Attack the current strategic projects of the political, economic and
military structures of the imperialist system in Western Europe!
Today, with the Commando Mara Cagol [1],
in an action against the Siemens Board of Directors of research and
technology, we attacked the chairman of the “atomic energy board” of
the BDI [2], Karl Heinz Beckurts.
Beckurts is a perfect example of the role of international capital in
imperialism’s current political, economic and military strategy, and,
at the same time, he drives it forward. By the 70s, he was already an
important capitalist
strategist; he was head of the atomic research centre at a time when
the
bourgeoisie - then with the SPD [3]
in
power - was realizing its atomic program to wage economic war against
the
new national states, against their demand for a new economic order and
as
a way of offsetting their control of the price of oil and the political
power
they enjoyed as the most important suppliers of oil at that time. The
fact
that the atomic program was pushed through in the Federal Republic of
Germany
(FRG) and was exported to the Third World, despite all of the
opposition
and resistance here, was a key factor in the economic growth of the FRG
and,
as a consequence, its increased political power in the world system.
Today, capital is restructuring for imperialist war, and in the
metropole this is being done by radically rearranging social production
through the research, development and production of high technology,
the goal of which is to produce maximum profits and an absolute
increase in productivity,
in order to stabilize imperialism’s structural and economic bases in
the
center and secure its position in the world market. The international
military-industrial complex (MIC), which has become the
political-economic foundation
of the metropoles, monopolizes technology as a strategic lever to
increase
its profits, with which they intend to reinforce and increase the
dependency
of Third World countries and to achieve military superiority over the
socialist
states.
Siemens is the largest high-tech corporation in Western Europe, and, as
KWU [4], the third largest atomic
energy corporation worldwide. No other company in the FRG so clearly
represents the
concentrated power and aggression of the most reactionary factions of
the
bourgeoisie, which are organized as the military-industrial complex.
Beckurts is a central figure within Siemens. He directs research and
technical organization in those areas of Siemens’ work which are
strategically central to the restructuring:
military electronics, to make war for international capital
winnable.
computerized communications, information and production systems
for factories, offices, work at home, universities and schools, ranging
from
the areas of human thought and manual labor up to the pure function of
machinery stripped of any human involvement, and tending towards its
complete elimination.
perfected control and surveillance systems for military and
police forces worldwide; Siemens computers from Wiesbaden, via Lisbon,
to Guatemala, Honduras, from Cairo to Johannesburg.
The history of Siemens is the history of the continuity of Germany’s
fascism and imperialism: the FRG.
Siemens helped to put Hitler into power – as, they said in 1930, a
“bulwark against communism” - and built factories next to concentration
camps here, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia.... After 1945, Siemens, with
financial, technological and political support from the USA, again rose
quickly to a top position
among corporations in Europe, becoming a central pillar of the FRG’s
power,
which indicates its significance.
Today, Siemens is among the largest transnational corporations in the
world and is responsible for the exploitation, destruction and misery
of millions of people in the Third World and in the metropoles.
In the early 1970s, when defeat loomed for US imperialism in Vietnam
and international capital was put in check politically by the offensive
of the liberation struggles, it concentrated on expanding into the most
developed Third World countries, so as to realize huge profits from
cheap labour and raw materials and to open new markets. In the context
of an “international division of labor,” these State-supported
investments by conglomerates and banks were to form the economic basis
for the political and economic stabilization of these countries along
social democratic lines, thereby strengthening
imperialist hegemony in the face of the liberation movements and
securing
imperialism’s control of natural resources.
As part of this strategy, Siemens expanded on all continents,
especially in Latin America. For instance, KWU established contracts
with Brazil in
1975 for the construction of eight nuclear reactors and Siemens
produced
civilian control technologies for puppet regimes. While in the FRG,
between
1970 and 1977, over three hundred and fifty million DM[5] in social spending was saved through
rationalization
and Grohnde, Brokdorf and Biblis [6]
were
built.
