Red Army Faction: The October Revolution, The Third International
Notes from a discussion in Stammheim Prison
Early May, 1976
We've said that the October Revolution determined the structure of the reactionary process in the West, that is to say that the development of capital became an explicitly political process in relation to the international connection between revolution and imperialism.
Second, the October Revolution produced, through a long and painful process of Soviet accumulation, the demarcation line between East and West.
Third, the peoples liberation struggles of the Third World took from October their revolutionary impetus, given they organized themselves into the Third International, created by the Revolution. Which means: they raised their struggle to the political level proletarian politics requires to be effective.
This is one of Lenin's central theses regarding the organization of the international revolution. One upheld by the First Congress of the Third International (or was it the Second? it's in that horrid book on the Comintern we have...look it up and send it to me if you have it...if not then I'll forget it again). According to which, the Revolution must, from the first moment, move toward the political level of the counter-revolution; if it does not, on its own initiative, anticipate that level, then it anticipates its own defeat, or put differently: it is doomed to fail.
The defense of the conquest of power accomplished in a single country —the October Revolution—and the organization of global revolution were, for Lenin,the same thing.
It's perfectly true that one does Lenin an injustice if one does not also say: an essential part of his concept of internationalism was his notion of revolutionary morals. Which is to say that he understood the expression "serve the people" like this: serve the global proletariat. And he did not apply this merely to his own person, but rather he determined the internal processes in Russia on the basis of this position, before and after the Revolution, conceiving of it as an instrument of the universal revolutionary process.
"Subordinated to it," functionally. We allude to this here because many on the left, enclosed in their national confines, keep going back to Lenin. And because the quotes they pull from him play an important role in the revisionist left's harassment of the RAF's internationalism. The aversion which has meanwhile developed against Lenin, at least among the non-revisionist left, has very little to do with anything Lenin may have actually done or what he fought for within the international communist movement, very little to do with his proletarian internationalism.
And related to this is, naturally enough, the Marx-Engels Institute's compendium of historical facts but, as we've said, Lenin's "reception" as a theorist doesn't interest us, but rather the real process set in motion by the October Revolution and the Third International.
Marxist orthodoxy has been, and still is—we can finally say it—white. Such that, in their analysis of the Third International's politics, they are unaware that the International's function as the face of anti-colonial revolution in East Asia played any role at all. (If they were aware then they would certainly have to relativize their image of Stalin, since on the colonial question Stalin was not only a Leninist but even an ultra-left one. And what cannot be done, in any way, is equating Stalin with Hitler. Well, ok...never mind. Or we'll wind up with a critique of Marxist-Leninists, analyzing the anticommunism of that label and their politics against social imperialism. The pigs resort to Stalin. How? What? Tell me. And what about "Stalinism" and Chinese foreign policy?...)
Schlesinger says:
"For the support in political power that the Russian Revolution could give to colonial revolutions...and which it had to give, for reasons of self-preservation, it was a matter of indifference how they viewed the Russian Revolution itself and the question of the Revolution's isolation wasn't relevant, since the Soviet Union's support had already been given."
And these days Brandt organizes, through the Socialist International, the counter-revolutionary project of social democracy, part of the project of subjugating States to the US system, according to the model of US capital, buying foreign investments with their national sovereignty, in the case of Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, links with NATO, Yugoslavia drifting toward NATO...the following has to be remembered: social democracy has its roots in the Second International, which always voted, on the colonial question, in ways that were clearly racist, chauvinist, always on the side of imperialist exploitation, against the emancipation of peoples proposed by the Third International.
And the revisionist left, which bases itself on Lenin, has to be reminded just like the anti-revisionist left, which rejects him, of the fact that the Leninist theory of imperialism, his theory of the function of the State after the proletarian conquest of power, was developed against the Zimmerwald Conference, against the Second International...taking the global proletarian position by declaring himself unconditionally in favor of Third World liberation movements against imperialism.
But it's not a matter of an abstract theoretical posture, on the basis of which, or for which, he fights. Rather, the center of all planning for Lenin is the global organization of insurrection, that is, the organization of armed struggle against imperialism. It's really a slithering, disgusting calculation to make Lenin's little book on left radicalism into his major work. That book was written against the left communism that these days has its caricature in the "spontaneous" left, for whom the international dimension of revolutionary struggle does not exist, as with the other sects. Or, put another way:
How is it that leftists like the KBW get themselves killed in Portugal, working on some rural Commune, or at least put their lives at risk there, instead of fighting here, illegally, against the system that's shooting workers in Portugal? And all this after seeing what went down in Chile with such mechanical precision.
