Greetings from the Underground, Martin (Burkhard Garweg), late 2024

To family, friends, comrades, allies, and the caravan park residents. To anyone who wants to engage with me and with our point of view.

Legal, illegal, who gives a shit? On February 26 of this year, Daniela Klette was arrested in Berlin. Journalists who offered their services as auxiliary police, helping to expand the increasingly authoritarian state into a state and citizens’ community of investigators and informers, used AI technology to track down images of Daniela on the Internet. The historic assistance of these podcast journalist denunciators provided timely support for biometric controls using facial recognition as a new step toward totalitarian state control.^[1]

The subsequent police manhunt for Volker Staub and me has consistently been characterized by lies and scaremongering. The police and the bourgeois media claim that we are violent criminals and terrorists who would kill for money without batting an eye. The building where Daniela lived and neighbouring buildings were evacuated, with claims about dangerous explosives, setting in motion measures, including psychological warfare operations, to mobilize popular support behind the manhunt. It has since been established that both the grenade and the rocket launcher that were found were dummies, which the police must have known all along. The purpose of the entire operation, which lasted several days, was to mislead and manipulate the public.

The constant propaganda about our violent proclivities and the danger we pose, the military-style searches of homes and caravan parks, involving police armed with military weaponry and armored vehicles, as if a war had broken out, the raids and arrests, all accompanied by carefully crafted images, serves no purpose but to establish the necessity for a militarized police force and to set the stage to mobilize widespread popular support for the manhunts.

Above all, however, the goal behind creating an image of violent criminals is to depoliticize and undermine the history of fundamental opposition—the history of attempts to gain freedom from the violent conditions of capitalism that emerged from the resistance of the (19)68 movement and that were linked to revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles throughout the world.

The urban guerrilla project in the form of the RAF ended twenty-six years ago. However, for those of us being pursued as RAF militants, life underground did not end. An effort has been made to craft an image of us as a violent marauding band of thieves who pose a danger to the general public and who are also prepared to kill—merely for money. For us, however, it is out of the question to use violence that could kill or physically injure people simply for money. While traumatizing the employees of money exchanges or armored car companies is regrettable, there is no reason to believe anything the police or judicial apparatus are saying. Their sole objective is to delegitimize fundamental opposition and create a climate in which state violence and repression seem justified.

Violence is the foundation of bourgeois society: in the misery of its penal system, in the ghettos at the margins of daily bourgeois life, in the militarization of “internal security,” in the relationships of exploitation.

Peter Brückner, 1976

State violence affects many people—the poor, the exploited, the marginalized. It is directed against those who protest or resist this normalized state of affairs, refusing to accept it as a given. These are the people who demonstrate against the genocide in Gaza and a German government that supplies weapons for it, and who, as a consequence, are subjected to different forms of authoritarian violence: police batons, imprisonment, legal threats, threats of deportation, loss of employment, and police surveillance, or whose demonstrations are simply banned altogether. They are the ones who occupy universities and are violently beaten by the police. They are the people who speak up at pro-Palestine events and, as a consequence, are banned from entering the country. They are the artists, writers, and academics from around the world whose exhibitions, lectures, and events are cancelled because they have the “wrong” opinion. This includes the Jewish activists who are branded as antisemitic because they are not representative of the German raison d’état and who are, as a consequence, subjected to the real antisemitism of those in power.

It is those who have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the destruction of all life on the planet by capitalism and who are, as a consequence, declared terrorists and sentenced to prison. It is those who are driven from their villages because energy companies want to profit from the development of fossil fuels. It is those who oppose this capitalist super-exploitation and the accompanying destruction of the climate. It is those who oppose the corporate bulldozers and find themselves at the receiving end of police violence for doing so. It is those in the Global South who are being forced to flee their homes by the millions, because the capitalist system, which guarantees corporate profits with police truncheons in the metropole, is leaving entire regions of the world devastated and uninhabitable.

It is those who recognized that the state instrumentalized Covid to take further steps to develop an authoritarian state and who are being denounced for this. It is the antifa who resist fascism and Nazis and who are, as a consequence, threatened by the police and the judiciary, forced underground or locked up in prisons. It is the comrades who organize against the oppression of Kurds, who oppose the madness that arises from the wars initiated by Western states, who resist ISIS, and who stand in solidarity with liberation from patriarchal structures and for democratic confederalism in Kurdistan. For this they are prosecuted as PKK members by the German judiciary and locked up for years in prison.