When Siemens, with financial support of the SPD government, wanted to
build a dam in Mozambique for the racist regime in South Africa,
thereby destroying essential living conditions in an entire region,
FRELIMO wrote to Brandt, “It is time that the German mark lost its
taste for blood and suffering.” [7]
But the exact opposite has taken place.
This did not lead to political stability, industrialization, economic
growth or new markets in the Third World, but rather it produced
massive misery, deepening social and political contradictions,
de-industrialization and
debt crisis.
One hundred years of imperialist barbarism has destroyed the basis for
this undertaking, and the people rose up against this new round of
exploitation and oppression.
In combination with increasingly frequent and serious cyclical economic
crises, the decline of industrial production, mass unemployment in the
centers and the crises of the international financial system, this has
lead to the greatest possible erosion of the capitalist system.
The collapse of the system of international economic relations is
irreversible. The political realization that the rule of capital,
caring only for expansion and profit, means greater and greater misery
and exploitation for human
beings has now become a source of antagonism against the imperialist
system
that is present in all confrontations.
Today, it is clear to see that international capital, under the
leadership of the USA, is unable to stabilize the political and
economic situation
around the world. This is a consequence of its attempt to strategically
reconstruct imperialist power at all levels.
In spite of pressure from the exploding social situation in the Third
World and the growing political contradictions resulting from it; from
the revolutionary struggles worldwide; from the breakdown of the world
market system, the
spiraling economic crisis for which there is no clear solution; and,
from
its inability to achieve the military superiority necessary for an
attack
on the international power relations on all fronts - in spite of these
factors
the chain of imperialist states is, in fact, still able to block
revolutionary
breakthroughs and self-determined developments by waging destructive
economic
and military war. But it can no longer do away with the causes of the
contradictions
that are exploding against the capitalist system around the world and,
above
all, politically, against the USA and its pack of hounds, or the
massive
misery and death produced by them. And it has forever lost the
political
power to extinguish, in the hearts and minds of people, the knowledge
that
a break with the system and the struggle for liberation are the only
options
for a life without exploitation and oppression.
The substantial crisis of the system is spreading faster than they can
control it. Widespread misery and revolutionary struggles have
developed
faster than their plans for world domination.
This is the context in which one must view the violence the bourgeoisie
is using to restructure society in the metropoles, and the pressure on
them to unite and deal with the contradictions that are threatening
their common interests and the totality of their power, despite growing
competition and diverging political and economic interests. It is the
external factor polarizing people in the metropoles that stands in the
way of their restructuring offensive and their politics of war.
Their drive to establish a total system results from the simple fact
that, in the context of the crisis of the system, no
single imperialist
power is able to surmount the political and economic problems that
endanger
its very existence.
Internationally, the development of the dialectic of class struggle and
the growth of misery - from the resistance against genocide, hunger and
the dehumanization which is inherent in the imperialist system - has
reached the
point where the strongest imperialist power, the USA, is increasingly
losing
its political and economic hegemony. International capital and the
chain
of imperialist states must direct all of their efforts towards
combining their
economic, technological and military capacities and uniting the
competing factions of the bourgeoisie in a common strategy to maintain
the power necessary for world domination.
The restructuring and preparations for imperialist war in Western
Europe is being driven forward today along two necessary lines that
outline the
contradictory yet, in essence, unified course of capital and the (West
European)
States. The first line, determining strategy, is towards greater
military,
political and economic cooperation and unity between the West European
nuclear
States - the FRG, France, Great Britain and Italy, with the USA (and
Japan)
- as is the case with SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative -“Star Wars” [8]), which Beckurts helped to
negotiate
on behalf of Siemens. This is why the military-industrial complex is
being
restructured and research and development is being strategically
reorganized,
in order to achieve a technological monopoly, as part of the US
military
strategy to bring the socialist States to their knees. SDI is also the
attempt
of US capital, with millions of dollars from the Pentagon and the
cooperation of West European high-tech corporations, to improve its
position on the
world market in relation to Japan and Western Europe, and, at the same
time,
to establish a role in military high-technology and access to US
markets
for West European capital.
