[RAF] ENG: "The possibility of a historical moment is now"

"The possibility of a historical moment is now"

The history of the RAF and the question of reconstructing an anti-capitalist, social-revolutionary, anti-patriarchal and internationalist movement in the present time.

In her text in ND <The Neues Deutschland newspaper>, in the week of January 18, 2025, Caroline Braunmühl presents an alternative position to that bourgeois attitude which tries to depoliticize the history of militant and armed resistance, by reducing its content to violence and negating a political conflict.

It was also an intention of mine in my declaration of December 2024, to present resistance against capitalism in the context of violent conditions - exploitation, the rule of man over man, of nationalism, militarism and war - and to direct the debate in accordance with historical reality and to oppose the historical narrative of the rulers and their attempts at manipulation.

The goal of bourgeois historical narrative is to delegitimize and criminalize anti-capitalist resistance and its history. Their elites have a fundamental interest in maintaining the exploitative and oppressive conditions, and in which, being able to continue to make profit. This is what the elites proclamation of the 1990s stands for: "There is no alternative".

Caroline Braunmühl connects with the RAF and other militant groups, such as the Rote Zora, radical resistance against, "the violence of socially dominant groups and individuals against social subordinates - such as class justice, patriarchal violence or transnational relations of exploitation, oppression and war, which the economic elites also benefited in BRD <West Germany> and benefit from today." She names the justification of militant resistance against violent conditions and at the same time denies the legitimisation of the targeted assassination by the RAF in its history.

She criticizes my statement from a feminist perspective and for lack of criticism of the RAF.

I agree with her, that a reflected picture of the history of struggles is necessary, with the ability to also see their weakness. It is above all about being able to draw conclusions for the struggles of the future.

The world of the dominant capitalist system is moving at an increasing speed towards societal and global erosion: war, poverty, displacement and destruction of the planet’s ecological livelihood. The bourgeois state - and this concerns the entire capitalist center of Europe and the USA - is increasingly using right-wing and authoritarian means. It uses the construct of "Volksgemeinschaft" <national patriotism> in order to exclude migrants, Muslims, refugees and the poor. It uses racism, nationalism and a rapid internal and external militarization. This has - partly intended - repercussions on civil society.

The society radicalizes itself in the inherent and deeply rooted racist, patriarchal and social forms of differentiation, exclusion and oppression. The world is moving unmistakably towards an infernal tipping point of social, ecological and military erosion.

Capitalism does not offer a solution for this; it would also be contradictory. The crisis solutions of the elites are now authoritarianism, developing fascism, war and the process of unification of bourgeois and fascist politics. This is nothing more than a journey into the possible abyss with clear parallels to the historical crisis developments that culminated in the world wars of 1914 and 1939 - but today with an extremely increased potential for global destruction.

If you want to prevent this, you should not deal with the hopeless rescue of bourgeois democracy as a facet of capitalism and the associated maintenance of the basic relations of violence, but with social-revolutionary alternatives, which can only be achieved as a result of social-revolutionary and emancipatory struggles.

Existential questions arise: in what steps, initiatives and processes is the reconstruction of an anti-capitalist, social-revolutionary and internationalist Left achievable?

But also: what do we take into the future from the struggles and concepts of history, from the attempts to overcome the inherent and completely violent capitalism and imperialism? How do we, as the revolutionary Left, discuss and write history from below and make it our own for the struggles of today and tomorrow and against the propagandizing, depoliticizing and criminalizing historical narrative from above?

I see in the history of the RAF, the courage and determination to dare, to risk, the unconditionalality and seriousness and the abandonment of their own privileges, which is needed to achieve the transformation of the misery of domination and oppression - including the upheaval of power structures inside of society.

How much I, as a young person, had appreciated their determination and unconditionality, the self-restraint in deep and true solidarity with the poor and colonized of this world, with the exploited in the countries of the starving Trikont <3rd World> and the insurgents there. How much their militant internationalism, for which they stood, grabbed me - still being green behind the ears and without much knowledge and especially out of empathy with those who had nothing or almost nothing. This was when I read the texts of Ernesto Cardenal or later the last texts of Ulrike <Meinhof>, that I was not yet able to fully understand at that time.
I heard about Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko. The first being a political prisoner in South Africa for decades, and the latter being a murdered insurgent who had been fighting the South African apartheid system, tortured by the South African police. I was outraged by this unspeakable racist and state violence, but also moved by the resistance of so many and that of the ANC. But at the same time I also learned that I myself live in a country whose elite profited from this system of violence called apartheid, that was deeply connected to the racist regime in South Africa, its military and police. It was a regime of predominantly South African, German or US-capital; of local government, military and police; of the self-proclaimed elite of white colonialists that treated people like slaves, exploited and killed them and declared them as second or third class humans because they were black. I perceived - and this also shaped my life - this oppressive and violent reality of this colonial and state crime, this "normality" of the world of capitalism.
 The perpetrators and accomplices of this unspeakable state racism and these crimes of colonialism, sat in their headquarters in Pretoria or Johannesburg. They also sat in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich or Bonn on the boards of banks and corporations, in the German government or the barracks of the Western world, mainly in the German, Israeli or US military.

For me, it was the RAF, which showed solidarity in the struggle alongside the poor and the revolutionaries in Nicaragua, El Salvador or South Africa, those attempts at revolution that moved me even in the days of my earliest youth. I began to realize that it is a common resistance - the one in the metropolis and the one in the Trikont <3rd World> This was the main focus of the RAF.

History is also the history of mistakes, defeats and moments of grief.

For me, the history of the RAF is also a history of strategic and tactical mistakes.

In the history of the RAF there are also visible moments that were not marked by the moral compass of the revolution.

No one has to find the whole story right today. For me, this does not question the fundamental legitimacy of the contribution of different attempts in the centuries of resistance - including that of the RAF - in the history of liberation from the violent conditions.