They are the ones accused of opposing militarism and the regime of racist deportations as K.O.M.I.T.E.E. and who as a result have been persecuted by the legal system and forced into exile for close to thirty years.^[2] It is all those in Berlin who have been evicted in recent years—Syndikat, Liebig 34, Mutiny, Potse-Drugstore, Köpi Wagenplatz—and who have been subjected to police terror and displacement for the profits of criminal speculators and to prevent the utopia of collective living based on solidarity. It is those who can no longer afford their rent and who are being evicted by the police.

It is those who, in the midst of opulence, experience daily displacement and are forced to live in tents or under bridges. It is those who know that, at a time when the masses can no longer afford rent, they have all the moral right in the world to simply appropriate and squat houses and reject the property laws of the few—and who are then ground down by the police and the justice system for doing so. It is the masses facing precarious employment, who have to sell their labor cheaply, and who are squeezed dry from sun up to sundown for wages that barely suffice to subsist on.

It is those who are locked away in solitary confinement in prisons or closed psychiatric wards, in spite of solitary confinement being recognized as clean torture and as a violation of international law. It is those who are threatened daily by the racism of the German police; for example, Oury Jalloh, who was burned alive in the Dessau police station, bound hand and foot, completely unable to move, because he was Black. It is the refugee teenager Mouhamed Dramé, who died in a hail of machine gun bullets at the hands of the Dortmund police, even though he never posed the slightest threat to his murderers. It is the sixteen-year-old unarmed teenager Halim Dener, who was shot in the back and killed by a police officer because he put up a poster supporting the Kurdish liberation movement. It is the people who, because they came from migrant families, were murdered by the National Socialist Underground^[3]—which functioned for years unhindered and free from state persecution, and which had proven ties to the German secret services.

It is those who are forced to migrate due to wars, climate collapse, and poverty, and who drown by the thousands in the Mediterranean, turned away at German and EU borders, or end up in prison awaiting deportation. It is the thousands in the former Yugoslavia whose lives were snuffed out by NATO bombers, ordered and launched by the German government, which, all the while, grotesquely twisted and abused the battle cry “Never again Auschwitz.” It is the 141 people who were murdered in cold blood by NATO bombs in Afghanistan—on the orders of German Bundeswehr soldier Klein, who had been informed by the US military that the people in question were civilians, and who was promoted to the rank of general by the German government as a result.

It is the tens of thousands or more who can no longer cope and who flee into drug addiction or commit suicide. It is all those who oppose war, who oppose the normalized fascist drift and militarization of the capitalist state. It is those who do not want to simply accept all of this. It is those who fight back. It is those who do not resign themselves but who stand up for a world free of domination, with no above and no below, with no police or military violence to protect those at the top from those at the bottom.

These are the countless people who could tell you a thing or two about the true conditions of violence in the capitalist system.

It is the apologists for capitalism who have a shared interest—that no alternative to capitalism arise—who especially like to talk about the alleged violence of those who rebel, wherever they are in the world, those whose grief and anger turns into collective resistance. However, they almost never talk about their own violence—the structural and brutal violence of the capitalist system.

This is the violence that should be talked about.

“The Structural Violence of Capitalism—Revolutionary Self-Defence—Liberation”

As part of the revolutionary left, we were—I would say: we are—convinced that a system based on violence is illegitimate, and that it can be overcome and freedom can be achieved. We abhor all forms of violence and long for a world that is not based on violence, death, and misery. We once set out to contribute to putting an end to the violence of capitalism—the domination of humans by humans, exploitation, militarism, and war—and to create a different social reality. We were part of the history of those who rebelled for human emancipation, freedom, and self-determination.

It was our assumption that anyone who poses the question of a nonviolent society that is not organized around profit for the few, the division of people into Black and white, rich and poor, and men and women, will inevitably have to confront the question of the structural violence of the system, revolutionary countermovement, and revolutionary self-defence.

“The Military Action of the State Security Apparatus Targeting Us in the Context of the Crisis”

The military action targeting us is taking place in the context of the present social development, with the question of an anti-capitalist alternative to the system having resurfaced. Therefore, any thought of and any history of fundamental opposition to the capitalist and imperialist system must be discredited. The capitalist system has fallen into a far-reaching and all-encompassing crisis. Its potential for growth, which is existentially necessary for its survival, is reaching its limit. The current consequences will continue to snowball: poverty, mass layoffs, and the dismantling of state welfare programs.