The second line encompasses all of West Europe at a
political-economic-military level, as in the case with Eureka [9],
which plays the same role within the system’s military strategy as SDI,
and
in which all European States are integrated. Through Eureka, a leap in
the
process of corporate concentration and cooperation is being achieved in
Western
Europe, in order to make them more competitive on the world market and
more
commercially successful through the creation of a “European market”
(which,
among other things, means that, with State support, Siemens is building
new
factories and moving production to Portugal, and is paying workers
there
¼ of the wages paid in the FRG). West European corporations and
States
are pooling their resources in order to strengthen their economic
position
within the world system and to secure the economic and military
conditions
for their restructuring in the metropole. Ideologically, Eureka is an
attempt
to camouflage the aggressive politics of the State structures,
corporations
and military forces in Western Europe with a “civilian-European” cover,
thereby
heading off contradictions and convincing people here that through this
“technological revolution” all social problems - labour, ecology,
economic growth, war
- can be solved. While in truth, like all technical
developments
under capitalism, it is actually conceptualized as a weapon against the
international proletariat.
IT IS NOTHING OTHER THAN THE ATTEMPT TO MAKE A TECHNOLOGICAL LEAP OUT
OF THE POLITICAL AGONY OF THE SYSTEM.
For people in Western Europe, the course of international capital means
the uniform intensification of exploitation, misery and oppression, the
calculated exclusion of millions of people from production and from
society altogether, the politics of war and the destruction of the
necessities for life, the
repressive pacification strategies and the fascist oppression of the
resistance
that stands against their plans. This is daily reality in the West
European
metropole, and for its total transformation, there can be only one
strategy:
revolutionary armed struggle and the construction of the
politico-military
front in Western Europe.
What was achieved under Nazi-fascism through bloody terror against the
organized workers’ movement and the people is to be achieved again
today
in West Europe through the “information society” (the measures to be
taken
will differ according to the specific political and social conditions
in
each country, but will follow essentially identical lines determined by
international capital).
THE GOAL OF THE BOURGEOISIE IN WEST EUROPE IS THE STRUCTURING,
DOMINATION AND CONTROL OF ALL PROCESSES OF SOCIALIZATION
AND ALL SOCIAL
SECTORS, ALL IN THE INTERESTS OF PROFIT AND OF IMPERIALIST WAR.
The force necessary to aggressively accomplish this restructuring will
be beyond the capacities of democracy’s political mediation, the
welfare
state, inner peace and work for all… these are the central ideological
pillars
of their rule in the metropole, pillars which are becoming
dysfunctional
in the substantial crisis of the system. In the face of all of the
existing
contradictions, the imperialist state must carry through the political,
economic
and military preparations required by the bourgeoisie’s strategic plan,
by
which it hopes to achieve world domination:
outfitting an aggressive and highly technologically developed
army; the nuclear reactor project in Wackersdorf [10], which the FRG
needs for
its leap forward to the status of a nuclear power; and the terror
directed
at those who are resisting them;
attacks on the right to strike; the calculated mass unemployment
and the programmes developed against those who are shut out, all of
which
are purely instruments of control and repression, to preventatively
crush
the resistance;
as Henry Ford said when he introduced the assembly line, “It is
completely unthinkable that the people should be permitted to have what
they want more than merely temporarily.” This is now extended to all
areas of socialized production, to all social relations.
Individualization of working conditions and wages, the mobility and
flexibility in labour and education and the
reactionary pact between the State, capital and the unions provide the
material
basis for restructuring in the metropole and prevent people from
thinking
in terms of a common fate or of organizing for their interests and
needs;
the structuring of surrounding institutions - science,
universities and schools - to make them direct agents of the
corporations;
the campaigns of psychological warfare and Staatschutz [11] terror against the resistance to
coerce, if not agreement, then powerless silence in the face of the
total State.