The RAF emerged from the resistance of the (19)68 movement. The movement of '68 reconstructed the anti-capitalist resistance that had been crushed by the Nazis in Germany. It brought into the consciousness of society,  the personal continuity of the elite. It is the miserable reality of the BRD to have been built by the old Nazis. They made a career - under the umbrella of the USA - as converted Democrats in all state institutions and on the boards of banks and corporations. The Nazi elite became the elite of West German democracy overnight.

It was a revolt against the reactionary mould, against the BRD democracy shaped by National Socialism and a questioning of the existing capitalist order, which was socially reactionary and repressive and structurally based on exploitation and militarization.

After the murder by the police of the anti-rearmament protester, Philipp Müller, and after the prohibition of the KPD in 1956, police violence, banning from certain professions and emergency laws were the state’s response at the end of the 60's to the movement of students, apprentices, the youth, the sub-proletariat and other parts of the population.

It was also the time of the Vietnam War, with the merciless brutality of the US-Military machine that tried to wipe out the Vietnamese attempt of the revolution and went into history with the massacres of the Vietnamese population and the use of the chemical warfare agent Napalm. Worldwide, huge solidarity movements against the imperialist war and for the right of liberation through the Vietnamese armed and revolutionary movement emerged. "Bring the war home" - a slogan of the US anti-war movement. The '68 movement, as well as the RAF, did just that and brought the worldwide resistance against the Vietnam War into German society. With the immense resistance against the war of terror in the Western world, the possibility of liberation had come into the consciousness of humanity worldwide and brought to the table of that time. Revolutionary, anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles developed around the world; capitalism and imperialism were being questioned. Armed struggle of the Gauche Proletarienne in France, the Red Brigades in Italy, armed struggle in Spain, Northern Ireland, England, Basque Country, Greece, Japan, Palestine, the Black Panther and the Weather Underground in the USA, the Tupamaros in Uruguay, the urban guerrilla in Mexico and Brazil or the anti-fascist uprising of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal.

It was the time of anti-colonial struggles in the south, in Mozambique, Algeria and many other places of anti-colonial liberation against the crimes there of the West.

The "racial segregation" of the Apartheid South Africa, the state and social racism in the USA, the murder of one million people during the destruction of the KP in Indonesia by the US military, or the CIA-led military coup against the government of Salvador Allende in Chile, are examples of Western implicitness and its brutalities that humanity was supposed to accept.

This violence of Western capitalism and imperialism caused worldwide revolutionary counter-violence, such as that of the resistance of the ANC and the Black Panthers. It showed millions of people worldwide that capitalism is built on the foundation of violence.

In Paris, a million people took to the streets, went on strike and on the barricades - large parts of the population, students and proletarians together.

Berlin, Turin, Paris, New York: Revolution no longer seemed unthinkable; it shook mightily in the Western world.

In Germany, the state tried to crush the insurgent movement with harsh repression, emergency laws, banning from certain professions, imprisonment of thousands and police brutality. The first shot came from the weapon of the German state: the police murdered Benno Ohnesorg on 2 June 1967.

The social democratic variant of repression consisted of Sugar and Whip: repression and the offer of integration; that should force a surrender of any resistance against capitalism and imperialism in the march through the institutions <changing the institutions from the inside> - and continues until today.

The situation in the world at that time, this age of uprisings as well as of imperialism at that time; whose state terror is figuratively concentrated in that image of the Vietnamese girl fleeing from the bombs of the West; the social situation in the post-National Socialist BRD; the hard and systematic state repression against a step into a new era; the elite of the BRD that was full of Nazi perpetrators; the  strikes - also wildcat and shaped by migrants - at the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s; the virulence of ideas of revolutionary transformation of the existing in all parts of society and the worldwide uprisings against imperialism, state racism and colonialism; as well as the emergence of urban guerrilla groups in many countries, including the metropolises - allow only one conclusion from my point of view: The emergence of the various armed fighting groups in the BRD, this venture, this revolutionary experiment, was perfectly justified and had to be attempted. Not to try would have been a failure in revolutionary history; a historical moment was possible.

1972

The "Concept of Urban Guerilla" and other texts of the RAF in this period were also an attempt to stop the decline of the movement, which suffered from repression and integration, and to take it into the perspective of liberation.

The actions of the RAF were directed against imperialist war, against the means of the dominance of repression and the aggressive-violent manipulation of society by the Springer press <German media conglomerate> and other media. All their attacks are a link to the movement of (19)68.

With the action against the headquarters of the US army and the destruction of the main computer there, used for the state terrorist bombardment, the RAF clearly stood on the side of the oppressed and those trying to free themselves, and thus took part in the global resistance to defeat the cruel Western imperialism that was raging in Vietnam. Due to the destruction of the US military computer in Heidelberg, the bombardment and the resulting mass killing of people had to be stopped for several days. In Vietnam the massacred population was appreciative.

The RAF had a social revolutionary and anti-imperialist concept in 1972, which was within the societal context and proclaimed the primacy of practice. How compassionate and correct as a part of the class struggle, was the serious and credible reference by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan Raspe, Holger Meins and Ulrike Meinhof and all others to the margins of society, the sub-proletariat, the institutionalized children, those who became mentally ill inside of the system or to the proletarian women of the Märkisches Viertel - that proletarian and poor district of Berlin. The militants of the RAF came from all classes and from the history of different political ideas of this period of new beginnings: anarchism, communism, feminism, social revolutionaries and anti-imperialists. That’s what I assume, that this RAF was so open.

The RAF had a base made up of the declining insurgent movement. Their practice was the attempt to take them out of the decline and into the revolutionary struggle. It was referring to the societal reality and the worldwide, revolutionary and anti-colonial new era.

The RAF in its development - exactly like the 2nd of June and later the Revolutionary Cells and the Rote Zora - was in its relation to state violence and the fundamental relations of violence in capitalism, a legitimate revolutionary counter-violence and legitimate attempt at liberation. All the actions in its early days, which were ended by the arrests of the then militants in 1972 and '73, are a very clear expression of it and convey exactly that.

