a form of international expansion, one which reflected the interests of the workers for abolishing the capitalist exploitation of both labor and life in general, and this could be nothing else than the contradiction between the international proletariat and the imperialist bourgeoisie. The first experiences of a communist consciousness were the new movements and guerrilla experiences of the 1970s.
Of particular strategic importance is the contradiction international proletariat/imperialist bourgeoisie as a projection on the general political scene, in other words, the confrontation with the power apparatus of the imperialist bourgeoisie at all levels, as well as the similarity which all proletarian struggles in the world experience. That is where a historical alternative to capitalism can be found, where we can find its potential construction and development, now, at that point where the crisis is more acute than before.
The new dynamic of imperialist contradictions at the global level which was unleashed by the crisis in the 1970s has opened (in the 1980s) an – albeit limited – material basis for the political East-West model as the key to approaching an international confrontation.
The immense pressure to newly define the political and economic positions of power increasingly took place during phases of naked imperialist warfare, with the USA and the USSR as the most significant, but not the only, players (from the Falklands to the Gulf War), and it began to increasingly overlap with the international revolutionary struggle. What remained was one of the active factors in the development/outbreak of wars.
It follows from all of this that it was correct for the revolutionary forces to involve themselves with the USA/USSR confrontation in their political initiatives, in order to influence the international power relationships. But to be involved with a matter, today no less than back then, does not mean to get stuck in a dead end without any way out. Sticking to the old model of the social/imperialist camps as a strategic foundation meant using this model to analyze and reduce to the point of the eternal philo-Soviet position 
any new line of development which began to orient itself around the international proletariat/imperialist bourgeoisie. This lead to the guerrilla in the metropoles, along with other revisionist trains of thought, losing all of its political-strategic significance within the revolutionary consciousness of the metropolitan proletariat.
If we concern ourselves for such a long time with East/West problematics then it’s because it is equally false to formally declare its end without first examining the consequences which result from this. It’s like being weighed down by an anchor when the necessities of the struggle are taking a different direction.
The new global situation has pushed forward two important questions which concern the advance of communism: The first regarding the end of the socialist world system, and the second regarding imperialist war.
From out of the crisis of the USSR and the experiences of socialist control, one can either go forward with a greater consciousness and attempt to advance the communist perspective, or one can react with a disastrous retreat, one which will damage us for who knows how long. That depends on how we envision the consciousness for a new advance of the communist perspective. A perspective, not in the sense of a “program”, but rather a political core, around which will develop the consciousness for a global confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in this historical phase.
The more the crisis develops, as the capitalist society changes even more in its entirety and the living conditions become more polarized and the interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie become qualitatively strengthened – that is, sharpened – the more also the struggle will be supported by the ability to display a possibility for emancipation, liberation, and the defeat of capitalism. In other words, a visible general interest to make the revolutionary process possible and to unite the struggles and the special interests.
In the meantime, metropolitan capitalism has developed increasingly innovative and complex global forces; its crisis, however, is also characterized by major global contradictions.
The strong interlocking between economic and social conditions prevents further significant developments and changes, in so far as these are not carried out with an international basis.
These are processes which lead to the pressure to form international associations as well as which lead to the splintering among individual states.
This is happening, because we have reached a point where the power struggle between the general interests of the proletariat and the general interests of the bourgeoisie are beginning to show themselves and become undone directly at the international level. This also partially happened at other times, but it was at those times linked to a different economic and social development; that’s why the goal of the power struggle could not be the universal interest of the proletariat becoming like that of the bourgeoisie. In reality, at those times a consciousness arose and material as well as political progress and change came about at the national level.
Today, progress is primarily measured according to its international dimension. Not because this international dimension means the weakening/disappearing of the “national agreements”, but rather because it displays itself as a “general necessity” and thereby as an element which determines each progression. For the bourgeoisie just as for the proletariat. Because this fact has worked itself into the power structures of the proletariat (both states and organizations) in a frightening balance of strength at a purely national level, unlike the global power struggle between the classes, building up and maintaining such power structures at the national level has run into serious difficulties. The economic foundation and the balance of strength are directly linked to one another.
The Gulf War, under pressure from the crisis and strong dependency at the global level, introduced a new phase of the destructive conflict between the various bourgeois groups. A problem that is closely tied to the future.
In this phase, the proletariat needs to clarify its general claim to historical equality, because only in this way can it intervene (independently and actively) in the struggles between states and between various bourgeois groups and more or less prevent getting stuck in hidden forms of nationalism or the passive toleration of destructive social consequences.
War is always precipitated by capitalist crisis. That’s true, but today, at this point in history, it’s important to see what exactly this process of expansion is, this progression of the crisis (the spiral of global technological restructuring and destructive recessions), given the global effects of war in a world of dependencies. We have before us a development through which an increasing number of contradictions culminate in war; a development, whose center is the martial advance of the USA. After the end of the “Cold War”, which was, so to speak, a “crisis of war” followed by “detente”, today again, war rules everywhere, the “war of crisis”.
New wars start up here and there without the previous wars ever really having ended; the crisis of the form of the nation state (as the key point for capitalist development in a given region), which is getting torn apart by claims of internal autonomy – regional struggles – and increasing international struggles, is also displayed by this endemic repetition of local wars. No regional authority has the power to definitively end a war, but rather they can only initiate conflicts and renew them through general destabilization by means of the destruction of the material and social forces of production.
The advancing crisis of the economic and political domination of the USA is connected to various forms of contradiction:
– Those which arise from the continuing development of three continental blocs (USA, Europe, Japan);
– Those which arise from the necessity of building up regional centers of power, for example in the Near East;
– Those which come about through the massive pressure of the imposition of new accumulation on peoples and classes.
The USA always did and still does represent the general interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie (in its purest form as an international class); its crisis is leading to a crisis of the entire global system: One break can mean the collapse of the entire complex construction of contradictions.
The predominance of the USA will, in future, base itself less and less on economic power and more and more on military superiority. The former will in fact become dependent on the latter. This was already proven during the Gulf War.
This necessity is enough for the USA’s politics of “total security”. A concept of a model of war which can be easily adapted to all parts of the world. In this model, the “swift deployment of troops” has replaced “preventive defence”, and the war is no longer limited to the battlefield decided on by the enemy, because it follows the logic of the mass destruction of the entire region without distinctions between “military” and “civilian” populations. That’s why the number of casualties among the civilian population always exceeds the number among the military.
The spreading out of war will increasingly be on the political terrain where the proletariat at the end of this century will have to struggle in order to form itself as a class under the new economic and political conditions.
War only strengthens the revolution when a clear political perspective is at hand at the level of the visible contradictions. In so far as we propose a communist alternative to metropolitan capitalism, and in so far as we struggle against the USA’s war to maintain its predominance, we go well beyond the national boundaries of communist struggle. This demands a qualitative leap to the international level of the conflict. Progress will come through a new idea of revolutionary development and through a joint international struggle.
For those of us here in Europe, that means, first of all, a project and a concept, establishing a European line in the conflict, because today it’s impossible to talk of global unity if we haven’t first been able to overcome the economic and political contradictions here in Europe
2. The RAF is not taking a step forwards towards a new orientation, but rather a step backwards in order to come to terms with its own history, because since 1989 they have missed the perception and analysis of the changes in the imperialist realm, as well as regarding the changes in class relations in Germany.
A new politics can only arise from a discussion of these new problems, only from progress at a comprehensive level.
That what the RAF has failed to understand is that “Great Germany” can only exist within a “Great Europe”. Outside of Europe, there is war and the radicalization of the contradictions between bourgeois fractions, strengthened by nationalisms and reactionary movements and their inevitably violent discharge against the proletariat and the communists.
In some cases, there develops a struggle for the perception of the main interests of the proletariat separate from the vision of a joint class struggle in Europe. Because the problem isn’t the prevention of a certain “imperialist unification project”, but rather in reality just the opposite. The difficulty lies in obtaining a consciousness and the practical strength so as to reach the level which the economic, social, and political conditions have already reached, through which the bourgeoisie, in every part of Europe, from north to south, forces its interests upon the proletariat, and to measure the general interests of 
the proletariat, as they have arisen in their entirety from the struggles, according to this level.
In the 1980s, the necessity of establishing an international strategy of the European dimension in order to resist the central projects of imperialism – not a necessity which could be delayed, but one based on objective conditions under which the revolutionary project must develop – gave rise to the joint dialectic between the revolutionary forces under the slogan “struggle together”, as well as the idea of the necessity and possibility of organizing the European metropolitan proletariat.
A process of building which was planned and begun by the close cooperation and dialectic between the forces of the vanguard and the progressive sectors of the proletariat at the European level.
At the present time, the revolutionary communist identity finds itself in a dialectical relationship between the revolutionary communist organization and the proletarian mass movements in Europe, one with enormous possibilities for concrete development.
In this respect, the discussion and process which arose from the formation of the anti-imperialist front in the mid-80s were certainly great advances, for one thing because they spread the heritage of national experiences to the European level, and also because they took an important qualitative step at the level of internationalist and anti-imperialist projects. Despite its limitations, the front displayed itself historically as being at the point of no return. It made it clear that international struggle has much broader implications than mere solidarity or simple “alliance politics”. It created a link to the global liberation movements of the proletariat.
Nothing whatsoever in the analysis of the contradictions inherent in the development crisis of the capitalist and imperialist world tells us that we should reject this consciousness. On the contrary, it’s quite clear that the international revolutionary strategy must press forward the conflict at the European level under the new prevailing conditions. The possibilities of the guerrilla as a power strategy for the European metropolitan proletariat exist primarily in clearly defining where today the power relations between the classes are and by clarifying these through close connections between the national sphere and the international system. In this sense, we are dealing with maintaining and further developing the dialectical relationships between the attack on the strategic projects of the imperialist bourgeoisie and their instruments of control and the most advanced struggles of the metropolitan proletariat, those which exist in the confines of political consciousness and the autonomous organization of the classes and which come about through offensive struggle and the defence of free spaces and living conditions.