IT IS TO BE MADE IMPOSSIBLE TO ORGANIZE AROUND THE GROWING ANTAGONISMS,
AND, IN A VICIOUS CIRCLE, THESE ARE TO BE INCREASINGLY INDIVIDUALIZED.
THE LOGIC OF CAPITAL'S FUNCTIONAL INTERESTS WILL BE SMOTHERED.
Here in the FRG, they calculate that they can rush through the
restructuring for imperialist aggression because the unions are social
democratic, their leadership is bought off, the broad resistance
movement is often still diffuse, petty-bourgeois and unorganized and
the revolutionary forces are still weak. When the CDU/FDP/SPD[12] speak about “2/3 of society”
or “the reconciliation society” and want to counter-pose this, in the
European framework, to the growing antagonisms, it is their
feeble attempt to depoliticize the fact that the gap that has opened
between
society and the State in this phase of imperialist reconstruction, with
the
aggression that exists on all political-economic-military levels, has
grown
so wide that it can no longer be bridged. It is an expression of the
political
fragility of the capitalist system, which in its crisis has lost the
ability
to provide a universally valid structure. The fascist response to this
is
to split society into two parts. One part is made up of those who serve
the
machines and profit from the war economy and fascism, alongside those
who
blind and submit themselves to power due to pressure and insecurity
regarding
survival. The other part is that against which they are perfecting
their
Staatschutz apparatus, bringing it in gradually and using it to address
all
aspects of life. These are the ones for whom profit-production has
become
superfluous, who have rejected it totally, and who, for the State, are
beyond
reach, because they struggle.
Against their plan to maintain the power relations here and
internationally, there stands the increasing polarization against the
State throughout metropolitan society, the politicization of the
resistance, which acts on the basis of its experiences in the
confrontation with the ruling apparatus and reformist cul-de-sacs, and
the development of the revolutionary front, which acts
on the basis of the ripening contradictions in the metropole and on a
political understanding of the totality of the imperialist system, and
thus has as
its goal a revolutionary upheaval in the international class war.
Through
its attacks the revolutionary front links itself to the worldwide
struggles
for liberation against the imperialist system. These processes in the
metropole directly concern the consciousness that is growing in the
struggles of the exploited and oppressed around the world, the
consciousness that the imperialist system is incapable of any
development that will meet the needs of human
beings - i.e. self-determined and shared living and working conditions
-
and that, so long as imperialism’s rule is not completely broken, every
independent process of development will be disrupted.
According to Marx, as imperialism develops a level is reached at which
it can only produce disastrous and destructive forces,
at
which it becomes the objective foundation for the process of
polarization
against the system, as is now occurring in both the Third World and the
metropoles.
Subjectively, and internationally, through this development, the unity
of
the proletariat and the revolutionary politico-military front, a common
strategy and shared perspectives, is taking shape around the world,
disrupting
the imperialist system and its destructiveness by means of an
international
revolutionary process.
The bourgeoisie has no alternative but to violently complete the
restructuring in the metropoles and to attack the resistance
fascistically; there is no alternative but political and military
escalation against the international liberation struggle and the
attempt to achieve military superiority over
the socialist States. They cannot retreat from a single point of their
strategic plan, with which they hope to achieve world domination.
But they shall not succeed.
The contradictions are already too deep and the struggles too broad.
The contradictions and the revolutionary struggles breaking out
internationally
with increasing political uniformity have surpassed their contingency
plans
and have dulled the effect of their war machine. The chasm between
society
and the State in the metropoles and the international contradiction
between
proletariat and bourgeoisie are growing sharper and deeper with every
step,
with every maneuver, of their all-encompassing aggression.
It is clear that whether their political power and material basis in
the metropole will break down quickly or whether they will be able to
realize their strategic plan depends decisively on the revolutionary
struggle in
West Europe. And in this context, everything is being done to prevent a
qualitative leap forward in the development of the revolutionary
process here.