In a poll of the time, one in five German citizens said that they were willing to grant protection from arrest to a member of the RAF.

The time was ripe for this revolutionary attempt and it was part of worldwide attempts at revolution. The formation of the urban guerrilla groups RAF and 2 June was based on historical conditions.

Given the circumstances, the reconstruction of fundamental resistance and the option of liberation had to be attempted, that which the NS <Nazis> had once destroyed, with the extermination of the workers movement and which, now, the NS-elites countered in the form of reformed, flawless democrats.

How important to me - looking back on this history of resistance and this contribution to the attempt at liberation - this first phase of the RAF is and  how my relationship with it was determined by it. I would not be able to understand the history of it in its totality - neither in its justifications nor in its downfalls - without being aware of this phase and of the legitimacy of its origin. That time - at the beginning of which I just saw the light of the world - seems far away, but the content of their attempt, even if it is history, is close to me.

After the arrests in 1972/73, the RAF only existed as prisoners.

"Mehr Demokratie wagen", as Willy Brandt said in 1972 <"Dare to be more democratic"> was not present in the execution of Tommy Weisbecker, Georg von Rauch, of Petra Schelm or bystanders during the search, like Ian McLeod - shot through the closed door - or the killing of unarmed apprentice Richard Epple by the police.

In the prisons, it was the Attorney General’s Office, the Ministry of Justice and the government - that is, the state - that decided to go to war against the captured RAF and bore responsibility for it: isolation against all political prisoners, daily cell raids, physical abuse by the Rollkommandos <prison guard assault units>  in the prisons, the "Dead Wing" of Cologne-Ossendorf, where Ulrike Meinhof and Astrid Proll were subject to sensory deprivation, or experimentation at the University of Hamburg of isolation as a method of subjecting people in detention.

The government plan to forcibly open the skull of Ulrike Meinhof in order to examine her brain and "prove" that her resistance is based on a "brain damage", was only prevented due to public protests. The factual parallel to the research of the NS-perpetrator Josef Mengele, who carried out forced examinations on living people in the German extermination camps during the Nazi rule and also killed or mutilated them, is obvious. These are traces of that time and of the state attempt, which in its ever increasing extreme measures can also be called faschistoid <sic>, to destroy or subjugate those who had revolutionarily questioned the existing order and were subjected as prisoners to the system.

The death of Holger Meins in 1974 on a hunger strike against the torture of solitary confinement by force-feeding, which in its dosage had to lead to his death, and the denial of medical assistance, was a state murder. They knew and wanted that he die by their actions. In the war against prisoners and with the attempt to subjugate or destroy them, the elite obviously broke with the basic law of bourgeois democracy that they proclaimed, "the dignity of man is sacred", and showed the inherent violence of the bourgeois state.

The former officers of the Wehrmacht of the Nazi state: Schmidt, Buback, Herold and others, were those who ordered this extreme form of state violence and bore responsibility for it.

Even much later in the next decade, of the (19)80s, as a young person, I was moved by the violent and state terrorist reality of this time, which helped me to understand that the foundation of the bourgeois state in capitalism is violence, terror, war and exploitation.

A little later in the 80s - I remember - being very moved by it, I once told my mother about the torture of solitary confinement against the prisoners. She was visibly touched. I had, unknown to her, with others, de-glassed the windows of some banks to support the prisoners on hunger strike. Many years later I would hear that my father and mother had engaged themselves in solidarity with prisoners and had started to support the liberation struggle of the Kurds as part of their lives.

Social and societal empathy is a motivation that they gave me in life. This can also be seen in their decisions to engage in the history of resistance with solidarity, and, despite the repression from German and Turkish "state security forces", to partially risk the privilege of their own integrity.

1975, Stockholm

After the death of Holger Meins, whose death also meant that the German state was ready to liquidate prisoners again 29 years after the end of Nazi fascism, the justified fear of further state killings of prisoners, and in the attempt to free the prisoners from the apparent attempt at subjugation and extermination in the prisons, led the newly formed "Kommando Holger Meins" of the RAF to the German embassy in Stockholm. It demanded the release of 26 political prisoners from the German government and threatened to blow up the embassy. The state refused to make contact with the occupiers and preferred to sacrifice its embassy members in favour of the German Staatsräson <reason of state>.

In the course of the occupation and in response to the refusal of the federal government to start negotiations, the command shot dead the diplomats Andreas von Mirbach and Heinz Hillegaart.

Siegfried Hausner, member of the Kommando Holger Meins, was seriously injured during the occupation of the embassy. With burns all over his body, he was no longer in a condition to be transported. Contrary to doctors instructions, the federal government insisted on his transport to Stuttgart-Stammheim, which amounted to a death sentence. They knew he was going to die from it, and he died.

The RAF’s reaction to the German government’s tough stance, which put military means above the political, was to strike back with the same logic. With the shooting of the two hostages, who themselves had no direct responsibility for the violent conditions to which the RAF reacted to by murdering them, the RAF lost in this action the moment of revolutionary morality and legitimacy.

1976

Ulrike Meinhof died after four years in the dungeons of the powerful.

After the failed occupation of the embassy in Stockholm, there was no visible RAF outside until '77. It remained the war of the state against the prisoners of the RAF; the isolation detention, exceptional laws and exceptional justice. With the verdict against the Stammheim prisoners, they were condemned to disappear forever into the isolation cells of those in power. The system of destruction or submission and exceptional justice had continued uninterrupted.

The brutality of the continuing, state-terrorist war in the prisons, which could not be countered with Stockholm, nor by the hunger strikes of the prisoners, can be seen today as a historical phase. In this phase the attempt of self-defence and basically the attempt to free political prisoners from the torture of isolation, was justified and legitimate. This was the precondition of the occupation of the embassy of Stockholm as well as the  RAFs '77 offensive.

