Hungerstrike Statement

December 1984

We say that the dialectic of revolutionary struggle is more important than the imperialist doctrine of the inflexible stance.

In the maximum security wings, in the prisons, on the whole social terrain throughout society, both here and internationally, the imperialists are piling up the weapons of war and repression in order to strangle the history that, throughout the whole world, desires to break with the system of capital.

Their power is military strategy, counter-insurgency, the machine – but it is hollow violence and nothing more.

We are now fighting with the consciousness of the unity of the prisoners from the guerilla and the resistance, using the hunger strike to gain our association in large groups. We demand the application of the minimum guarantees of the Geneva Convention [1]. Against the institution of torture and criminalization, this is both the political demand for which the political prisoners struggle together and protection that is possible.

We are faced with the same problem in our situation that all the revolutionary left faces: how, from a deadlocked balance of forces, to break through the defenses, to turn the striving, the attempts, the will into struggle and to create new political breakthroughs.

For us, that means to begin from the fact of isolation, of forced separation, and to trust in our own strength in a situation in which the imperialist State, due to its substantial instability and its progressive loss of legitimacy, only wants to demonstrate its potential for domination and perceives all change, even regarding the prisoners, as a question of power.

Our struggle joins with the struggles of the prisoners of war in France, Ireland, Turkey, Spain, Italy, and in occupied Palestine, and opens new ones. And it is integrated into the task which presents itself to the whole revolutionary left here: either it fights its way forward, in the tradition of resistance, to an authentic revolutionary process by being the subject of the struggle for liberation, or else it can only comment on the crimes of imperialism and its road to the completely restructured fascist State as a marginal opposition.

Unity in the struggle of the anti-imperialist front.

Prisoners of the Red Army Faction – December 1984