Ever since the increasing unification of the global market has continued to make more and more national economic forms irrelevant, the economic, political, and social control of nation states has sunk deeper into crisis, and this gives rise to possibilities for intervention, either to “occupy” these states or “help yourself’ to them. Each political or social force which seeks to revolutionize the prevailing conditions of domination and exploitation must, by necessity, clearly recognize the enemy power with which they are in conflict. Increasingly more revolutionary movements and communist organizations must realize that they are struggling for power with international subjects; the same economic, social, and political contradictions from which the conflict arises are developing more and more under pressure from international factors.
It is this material basis which, during the orientation of the revolutionary strategy towards the seizure of power, makes it necessary to place the international seizure of 
power before the national, because the national area and its political structures may seem independent, but in an international sense they are but an integrated part and expression of the actual situation of the unified world market.
The fundamental question isn’t really to figure out how much “power” an individual nation state still possesses; rather it’s more essential to figure out whether or not sticking to such fundamental assumptions will change/destroy capitalism.
Whether in this realm, despite the big and increasingly complicated and quickly advancing capitalist contradictions and given the destruction caused by the crisis and the increasingly sharpened situation, whether the general and direct political and economic interests of the proletariat can be protected.
This requires each communist subject to orient their perspective and the process of the vanguard towards the fundamentals of the contradiction international proletariat/imperialist bourgeoisie and to create an offensive line of struggle which possesses the strength and potential to weaken the imperialist system.
The crisis of the nation state is one component of the capitalist crisis; as such, its general validity can be seen in virtually all national contexts and therefore cannot be understood nor struggled against at a purely local level.
It is directed by the needs of the great bourgeoisie according to the political instruments to maintain and regulate the processes which are connected to accumulation, competition, and control, and which have already gone beyond the national level, and which have been multiplied and strengthened over the past fifteen years by international institutions and their power.
The form which the nation states of Europe will increasingly take on will be dependent on the advance of the dialectic between themselves and the new state structures being erected in Europe, a process of joint state building which is not the merely mechanical adaptation of the nation state model in a larger size, but rather a systematic unification of states and international institutions which will take over state functions at the European level.
To differing degrees and at different levels, each European state must deal with the crisis of its own political system, systems which are confronted with previously unknown wear and tear on the “political democracy” in the capitalist system and a substantial change in the power relations in the class struggle which fully involves the state apparatus.
In Italy – and the situation isn’t much different in Germany, France, and elsewhere – in the middle of a war between the apparatus and various bourgeois factions, which has already lasted for a year, an authoritarian restructuring of the “democracy” is taking place, in which the re-adaptation and “modernization” of the political state system is based on the fact that all of the “historical” political forces are being forced to accept a series of general political goals which are supposed to represent the “national interest”, and to thereby remain firmly on the path of European unification and to avoid the collapse of the state’s ruling political system.
The imposition of these “objective necessities” (“either European Union or war!”) is the model by which the bourgeoisie hopes to escape from its political crisis. The idea is to coopt into the confines of state control all those political forces (from the conservatives to the reformists to the trade unions) that manage to rule over the many tensions and social and class contradictions during this comprehensive process of re-founding the state.
A fatal embrace, one by which the imperialist bourgeoisie hopes to neutralize the class struggle which arises from the new social polarization which is presently taking place in all advanced capitalist nations. The revolutionary vanguards must unmask this and fight to create spaces for the struggle of the metropolitan proletariat.
The advancing European integration of the capitalist economy necessarily leads to a political structure of dominance which secures its existence and development according to two fundamental lines. Internally, this is achieved through new investment structures, new forms of competition, unequal development, control over and pressure against the proletariat (as a labor supply and a labor reserve); externally, through the functioning of the balance of power and confrontations with other regional economic blocs (North America and South East Asia), pressure against the weaker capitalist economies on the world market (the Three Continents and Eastern Europe), and finally, at the political level, to defend the general interests of the global system in the face of the USA’s crisis.
A political restructuring which takes on the form of a state, since it does not react to the conjunctural dynamics, but rather it follows the general interest of an imperialist bourgeois Europe in the organization and reproduction of the socio-economic relationships which get developed during a very contradictory long-term process.
On the other hand, this process has already left behind deep scars in the economy in Europe, as well as in the relationship between capital and labor and in the direct social relationships: To a large degree, the great bourgeoisie have already established all the fundamental processes of the development, accumulation, and concentration of wealth, a dynamic which necessarily requires a redefinition of the instruments of power which affect the entire national sphere.
This process, which is being driven by the big multi-national corporations and the strongest bourgeois factions, is aimed at creating a real European imperialist bourgeoisie, which is already in different ways the representative of global class interests against individual states. What began in the European power centers, from the exponents of the board of directors of the international finance trusts up to the new European system of power, is now a trans-national political personnel which largely represents the interests of the elite.
European union will neither eliminate the economic crisis nor the imbalanced development nor the competition within giant capital. In a phase of capitalism in which the multi-national is dominant on the global market, competition is no longer between individual firms, limited to individual products, but rather it encompasses the entire market. Unions which have since become economic in nature are now exploitable and they must be played off against one another. The dialectic between the formation of a common state and the nation states reflects itself in this new dimension in a progressing integration while at the same time not disappearing. This comes about as the result of the continuing dynamic connection between the various economies and states and continually functions independent of these. It limits these and forms them into a system of contradictions which are becoming increasingly pressing when given the current necessities.
A dialectic which is pushed through by the confrontations with the proletariat at all levels, and which is produced by the necessity of constantly redefining and broadening the exploitation of labor and knowledge as well as by the general dominance of capital over society.
This European construction, in its various phases of development, has an increasingly stronger effect on class relations. First of all in the factories, because the heart of capitalist restructuring is, now more than ever, the achievement of surplus.
The global dimension of the internationalization of capital relations, which is especially far advanced in Europe, and the specific and general strategies linked to this, which have led to the process of restructuring production and the social reordering in the situation of a capitalist development crisis, has led to the formation of a European metropolitan proletariat with generally similar living conditions.
The creation of European trust monopolies at the international level and the processes of concentration and centralization of various sectors of production have characterized the processes of restructuring, which have made possible a level of exploitation and an increasingly uniform manner of organizing labor, both of the working class and the white-collar workers and other sectors as well, including education models, the labor market, and the unlimited growth of an industrial reserve army, which stands available even outside the national borders for use as a massive labor force in the politics of the restructuring of production. This is happening all over Europe. In this way, capital is attempting to rid the labor market of its expensive restrictions and inflexibility.
It is a proven fact that in the last ten years, particularly in the last few, that the most significant struggles in each country had to do with restructuring measures dealing with “European projects” decided at the EC level, including changes in politics and the introduction of new norms in the service, administrative, and other sectors.
Another important dynamic is that created by migration towards Western Europe, particularly from Eastern Europe and the Three Continents.
The importance of migration, which has affected social conflicts in nearly all countries in Western Europe, can no longer be underestimated.
To name one example: To optimize the relationship between capital and labor, it is sufficient to enact restrictive measures to prevent “foreigners” from coming into Italy, or into Germany or into all European countries, according to the guidelines of the Schengen Agreement, thus creating a form of politics which has as its goal the regulation of the 
labor market according to strict EC guidelines, backed up by a huge supply of labor reserves. In reality, the masses of immigrants from the south and east who are pressing at Europe’s borders are actually the undeniable foundation of the development of the European economy, and the entire politics of the EC is designed to secure a plan for their exploitation and control.
In this sense, it is misleading to speak of a “two-thirds” society, because no one is “superfluous” under the social formulation of capitalism, albeit in the nations of the “center” or the “periphery”. The new international division of labor creates a new configuration of the working class, one in which the deaths from starvation in the Three Continents as well as the 10% “structural” unemployed persons in the wealthy nations of Europe are the result of the rationality of surplus and not the evil of the bourgeoisie. The sociological analyses of the “two-thirds society” describe the poverty of broad sectors of the proletariat, but they are not in a position to grasp the substance of capitalist dynamics from which they are created and increasingly expanded.
The phenomenon of the “new racism” which is presently breaking out in Europe, from Germany to England, from France to Spain, in Italy…, after a proletariat has come into being from several races and ethnic groups which continually distresses the European governments, is also especially an opportunity to introduce an ever more refined and repressive system of laws and police powers for social control all across Europe.
Today, the power struggle in Europe can only be defined with the following two subjects: the European imperialist bourgeoisie and the European metropolitan proletariat.
This struggle is already developing itself at the European level, as the simultaneous nature of the struggles of the metropolitan proletariat in all of Europe shows. The vast majority of the struggles are directed against an increasingly recognizable enemy: the imperialist bourgeoisie in Europe, its refined system of power, and the totality of the European strategies of the new capitalist order.
The simultaneous outbreak of social and labor struggles in Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Greece, this should cause us to reflect on the homogeneity of the processes from which they came about, as well as to recognize the lack of a corresponding revolutionary political orientation point.
The process of European unification is the dynamic by which the revolutionary movement in Europe must measure the possibilities for concrete changes in the living conditions of the proletariat and the advancing of a communist perspective.
This is namely the field where the increasingly heavy present and future power struggles will most likely be concentrated. For the first time, the living conditions of the working masses are directly connected to the form and time schedule of European unification.
That means that considering the European dimension of the confrontation between class and state in each country on the one hand, and between the state power and the social formulation of the present changes on the other, must be re-evaluated in terms of what most general elements which can be observed in the most significant European states and what they indicate about the international dimension, as well as what is taking place in each individual country.
The confrontation with the state at the national level will nonetheless remain an element in the politicization and the reorganization of the local struggles. The state will retain and strengthen its function as the internal force of counter-revolution, the control over significant portions of the economic processes, and in the area of culture and ideology. It follows from that that the destruction/weakening of the state will always play an important role in the project and in the communist perspective of revolutionaries in Europe.