The successful liberation of prisoners by the abduction of Peter Lorenz in 1975 by the 2 June movement also stands for this.

1977

Siegfried Buback, Federal Attorney, largely responsible for the repression of that time and in particular for his orders of isolation detention and exceptional justice, as well as for the murder of Holger Meins, Siegfried Hausner and Ulrike Meinhof, was killed by the RAF "Kommando Ulrike Meinhof". From the perspective of those who were aware of the violent conditions in capitalism and saw or were affected by the extreme state violence of that time, this act was a form of legitimate counter-violence and self-defense. A negation of this connection can in no way capture the historical reality.

This was the prelude to the '77 offensive, with which, the RAF tried to end the  "special detention" of the RAF prisoners, by their liberation and tried to allow a reorientation of the RAF and the prisoners.

They wanted to kidnap the head of the Dresden bank Jürgen Ponto, which failed and ended with him being unintentionally killed.

In the kidnapping of Hans Martin Schleyer, four policemen and the personal guards of Schleyer, were shot to death.

The federal government declared a state of emergency and the executive took over the decision-making, in the form of a crisis management team. The press declared itself to be aligned.

Historically, the state of emergency at that time symbolizes the fascist power option, which bourgeois democracy can use in capitalism. It also stands for the willingness of the elite to use the option if necessary.

The leaders of the crisis staff decided to sacrifice Schleyer for the sake of state. They refused to exchange him for the prisoners; this was the decision on the part of the state for a purely military solution. It was accompanied by discussions within the crisis staff, to extra judicially shoot a RAF prisoner every hour. All this tells of the governments responsibility for this course of history.

The RAF responded, hoping to change the attitude of the ruling crisis team, by authorizing a command of the Palestinian PFLP to hijack an aircraft with uninvolved civilians.

The '77 offensive completely isolated the RAF. It created a situation in which the entire Left turned away from the RAF, while it closed itself off from the Left; revolutionary goals that tried to achieve a social impact were no longer a visible and direct motivation for their actions; they acted primarily for themselves, and therefore subjectivistic; they escalated the power question against the state on a purely military level, thus opening up a duel with the state that they could only lose.

The military dynamics went against a political analysis. The isolated and subjectivist struggle was the prerequisite for an unjustifiable hijacking of aircraft, which was in contradiction to revolutionary principles and the idea of revolution as class struggle.

The killing of the four policemen as a prerequisite for negotiations is hardly comprehensible today and corresponds to a purely military logic. The killing of Ponto was not intended and in itself was already at odds with a realistic negotiating position for the release of the prisoners. Therefore, this action is part of the offensive at that time, which had lost its revolutionary legitimacy.

18 October 1977

The German government had rejected any political solution and risked the lives of the hostages by storming the plane in Mogadishu for the benefit of the German "Staatsräson".

Gudrun Enslin, Jan Raspe and Andreas Baader did not survive the night of 18 October in Stammheim. Irmgard Möller survived badly injured and declared: It was murder.

With Schleyer died a man who entered history as the right hand of SS-leader Heydrich, head of the protectorate of the Nazi occupied Czech Bohemia/Moravia. Schleyer was a career man in the SS and responsible for the deportation of more than 40,000 Jews to the German extermination camps. He was one of the persons responsible for the extermination of the Jews in the Shoah.

He died as a personified continuation of Nazi perpetrators, who made careers in the BRD after 1945 and whose elite he represented. He died as the boss of the bosses, as responsible for the exploitative conditions of the capitalist BRD state.

He also died as a prisoner of the RAF.

The death of the Nazi perpetrator and the representative of the continuation of Nazi fascism in West German capitalism, is certainly not a moment of mourning.

The killing of a prisoner or hostage is itself a moment of weakness and even a moment of defeat.

With the defeat of '77 began long phases in which the military motive shaped the visible path of the RAF ahead of the political motive. The military confrontation between guerrilla and state was the focus of politics, unlike during the May Offensive '72.

'77 shows: Armed struggle can only work if it is part of political movements and politically committed to them; Armed struggle is always only a possibility of revolutionary movements and could not function alone, the isolated guerrilla always runs the risk of getting into a militaristic and subjectivist dynamic; in the confrontation based on military logic, in the metropolis it can only lose.

The RAF was completely isolated after '77; it stood there without a base and had decided against a social-revolutionary policy in '77.

The militaristic moment of the '77 offensive marked the beginning of a policy focused on assassinations for the next 14 years.

The dissolving base of the guerrilla, towards the mid 70’s, had led the Stammheim prisoners to develop a tone in their statements from 1976, in which the RAF in its anti-imperialism, began to detach itself from the social-revolutionary and class-struggle aspects of its conception of the revolutionary struggle.

1979

With the attacks from 1979 to '81 against the US military and two of its generals, as high decision makers and co-responsible for the most aggressive and powerful part of western imperialism, the RAF initiated the politics of the urban guerrilla, focused on anti-imperialism. From then on, they sought their purpose in the international coordinates between liberation and the counter-strategy of imperialism. They saw themselves - and they were - part of the anti-imperialist Liberation movements of the world. But they were separated from the societal conditions of their combat terrain; the analysis put them in the coordinates between liberation and imperialism; they now knew only the world proletariat, which without orientation to the societal relations, mutated into abstraction.

May 1982

The strategy statement of the "Maipapier" <famous RAF text> formulated the policy of the RAF and included its purpose, conceptualized the errors of '77 and set the course for the 80s. The idea of politics of the '82 concept was an anti-imperialism whose focus no longer aimed at the conscience of the society in which they were fighting. The bombs against the state and US imperialism were laid. It was not planned to put bombs into the conscience of society.

It was a departure from the strategic foundations of the 1972 concept "Urban Guerrilla" . The anti-imperialism of the RAF was now detached from any social-revolutionary strategy.