The top ten thousand will not bear the brunt of this crisis—those at the bottom will: the elderly, whose pensions are not enough to live on; those dependent on state social benefits, for whom rising food prices are becoming an existential problem; those who will no longer be able to afford their homes; those who must take on ever more precarious jobs to survive; the unemployed, who are to be disciplined with every new tightening of the job centre system; the junkies; the young people (especially in the poorer districts); those affected by violence and many others who are seeing the spaces where they had received support and could meet being closed down.

Politicians and the police like to talk about migrant clans as if they are the problem facing society. They never talk, however, about the clans of the Hohenzollerns or the Quants, even though, with their immense wealth and the way it is distributed, they represent and are in no small way responsible for the insanity of capitalism. Worldwide, the richest 85 people own as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest people.

“Fear, Force, and Discipline to Ensure Compliance—Class Justice”

As part of the authoritarian state crisis response, more and more people are being sentenced to prison. These poor wretches “gladly” end up inside for purportedly or actually wanting their slice of the pie. Those who allegedly or actually receive a few euros “unjustly” from the job centre or who shout the “wrong” slogan at a demonstration are sentenced by a legal system that functions in the interest of those in power. The rich and powerful, however, those involved in the CumEx^[4] scandal, for instance—the capitalists, billionaires, and politicians who skimmed off millions—go unpunished.

The authoritarian state response to the crisis is to prioritize militarization both at home—granting more powers to the police and secret services—and abroad. This means that huge sums of money are spent on the police, the military, the arms industry, and wars. By contrast, less and less goes to those affected by poverty or in any kind of need—a massive process of redistribution from the bottom to the top. The ruling class’s crisis management is aimed at revitalizing the “national community,”^[5] while forcing the masses to “tighten their belts.” That is how they refer to the impoverishment and social decay caused by their policies. That is also how they refer to whittling away at the right to asylum to the point of nonexistence, with the right to live in the metropole only available to those whom capital can exploit.

Two stabbings—in Solingen and Mannheim—were enough to justify a comprehensive expansion of policing, increased border controls, further steps toward abolishing the right to asylum, and mass deportations. Three hundred and sixty femicides in 2023, on the other hand, did not move those in power to do anything. Today, the Muslim population and refugees are an enemy manufactured to meet the needs of those at the top and are instrumentalized to construct a “national community.” By claiming that Muslims and refugees are the source of the existing problems, those in power divide people, channel the discontent of broad sections of the population, and conceal the fact that it is they themselves and capitalism that are the cause of the fundamental problems.

These bogeyman images can be used to justify authoritarian and repressive policies and to establish a broad consensus for them. This is particularly effective when no relevant social revolutionary anti-capitalist left exists. The common ground that the neo-fascist right shares with the entire bourgeois spectrum is clear.

The great problems facing humanity—environmental destruction that threatens the conditions necessary for life, nationalism, war, and poverty—cannot be addressed effectively under capitalism. Anti-fascism must be anti-capitalist, or it is pointless.

The rise of the radical right across Europe is an expression of the ongoing and deepening crisis of capitalism, and the right-wing parties that are being integrated into ruling circles in more and more countries in the EU—Italy, Netherlands, Austria, France, and at the EU level itself—are gaining the support of a section of the population that has been left behind, as well as those who fear social decline, with the offer of bogus solutions that never call capitalism into question. The European elites and the right-wing parties have long had a programme to deal with the crisis: an authoritarian state targeting those who do not comply; dismantling the welfare state; a massive arms build-up, increasing the capacity to wage war; arming the police and expanding their powers, including increased police and secret service social control; nationalism; scapegoating migrants for the crisis and carrying out mass deportations.

All of the neo-fascist parties and so-called centrists in Germany—from the AfD to the Greens—share this view. It is delusional to hope that neo-fascist racism and the neo-fascist vision of the “German national community” can be countered by a bourgeoisie that shares this racism and has the same vision. The vision of the AfD and other European right-wing parties has long been the consensus of those in power and will determine their orientation in the future.

Humanity’s biggest problems—life-threatening environmental destruction, war, and poverty—cannot be addressed effectively under capitalism. The present far-reaching crisis is the catalyst for all this and is driving the world to the brink of military, nuclear, and climate catastrophe. The solution can only be found in an anti-capitalist organization of humanity that is free of domination and capitalism’s need for incessant growth. As such, the radicalization of the state and society that has emerged with the crisis can only be countered by a search for a path to alternative systems.

Addressing social issues, resisting war and militarization both domestically and internationally, resisting the environmental destruction of the planet that results from capitalism, and organizing international solidarity are necessary elements if we are to move forward.

In the West’s resistance to the threat to its global hegemony, the ruling class is relying on militarization and is planning for war on the scale of a World War III.