The creation of a European line of struggle is of fundamental importance, because only this can make it possible for the struggles to “break out of their confines”, by means of which the proletariat in all countries can react to the pressures of difficult living conditions which are at the heart of the European restructuring of capitalist production and the capitalist market.
Only in so far as we clearly define and push forward this line can we bring about a direction for the general struggle, in which the most significant forces of the revolutionary movement, which already – albeit to a limited degree – are active at the 
European level, will once again find themselves in relation to one another.
Today, the situation is ripe for working on the creation of a new European revolutionary project, especially since this is the historically most important arena for the reformulation of the communist perspective. From this, a process of the unification of the revolutionary forces at the global level can come about, one which is adapted to the realities of metropolitan capitalism.
A European revolutionary project, at the center of which is the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie at the European level, must not become dependent on or speculate about the process of European unification and its creation of an imperialist bloc.
Even when the European bloc in held back by the contradictions which it cannot solve and even when the march of nationalism in the EC countries continues to gain momentum, none of this will change the main focal points of proletarian politics at the strategic level.
The process of proletarian emancipation must not be limited by the conditions which happen to be predominant under the capitalist system, but rather it must be based on a universal internationalist vision of the communist perspective. That’s why the perception of the European conflict as part of the global struggle between imperialism and revolution must be the foundation of a European revolutionary project.
That is the basis for creating a new European form of revolution, one which is in a position to intervene in the war of the “new world order” by which the USA seeks to defend its dominance, and this can be a starting point for anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles throughout the entire world.
3. The RAF says: The guerrilla cannot be the “center” of this new process, because it is so alienated from the class opposition that it loses its “social point of reference”.
It’s clear that, according to the RAF’s opinion, the guerrilla is only at the center because it can strike “at a higher level” than any other subject of the resistance. In so far as it places itself at the top, at an unreachable level, then it only becomes one isolated step in the confrontation for the movement. By doing so, one can win broad sympathy, but it’s not possible in this way to create new forms of organization or to arouse a new revolutionary consciousness among the proletariat.
If the guerrilla is viewed as a “military” act, whose “political” content is characterized by the chosen goal which is then supposed to automatically spell out the line for the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat, then sooner or later the struggle will be abandoned.
The guerrilla is praxis lead by strategy. Its beating heart is the strategic content which it gives rise to.
The quality of the politics which get expressed by the European guerrilla cannot be reduced to a military level, which nonetheless has not been lacking. The metropolitan 
guerrilla is the embodiment of the revolutionary break which was made in Europe in the early-70s by those organizations which took up armed struggle in order to renew the class consciousness of the proletariat and to reopen the power struggle in the belly of the imperialist beast. The introduction of revolutionary struggle, even if it has since become partially contradictory, has not lost its essential form.
A struggle which has been set forth and whose qualitative development in the 70s and 80s the bourgeoisie was not been able to prevent, although today they are seeking to get rid of its strategic importance by removing it from the minds of the European proletariat.
Today, there can be no real development of a process of organization and revolutionary consciousness among the proletariat without a guerrilla strategy. Without a guerrilla strategy, there can be no qualitative advance at the level of perspective, nor can there be any concrete changes.
In the long-range war between the classes – at present, the content and historical form of the revolutionary process – it’s not so much the form in which the proletarian struggle and its qualitative expansion are expressed that matters, but rather much more the qualitative advance of the process of class organization. In fact, the guerrilla, even if it first characterizes itself as controlling a certain territory for the vanguard, can at the same time be politically generalized, on all levels, as increasing the autonomy and resistance of the entire proletarian movement. A strategy which can be used in every situation during the confrontation and which also can function as a means of revolutionary communication and for the reformation of the classes.
That’s why the guerrilla’s task in the metropoles is not solely to “strike blows against the enemy”, it never was, but rather at the same time it must also, in different phases, (re)establish the consciousness of the proletariat, beginning with the concrete struggles which it is waging, and following the lines of attack of the masses.
The strategy of the guerrilla as the existential form of the revolutionary vanguard in the metropoles then opens the way for the entire proletarian struggle and it once again gives the class its perspective for liberation from capitalist social relations. This strategy is then strengthened by formulations within the proletariat.
This is a fact revealed by revolutionary experiences in the metropoles, guided by the guerrilla, whose advances and organizational process, anchored in the increasingly intense proletarian struggles which have developed in the metropolitan centers. In this sense, this represents an advance from the model proposed by the Third International of the party which was supposed to function as the “external” bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat.
In this sense, the organization of the vanguard cannot be seen as the only starting point for the development of the consciousness and organizational processes or the formation of the classes of the metropolitan proletariat.
Although the vanguard plays a special role in the context of the class struggle, it develops in relationship to the proletariat according to the notions of unity and diversity. Unity in terms of the general class interest; diversity in the sense that the vanguard of the revolutionary process, in comparison to other sectors of the revolutionary movement, plays a different role, beginning with the various levels of consciousness which are expressed by this orientation. In this sense, the vanguard is a party.
This principle has always been a part of the organizational processes of the proletariat; but that cannot mean, as history has often shown us, that it can possess only a purely ideological mandate over the class interests. During the progress of the confrontation, such a position leads to increasing alienation from the concrete process of class struggle and simply to the creation of one’s own role.
The existence, struggle, and development of the vanguard is legitimized by the political resonance which comes from the consideration of its general and proletarian-specific interests, which come out decisively during various phases of the class struggle.
The fact that the organization of the vanguard in its praxis must always keep its eyes on the general interests of the class, while staying active at the highest levels in the power struggle and by revealing the main contradictions, does not mean that it alone can represent the complexity and progress of the general interests of the proletariat. This can only be achieved by all the organs together which, phase by phase, in each situation, represent the system of proletarian power in its various forms, and which comprise part of the vanguard when it is at its most advanced point.
In so far as it is a projection on the influence of the entire class resistance, the guerrilla praxis always plays a central role in the vanguard and has over the years proven that the influence of the proletariat is at once a process, a relationship, and a system.
Only in so far as we continually bring to mind the general interests of the proletariat in the class/state struggle can the entire revolutionary process be pushed forward and advances be made in the building up of proletarian power and changes in the living conditions and self-organization of the metropolitan proletariat be made
4. Finally, we, as revolutionary prisoners and as communists, drawing on our experiences in the Italian guerrilla, would like to clarify some things regarding the problems of “political prisoners”.
Guerrilla prisoners are most certainly part of the revolutionary movement and they are involved in the actual confrontation; that’s why their contribution to discussion and to the creation of a revolutionary perspective requires a certain significance in the various phases of the struggle, especially in the difficult times we are experiencing today. That’s the very reason why the Italian state, as with the other states in Europe and the USA, wants to be rid of the prisoners as a political reality in order to prevent any form of continuity between the revolutionary experiences which the prisoners represent and the actual conditions of the confrontation.
The common interest of the revolutionary movement in general and the political prisoners, who jointly resist in their present situation, is not decided by the increased intensity of the counter-revolution at the European level – which is nonetheless an
important factor – but rather by the fundamental necessity of a new perspective, one in which the “memory of past confrontations” is always an significant element.
The role of the guerrilla prisoners, who have maintained their revolutionary identity for all these years and who have contributed to the general advance of the revolutionary perspective, is an undeniable historical fact, as has been proven in Italy, Germany, Spain, France, England, the USA, and in many countries of the Three Continents (Peru, El Salvador, occupied Palestine, Turkey, the Philipines…). And from this, it’s no coincidence that the counter-revolution targets them for reprisals and seeks with any means of repression to break down and destroy their identity and their consciousness as political subjects.
In the last few years, in those countries where the experience of the guerrilla has qualitatively advanced the class struggle, we can see clearly that the counter-
revolutionary strategy has reached a new level of aggression and is seeking via military means to compensate for its identity and planning crisis in order to break holes in the organizations of metropolitan guerrillas. The “political solution” which was introduced in Italy a few years ago, which was supported by many political prisoners who have since renounced their political identities, although it was actually an initiative of the imperialist bourgeoisie to press forward the war “from the inside”, has shown the way for the counter-revolution for all of Western Europe and has spelled out an effective model to deploy.
It’s clear that this model cannot be mechanically transplanted to all other countries, but despite differences in historical context and the specific conditions in each individual country, the content of this imperialist strategy is well-known, namely the destruction and the adaptation of the forces and subjects of subversion and social change, two different sides of the same politics whose goal is to win.
In this sense, the “Kinkel Initiative” of “social reconciliation” in Germany is not very different from the initiative of Italy’s governing parties. Above all, they have the same goal, namely to prevent any continuity from existing between the revolutionary experiences of the last 20 years of struggle and the actual conditions today. These initiatives, like the one proposed by Kinkel, which are supposedly aimed at finding
“political solutions” to the question of political prisoners, in reality have a very different goal in mind: They seek to utilize the political prisoners as a “weak point” in the revolutionary movement and to use them as a means of pressuring the contemporary guerrilla in order to influence and control the development of the revolutionary confrontation in Western Europe.
That’s why from the beginning we felt it was dangerous and unrealistic to construct a flat and mechanical connection between the question of the political prisoners and the possibility of restoring some orientation for a new form of politics. That would mean giving the German state the possibility of pushing forward its hostage politics to its conclusion, using the prisoners as a means of forcing the development of the organizational processes of the proletariat to take place under new conditions. Above all, that means that the revolutionary perspective has been led into a dead end, one where there is no possibility for a political solution.
This displays a great lack of understanding for the international dimension which the revolutionary process as well as the question of political prisoners possesses.
The preventive counter-revolution in Europe – it seems appropriate to repeat this – has reached a historical threshold, one which is decided by the relationship between revolution and imperialism in all of Europe, and it is now the rule that the international level of the counter-revolution continues to rise and to manifest itself in each individual situation.
In this sense, Kinkel’s initiative of “social reconciliation” is nothing new, and it’s suicide to believe that the question of political prisoners is only decided at the national level and that the difficulties and contradictions of the German state can therefore be dealt with. All communists and revolutionary prisoners who wish to concretely work on the reestablishment of the perspective in Western Europe can learn a great deal from the example of what happened in Italy!