The proposal to the movement outside the RAF was militant attack, or militancy at all, on different levels in the context of the anti-imperialist strategy of the guerrilla and under the RAFs leadership.

In this way they acquired a vanguard concept, with which they declared themselves to be the vanguard. However, the course of history and the potential to take others with you into the revolutionary struggle, decides what the vanguard is.

Due to the lack of class analysis of the RAF and the reduction of anti-imperialism to only international coordinates, politics remained abstract and did not lead the guerrillas out of their isolation throughout the 80s. Isolation is meant here as isolation in a societal relationship. The RAF was deeply connected and organized in the anti-imperialist and also in the West European fronts, with comrades from the resistance and other small urban guerrilla groups, mainly the Action Directe from France. But this could not be enough for the revolutionary process, because it fundamentally develops in the societal context.

Without the reference to society and without the primacy of the political, politics remained in subjectivism and did not lead it out of the antagonism of the State/Guerrilla confrontation.

The RAF’s strategically connected "Fighting Units" or other militant groups with other names, who carried out a number of incendiary and explosive attacks throughout the 80s, didn't change anything either  - for example, 1982: militant actions against Siemens, AEG, US military barracks; 1984/85 Turkish Consulate, Nato-Pipelines, NATO-US-/German army-Facilities, US- Secret Service, Interior Ministry of Hannover, AEG Computer Centre; 1988 branch of Renault, Deutsche Bank Education Centre; 1989 Frankfurt Stockmarket; 1990 Deutschen Bank Computer Centre and many more - all militant, unarmed actions, where the killing of people was ruled out and never happened.

The Western European front was in reality weak and could not replace the lack of strategy in the societal context, which, if to be a fundamental opposition, could only have been social-revolutionary and anti-imperialist.

The lack of class-struggle in the politics, reduced only to anti-imperialism, was an immense strategical mistake and had been criticized rightfully, for example by the Belgian Communist Urban Guerilla of the 80's, the Belgian CCC, which was completely ignored by the RAF throughout the 80's.

The factual and historical conditions for a redefinition of the politics since 1979, would have been both the complete isolation of the RAF and the reasons behind that, as well as the class situation in neo-liberalism: the pacified proletarian strata, the integration of the proletariat with the promise of mass consumption in the metropolises; as well as isolation as a neo-liberal principle of life, which was a result of the restructuring of industry within globalized neo-liberalism. This was also a consequence of capitalism on the rebellions in the factories at the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s, as had happened in Italy and France. The ruling class feared the "Mass Worker"and preferred the isolation of the population in production and society.

The development of worldwide liberation movements, the strategies of NATO at the junction between liberation and imperialism and the presence of various large, of course reformist but partly also militant sub-movements, would have been the prerequisite of the necessary strategic reorientation of the city guerrilla.

A social revolutionary and not only anti-imperialist Urban Guerrilla might have had the chance to create a social-revolutionary and anti-imperialist radical opposition. Fusing together the movements that were created independently from the RAF, in the end of the 70s and 80s, that were partly also militant: the squatting movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-Nato movement, the feminist movement and the solidarity movements with the liberation movements of the Trikont <3rd World>. Then, without a doubt, it would not have  been possible to put the focus on the RAF/State conflict within the international context and set a militaristic dynamic in motion.

But the RAF was only committed to itself and did not manage to break out of this during the 80s.

The politics from '77 and throughout the 80s only managed to reach a few people, with the radical left largely becoming a spectator in the anti-imperialist RAF’s confrontation with the state.

1984

The strategic errors, which took place in 1977 and were declared a concept in 1982, underlying the militaristic actions of the second half of the 80s, were rightly criticized as not comprehensible, were politically in hardly any societal context, and remained in the abstract and subjectivist .

With the lack of revision of the strategic errors since '77 and their conceptualization in May '82, a militaristic logic independently developed during the 80s, that from a revolutionary point of view, brought moments of loss of the moral compass of the revolution and moments of loss of legitimization into the struggle.

The shooting to death of Gerold von Braunmühl in 1986 is an expression of this. The failure of RAF militants to respond to legitimate questions from von Braunmühl's brothers at that time, is a further expression of political weakness and destructive developments after '77.

It was a continuous line from the lack of evaluation of the '77 offensive as a phase of militaristic logic; the consequently failed revision of the military strategy of May '82, where the social question mutated to an abstraction detached from society, and in which the class struggle started to play only an abstract role; to
the class-struggleless, independent militaristic dynamic, and the unjustified killing of the US soldier, Pimental.

The reduction to anti-imperialism and "Assassination Policy" after '77 tells more of subjectivism and the autonomy of the military dynamic before the political, than of class struggle and social-revolutionary processes. The anti-imperialist and social revolutionary Urban Guerillas primacy of praxis from 1970 until '72, ended up in a militaristic dynamic, with the dividing line between themselves and the enemy as now subjective consciousness.

The lack of a break since the defeat of '77 - in the sense of a collective conclusion, summary, reflection, re-substantiation and change of strategy - characterized the primary policy of RAF practice since '79 through the 1980s. 1979 would be quite obviously the time for social analysis or class analysis and a reorientation of a radical opposition in the form of the RAF. Also, the reformation of the RAF in 1984, as well as the dawn of a new era in 1989, would have offered a good occasion to pause.

After 1977, the German state pursued the guerrillas with a hunt and search, with the aim to kill: no prisoners were taken; Willy Peter Stoll and Elisabeth von Dyck were shot dead by the police in cold blood; Rolf Heißler survived a head shot when his apartment was entered.

The harsh repression and massive criminalization reached large sections of the Left and forced various legals <militant activists/comrades not living underground> to go into illegality in the course of the 80s to avoid arbitrary arrests. Some ended up in exile for many years. The climate of repression, not only against the RAF, was extraordinary and can, if evaluated in a serious way, in its structure and form since the 70s be seen only as state terrorism.

1989

The dawn of a new era and the hunger strikes of political prisoners came.