The revolutionary movement in Western Europe must now transform its
different struggles into one conscious and specific
attack on imperialist
power; which means attacking the current strategic projects for the
political,
economic and military structuring of the imperialist system in West
Europe,
and combining politics and practice in an overall revolutionary
strategy
to disrupt the system in the center in a way that encourages the unity
of
the metropolitan proletariat within the revolutionary front. The task
is
now to further develop this strategy into a practical process and to
anchor
it in the revolutionary movement and the entire spectrum of the
antagonistic
forces in West Europe.
Organize the revolutionary front in West Europe!
Commando Mara Cagol
Red Army Faction
July 9th 1986
Footnotes
N.B. All footnotes in this document were
added by the translator and editor. None are originally from the RAF.
[1] Mara (Margerita) Cagol was a leader of the
Red Brigades in Italy. She was married to Renata Curcio, also a leader
of the Red Brigades, and led a commando which successfully liberated
him
from prison in 1975. She herself was killed in a shootout with Italian
police
during the kidnapping of the industrialist Vittorio Vallarino Gancia in
1975.
She became an important symbol of women’s militancy in the Italian
women’s
movement. (from the Rheinische Post, 7/10/86) [return
to text]
[2] BDI - Bundesverband der deutschen
Industrie: Federal Union of German Industry. [return
to
text]
[3] SPD - Sozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands, Social Democratic Party of Germany. Mainstream party
of the left; one of the two major parties. [return to text]
[4] KWU - Kraftwerk-Union: Energy Union. [return to text]
[5] DM 350 million - approx. $140 million at the
time. [return to text]
[6] Grohnde, Brokdorf, Biblis. - Grohnde and
Biblis are sites of nuclear power plants of approximately 12-1300
Megawatts (2
such reactors alone at Biblis); new projects are planned for or under
construction at Biblis and Brokdorf. [return to text]
[7] One of the projects undertaken by the
Portoguese colonial government in Mozambique in the 1950s was the
Cabora Bassa dam
on the Lower Zambesi River in Mozambique. Amongst other things, the
colonialists hoped that dam would isolate a large portion of the
frontier from the anti-colonial FRELIMO guerillas. This project wrought
devastating effects on peasant communities inundated by the dam's
reservoir, on down-river communities and on the ecosystems of the Lower
Zambesi. [return to text]
[8] The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),
popularly known as “Star Wars”, was Ronald Reagan’s proposal to build a
high-tech
missile shield to protect the United States from nuclear attack. It was
widely viewed as technically unfeasibly, and primarily a way of further
bleeding the Soviet Union by forcing it to undertake similar costly
research
and military plans – the implication of the United States developing a
missile
shield if the Soviets did not have one being that it would be free to
launch
a nuclear first strike while being protected from any Soviet
retaliation. [return to text]
[9] Eureka - A project to promote technological
cooperation for military development undertaken in July 1985 by
seventeen European States (EEC members plus Spain, Switzerland,
Austria, Norway, Sweden and Finland) in answer to the USA’s challenge
to European States to participate in SDI. FRG Foreign Minister Genscher
said, “Eureka is a necessity with or without SDI. Eureka is neither in
its purpose nor goals a substitute nor an alternative to SDI.” [return to text]
[10] Wackersdorf – Site of a major demonstration
in April 1986, in which many militants from the resistance movement
took
part, fighting the police and attempting to sabotage the nuclear
reactor. [return to text]
[11] Staatschutz - Literally “state
protection,” it is unique to the FRG. It extends into all sectors of’
the West German
State, including the police, the courts, the military, the prison
system,
etc., and gives the State extraordinary powers under the justification
of
“protecting the State.” [return to text]
[12] CDU - Christliche-Demokratische Union:
Christian Democratic Union. FDP - Freie Demokratische Partei: Free
Democratic Party. The CDU is the mainstream center right party. The FDP
is a smaller party
representing the interests of large capital, and has power through
joining
in coalition with either the SDP or the CPU. [return to
text]