Wotta Sitta, communist prisoners collective
Summer 1993
and they acted in the context of the RAF’s politics. Their concept of developing “coordinated militant projects”, to open a new level in the confrontation, was in line with the course spelled out in the May Paper. T
world. In this research center they tested this year 20,000 new pesticide compounds and they will be expanding this research discipline even further, from about 150 million to about 500 million a year. The plants that are raised here and the pesticides that tiamt are produced here form an important support for Bayer’s overwhelming market share in the world market for agricultural products. This represents a new understanding for a more effective production controlled exclusively by Bayer; and by extension they control the peoples and countries which depend on this research and production for their food.
respect to the Third World.
acceptance.
perspectives with a view towards the growing strength of the FRG and Europe who in every aspect of society through their policy of modernization are going to oppress and alienate. The FRG, as member of the imperialistic organization of states has favored the integration of Western Europe and becomes more and more determined to act as a power for oppression. The strategic plans of the imperialist states whereby they have joined the economic, technological, political) and military powers is barely opposed. The penetration of the socialist countries both guarantees imperialism unknown profits for the next few years and ensures that an important opposition to world-wide imperialist aggression has been nullified. At the same time a situation has developed in the FRG, as a result of the entire dialectic of the anti-people and inhumane politics of those who govern, which gives us an opportunity to subject these imperialist policies and their consequences to discussion and resistance.
were forced to make concessions to the resistance, because it had already for some time become a national conflict.
pay steadily more and more for the energy we consume, RWE supplys electricity at a special rate to industry and also destroys, in all areas of its energy business, the conditions necessary for life; for example the destruction of Ville, an area affected by the mining for brown coal, also the destruction of the forests as a result of the drilling for oil in the DEA (by the previously German Texaco which was bought by RWE), and also through the mining for uranium in Australia and Africa which robs people of their property and exploits their labour in the mines where they must work for starvation wages. It is in the area of nuclear technology and industry that RWE’s destructive policies most clearly emerge.
who dictate the living conditions It is those who stand behind these projects and technologies who are creating a fascist and patriarchal society, degenerate and void of any humanitarianism where poverty is just as real as luxury for a few and where the over-regulated environment can only be made bearable through, for instance, the consumption of drugs.
relevance. Together with the prisoners, in this new phase, we want to give shape and substance to the composition of these conditions, and to the thoughts and processes which will lead to the realization of these conditions.
Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt-Eschborn. We don’t know why the charges did not explode. In any case, we had set the time to 15 minutes and it is not possible that a pig patrol could have defused the bomb in that time. At this time it is very difficult for us to say anything about this action because it failed.
coalition had gone into the streets, could have brought pressure on those responsible so that they could have been forced into making concessions. This mobilization did achieve concession from several states and small groups of prisoners were brought together, but they refused to let go of their extinction-project against the prisoners.
life. The hunger-strike made it clear to us that we need to develop a revolutionary process and that we need to fight for a political idea and by doing that we will have created for ourselves the opportunity for sharp political interventions, such as the militant attacks against central installations owned by banks and corporations, and through our discussion with comrades from the guerrilla and the other Fighting Units, which have become very important.
regulations, an increase in short term labour contracts. Siemens earns good money through the exploitation of black labour in South Africa. Siemens is one of the largest corporations in Western Europe, and just so that it can make a profit, is prepared to engage in inhumane projects. During the period of Nazi fascism, Siemens profited from the merciless exploitation and murder of concentration camp prisoners who laboured in the production of weapons.
economic uncertainty, sexism, overt racism, destruction of the environment, daily starvation of peoples of the continents – South America, Africa, and Asia, and genocide
by a wave of repression. In 1986, many people from the anti-imp spectrum were arrested and sentenced for Fighting Unit attacks. This temporarily halted attacks by the militants. But the paper ‘Zusammen Kämpfen’ was still published periodically until 1991. After the RAF’s attack on the head of the Deutsche Bank in November 1989, the Fighting Units carried out four attacks between December 1989 and February 1990. Two bombs were detected and disarmed. Then there were no more Fighting Unit actions.”
claiming responsibility in the name of the Revolutionary Fighting Group for the bombing of a Federal building on Staten Island which had occurred the previous night. The Federal building contained FBI offices and recruiting stations for the U.S. Navy and Air Force.
growing liberation movements in El Salvador, in Guatemala, with the socialist government of Nicaragua. This region today is the center of world revolution and the front line in the defeat of U.S. imperialism. For this reason, it is currently the target of the most vicious U.S. counterrevolutionary attacks.
Green Berets fight directly in El Salvador while thousands of Salvadorean government troops train at Ft. Bragg and Ft. Benning, hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid is given to the junta, and massive “war games” are conducted by U.S. troops throughout the region. The CIA has hundreds of agents in Central America and is training and supplying thousands of mercenaries and ex-members of Somoza’s National Guard who are currently invading Nicaragua. The U.S. is openly transforming Honduras into a garrison state to implement U.S. military strategy in the region. Facing military defeat in El Salvador, the U.S. is implementing “rural pacification” programs that will result in the deaths of tens of thousands, the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of campesinos into barbed-wire enclosed strategic hamlets, and the destruction of the land. Faced with a people’s war, the U.S. attempts to kill the people. This is full-scale counterinsurgency war, and we must actively oppose it.
the Caribbean. We hope that this act of proletarian internationalism is just one of a growing number by anti-imperialists in this country determined to show that there will be no blockade between the struggle of oppressed people around the world and those here inside the U.S. borders.
independence of Puerto Rico. We extend our solidarity to the FALN and the revolutionary clandestine organizations fighting in Puerto Rico. We join with people around the world in demanding the freedom of William Morales, the unconditional release of the 11 Puerto Rican POWs held in U.S. prisons, and the freedom of all Puerto Rican political prisoners and grand jury resisters.
imperialist aggression that has sent the marines, the CIA and the army to invade sovereign nations, to trample and lay waste to the lives and rights of the peoples of Grenada, Lebanon, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, to carry out imperialism’s need to dominate, oppress, and exploit. Every act of the U.S. military – directed by the White House and Congress – has been nothing less than an outright attack on the fundamental right of nations to self-determination, peace and freedom. These acts have been carried out with cynical disregard for life as well as for truth. Reagan calls progress and revolution “terrorism” and tries to portray the true terrorism of imperialist invasion as “democracy” and “freedom”. Only a government arrogant enough to believe that its economic and political needs should dominate the whole world can call the invasion of Grenada a “rescue operation”, the invasion of Lebanon a “peace-keeping mission”, the fascist rulers of El Salvador “democracy’s friends”, and the contras “freedom fighters”. The Reagan lie that the invasion of Grenada prevented a “Cuban takeover” is nothing less than a pretext for eliminating a Black socialist nation in the Caribbean. Last year, in a dress rehearsal 
called “Ocean Venture”, the U.S. armed forces practised the Grenadian invasion on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. The vicious attack on the socialist nation of Cuba – which has provided a consistent, revolutionary example of proletarian internationalism – and the attempt to discredit and destroy the People’s Revolutionary Army and the New Jewel Movement of the Grenadian people, show the extent to which the U.S. will go in order to control and dominate Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean, and to try to defeat socialism in the region. With the collusion of the press, the U.S. government is building anti-communism to justify these attacks and further military aggression to resolve its own internal economic and political problems.
determination. We join with all the people across the U.S., and the millions throughout the world, who condemn U.S. imperialist aggression. Our solidarity with the liberation struggles under attack by U.S. imperialism must be uncompromising, militant, and unwavering in supporting the right of those nations to self-determination. We cannot fall into the trap of debating which wing of the government has the right to declare war, or which politician might be less blatant in his racism and anti-communism, nor can we be fooled by those bourgeois politicians who claim to be sympathetic to Third World nations – and who would more “humanely” exploit those nations in the interest of U.S. imperialism. The enemy is the imperialist system. Electoral politics and pacifism are paths that have been tried many times, and that have failed. To follow those paths now will only weaken and undermine the movement and defeat our attempts to organize greater numbers of people to resist.
ruling class are war criminals, and they will be held accountable for their crimes.
Victory To The FMLN/FDR!
Palestinian men, women and children at Deir Yassin. Genocide literally paved the way for the establishment of the zionist state a month later. 36 years later, Begin is a respected elder statesman and his fascist Herut party controls the “Israeli” government.
example to our entire struggle. To honour the memory of Carroll Ishee is to pick up his gun, build a militant resistance, and struggle to defeat U.S. imperialism on every front.
For years, the inhabitants of the Puerto Rican islands of Culebra and Vieques have struggled against U.S. naval attacks on their islands – attacks that pockmark these islands with bomb craters, threaten to destroy the fishing industry, and force the inhabitants out of their homes. Determined struggles on Culebra in the 60’s drove the navy out; then Vieques became the new target of the genocidal “games.” In 1979, Comrade Angel Rodriguez Cristobal, Puerto Rican revolutionary and leading member of La Liga Socialista Puertorriquena, was arrested demonstrating with the people of Vieques against the U.S. Navy; on November 11, 1979, he was assassinated by the U.S. government while imprisoned in Tallahassee, Florida. In honouring his memory, we commit ourselves to continuing to fight in solidarity with the struggle for Puerto Rico’s independence and socialism. We express our support for the Puerto Rican armed clandestine movement and Puerto political prisoners and prisoners of war.
with the hundreds of thousands of African people fighting in Sebokeng, Sharpeville,
both societies have a system of white supremacy that affects everyone. The U.S. ruling class tries to guarantee itself enormous wealth, power and privilege by giving the masses of white people here a little of each. In turn, they expect class collaboration rather than class struggle, white supremacy and national chauvinism rather than proletarian internationalism, support for war and repression rather than struggle for peace and justice. Too often it has worked, and the ruling class successfully forces a mass base of support for repression of the struggles for human rights and self-determination of oppressed peoples here and abroad. That consensus needs to be smashed if white people here are to share fully with working people around the world in the struggle to build a non-oppressive and non-exploitive socialist future.
aid to national liberation movements.