The permanent state of emergency, designed to destroy or subjugate political prisoners, by means of terror, lasted for 19 years.

19 years of a state of emergency in the prisons were 19 years of isolation, partly in the form of small group isolation. 19 years of isolation in the form of white torture <sensory deprivation> declared illegal internationally. 19 years of various hunger strikes as a remaining possibility to fight for survival and dignity and to resist torture and destruction.

Günter Sonnenberg, critically injured by a head shot, was deprived adequate life-sustaining treatment for many years by the state, for which his release would have been the condition. Sigurd Debus died in the hunger strike struggle against isolation torture.

The misery of prisons and isolation torture was endless.

In 1989, the hunger strike of the prisoners and this new era, occured in the same year. It was the end of Real-Socialism as a decisive change in the global junction between Real-Socialism, liberation movements and capitalism.

The prisoners' hunger strike of 1989 was their last attempt to collectively change their situation. They also declared that they wanted to establish discussions with other groups in society.

The end of the international order of the eighties, which was a prerequisite for the determination of the RAF in May 1982: the dissolution of the Socialist Bloc and the decline of the remaining liberation movements; dissolved the framework of the RAF.

The Executive arm of the state was sure that the RAF would not return to a practice after the hunger strike, after the political changes at various levels, including international ones, and after the collapse of the Guerrilla strategy of May 1982.

The state reacted to the prisoners opening up politically and their attempt to put an end to the detention of extermination and despite the broad solidarity for their demands by many people across all sectors of society, as it had done for 18 years: it maintained the conditions of extermination in the form of isolation torture.

The new era of 1989 would have been a historically compelling moment in retrospect - as it was after 1977 - to review the continued existence of the RAF, carry out an appropriate investigation and class analysis, and decide whether the project should be transformed or terminated.

The RAF did not have at that moment the political strength to fully grasp the dimension of this historical moment regarding its own situation. However, their will was strong to not give up in the face of the darkness of this time, a time that showed that German capital now gained what they had not achieved with the National Socialist rule: the rise to become one of the world powers behind the USA, the hegemonic power of Europe and an active actor in imperialist wars.

Looking back, it seems unrealistic that the RAF would have simply continued in light of the new era of 1989, if, at the same time an end to the imprisonment-designed-for-destruction could have been enforced, and thus the discussion about the updating of transformative strategies of the Left and the old radical opposition inside and outside, would have been possible.

In this respect, the state bears its share of responsibility for the RAF's killing of the head of the Deutsche Bank and the Treuhand <an agency established by the BRD to privatize East German enterprises>. The action against Herrhausen <Head of Treuhand> was also obviously a response to the continuation of the state’s will to destroy the prisoners. The RAF was objectively at a historical point where it could only have dissolved or come back as a new project with a new strategy - considering the conditions of society and the remaining Left, even this is not clear.

1989

The action of the RAF against Herrhausen was in this contradiction: the RAF reacted clearly in the context of the immense scale of state terrorist violence, which had continued from 1970. At the same time, it no longer acted within an inadequate strategy, but without a strategy. Here, of course, there is a visible contradiction: an action of this dimension without an explainable strategy, but as the initiation of a process of search and re-determination, has a deficit of legitimacy from the outset.

At the same time, however, an action against Deutsche Bank at that time was a return to a policy which was objectively defined by a relationship to society. Herrhausen was the one who set a course of German capital for reunification, for the strengthening of Germany into one of the leading economic powers in the world and represented, more than anybody else on the side of German capitalism, the emerging new German imperialism after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the political sphere, the focus and/or an attack on the Deutsche Bank group at this time - regardless of its form - was again objectively the possibility of a social-revolutionary and anti-imperialist perspective and marked a departure from subjectivism - the acting outside the societal conditions.

1990

Facing the rise of Germany to the 4th Reich, as was feared by many on the Left at that time, along with the rise of German capitalism, the practice of the RAF in the 90s was a visible unconditional grasping to a radical opposition, in the form of the RAF. Their will to change a long standing wrong was unmistakable. Their courage to see themselves as searchers and not as those with answers, was clear.

However, it was also marked by its obvious theoretical weakness; in this sense it was visibly a child of the 80s. The initial group of the RAF and the comrades in the 70s still drew from the pool of the profound and diverse worldwide discussions of the time of '68 and the effort to appropriate theoretical knowledge collectively.
In the 1980s, the militants of the RAF then drew from the pool of May '82 and stuck to it. The 1980s were also years of practice rather than theory in above ground sections of the movement.

I myself was, in the 80s and at the historical moment of the new era, driven as a part of the squatter movement and as a resident of Hamburg’s Hafenstraße - what a unique, special and formative time in my life, I still thought of it with melancholy and affection for a long time - more supported by a youthful, emotional and immature radicality and determination than by profound conceptual debates or the theoretical appropriation of knowledge.

I was not yet aware of the importance of the wealth of knowledge of my former roommates in Hafenstraße, some of whom had already brought experiences from the 70s, some were anarchists, social revolutionaries or former prisoners of the 2nd of June and RAF - nor of the possibility to draw from it and take it into life.

1990

The action against the then State Secretary of the Interior, Neusel, showed how much the RAF acted (despite the fact that you could get the impression from their declaration that they had learned something must change) still under the influence of the 80s, outside the societal relationship, ie subjectivistic. A non-fatal assassination attempt in the context of the hunger strike of Spanish revolutionary prisoners during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the takeover of the GDR by the BRD, that is, the victory train of capitalism with its serious social rifts in Germany and Eastern Europe, is absurd in retrospect. Not to say solidarity with the Spanish prisoners was not a good thing - but an assassination in this context, during the fundamental changes in the world and the social and political effects of it in Germany, was politically completely disoriented. It was a bad joke in history.

