This isnt European, but members of the Weather Underground in the US went and visited the North Vietnamese, who advised them to "not get too far ahead of the people." This was good advice that they didn't listen to.
I think they also told them their energies would be better spent supporting the anti-war movement
Adventurism/terrorism is ineffective in the imperial core, and all those groups prove it. Some of them operated for decades and none of them even moved the needle in the class struggle. Not to say they weren’t brave and principled comrades, just that the historical lesson we should learn from them is it’s just not an effective tactic (communists were writing about this as early as the start of the 20th century).
There’s actually an interesting discussion in that IRA thread about the difference between terrorism in a colonial context vs terrorism in the core, something Fanon wrote about.
All that said, N17 were pretty bad ass.
You gotta admit the assassination of Blanco was pretty damn impressive tho.
The blast sent Blanco and his car 20 metres (66 ft) into the air and over the five-story church, landing on the second-floor terrace of the opposite side. :che-laugh:
Looking at 3rd world countries and the people's revolutions over there, the RAF (anarchists that they were) believed that the only reason people anywhere do not start a revolution is that they are afraid and think nothing can be done. Therefore, what you have to do is show them that resistance against the state is possible by killing state officials and getting away with it. They were wrong in this respect. Not because they did not get away with it. They were wrong because people in capitalist centers such as the US, Germany, France and so on do not see themselves as oppressed by their state. To them, their state is necessary to enable them to pursue their happiness, aka go and get a job. This is true, in a perverse way: Capitalist society is based on competition for property in the form of money and therefore the urge to use violence to get ahead is always present, in every transaction you do. People rely on the state and its monopoly of violence in order to get their boss to pay their agreed-upon loan , their landlord to repair some shit he is contractually obliged to repair and so on. Why did I call this true in a "perverse" sense? Because the state with it's guarantee of ownership of property is the one who forces people into that shitty situation. Anyway, like I said: Contrary to what I just tried to explain (English's not my 1st language), the RAF believed the people to be simply oppressed, as if they were basically already left-wing revolutionaries who are hindered by their own fear. They are not: The attacks of the RAF brought the German people and their beloved state even closer together, made them cheer for the creation of a new, state wide police force.
edit: Lefties should learn from this mistake. If you want to abolish capitalism, you first have to acknowledge that those who get fucked by it on a daily basis, the proletariat, have no class consciousness whatsoever. So the first thing we have to to is some explaining.
edit 2: The political group I am affiliated with has some texts in English on a badly designed website. There is nothing on anarchism or the RAF, but there are some other tranlations of texts on different topics of the left. http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/index.htm
RAF (anarchists that they were)
I’m pretty sure the RAF considered themselves Marxist Leninist, they just mixed it with some new age beliefs. I also believe they did get some clandestine backing from the Eastern Bloc but never much. The Movement 2 June was an allied group that IDed as Anarchist though.
Yeah, you may be right there. I was only say the anarchist bit to make clear that the mistake I tried to point out was the same mistakes anarchists usually make.
That makes a perverse sort of sense, in their world where surplus is defined as the product of successful oppression. In that schema, the meting of that surplus back at a profit just looks like fair exchange. I like Graeber's observation that the paralogic of private property is a sort of taboo, a prohibition that proscribes its own interrogation. I see rich possibilities in détourning that taboo.
"Was there really any chance of this working in west-Germany?"
There never was a better one since the early 1920s, and it still failed. Countercultural left movements where about as big in Germany as they where in the US or France, there where larger than ever numbers of disenfranchised young people fed up with the postwar order, an amount of activism unprecedented in West Germany, everybody asking their parents and grandparents uncomfortable questions about what they did during the war. While former Nazi-Bonzen still dominated politics, economy, law, academia and the media. Many of the RAF's targets where selected specifically because they where elites with a nazi background that had gotten off scott free after WW2. Baader and Meinhoff where convinced that targeting these figures would spark something like the Cuban revolution, which had also been carried out by a tiny core group of a mere 200 revolutionaries. Ché's Foco theory was a huge influence on the concept of the Stadtguerilla ("urban guerilla").
The thing is, Germany is not Cuba. During the heyday of the RAF, it was a state full of labor aristocracy, with social security systems still intact and unions still powerful bargainers, with the SPD having its greatest electoral successes since decades. Even though the oil crisis shook those foundations, workers did not live in the conditions you see in countries with successful revolutionary projects. They did not see themselves as opressed revolutionary subjects, but as people who enjoyed representation and a share of the wealth they were producing. The RAF always had its support largely in academic petit bourges, not among the working class, which was also bombarded with highly effective reactionary propaganda courtesy of Axel Springer and the BILD tabloid, a blight upon German mass media till this day. The unrest seen at that time and the decade prior to it could not bridge that class and ideology divide, and it was also in many ways rooted in idealist, ultimately liberal mindsets that gave rise not to a revolutionary class, but to what later became the Green neo-libs.
I don't think you win the support of labour aristocracy with that kind of terrorism. I just don't see how that translates into mass support.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/jun/09.htm
Good text, albeit a bit fun since Lenin's group during the early 1917 was very small and close to every point thrown at others was thrown at him or could be seen with him, till the trend shifted over the course of the Russian revolution.
Che’s Foco honestly does not seem theoretically sound and also didn’t result in successful revolution in the other places Che himself tried it, Cuba was in a pretty unique position to where any number of people might have been able to waltz in and seize power, Fidel and Che were lucky enough to be the ones that happened to do so.
Interesting take, I don't know enough about where it was tried, or Foco itself. My feeling is that not everyone would'be been able to lead the prolonged peoples battle on Cuba and kept the reaction down though.
It seems a whole lot like trying a protracted people’s war without getting the people on board first. I once read a pretty long and in depth analysis about it that was pretty interesting, I think written by some Trotskyist.
I know for sure the groups in Italy were all false-flags for the US and the CIA under OP Gladio, so we can exclude them off the bat.
Gladio is one of those historic moments where all the consipracy theories are simultaneously fully or at least partially true. Everything from massonic lodges, fascists groups, intelligence services, mafia, Gaddaffi, etc were involved to some extent. All so Giuseppe would have a harder time organizing a union at the car factory to negotiate better pension benefits.
If you are interested in Italian history and the socialist movement within I currently do recommend this MIT study about reactionary violence supported by the landowning elites and petit bourgeoisy against the socialist especially where they were strong.
Is this the thing true anon talked abt in one of their BD911 eps? Or a different but also true thing?
go through Revolutonary Left Radio's archives, they covered a few of these groups in past episodes. https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/
I read the book Der Lockvogel by Stefan Aust about a group in the vicinity of RAF and I can sincerely conclude that they were cringe. Never would've gotten anything done.
Oh snap! I was actually thinking to myself "I need to post about the RAF on Chapo". I did once back on Reddit and some people thought it was the Royal Air Force Logo :( Since there are some good takes let me just say: Even though the RAF didn't achieve a lot. However, the fear of Kidnapping or worse in the heads of the most ruthless bankers and politicians might have prevented some shit. The Movie "Baader Meinhof Complex" is an interesting watch and not too propagandistic against the RAF. Of course it's not unbiased but it's a mainstream movie.
"Of course we say the cops are pigs, we say the guy in uniform is a pig, this is not a human being, and so we have to deal with him. That means we don't have to talk to him, and it's wrong to talk"