Right now in New York City we are experiencing a white supremacist offensive. Bernhard Goetz shoots 4 Black youths, becomes a white folk hero, lauded by Koch, and exonerated by D.A. Morgenthau. 10,000 armed racists demonstrated their support for the killer of a 66 year old Black grandmother and tried to intimidate those who have fought to bring him to justice.
fully back the violent white colonialist South African government. Within the borders of the U.S., Black People – on whose labour U.S. imperialism was built – have been completely written off. There is no longer even the pretence that they system will offer Black youth a chance to grow up to an education, a job, even a home. The programs of pacification have ended. In 1985, the U.S. government’s main program of ‘social welfare’ is to cut back the minimum wage for Black teenagers. To the imperialist state, Black people’s lives are expendable.
determination and national liberation. Black people have led the struggle for human rights for years – in the courts, in the schools, and in the streets. They have also led by developing the struggle of the New Afrikan/Afro-American Nation for land and independence – the only way that killer cops will really be brought to justice, police terror against Black people ended, and the right to survive, grow and prosper as a nation be won.
people in fighting the police as our enemy.
the Black community against killer cops. We have learned much from this struggle about who the enemy is and what it will take to defeat it. We are glad to be able to do some damage to the white supremacist pigs in the PBA, and we hope our action helps to build an anti-imperialist resistance movement that fights in support of national liberation struggles, upholds the right of self-determination, and organizes itself as an effective force to help STOP KILLER COPS.
Fight White Supremacy – Stop Killer Cops!
Unlike the infamous Red Army Faction, which flaunted its rejection of bourgeois society, AIZ members operate in complete secrecy, using the in-former-proof cell structure favoured by the IRA. Their intended victims have been middle-ranking officials, few of whom enjoy round-the-clock police protection.
The authorities hope that, despite the vanishing explosives, last week’s arrests represent their first successful blow against the AIZ. But even if’ the AIZ is crushed, Bierbrauer doubts if extremism will ever leave the political stage in Germany for good.
“The left at that time knew that it would be right to link the spreading of socialist propaganda to the actual hindering of the deliveries of the Bild-Zeitung [a right-wing daily newspaper – trans.]. That is would be right to link the spreading of propaganda to the GIs, urging them not to go to Vietnam, to actual attacks on airplanes destined to be sent to Vietnam, to disrupt the plans of the German army by attacking NATO airports. That it would be right to link the critique of class justice to blowing up prison walls, to link the critique of the Springer Corporation to the physical disarming of their security guards, to set up our own transmitter, to demoralize the police, to find illegal living spaces for army deserters, to be able to agitate among foreign workers by being able to give them forged papers, to sabotage the factory production of napalm.
apparatus, to remove its power step by step, and to destroy the myth that the state is omnipotent. The urban guerrilla advances the development of an illegal apparatus, namely homes, weapons, munitions, cars, identification. The most important aspects of this were spelled out by Marighella in his mini-handbook for the urban guerrilla. We are prepared at any time to tell other aspects of this to anyone who needs to know it, if they want to do it. We don’t know a lot of things yet, but we still know quite a lot.
1972: Attacks on: 1) the headquarters of the 5th US Corps in Frankfurt; 2) the police headquarters in Augsburg; 3) the LKA [state criminal justice office – trans.] office in Munich; 4) Buddenberg (federal judge) in Karlsruhe; 5) the Springer Corporation headquarters in Hamburg; 6) the Heidelberg headquarters of the US army forces in Europe.
to put up with any crime committed by the system as long as they can have a car, a little money, life insurance, and a mortgage, and they couldn’t imagine or dream of anything better than having their own car, a vacation, or a glazed tile bathtub. It follows from this, therefore, that the revolutionary subject is anyone who has freed themselves from these urges and who refuses to participate in the system’s crimes. That means that anyone who finds their identity in the liberation struggles of the peoples of the Third World or anyone who refuses to just go along is a revolutionary subject. Only if we succeed in making the connection between imperialism and anti-imperialism 24 hours every day can we really formulate and present people’s problems in terms so that people will understand us and not only our actions – in the same way the RAF is understood, so too will our propaganda, our speech, our words be understood. To serve the people! If the people of the Third World are the vanguard of the anti-imperialist revolution, that means that it is our task to realize the big hopes of the people in the metropoles for their own liberation and to link the liberation struggles of the people in the Third World to the desire for 
liberation in the metropoles, wherever it manifests itself: in schools and colleges, in the factories, in families, in the prisons, in the big office buildings, in hospitals, in bureaucratic offices, in political parties, in unions – everywhere. Against everything which negates this connection, suppresses it, destroys it: consumption, the media, conformism, opportunism, dogmatism, domination, patronizing, brutalizing, isolation. ‘We mean everyone!’ We all are revolutionary subjects. Anyone who starts to struggle and to resist is one of us.
1991: Attacks on the US embassy in Bonn and Rohwedder (head of the Treuhand Agency) in Dusseldorf.
repression.
“We conclude: Fundamental opposition to this system, like in no other time in the past, is needed. Cold, without illusions, nothing more to be achieved through the state. There will be no more ‘changing of the system’ or ‘alternative models’ under this state. These are simply impossible. This is the end – only when this system is finished will it be possible to imagine a perspective on life.
“The discussion is still the same, in so far as isolated positions and ideals are pointed out, but the strictness of individual group thought and the determination to start taking on matters are lacking in those places where the understanding of the situation becomes one’s own: The anti-imperialist front is both as necessary as it is weak, it could be potentially strong in its position in the centres of Western Europe and there are
political boundaries, the ‘annoyances’, in the metropoles are transgressed – democracy, welfare, internal security – and this can’t be kept up for ever if the state is continually being broken by the anti-imperialist struggle, which means that the confrontation becomes open and the thin ideological division between the state and the society gets torn down.
which it’s impossible to make revolutionary politics. The guerrilla are not the ones responsible for this, but rather this is the fault of everyone for whom the slogan “struggle together” has any meaning. We don’t criticize these attacks in and of themselves, but rather the fact that, since they were not imbedded in comprehensive politics, they attacks could no longer achieve their potential political effect. Nevertheless: The successful attacks on Herrhausen and Rohwedder made a lot more people silently happy than the comrades themselves seem to admit.
apparatus in a manner which we feel to be mistaken. The ultimate aim of the people like von Stahl [attorney general – trans.], Werthebach, and Kinkel, who has since been promoted to the post of foreign minister, is domestic peace in Germany. In other words, the ruling elite have made the following demand on the politicians: There can be no visible resistance which is in a position to bring into question the state’s totality. But the state security apparatus is confronted with the fact that the means of destructive prison conditions has only been partially successful towards that end.
revolution, a country where a particularly evil variant of fascist “national socialism” once ruled, a country in which there are only a few traditions of resistance, all of this makes it even more important for there to be a continuity of resistance. It follows from this: Those things which the comrades correctly/decisively recognized years ago in their analysis need to be applied to the present social/political situation. On May 6, 1975, two days before her death, Ulrike Meinhof was visited by the Italian R.A. Capelli. In her May 7 report of the conversation, she said, among other things, that: “The function of the reactionary integration of Western Europe for counter-revolution in the Third World and the development of North-South antagonism, the general connection between the struggle in the metropoles and the development of the front in the Third World – the conversation astounded him (Capelli, that is).”
property. Of the 14,000 suicides registered in 1990, 4,000 were elderly people. In Oschersleben, 50 unemployed persons take over the state employment office and begin a hungerstrike. After 18 years, workers in the “public sector” go on strike against the will of both the employers and the unions. In the states of Baden- Wurtenburg and Schleswig-Holstein, 30% of people don’t even bother to “vote” while two fascist parties book election “successes”.
The third point is as follows: The guerrilla write that “the question” is “whether or not German soldiers will once again march against other people”. The fact is, during the 33rd Commanders Conference in Leipzig, people like Ruehe [defence minister -trans.] and Naumann [military chief of staff – trans.] left no doubt that, in the long-term, they intend to send the German army on armed, Out-of-Area missions. The decisive factor in this is Germany’s role in NATO: New stationing agreements imply that Germany will remain a important station and base for global US imperialist interventions for the unforeseeable future. Even apart from this, Germany’s role is quite clear: At 6.5 billion dollars, Germany was one of the four biggest financiers of the Gulf War.
competition of everyone against everyone, the system, the law of fear, the pressure to succeed, all of this is what rules over us, for the one at the cost of the many, the division of people into men and women, young and old, healthy and unhealthy, foreigners and Germans, the struggles for prestige. And that’s where we’re from: The isolation of the row houses, the concrete jungles in the suburbs, the prison cells, the asylums and the clinics. From the brainwashing by the media, consumption, punishment through beatings, the ideology of non-violence; from depression, sickness, and the declassifying, insulting, and degrading of people, all exploited peoples under imperialism. Until we have satisfied the needs of each of us and the necessity of liberation from imperialism, there is nothing to lose in this system of destruction, and there is everything to gain in the armed struggle: collective liberation, life, humanity, identity. That the concerns of the people, the masses, the assembly line workers, the lumpen, the prisoners, the students, the lowest class of people here and the liberation movements of the Third World are our concerns, too. Our concern: armed, anti-imperialist struggle is the concern of the masses, and vice versa – even when it’s a long, slow process at first, the guerrilla’s military- political offensive can become a real people’s war. It can become real.”
brutality with which the human labour forces of the Three Continents are exploited. Our militant action against Gesamtmetall follows in logical consequence.
comrades in the Near East.
reality of the 90s.
of the CDU [christian democratic party – trans.] in Dusseldorf as well as the CDU regional office for the ‘Bergischesland’ region (Solingen, Wuppertal, etc.). We chose this site because of the minimal risk to uninvolved persons. By means of this action, we want to start an open discussion concerning the CDU and the politics represented by this party.