1991

During the war that was directed against the people of Iraq, that was the first violent expression of the new world order, in which world wide power was centralized within the capitalist centres, and which was a war that lead to millions of deaths as a result of military force and sanctions, the action against the US embassy was a first step away from the "Assassination Policy" of the 1980s. Since the action against the Springer group <media conglomerate> of 1972 led to only unintentional injuries on the part of the RAF, the action against the US embassy was the first political/military non-lethal action, whose declared goal at that time was not to endanger others. The action in 1972 was an attempt to approach the dying movement of the '68, which was denounced by the constant lies of the Springer press.

The action against the US embassy in 1991 was also, according to their statement, the first time since the beginning of the 70s, a clear move closer to Left movements and an attempt to connect with them - even without the intention that they should join the ranks of militancy behind the Guerrilla. In fact, the erroneous concept of vanguard was thus abolished and  obsolete anyway, due to the declared process of learning.

1991

With the action against Rohwedder, the RAF returned in a contradictory way to the "Assassination Policy". In contrast to the 1980s, they acted politically in a clear relationship with society. The action explained itself from the conditions of society: the "incorporation" of the GDR by capitalism and the social upheavals that it produced. It was essentially based on class-struggles and social revolution. It had an obvious and explicit addressee: the workers and masses affected by the upheavals and realignment of capitalism, who were exposed to the new conditions of exploitation of capitalism. The decision to attack the Treuhand trustee agency as a front institution of West German capital in this process, was self-explanatory and politically coherent as an attack on the institution regardless of its form.

In the process of its search for a new conception and a path to an updated strategy, the RAF acted according to this and therefore did not yet know a possible future of a "Political-Military" conception.

Also the "Assassination Policy" of the RAF since '77 was completely discredited, which should have led to a rupture as a political decision and thus marked a moment of political weakness and lack of foresight of the then RAF.

Both delegitimized the attack on the trustee chief. So happened, what had to happen: It left society and left the Left movement as spectators on the sidelines. The severity of the attack was in this way at odds with a convergence between the city Guerrilla and the Left. The same applies to the apparent attempt to reach those who in the new Germany were plagued by great uncertainties and social upheavals, who were degraded or downgraded. Not only the Left, but many within broader society, recognized this attempt of the RAF - especially those of the downgraded and insecure, proletarian parts of the population of the collapsed GDR. But nothing came of it. An assassination attempt could not contribute to a new beginning, despite the unmistakably social-revolutionary orientation and purpose.

Each individual attack in the long history of revolutions and uprisings over the centuries can only be differentiated and evaluated in their historical context. In fact, history can only be discussed in a differentiated and political way. The "Assassination Policy" on the other hand, could not achieve what the revolutionary politics and praxis in the Metropolis is about (there is no way around calling it "Assassination Policy", this form of praxis that has become Dogma. Though it had at no point been called that by the RAF, this term is in fact very on point when talking about the praxis of 1977 to 1990 and this terminology already tells of its political weakness. "Assassination Policy" is in its structural application an expression of a militaristic self-perpetuation and subjectivist consciousness.  "Assassination Policy" negates the structural interchangeability of individual decision-makers in bourgeois democracy, which inevitably leads to a legitimization deficit. "Assassination Policy" has too little effect on the consciousness of society in the process of the construction of revolutionary counter-power in the Metropolis.

"Assassination Policy" takes only a few with it and leaves those, whom one wants to reach, as spectators on the sidelines.

A primary goal of revolutionary strategy then, should be to reach the consciousness of the addressees in the social context - those who are to be reached.

This was consecutively lost by the RAF since '77 and could not be changed in the beginning of the 90s with the necessary decisiveness. Here the means of assassination was contradictory to their aim and countered their declared political redirection in the beginning of the 90s.

Historically there are of course assassinations as a form of revolutionary self-defense and counter-violence, which are clear and whose legitimacy from a revolutionary perspective cannot be denied: for example; the assassination of the former boss of Schleyer, the SS mass murderer Heydrich <chief of Nazi police>; the attempt of Georg Elser to kill Hitler, or the assassination in the anti-fascist struggle in Spain of Carrero Blanco - the successor and deputy of the Spanish fascist and dictator Franco.

At this point it must be said that the violence of the BRD in the counter-insurgency, which under realistic consideration of its sheer magnitude, can only be seen as state terrorism with partly fascist forms, led to moments of legitimate self-defense in the history of the RAF.

Undoubtedly there were moments of weakness in the RAF’s struggle and political decisions that were wrong. There were also moments when the moral compass of the revolution did not determine the historical moment. Every moment of this is one too many and remains a burden of history.

Moments of collective memory of the revolutionary Left also connect with the numerous militants of the RAF and the resistance, who did not survive the struggle for a world free from human domination over other humans and state terrorism, either in prison or outside.

1993

The year in which Wolfgang Grams was executed by the police, lying incapacitated on the railway tracks of Bad Kleine. For Birgit Hogefeld, long years of life in prison began.

Before all this, the RAF blew up the jail of Weiterstadt. It was the end of the RAF’s armed policy and the beginning of another possible perspective of militant politics.

The destruction of the prison had opened up a relationship to society, in which imprisonment as a means of domination affects all those who, out of need and necessity or because of their consciousness, are affected by repression and the misery of the prison. It is the poor; it is those who do not have the money for the tickets; it is those who sink into drugs in order to no longer feel the misery of the conditions of violence; it is the rebels; it is those in deportation detention; it is those who resist and those who rebel against domination and violent conditions - and therefore end up in the jails.

Thus, the explosion of the Weiterstädt Prison enters into history as a political bullseye. It reached the hearts of so many. And so it shall be.

The RAF of the nineties, had attempted within the changed conditions of that decade, to get back to their social revolutionary, class combative and internationalist basics, that it had known in its beginnings. Regardless of the fact that it ended its "Assassination Policy" in only 1992 and despite all its weaknesses, its sometimes lacking foresight and the weakness of its theoretical foundations, and despite the fact that in moments of their search they were more "clumsy" than sharply analytical, they were courageous enough to proceed, demanding and searching.

