Letter from the RAF to the RAF Prisoners
To the RAF prisoners:
We are asking you to call off your hunger strike now even though the demand for an end to isolation has not been met. This demand has not been met because of the powerful reactionary mobilization and the class offensive from above, the subjective conditions of an underdeveloped class struggle, the corruption of the proletariat’s class organizations, and the weakness of the revolutionary left.
Understand that this is an order.
The fact is that the legal left, as a result of their defensiveness and helplessness in the face of the new fascism, has not developed the capacity to organize solidarity as a weapon, and has failed to develop in a way that corresponds to the construction of the guerilla and the politics of the raf.
The strike has brought them face-to-face with reality: the weakness of political strategies that ignore the need to establish and develop the capacity to act from the underground, the necessity for armed politics as the concrete expression of proletarian internationalism here. Our massive mobilization in 68 was followed by a series of setbacks: the splits, the sects, and the corruption that forced us onto the defensive.
We are saying that the prisoners’ strike has done everything it could to mediate, mobilize, and organize anti-imperialist politics here. Its escalation would not contribute anything qualitative to the struggle.
The state has calculated that it will be able to create propaganda from the execution of guerilla prisoners—who struggle, always struggle, in spite of everything struggle—that would make resistance seem hopeless. Allowing you to continue in this situation would amount to sacrificing you.
We are taking this weapon away from you, because the prisoners’ struggle—given the existing balance of power—is now something that we must settle with our weapons.
Victory will be ours!