death in protest against the German state on March 21 (Newroz). In the statement they left behind, Nilgun and Bedriye make mention of German weapons sales to the ruling Demirel/Ciller [Turkish government leaders – trans.] clique. There has been a lot of debate recently concerning these weapons shipments, but the facts speak for themselves: Under the terms of three material aid agreements (1990-1994), 100 Leopard-1s, 300 BRT-60s, 30 Phantoms, 131 artillery systems, and 187 MTW M-113s have been delivered.
and 50,000 militias (so-called village guards) are stationed in 13 provinces (the state of emergency region) to carry out a war against the Kurdish liberation struggle. The war against militants there and the repression here are closely linked: On November 26, 1993, Kanther (CDU) “banned” the PKK and other Kurdish organizations; at the end of March alone, 547 Kurds were arrested in Germany; while chancellor Kohl (CDU)described the Kurdish Autobahn blockades as an “unbearable misuse of guest rights”, deportation orders were signed and carried out step by step. The raid by a police commando, including GSG-9 agents, in Saarbrucken last week is a clear sign of the course which is presently being followed. On March 7, after a trial lasting more than 4 years in the court bunker in Dusseldorf, a verdict was handed down: Both Kurds, Ali Aktas and Hasan Hayri Guller, were given life sentences. On April 12, a trial began in Munich against 13 Kurds who occupied the Turkish consulate on June 24, 1993. By means of this action, the Kurds had hoped to force Kohl (CDU) to publicly declare an end to weapons shipments to Turkey. The Kurdish militants have acted according to their conviction that “resistance is life – berxwedan jiyane”.
Germany is also a party in the war against the Turkish communist resistance that has been waged since 1982. Already in 1983, Devrimci Sol was banned, and militants and activists that have sought political asylum in Germany have often been deported. In order to avoid being handed over to the fascist military junta (that seized power in a putsch on September 12, 1980), Cemal Altun, one of the founders of ‘Ankara Liseli Devrimci Genclik’, threw himself out of a window in a Berlin courthouse on August 30, 1983, and died later from his injuries.
in close cooperation, thus making the immediate arrest of deported persons at Turkish airports possible. And the MIT can even make “arrests” in Germany: For example, 4 Devrimci Sol militants were kidnapped in Germany and taken to Ankara in 1986. Torture in Turkish prisons has been well documented. And this torture continues in the courtroom: 7 Devrimci Sol prisoners were beaten up in a courtroom in Istanbul because a May 1st banner was unfurled; another 5 Devrimci Sol prisoners were beaten with clubs in the courtroom in Kayseri. The Turkish security forces, armed and trained by Germans, have shot and killed several Devrimci Sol militants during arrest operations over the past few years. We particularly want to make mention of the raid on a house on March 6, 1993, during which Bedri Yagan and Gurcan Ozgur, who made important contributions to the further development of communist resistance in Turkey, were killed.
political arena, it is the duty of the CDU to press forward with the interests of these corporations. On May 30, the federal government wrote a letter to the business group BDI, insuring them that restrictions on arms sales to countries outside of NATO would soon be eased. For a corporation like Daimler, who commented on the sale of Unimogs to the Sudan (where two million refugees are continually threatened with death through famine) with the words “the deal went through perfectly”, the common interests of major German corporations and the CDU politicians are solidified through personal contacts and consultations. For example, von Wartenberg (BDI executive) and Schoser (DIHT executive) are part of Kohl’s election team. Stihl, Necker, and Murmann make no secret of the fact that they hope that the government’s present course is further pushed through during the next legislative period.
SPD just presents itself as the CDU with a red veneer, why shouldn’t we just stick with the original?”
corporations), Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic) is the next region to move into. At the same time, 12 years of CDU rule have led to social polarization: At present there are 8 million people (including those in re-schooling programs) out of work, 2.2 million children live in poverty, and at least 2.5 million new homes are needed. Workplace reconstruction has led to the following: This year alone, 100,000 machinery jobs will be lost, as will 30,000 in the electronics industry and 23,000 in the steel industry, and so on. The CDU government is furthering these developments through it privatization program (another 35,000 railway jobs will be cut this year) and is expecting the number of unemployed to grow by at least 500,000 by the end of 1994. Around 60% of the population are worried about the present situation in Germany, particularly regarding uncertain employment, and a majority of the German population has a lot, on a global scale, to lose in all of this. The workers in the steel industry are, thanks to the situation with the corporation Eko-Stahl, getting first-hand experience at how big capitalists can eliminate an entire industrial region if they feel like it: In 1989, there were 11,000 jobs, now there are only 3,000. First Krupp refused to take the firm over, now Riva is also refusing. Ever since the CDU first came to power in Dusseldorf in 1949, nothing has changed in the way this party mobilizes large sectors of the population in the interest of the capitalist elite. Unlike the FDP, which openly characterizes itself as a party of the elite and thereby always gets at least 5% of the vote [the minimum required for 
representation in parliament – trans.], the CDU is supposed to be a “people’s party” whose voter potential reaches well outside its own regular clientele (businessmen, self-employed persons).
secret of the fact that he often gave judicial advice to the leader of the fascist DVU party, Frey. So it’s no surprise that Frey’s newspaper ‘Nationalzeitung’ wrote in 1982 that it’s impossible to imagine “a more honourable person than Dr. Herzog to serve at the head of Germany’s highest court”. In 1987, Herzog became head of Germany’s constitutional court, and even before his election as president, he stated in an interview with Focus magazine that he supports a form of politics which would have pleased his deceased friend Maunz. Focus: “The preamble of the German constitution speaks about the German people (“das Deutsche Volk”)…” Herzog: “The Weimar constitution phrased it even better: The German people, united in its roots… Those people that don’t wish to become German should be allowed an adequate amount of time to make up their minds. In the end, if they decide against taking up German citizenship, then we should say to them: We expect you to go back to that country which you consider to be your home.”
campaign was tremendously successful: He achieved a sort of division of labour between the racists on the streets (Hoyerswerda, Rostock, etc.) and CDU party politicians. By means of a self-fulfilling prophecy, “so that things don’t get even worse”, the CDU was able to abolish the right to asylum in Germany. It’s no surprise that the vote to change the constitution and the fascist firebombing in Solingen took place during the same week in May 1993.
ideological direction, and they rewarded him with standing ovations. With this direction, Schauble is not only reaching out to Republikaner voters, but he is also securing an ideological course which will hold together the party’s own 700,000 members after Kohl is gone. Schauble accepted his position as key negotiator, first with the last DDR government (the reunification agreement) and then with the SPD (changing the asylum clause in the constitution). But he is not only a pragmatic power-politician, but rather he is also one of the few CDU leaders who can effectively articulate the party’s ideology.
illegality, apology. And now to see just how fucked up, dirty, and mean it is, and that the simplicity (on the one side) lies in once again recognizing oneself as a fighter, how it was, what you know about yourself, our methods, the level – to break through countless levels to arrive at ‘we’: reality as a fight – and certainly not a have/should have balance,…”
was shown, despite preventive measures from the German state, that various comrades from the anti-national resistance could articulate militancy from a position of weakness. The “politics of needle pricks” of the militant resistance, which Bremen’s interior senator Nispen (FDP) mentioned, was a politically painful reality for the self-representation of the German state. We deposited explosive devices in early June (before the European elections) at the CDU office in Dusseldorf and at the end of September (before the German elections) at the FDP office in Bremen. We did this, because we think it’s important to have a militant exchange with the politics of the ruling party bloc CSU/CDU/FDP/Greens/SPD. In our communiques from both actions, we attempted to thematize the politics of the ruling CDU and FDP parties. The result of the parliamentary elections is that Germany will in future still be ruled by an all-party coalition, as was the case previously. The situation in the institution conglomerate parliament/upper house/mediation committee makes that clear.
people who do not accept the ruling conditions in Germany to be fooled by the illusion that it is not necessary to self-consciously break through the boundaries for action set up
took part in the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt. After the general elections in 1990, the CDU in Stuttgart hired Dr. Eilfort from Tuebingen to carry out “abstention research” to figure out the political motives of “non-voters”, and he described his findings as “shocking”: Approximately 80% of “non-voters” described themselves as politically interested, but they reject the ruling political parties. These people assume that “the politicians do what they want”, they are unhappy with their socio-economic situation, they can’t identify a real political alternative and hence they become apathetic. Eilfort concludes in his dissertation: “There seems to be a strong correlation between poverty and voter abstention: Those people who should be most interested in change take part the least in voting.” The relationship between voters and non-voters is, therefore, a reflection of the splits within German society in general. The following data from the so-called poverty conference also illustrate these splits: In 1992, 7.5% of people in the West and 14.8% of people in the East had to get by with an income which was less than half the average level in Germany. Approximately 2.2 million children in Germany live in poverty (1 out of every 7 children). The minority cannot push through its demands against the majority through “democratic” legal means. Here is where the responsibility of militant resistance politics comes in.
stability in the monetary union, as long as France is willing to help Germany to become a military-political superpower. France is willing to accept this deal; when France takes over the EU presidency from Germany in January 1995, they will put forward a plan to develop a joint air force which can be deployed in international missions. To emphasize this new cooperation for the French population, on July 14, German tanks were allowed to roll down the Champs Elysees for the first time since 1945. It is known that France continues to intervene in Africa with the arrogance of a military superpower and a former colonial power.
Braunmuehl, this analysis had a rather singular character. A broad anti-EU discussion has thus far been lacking. Content work is made even more difficult by the fact that the institutional conglomerate of the EU apparatus is so hard to understand in its entirety. This can be confirmed by those people who have attempted to keep track of internal EU developments on such issues as the bioethics convention, patent standards, biotechnological discoveries, new food prescriptions, drinking water and pesticide guidelines, etc. On the other hand, there are facts which clearly illustrate the full inhuman extent of EU politics: While 786 million people are starving across the world, the EU bought up and destroyed 2.5 billion kilograms of fruit and vegetables in 1993/94. The world’s food production would be more than sufficient if things were distributed more justly; each person in the world could receive 2,500 calories per day, 150 more than are required for good nutrition.
example, the head of the Lycee Faidherbe refused to allow 18 young women to attend classes at the school. The reason: they were wearing Islamic head scarves.
