The RAF Is Dead - But The Struggle For Liberation Is Not!
A Few Last Words On The End Of The Red Army Faction (RAF)
July 1998
Somewhere. In March 1998, the Red Army
Fraction (RAF) announced its dissolution after 28 years of armed
struggle. This step was an anti-climax, and one long expected, since
nothing had been heard of from the RAF for months. Just like the Left
in general, the organization had
lost its social relevance over the past few years, and it could not be
expected
that the RAF would provide any impulses for a re-orientation of the
Left.
But sighs and the shaking of heads are by no means called for.
For 28 years, the RAF was an attempt to
wage resistance to the murderous capitalist system and conditions of
exploitation. It arose from the correct consciousness of bringing the
anti-imperialist struggle
of the liberation movements around the world back here, to the center
of
power. It arose from the realization that the social movements and the
guerrilla
movements of the Three Continents, which are confronted with U.S. and
NATO
interventions and the dirty wars being waged by contra-guerrilla forces
trained
by the BND [German intelligence agency] and the CIA, can only be
successful
if there is no peaceful calm in the metropoles, in the belly of the
beast.
The formation of the RAF was the first serious attempt to transform the
'68
slogan "Create One, Two, Many Vietnams!" into a reality. This was
expressed
in the early years mainly in the form of attacks on U.S. military
institutions.
In the early 1970s, RAF actions, for example the attack on the U.S.
Headquarters
in Heidelberg, where logistics for air raids on the Vietcong were
planned,
enjoyed broad, if silent, support. At that time, around 20% of the
population
were willing to help shelter RAF militants from state repression. So
it's
no surprise that the repressive authorities in Germany did everything
possible
to create a social climate in which the RAF and the Left in general
could
be isolated and defeated. This chance came during the confrontations in
1977.
The surveillance state was prepared to make the most of its searching
methods
and isolation torture. The political error of the RAF, to approve of
the
hijacking of a civilian Lufthansa airliner by a Palestinian commando
during
the Schleyer kidnapping, tipped the balance of public opinion, already
heated
by media smear campaigns, against the guerrilla once and for all. The
pogrom-like
atmosphere among the public against the RAF political prisoners gave
the
government's Crisis Staff the signal it needed: The alleged "suicides"
of
the prisoners in Stammheim were just a formality following the storming
of
the airliner by a GSG9 police commando.
The RAF could never recover from its
defeat in '77. The state had succeeded in creating a permanent gulf
between the guerrilla
and a majority of the extra-parliamentary Left, and solidarity from the
general
public was now completely out of the question. The consciousness that
the
actions of the guerrilla were only directed at the ruling structures,
against
those responsible for exploitation, war, and oppression, could no
longer
be proclaimed. "Anyone who attacks people vacationing on Mallorca would
eat
their own children..." - it wasn't hard for the ruling powers to make
such
notions stick in the minds of the people. After this time, only a small
portion
of the radical Left showed solidarity with RAF actions.
Even the attempts by the RAF in
the 1980s, by means of the Front Concept, to link up with radical
social movements at the national level and with Action Directe (France)
and the Red Brigades (Italy) at the West European level did not make
any new beginnings possible. These only exhibited the developments
which the RAF themselves criticized in their dissolution
communiqué: The lack of a political-social organization, which
needed to have an equal importance as the armed politics of the RAF.
The distance between the actions
of the RAF, who were only becoming more isolated, and the repressive
social reality
of the class whose liberation the RAF propagated became too great.
Unlike
the early 1970s, when social relationships played an important role in
texts
issued by the RAF (for example, with reference to the strike movements
in
1971, and "Urban Guerrilla And The Class Struggle" of April 1972), the
statements
by the new RAF militants hovered at the abstract-militarist level. For
people
involved in concrete social confrontations, like unemployed people, the
Latin
America solidarity movement, or anti-fascists, there was little common
ground
for discussion with the RAF. The attempts by the RAF in the 1990s (the
execution
of Treuhand chief Rohwedder, the destruction of the new prison in
Weiterstadt)
to renew a concrete relationship with the social situation in Germany
and
a dialogue with the Left came too late. The lack of an organizational
framework,
a political-social organization which would have made such a discussion
possible,
was a major problem. This mistake was the fault of the entire radical
Left,
because the RAF never had the chance to build up such an organization
while
operating underground.
The dissolution of the RAF is a natural
result of their history. But it is merely the end of the chapter on the
RAF in the history of the revolutionary Left in Germany, not the end of
armed struggle for all times. As long as social conditions exist "in
which a human being is treated as a dirty, pitiful, abandoned, and
hated being", so long as the heart of the beast continues to beat,
producing new capitalist barbarity with
each new day - the struggle for liberation will continue. The means of
this
struggle will be decided on by the radical Left, not dictated by their
enemies.
Published in Einsatz! #31, the magazine of Autonome
Antifa (M), in July 1998.