We have arrived at the age of the increasingly authoritarian state. This is undoubtedly a perilous situation. However, it also speaks to the increased instability of capitalism. In its insatiable hunger for profit, capitalism requires opportunities for accumulation, which are becoming increasingly hard to find. Capitalism now lurches from crisis to crisis.

This is the age of wars, social upheaval, and a reactionary reversion to Volk and Nation. But this also suggests that those in power might be losing their grip on society, and the question arises: What is to be done? Will a class struggle develop in the future that questions and resists the conditions of exploitation and oppression through a collective process?

In an age of social and economic decline, increasing military power struggles, and the irreversible environmental destruction of the planet, the question of how change can be achieved is more vital and pertinent than ever before.

“Coming Full Circle”

Revolutionary concepts from history have failed to provide the answers for overcoming capitalism. Nonetheless, while the conditions have changed, we face the same basic questions.

“The State Relies on Division”

“Illegality, Solidarity, and ‘Terrorists’”

We have met many people in our decades underground—friends, allies, neighbours, my fellow residents at the caravan park, and many others. I lived for many years with people who didn’t know my history. When you are underground, it is impossible to talk about your own illegality. Please forgive me for that.

Our time together ended with repression. Caravan park and house searches: local war simulations—something I never wanted, but, in the end, it was beyond my control. Revolutionary struggles and struggles for freedom are followed by repression—that is how it will be until the struggle for freedom triumphs over injustice. We are part of the history of worldwide rebellions that have always arisen in response to domination and slavery—for as long as the evils of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism have plagued humanity. From this perspective, the responsibility for repression lies with the ruling class and no one else—repression is an instrument of domination. As I see it—and this would be our perspective—there is only one possible response: solidarity.

Unite against the repression Daniela currently faces!

Build a public response!

Act in solidarity!

We were and are the same people whom so many of you got to know during our long years underground. Resisting violent conditions—patriarchal violence, poverty, and racism—among many other things, was part of our encounters and friendships with people during this period and are part of my life and our lives. Much of what we did with others in our decades underground, the paths we walked with others, speaks to the search for a liberated reality and a life of solidarity beyond the violence of capitalism. Our connection with others during this period was a reflection of our reality—of what and who we are.

Those in power have a version of history regarding fundamental resistance to the capitalist system: crime, violence, and terror. The image created is intended to obscure reality and conceal the fact that it is the structural violence of the system that is humanity’s biggest problem. The manufactured image of the “terrorist” is meant to depoliticize the history of resistance to the violence of capitalist conditions, to sow divisions, and to obscure the fact that state violence and the violent conditions of the capitalist system are the only real terror faced by many people the world over.

Peace to the huts! War to the palaces!

Georg Büchner,1834

Anyone who moves from protest to resistance will be painted as a “terrorist.” Countless stories of rebellion and resistance attest to this: Klaus Störtebecker, Thomas Müntzer, Georg Büchner; August Reinsdorf, the social revolutionary anarchist insurgent who took action against the reactionary German Empire and was executed in 1885; Karl Plättner, the council communist critic of the KPD, Red Aid activist, the first author to imagine an urban guerrilla, and a militant who participated in the workers’ uprising of the 1920s; Olga Benario, Georg Elser, Phoolan Devi, Durruti, Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Ulrike Meinhof, Sigurd Debus, Patrice Lumumba, Nelson Mandela, Assata Shakur, Sakine Cansiz, Mumia Abu Jamal.

Whether it is the Paris Commune or the Black Jacobins—the people enslaved by European colonialism who fought for liberation in Haiti in the anti-colonial revolution from 1791 onward; the partisans in numerous European countries who resisted Nazi fascism or the CNT anarchists in Spain who resisted military dictatorship; the revolutionary struggle of the Black Panthers, the 2nd of June Movement, Rote Zora, or the ANC’s resistance against apartheid—they were all “terrorists” according to the propaganda of those in power.

Terror has nothing to do with us, but it has a lot to do with those in power and with the capitalist system.

The term “terror” has nothing to do with revolutionary counterviolence, which throughout history has been the revolutionary self-defence of the liberation movements, and which is directed exclusively and specifically against those in power. Terror describes the indiscriminate violence used to secure and enforce domination. An accurate use of the term “terrorists” in bourgeois society would, among other things, serve as an admission of guilt and a description of those in power, rather than as the manipulative term it is at present.