Our politics will from now on be oriented towards making a militant/armed intervention in those places where the German elite have their workplaces and homes.
Among others, the CDU’s parliamentary foreign policy spokesperson Kurt Lamers and CDU general secretary Peter Hinze had offices there. The media falsely credited this action to the Anti-Imperialist Cell (AIZ).
responsibility at the target attacked. Danger to uninvolved persons must, in every case, be prevented. We reject a lack of scruples, the notion that “the ends justify the means”. In our opinion, targeted attacks against individuals, and that doesn’t just mean the potential danger caused by an action, are out of the question at the present time in Germany.
We have the following criticisms of the attack on the house of Volkmar Koehler:
fundamental principles of emancipatory politics. For example, when Khadaffi writes in his ‘Green Book’ that the role of women is defined by nature and that a “woman who neglects motherhood has forsaken her natural role in life”, this removes any possibility for solidarity.
sectors of the population. We should make use of the gap between “those above who
Imperialist Cell (AIZ). We are also working on such a paper and plan to publish it in the near future. This preliminary statement is a result of some comments made by Group Barbara Kistler. In short, what they wrote disturbed us so much that we couldn’t wait until our paper was finished.
theoretical/practical experiences of the guerrilla (that also means learning from their mistakes) and contribute to the further development of militant politics in this country.”
potential for loss of life also applied to uninvolved persons. Sure, anywhere a bomb goes off or a molotov gets tossed danger can never be theoretically entirely eliminated since chance occurrences can result in uninvolved persons being harmed. Even with very careful planning, human beings cannot rule out bad luck. Even with your own action when a CDU office went up in flames, maybe someone (like a burglar, for instance) could have been inside at the time. Or maybe the cops in Berlin could have found the device which was designed to blow up the new deportation prison just at the exact moment it went off. As far as that action was concerned, these cops would have counted as “uninvolved persons” since they weren’t the target of the attack. But let’s forget about such useless and absurd speculations. It’s clear to everyone that actions should be planned in such a way that uninvolved persons are not harmed. But we can never fully rule out coincidences. We think the AIZ fulfilled these necessary criteria during their actions.
Autonome notions of PC is characteristic of the present times. The fact is, however, that the Great Socialist Libyan-Arab People’s Jamahiriya is the last clearly anti-imperialist state in the world. The Libyan people have developed a truly unique form of base democracy. The organs of popular power from the bottom (people’s referendums) to the top (general people’s congresses) are built on the principle of the reversed pyramid. The second element which is designed to guarantee the unperverted implementation of this popular power is the imperative mandate. This means that Libya has no system of representatives, rather delegates only come together when people’s congresses are convened. The illiteracy rate, which stood at 90% when Libya gained its independence in 1969, has sunk to less than 40% today, and school enrollment figures are presently higher than 90%. There are no slums, each family owns a home. Health care in Libya is free, a fact which has risen the life expectancy from 37 in 1969 to 60 today. Furthermore, the Jamahiriya is the only Arab country where all people are guaranteed a minimum income and a level of social security which is comparable to international standards. As for the role of women in Libyan society, Karam Khella wrote the following in the newspaper Al Karamah: “Libya is one of the only Arab or Islamic countries in which the traditional role of women has been surpassed in quick steps. In educational labor, and decision-making structures (people’s congresses), the number of women is continually rising. The mobilization of women has been a tremendous service to the Libyan revolution. From this, it can be seen that the praxis of women has gone well beyond the boundaries described in the third 
volume of the Green Book.”
other solidarity. Demands that the AIZ cease to exist are counter-productive and seem similar to the methods of counter-insurgency. That’s all for now.
Most people on the left, those people you are trying to reach, either don’t understand your activities, or they reject them. The same is true for us, the editorial collective of ‘Agitare Bene’.
prosecutor’s office are claiming to have finally captured some members of the AIZ. So far, we have neither heard nor read very much in the way of solidarity. With this text, we would like to offer a few thoughts for discussion and call for solidarity against the repression apparatus.
resistance are being heavily repressed. In addition to the AIZ, there is the campaign against the editors of Radikal, the investigations against comrades in Frankfurt, Saarbrucken, and Wiesbaden because of the state informant Steinmetz, and the charges to be tried against alleged members of Autonome Antifa (M) in Gottingen; smaller AA/BO groups are also being investigated, albeit at a “lower level”. Militant groups have always faced repression, and it’s obvious that the cops aren’t just gonna let people plant bombs in front of the homes of members of parliament. (We haven’t mentioned the
something – that’s lacking in much of the autonome scene. The texts of both the AIZ as well as KOMITEE seem to speak of this. Such considerations aren’t new to us, but we have tried to balance this with reality and we have come to the conclusion that there’s little point in carrying out isolated actions. The praxis of the AIZ is a paradox: They seek to mobilize, but all they do is generate criticism. From this they draw the conclusion that
others, the common search for liberation. We don’t think it’s a coincidence that such a development has happened at a time when the left is very weak. For this reason, we think that we all share the common responsibility to further develop leftist theory and praxis so that we can all struggle together. That’s why we show solidarity, as well as offer criticism. As for Bernhard and Michael, they must be released! We can only discuss their ideas and the praxis which they support when we are all together on the outside. We refused to sit around and talk about who what where when and why the cops have locked them up, just as we refused to do so for the Kaindl defendants, the Antifa (M), the Radikal suspects, and all others!
Office (BAW) formal charges against the two men have still not been filed. The
Bernhard Falk, who is on trial together with Michael Steinau charged with membership in the Anti-Imperialist Cells (AIZ) and attempted murder, stared in disbelief at his former schoolmate. Although Steinau had previously refused to make any statements with regards to the charges against him, the former physics student now said: “I admit to carrying out the attack.”
today he no longer supports the goals of the Anti-Imperialist Cells. “That was a mistake, he said.
Since November 1997, Bernhard Falk and Michael Steinau have been on trial at the State Supreme Court in Dusseldorf, Germany on charges of violating Article 129a, “forming a terrorist organization”, namely the Anti-Imperialist Cell (AIZ). They are also charged with participation in several bomb attacks. A prosecution witness from the North Rhine Westphalia state intelligence agency, Mr. Duren, told a tale to the court that the
the trial, including Frank Ament, who had moved from Hamburg to Berlin. Frank called in sick and did not attend the court session. He was called again to testify on March 23. Frank did not go, so he was fined 400 DM and sentenced to four days in jail. On April 11, 1999, he was arrested at his home in Berlin and taken by force to Dusseldorf. In the courtroom, he stood with his back turned to the judge and did not respond to any of the questions which were put to him. The court sentenced him to one week in jail for his conduct, and ordered him to testify on April 20. But the judge, noting Frank’s “political motives” in refusing to testify, ordered that Frank be held for six months and pay a fine of 800 DM.
K.O.M.I.T.E.E Communique / November 1994
an arson attack on a building of the German armed forces (Bundeswehr) in Bad Freienwalde on October 27th, 1994. The context was the criticism of the German political position towards the Kurdish liberation struggles. Germany was supporting the Turkish war against the Kurds by exporting weapons and prohibiting the organization of the PKK within Germany. The campaign by ‘Das K.O.M.I.T.E.E.’ was aimed against the repressively biased position of the German state towards the Kurdish liberation struggles: Germany is “party to the genocide in Kurdistan (…) – in military, economic and
explosives had been disguised as fire extinguishers and were designed to destroy the new prison before it could be opened. However, ever since the spectacular RAF commando attack which completely destroyed a new high-tech prison in Weiterstadt in March of 1993, German authorities have greatly increased their surveillance of prison construction sights.
abandoned army barracks in Bad Freienwalde in East Germany in November of 1994. This action, which caused 200,000 DM in damage, was done in solidarity with the Kurdish national liberation struggle and to protest German arms sales to Turkey.
construction firm, because they are involved in the construction of the deportation prison in Grunau and therefore are partly responsible for the deportation of countless refugees and immigrants to regions of war, crisis, and poverty. This company earns money by constructing a place where people will be caged up for weeks, just for exercising their right to demand their fair share of the world’s wealth.
We demand that all refugees and immigrants be given the right to stay here. Not only because Germany, through its imperialist policies in the Three Continents (the so-called Third World), has created the root causes of flight (poverty, war, etc.), but also because we envision a society where it doesn’t matter in the least whether someone is green, black, white, or purple, whether they have a passport from this or that country, whether they speak one language or the other. We don’t give a shit about any of these things! Everyone has the right to live here. Period!
cornerstone of our security. Today, because of the developments in the southern regions of the former Soviet Union as well as in other countries in the Near and Middle East, Turkey is even more important. A democratic and stable Turkey can play an important role in this region’s relationship to Europe. (…) Our military aid is the continuation of agreements made by previous German governments and is of particular importance for the Atlantic Alliance.”
