The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History Read Online Free PDF

the Third World as a key site of struggle, the RAF continued to avoid the usual approach of identifying and naming social sectors that had a material interest in revolution. In no way did the May Paper represent a turn to the working class. Neither was it quite the same as the RZ’s embrace of movementism, of variegated citizen complaints giving rise to multiple sites of resistance; nor, despite the appearance of groups like WAIW, were the antipatriarchal politics of Rote Zora in any way approximated. 7 Rather, the May Paper continued to build upon the RAF’s traditional (ungendered) radical subjectivity, the idea that by experiencing the violence and repression of the capitalist state, and the sense of collectivity that came from fighting back alongside others, people might undergo a psychological break with the system. In
Serve the People,
written in 1972, it had been proposed that this break would lead people to join the guerilla; now the May Paper updated this to the somewhat more realistic view that they would rally to the “resistance” and its front:
    We have already had this experience ourselves, and we are ready to share it with those we know: the decisive moment for the breakthrough, which shows how far we’ve come, is the struggle of those who have begun to act within the framework of this strategy, or who want to participate as subjects within the framework
of the anti-imperialist front. They have started to anticipate this within themselves and for themselves and to determine all political initiative and action from this perspective and toward this end. They think of everything they do from the perspective of the fighting front.
    Initially, the RAF’s line on radical subjectivity had drawn upon ideas circulating in the New Left, ideas which signaled a break with what was (somewhat unfairly) looked down upon as the narrow class focus and cultural conservatism of their predecessors. Radical subjectivity emphasized the view that for all its wealth, life in the metropole left people psychologically and culturally bereft. At times sounding like a distant echo of the Situationists or the Frankfurt School, the RAF had applied this analysis in a unique way by combining it with violent action and an anti-imperialist worldview.
    It is not surprising that when the May Paper was released over ten years later, it too contained themes that one could hear being voiced by quite different political thinkers—thinkers who in the 1980s were now pondering the shortcomings of the New Left. Although the RAF had retained the idea of a primary contradiction, this had been projected outwards, onto the Third World; as such, within the metropole the RAF was now able to embrace not only the reality of multiple sites of resistance, but also the way in which a revolutionary identity could be forged
sui generis,
out of resistance itself, with no blueprint for the future required. At its most simple, this was expressed in the phrase (often mocked by detractors), that, “The revolutionary strategy here is simply a strategy against their strategy.”
    While some might object that this could not provide a sustainable basis for action, and that its proponents were opening themselves up to a new host of errors, it did reflect the zeitgeist of the day. From the Revolutionary Cells to post-structuralist Marxists like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, by 1982 the blueprint and the big-theory-that-explains-it-all had fallen out of favor, in a philosophical turn whereby opposing suddenly seemed infinitely better than proposing. Such ideas were particularly attractive after the 1970s—a period during which the K-Groups in particular had pushed the grand narrative to absurd lengths—and especially among the
Autonomen.
Where the RAF distinguished itself was in declaring that it would harness this micropolitical anomie to what remained a quintessentially macropolitical project, the destruction of imperialism.
    Yet,