The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (33 page)

This psychological misery—insufficient, perhaps to carry out a revolution, but enough to establish a revolutionary tradition—was seen as providing a subjective basis for armed resistance to imperialism within the metropole. As the capitalist system would find itself increasingly besieged by the liberation struggles in the Third World—or so the theory went—this base could grow, and then, “the masses here will eventually find their political identity on the side of the liberation struggles, and will eventually free themselves from the grip of the system, with its lies, its glitziness, its election promises, and its lotteries.”

Black September
provides the RAF’s most explicit attempt to link the concepts of imperialism, the labor aristocracy, and the subjective basis
for revolt in the metropole. In hindsight, it is clear that the optimistic notion that the West German masses might rally to an anti-imperialist position has not been borne out. Nevertheless, this should not detract from the fact that the RAF was at least trying to deal with questions that most leftists in imperialist societies preferred—and still prefer—to ignore.

As we have seen, Black September was a document firmly embedded in the context of its time. Perhaps for this reason, it did not “age” well, and would be increasingly ignored by those sympathetic to the guerilla in years to come. Yet it was an important document, and the relationship to the national liberation struggles in the Third World and to the working class in Germany as elaborated here would not be revisited by subsequent waves of guerilla fighters for years to come.

Proletarian Revolutions… are constantly self-critical, repeatedly come to a standstill, return to past undertakings to begin them anew, pitilessly and thoroughly mocking their own half-measures, and the weakness and shabbiness of their own preliminary efforts. They seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them. They shrink time and again from the unimaginable enormity of their own goals, until they reach a time which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: hic rhodus, hic salta.
¹

Karl Marx

THE STONES YOU HAVE THROWN AT US WILL FALL AT YOUR OWN FEET.

The Black September action in Munich has simultaneously clarified both the nature of the imperialist ruling class and of the anti-imperialist struggle, in a way that no revolutionary action in West Germany or West Berlin has. It was simultaneously anti-imperialist, antifascist, and internationalist. It indicated an understanding of historical and political connections, that are always the province of the people—that is to say, those from whom profit is sucked, those who are free from complicity with the system, those who have no reason to believe the illusions fostered by their oppressors, no reason to accept the fantasy their oppressors pass off as history, no reason to pay the slightest attention to their version of reality. It revealed the rage and the strength that these revolutionaries get from their close connection to the Palestinian
people, a connection resulting in a class consciousness that makes their historical mission to act as a vanguard perfectly clear. Their humanity is firmly based in their knowledge that they must resist this ruling class, a class which as the historical endpoint of this system of class rule is also the most cunning and the most bloodthirsty that has ever existed. It is based in the knowledge that they must resist this system’s character and its tendency towards total imperialist fascism—a form which has many fine representatives: Nixon and Brandt, Moshe Dayan and Genscher, Golda Meir and McGovern.

The West German left can reclaim their political identity—antifascism—antiauthoritarianism—anti-imperialist action—if they cease to embrace the Springer Press and opportunism, if they begin to once again address Auschwitz, Vietnam, and the systemic indifference of the masses here.

BLACK SEPTEMBER’S STRATEGY IS THE REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY FOR ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE, BOTH IN THE THIRD WORLD AND IN THE METROPOLE, GIVEN THE IMPERIALIST CONDITIONS CREATED BY MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS.

1.
IMPERIALISM
Anti Imperialist Struggle
The action was anti-imperialist.
The comrades from Black September, who had their own Black September in 1970 when the Jordanian army massacred 20,000 Palestinians,
¹
went back to the place that is the origin of this massacre: West Germany—formerly Nazi Germany—now at the centre of imperialism. Back to the site of the power that forced the Jews of both West and East Europe to emigrate to Israel. Back to those who had hoped to profit from the theft of Palestinian land. Back to where Israel got its reparation payments and, until 1965, officially, its weapons. Back to
where the Springer Corporation celebrated Israel’s 1967 Blitzkrieg in an anticommunist orgy. Back to the supplier who provided Hussein’s army with panzers, assault rifles, machine-pistols, and munitions. Back to where everything possible was done—using development aid, oil deals, investments, weapons, and diplomatic relationships—to pit Arab regimes against each other, and to turn all of them against the Palestinian liberation movement. Back to the place from which imperialism launches its bombers when other means of repressing the Arab liberation movement fail: West Germany—Munich—the NATO airport at Fürstenfeldbruck.

Vietnam
Do people think Vietnam is a joke? Guatemala, Santo Domingo, Indonesia, Angola are all just jokes? Vietnam is an atrocious example for the people of the Third World, an example of how determined imperialism is to commit genocide against them if nothing else achieves the desired results—if they don’t agree to being markets, military bases, sources of raw materials and cheap labor.