The Third International organized the communist parties as operatives of armed struggle, which in China and Indochina was a peasant revolution. The communist parties of Korea and Indonesia organized, with the Comintern's protection, colonial revolution. While the Latin Americans, like the Europe-oriented intellectuals they were, never succeeded in entering into broad contact with the mass base in Latin America, the indigenous population.
The Third International —this is the main thing— was "anti-white". So if the question is, where does the Soviet Union's prestige in the Third World come from —setting aside the fact they provided arms to liberation movements— then the line to be taken up becomes clear.
The Chinese attempt, at the beginning of the seventies, to evolve the Sino-Soviet conflict into one between a white communism and the communism of the red, black, and yellow peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America was —we can say in retrospect— an attempt to usurp, in China's favor, the strong tradition of the Third International, with the goal of strangling it...
To the extent that what Chinese foreign policy does isn't exactly people's emancipatory movements against imperialism, rather it neutralizes them. They go even so far as to support reactionary regimes in the style of Mr. Bandaraneike in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) against the liberation movements, which the reactionaries call "guevarist" and toward the elimination of which they provide Mr. Bandaraneike's counter-guerrilla with military equipment.
Ok, let's see...Maybe this piece should go with another one about M-Ls. And there more can be said about Chinese foreign policy.
So there are two communist lines and three models of development. First, the Chinese, which neutralizes independent States along the North-South front, making itself thereby an instrument of imperialist policy.
The Soviet: construction of heavy industry/lack of simultaneity/support for armed struggle.
The social democratic: economic aid and counter-insurgency.
No! Again: the Chinese development model, neutralizing; the Soviet, which supports anti-imperialist struggle; and the social democratic, which organizes counter-revolution...when it's all said and done, white communism.
We shall see.
translation note
This text is a translation of a translation, into Spanish, of the German original. Ordinarily I wouldn't really consider that kind of thing worth the effort. But in this case, the fact I had never seen the text in English before, having read a great deal of RAF material the last four or five years, was reason enough. The arguments of the piece, and its place on the timeline of RAF text production, made it more necessary. Because this odd, short text is more important than it may appear. Dated "early May" of '76, the text cannot date from any later than May 8, 1976 because Ulrike Meinhof died on May 9 of that year.
As such, this is not only one of Ulrike's last texts but, more to the point, among the last theoretical documents produced by the group as a whole. It consists of notes from a conversation among them while in a shared dayroom to which they had some access in while in Stammheim. The conditions of their imprisonment varied greatly over time, but for a while the combination of hunger strikes and political pressure was effective, winning the right to meet and talk together, and to have some comforts. One of them had a small camera, another a record player. But it was characteristic of the group that even in prison, wrapped up in sham court proceedings that could only have one outcome, they used their time together to do political work.
Which is what we find them doing in the Stammheim dayroom, the last week of Ulrike's life. All four of the RAF prisoners seem to be present, participating in the discussion; Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof and Jan-Carl Raspe. The topic is, broadly, internationalism, one of the group's major concerns. They appear to be continuing an ongoing conversation, which is roughly sketching an outline for a theoretical paper. It seems the argument is a critique, based in Lenin, of the varieties of communism then prevalent, especially as regards their internationalism. Which would be in keeping with, and perhaps extend, a line of thought in their writings going back to the group's earliest texts.
These theoretical reflections, coming as they do at the end of the group's activity and after all their major actions, seem to me both rare and valuable. If it's theory-praxis-theory, then here as in a few other texts we see the second theory, informed by the praxis. Even more rare and valuable, though, is the glimpse the text gives us into the RAF's working method. This is neither Ulrike typing away on her own nor Andreas holding court and someone taking dictation. If anything, the strongest voice here is probably Gudrun's. But the whole group is participating. They are clearly talking out points before they are written down, and this process has been ongoing for some time. They have layers of argument, to which they are adding. And levels of analysis, which they are seeking to clarify and refine.
Discussion leading to consensus and then to writing, and that writing being the product of the entire group, effectively cosigned by them. And this is plainly not a new method, something they've come up with while locked up, but rather the established method the group has for doing this kind of work. Someone turns up with an exact citation and into the notes it goes for later use. Someone else recalls another citation and a note is made to find it and copy it out. This sketches a model of group text production that informs the RAF's entire theoretical output: who the authors are, how it was made and what it can therefore mean.
That they more or less coin the term "white communism" here is legitimately pretty funny. But not only that. Less amusing is the fact that, in terms of discourse, they are decades ahead of everyone in the imperial core except the Black Panthers, gap which remains intact, even at this late date.