And this doesn’t include the cheap credits for arms purchases and other “regular” deals which Turkey enters into. The “NATO defence aid” which Turkey was granted in a 1964 NATO decision will finally expire at the end of 1994. In addition to the deal for 68 million DM of arms from 1992-94, a report from the Foreign Ministry has noted that Turkey recently received an additional 1.5 billion DM in other materials from Bonn. This included the free delivery of former NVA army weapons from the former East Germany. The total amount of arms gifts given to Turkey since 1989 makes the real dimension of this transaction clear. Here are just a few examples: 30 fighter jets, 170 Leopard-1 battle tanks, 300 BTR-60PB (East German) armoured tanks, 537 M-113 armoured tanks, 1,000 air-to-air rockets, 5,000 tank shells, RPG-7s (East German) with 200,000 grenades, more than 300,000 Kalaschnikov machine pistols (East German), and 175,000 gas masks.
context. The security interests of the Alliance can be affected by other risks…such as the disruption of necessary resources by means of terrorism or sabotage.” That’s how the Turkish government can justify its military actions in Turkish Kurdistan. The deployment of German weapons are just part of a “fight against terrorists”, in full accordance with NATO guidelines. According to Foreign Ministry spokesman Hans Schumacher, the German government has “full understanding” for this argument. During his visit to Turkey in July 1993, the Bundeswehr’s General Inspector Klaus Naumann, after meetings with Turkish Chief of Staff Dogan Gures and Defence Minister Nevzat Ayaz, stated that the use of German weapons in Kurdistan was “fully legitimate given the present conditions”.
political system dependent on it.
stationed in North Kurdistan in late-1990. Future deployments as part of NATO missions in Kurdistan cannot be ruled out. German foreign policy has created the necessary instruments for direct military engagement and these will be utilized. This development must be resisted.
Eisnerstrasse and we hope that lots of their equipment went up in flames. The firm Kuthe, just like the Allround corporation whom we visited last month, is involved in the construction of the new deportation prison in Berlin-Grunau and is therefore partially
persecution, and so on. These facts are all well known by now. But still, KUTHE and ALLROUND have no scruples about being part of this murderous project. We hope that the material damage we have caused them will eat into the bloody profits they are making by helping to construct the prison in Grunau.
April 11, 1995, we weren’t sure if we’d release any more statements. Considering the charges being brought against some people and all the uncertainties surrounding
increasingly distant from radical positions. As long as there was a common strength, at the militant level as well, we didn’t think it was necessary to always appear on the scene under the same name.
a stand, we think it’s necessary for us to explain why we decided upon militant politics in a period of relatively little movement. We’re always hearing the argument that, after the decline of the left-radical movement, just “keeping going” is pointless, but these people don’t seem to realize that revolutionary politics here as always been on the margins for the last few decades and never possessed a realistic strategy for overthrowing the conditions.
as the most important partner in Turkey’s war of genocide against the Kurds, as we saw it as the duty of the German left to break through their lethargy and actively oppose German policy.
struggle and the continuing smear-campaigns against the PKK. Therefore, one of our goals, to act as German leftists in solidarity with the Kurdish liberation struggle, was displayed widely in the open.
deportation detention facilities, since most refugees don’t leave of their free will.
the face of this, protests against poor conditions in the detention centers are mute.
stationed in a watch tower, but they hadn’t been there before. After using a ladder to get over the wall we were able to walk around the entire prison and check everything out. There were no locked doors.
was destroyed by fascists.) The obvious intent here was to associate us with dead children in Oklahoma. The bomb in the USA was 95% ammonium nitrate (fertilizer) and 5% gasoline or diesel and was hence the “correct” way to make an ammonium explosive, one which is much more powerful than an explosive made of a nitric chloride mixture.
sight of the broader task at hand. This was a mistake. All actions, especially one of this dimension, should allow time for intermediate collective decision-making. The goal of the action or some time schedule should not hide the actual situation of the individual
logic. As the turn of events and the subsequent pig investigations show, we were very short-sighted. Those people who are now in the cops’ sight because of our mistakes now have to deal with problems like membership in a terrorist organization. Without the similar timing devices and the warning signs, that would not be the case.
the sum total of all the mistakes we made.
attempted action against the deportation prison in Grunau. As one of the people involved, I would like to address a few points, because I think people are very unclear as to how we should deal with all of this. Just as it looked, the cops’ success was the result of
constructions. Why aren’t such attacks being made public and exposed? It goes without saying that the cops and the justice system don’t play by their own rules if things are kept in the dark and they don’t face public scrutiny.
which was justified with, among other things, an alleged search for AIZ members, may seem out of line. But I think that in a situation like this it’s more important to have a
expression it must be possible to create a broad base of support, because the reasoning behind the house searches and arrests is not at all solid. The justice system has messed up in the past when it tried to shut down Radikal. If we are able to make their charges fall apart, that won’t just mean protection for the individuals concerned, but we would also have won ourselves a bit of freedom: the possibility to continue an open discussion of leftist strategies. To the producers of the paper: don’t stop publishing Radikal! “That which is true will continue to be said, to be written, and to be published!”
expression of capitalist society. People who are no longer needed in the “labor market” are pushed out by the ruling powers according to their class, gender, skin color, or nationality. The bosses and their lackeys in the unions, political parties, and the media condemn these people as “welfare bums” who “refuse to work”, sometimes even branding them as “potential criminals”.
weaknesses of the politics of the predominantly middle class left, and it shows just how important it is that we turn our slogan “Borders don’t run between people, rather between the top and the bottom!” into reality.
imagine that similar tendencies aren’t recognizable here in Germany, as more and more prisons are being built as benefits to the unemployed and people on welfare keep getting cut. Proletarian youths, especially the “foreign” ones among us, are in an especially difficult situation. It starts with trying to find a spot in school and doesn’t end with trying to find a place to live. Youths are constantly bombarded with the “values” of capitalist death-culture by their parents, teachers, bosses, and the media: competition, the “rights” of the strong, self-satisfaction through performance and consumption, and so on. In our cities, its “every man for himself”, coupled with traces of social disadvantage and exclusion, which gets expressed in such things as proletarian neighbors breaking into each other’s cars and homes, or outbreaks of violence, often with a sexist or racist motive. Then there are the problems of drugs and the increasing influence of right-wing nationalists, or Islamic groups among youths from Turkey or Yugoslavia.
plenty of positive examples both here in our country as well as internationally!
Germany were stormed. The mainstream media praised the action as a “blow to terrorist groups”, spewing forth the cops’ line that the raids were directed against the Anti-Imperialist Cell (AIZ), the group K.O.M.I.T.E.E., and the illegal magazine ‘Radikal’. The usual stigma of “terrorist group” was attached, justified with Paragraphs 129 and 129a. Standard pig procedure. It’s a part of German reality to have homes being stormed, children rousted from their beds by masked cops with guns, weapons pointed at the heads of individuals whose “only” crime was their work on a left-radical newspaper. Even on the suspicion of simply distributing Radikal, people were terrorized all over the
the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The existing social conditions can only be changed if left-radical groups and associations build up their abilities and structures so as to be able to counter some of these effects even today. This, of course, includes militant and armed intervention, but these would be empty gestures if there wasn’t also some sort of linkage or means of conveying their message. Of course, we are very happy when militant anti-fascist initiatives disrupt Nazi meetings. So we also see one of our functions as exposing fascist structures so as to make both old and new Nazis attackable, and we think this is one very important aspect of anti-fascist work.
the future from this discussion.
distribute the magazine, mail out subscriptions, write articles, answer letters from readers, and so on and so forth. The only difference between us and normal, legal magazines is the fact that we have removed ourselves from state control, out of the reach of the censorship authorities. Over the years, we have built up an organizational structure which allows us to distribute a relatively high number of magazines nation-wide, by radical-left standards that is. As with other groups who seek to build up open or hidden structures, we are subject to state repression. From their point of view, the BAW had good reason to act now, since all their previous actions against us had been fruitless. Radikal kept being published, and there was nothing they could do about it.
law and order are continuing to act against left-radical groups, who are all equally defined as dangerous, and these are attacked at the same high level.
We need an uncontrollable resistance media!
On July 3, autonomist and women’s/lesbian groups sprayed slogans, smashed windows, glued locks, and damaged ATM machines at 7 branches of the American bank Citibank. Ten days later, the “Commando Assata Shakur” attacked a Chrystler dealer in Kassel. 
Stop The Execution Of Mumia Abu-Jamal!
“Autosalon am Elsterwerdaer” at Kopenickerstrasse 78 in Berlin-Biesdorf.
military, and economic power and thereby overlooks the other imperialist power blocs (the European Union, the Japan-dominated Pacific Rim).
criminalization, all dissidence to the state.
publication ‘Radikal’. The BAW failed, however, and most of the criminal cases were eventually dropped. Since then, two brochures have been published, in which former Radikal members announced their retirement from the project. Last summer, the only issue of Radikal published by the “third generation” thus far appeared. Nothing has been heard of from the project since then. The following is a joint discussion with members of Radikal as well as some people involved in ‘Interim’, a semi-legal weekly autonomist publication based in Berlin.
clandestine organization, it’s not that easy, and changing plans takes a lot of energy.
collective working and collective living projects – the Sprengel in Hannover, for example, or the Marchstrasse in Berlin [former squats – trans.] – in our movement are disbanding. It’s becoming harder to resist this trend, but we need to do something about that. And that goes well beyond just organizing a magazine.
capitalism. In so far as real-existing socialism no longer exists as an external corrective, capitalism is presenting itself as the better model. And then there’s the dismantling of social security. The consequences of these are mirrored in the collective projects, and simply replying on increased collectivity seems false.
impression which you have described. It’s about understanding collectivity as a political value again. The average person in the scene works 30 to 40 hours a week, lives with a partner, meets old political buddies now and then in a bar, and so on. The trend is towards an isolated anti-collective lifestyle. And we need to ask ourselves: How can we do something about that? As for students in Berlin or Dresden, well, when we were that age, it was important to find something different, to feel affirmation, togetherness, alternatives. Nowadays, despite all the failed projects, we still want our project to show an attractive alternative. It’s too simplistic to simply say that the political conditions have become worse.
other people? How do we convince them to adopt an anti-patriarchal position? Things in the scene are too often self-satisfied. But what sort of external influence does that have?
Interim: In their self-critique, some former Radikal members said that before passing on information was managed very broadly. Papers were distributed very widely, and that this fell at your feet. How will you manage this in the future? Division of labor, or specialists?
reflected the scene, autonomist actions, many small antifa communiques, debates on militancy, and so on. Then at some time you opened something, for example the theme
Interim: Will the next issue of Radikal be a number in which it’s still unclear how things will proceed, or will that be the main topic of the next issue? Hopefully we’ll see it in less that a year’s time…