And the opportunistic left in the metropole behaves idiotically—being the labor aristocracy of imperialism (Lenin) who benefit from this theft, they sit on their arses. They only take to the streets if something affects them, if the war escalates, if some of them are shot—like during Easter 1968 in Berlin or May 1970 at Kent State.
²
If the system does something against them like what is always being done in the Third World, all of a sudden they get upset, they run to the police, they chase after that rat-catcher McGovern, they run for a post on the labor council and they write a bunch of poems against the war.

The Imperialist Centre
Black September has brought its war from the Arab periphery of imperialism into the centre. The centre means: central to the multinational corporations, the market’s command centre, where they determine the laws of economic, political, military, cultural, and technological development for all countries within their market. The centre is the U.S.A., Japan, and West Europe under the leadership of the FRG. The volume
of business, the numbers employed by the corporations, these are only the formal, quantitative data—their weapons production is only one of the sectors of their productive capacity that is directed against the liberation movements, their price controls for raw materials constitute just one of the many ways they ensure their rule over the Third World.

The Aggressive Character of Imperialist Investment Policy
Marx analyzed machinery as a weapon that led workers in the 19th century to destroy machines. Marx:

Machinery is the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes, those periodical revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital. It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions made since 1880
¹
for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class
.

This was the machinery that created unemployment for the working class, that created the wageworker, at the same time offering the proletariat no choice but starvation or overthrowing the dictatorship of capital.

It is now time for someone to write a history of the imperialist investment strategy and in their analysis to demonstrate that it was “made for the sole purpose” of eliminating the liberation movements in the Third World.

Multinational Corporations
The multinational corporations control everything in the countries that imperialism has deprived of the opportunity to develop. They use this control against them. At one and the same time, capital creates divisions, skims profits, and then uses these same projects, investments, and profits to play the countries dependent on them off against each other—they use the very raw materials they rely upon the Third World for to oppress the people of the Third World.

Weapons
Their weapons consist of the potential of capital, technology, the means of communication and information control, and the means
of transportation. Their strategy for conquest is based on investments, transfer of profits, information policy, diversification, marketing, sales planning, and stockpiling. Their occupier or colonial ideology means controlling currency and creating work. Their goal is to assimilate, repress, and rob—the alternative offered is starvation and extermination.

Oil Investments
Oil is the primary issue in the states that support the Palestinian liberation movement. 70% of Western Europe’s oil imports come from there. Western Europe’s demand for oil will double by 1985 (1970: 647 million tons). The corporations and their governments are determining their oil policy based on the spectre of revolutionary Arab regimes using this demand for oil to carry through their own industrialization. This would mark the end of oil corporations making profits of more than 100%.

Algeria’s Natural Gas
American corporations are investing millions of dollars in profit liquefying Algerian natural gas and shipping it by sea, so as to play Algerian natural gas off against that of Libya and against Arab oil: Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia.

Pipelines
West European consortiums (Bayerngas—Saarferngas—Gasversorgung Süddeutschland) invest billion-dm sums to build pipelines (1 km costs between 1 and 2 million dm)
²
to transport Algerian natural gas so as to partially reduce their dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

North Sea Oil
Oil companies and governments invest billions in oil and natural gas extraction in the North Sea. With regards to development costs, North Sea oil is ten times as expensive as oil from the Persian Gulf—only every sixth drill point is successful, construction and installation expenses for platforms, underwater pipelines. (North Sea oil makes up an estimated 1% of the world reserves; reserves in the Middle East make up 60%.) This is considered preferable to having a flexible approach to the Middle East. According to the European Economic Community (EEC) Europe
Committee, “The increasing pressure on Western societies from some oil countries could lead to supply problems in the case of a political crisis”—meaning the problems that corporations will have maintaining their current high rates of profit.

Australia and Canada
Regarding raw materials available in Australia and Canada, the economic edition of
FAZ
wrote with cynical, capitalist bluntness, “The developing countries’ position has deteriorated as a result of the discovery of enormous natural resource reserves in Canada and Australia. The geologically favorable sites in these countries, with their stable governments, lower taxes, and developed industry, have attracted the attention of multinationals from all over the world.”

The Conference in Santiago de Chile
In April and May 1972, at the conference in Santiago de Chile, the “developing countries” attempted to establish fixed prices for raw materials. In response to their powerlessness, the
FAZ
writes, with the condescension and consciousness of a corporate bulletin, “The developing countries overlook the fact that natural resource reserves alone do not constitute wealth. In the final analysis, development, transport, and technical research are more important, and we control an ample share of the world’s reserves of those. It is no accident that the powerful multinational corporations, with their restrictive policies, exercise substantial restraint in their investments in the developing countries.”