With the actions against the US Embassy and with the bombing of the prison of Weiterstadt, the Guerrilla found the propaganda of the deed, this idea of revolutionary practice from the history of the anarchist movement. Thus, in its return to acting within the social relationship, it was appropriately populist in the best sense. A moment that also guided the Red Brigades in Italy in their early days until 1974 - despite comprehensively different circumstances and incomparable strength.

Ultimately, the Left, the RAF and the social conditions in the 90s were not ripe for an armed struggle of a social-revolutionary transformation.

The West German Left, what remained of it, was preoccupied with the emerging nationalism and racism and its fascist and widespread violence.

The radical Left, had neither the strength nor the foresight to find a social-revolutionary response to the surprising annexation of the GDR. The up to 50,000 people on different demos in the collapsed GDR at the time of the fall of the wall, against the alignment to capitalism and in the dwindling hope for a "Third - socialist and emancipatory - Way", beyond the big mistakes of repressive and frozen Real-Socialism and beyond capitalism, remained rather alone. In the following years, no relevant social-revolutionary Left was formed, especially one that could have become politically threatening to the new German imperialism, which had begun to kill in the war in Yugoslavia.

The RAF had become history anyway and an idea of repetition is absurd.

The time in the 1990s was not ripe for new forms of militant struggle as an arm and option of large emancipatory movements, which no longer existed and do not yet exist.

After the upheavals and the division within the then prisoners from the RAF and the RAF itself - and after the end of RAF was declared, I felt an inner distance towards this history.

Today I see in the history of the RAF, the moment of justified resistance and its moments in history.

I see in these 28 years of history those who have given everything for the goal of a better and more just world. I see those who have had to bear the decades-long misery of the jails on their shoulders or those who died in this struggle for liberation from the violent conditions of the capitalist system.

I also see in the history of the RAF its strategic and tactical mistakes.

I see their low points, in which they deprived themselves of legitimacy in moments and which remain as a burden in their history.

Every revolution or its attempts, probably every history of struggle between domination and liberation through all the centuries, had their contradictions.

The collective appropriation of revolutionary history and its reflection, lies a path into the future of the struggles for human emancipation and liberation, as well as their own development and transformation.

The RAF is history, the question of resistance and transformation has remained and is existential.

The legacy of revolutionary history is the struggle for liberation in the present and in the future until the overcoming of every domination, and until all are free.

Today

Today we are in the midst of the dawning of a new era. The crisis of eroding capitalism has opened the time frame in which new dimensions of imperialism leading to World War III are realistic. It is the age of authoritarianism, advancing impoverishment, nationalism, widespread militarization and ecological destruction of the planet, of flight and displacement.

Today’s new era is a threatening age. In the erosion of conditions, however, the possibility and opportunity for system transformation and liberation from capitalism could also arise.

Emancipation and revolution are only possible in the coexistence of different struggles and in the "Recognition of Entanglement", as Caroline Braunmühl wrote - and the existence of privileges and power divides in all areas of humanity. This, too, is an important and crucial prerequisite for transformational processes. I agree completely to this certainty.

An emancipatory upheaval begins with our own awareness developing and then makes us change.

It would be a process of revolutionary transformation, if we get together in recognition of different axes of power and privilege, and in the certainty of the processes in our own change - in struggles against exploitation, oppression and war in capitalism. This would be the view in the mirror and then in society.

There we see exploitation, poverty and an above and below. There we see patriarchy and its violent conditions; racism as an instrument of domination and its own dynamic in society ; militarism and war and the few who benefit from it and the many who flee from it. There we see weapons being produced, the class benefiting from them and the many who they kill. We see the protest and the daily repression against the protest, we see structural police violence and class injustice. We see ecological destruction of the planet for the profit of the few and the masses who have to flee because of it. These are spaces in which we can come together today in all diversity and in the awareness of a complex and multilayered power structure in the process of transformation. It could be the rooms of tomorrow’s uprising.

The end of violence, a peaceful world, a world beyond ecological destruction, freedom from patriarchy, exploitation, domination and nation will not exist in capitalism. This is the factual condition, which is evident and not modifiable.

The questions of revolutionary transformation instead of barbarism are today topical and existential.

The emancipatory Left today inevitably asks itself the question, whether it wants to save the bourgeois democracy with the existence of its inherent relations of violence - although the fascist option and authoritarianism underlies the bourgeois democracy and one emerges from the other - or instead engages in a transformation into an anti-capitalist future free of domination.

Bourgeois anti-fascism as a form of left-liberal politics, which focuses on far-right parties, fights against symptoms, negates the systemic causes and intends to save bourgeois democracy, will not be able to stop the run toward further authoritarianism, fascism, war and climate destruction and therefore leads to nothing. The transformation of the system into an anti-capitalist age would be the only option that could lead to the goal.

The time is over for purity doctrines. For the future of revolutionary transformation we need the knowledge of the history of emancipatory movements: feminism, anarchism, communism, anti-racism, the movements of people of color, the left-queer communities, the communities of people with disabilities and their movements for self-determination, the social revolutionary and subcultural movements, the left-migrant communities, the migrant history of resistance, the failure of Real-Socialism and many more.

The words of Rosa Luxemburg in the face of the great crisis of capitalism in 1918 are valid today - and stand for the possibility of building a liberated society instead of domination, patriarchy, fascism, war, nationalism, exploitation and destruction:

Socialism or barbarism!

The circle closes.

The possibility of a historic moment could come and is now.

As long as we live in a system based on violence and people who resist it are locked away in prisons, various forms of resistance are justified and necessary.

The special conditions of detention and generally the imprisonment of Daniela Klette - like all prisoners from the history of emancipation struggles worldwide - are an expression of the violent conditions of capitalist realities.

Not only for the prisoners, but for all humanity, the following applies: we can be free only if everyone is free.

Freedom for Daniela.

smash the system