Today, the term “terrorist” is, first and foremost, an instrument of domination, exploitation, repression, of the Frontex regime,^[6] class justice, and the prison system; of hunger, wars, coups, and military dictatorships directed from the capitalist centres, for which every German federal government historically shares responsibility—including for the countless millions killed. Terror has nothing to do with us but a lot to do with them and their system.

“Solidarity Knows No Borders”

In a situation where we were weak, the solidarity demonstration in March in Berlin calling for Daniela’s freedom and expressing solidarity with those of us underground, against the caravan park and house searches, and against the scaremongering and all the state terror, meant a lot and gave us strength, as did the solidarity expressed at the prison in Vechta, the graffiti on the walls, and the solidarity rallies in various European countries.

For more than three decades, we were able to organize ourselves collectively and elude the outcome prescribed for us by bourgeois society, which was simply that we be locked up or shot. We were able to find ways to lead lives that, with all their ups and downs, allowed for a social reality beyond the capitalist norm of alienation, isolation, and exploitation. No one can take that away from us. It will remain part of the history written from below—our solidarity with one another—with those who have rebelled, are rebelling, or will rebel against this system yesterday, today, or tomorrow.

Despite the grim reality of Daniela’s circumstances—being locked in a prison cell day in and day out—one thing is clear: they may have some of the laws that they have created on their side, but they have no legitimacy. The historical attempts of countless people over many centuries to overcome these conditions—to resist the violence of those who want everything to remain as it is, who declare human freedom and liberation to be unacceptable and injustice to be the way things should be—were and are entirely legitimate.

The judiciary of the Nazi-successor state, which almost never convicted Nazis from the fascist period, is now planning years of show trials against Daniela, in which she is to be sentenced as a representative of the history of fundamental opposition and locked away in prison for many years. The state is focusing on deterrence, targeting not only Daniela but all those who fail to comply, who do not accept the idea that humanity has no alternative but capitalism and, with it, the destruction of the planet. This farce is of concern to everyone who rejects capitalism as the end of history—regardless of their own history or perspective.

“Act in Solidarity”

Making the impossible possible, as Che Guevara put it, is of vital significance to humanity today: learning to rethink the systemic alternative in collective processes of resistance to the abyss we risk tumbling into at the “turn of an era,” both for ourselves and in all our relations, and to fight for it collectively and internationally, breaking through the logic of those in power, the idea that “there is no alternative” to capitalism. The historical window for epochal change—capitalism’s systemic and social decay—is opening ever wider. A new age of barbarism is lurking in the continuing intensification of conditions. Only the struggles of a social revolutionary countermovement can provide an alternative.

“Socialism or barbarism,” as Rosa Luxemburg predicted in 1919, accurately foreseeing historical reality: after World War I and the global economic crisis of the time, a window opened for the decline of capitalism and the rise of revolution. From 1918 to 1923, the workers’ movement, revolutionary feminists, anarchists, and communists in Germany attempted to carry out a socialist revolution. At the same time, a large part of humanity was rising up in revolt on five continents. In Germany, the insurgent workers’ movement failed in its attempt to overcome capitalism. Success would have been the only way to avert the subsequent era of barbarism. When the attempt at socialist revolution was crushed, all that remained was capitalism, which in Germany took the form of Nazi fascism and led to World War II and Auschwitz.

With today’s profound capitalist crisis and worldwide epochal changes, we are accelerating toward a point where a historical “either or” “socialism or barbarism” moment with a clear direction could arise once again. The fixation on fascist bourgeois capitalist parties will not prevent the growing authoritarianism and war-mongering of the German crisis state and the EU. There is nothing worth saving. Only a transformative movement from below for the abolition of capitalism can prevent such a development.

Today, the social-revolutionary alternative—to the increasing fascist drift of the capitalist system, which is spreading poverty even in the metropole, to the impending global war, and to the environmental destruction of the planet—would be a socialism that learns from the mistakes of the past, thereby providing an opportunity to build a free society: a world based on collectivity, freedom from patriarchy, exploitation, domination, and nationalism, and the survival of the natural world.

Such a world will not be possible without a diverse and creative militant movement that makes its presence felt in the nascent and rapidly growing social struggles that are responding to the accelerating crisis. This would require rebuilding the capacity for action of an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary, and internationalist left, one capable of acting in a way that transcends borders. Sleeping Beauty’s slumber must end. The time has come—now—to act.

Solidarity with Daniela!

Solidarity with the comrades in exile, with all those in hiding, and with the prisoners from the struggles of the antifa, of the resistance, of the Kurdish and Turkish comrades, of the climate movement, and of all other struggles for freedom worldwide!

Demanding Daniela’s immediate release is the right thing to do.