Maoism and its relationship with the terrorist cul-de-sac

La Bande a Baader by Maressin (Champ Libre, April 1972) is the only extensive analysis of First World terrorism and it is necessary to consider his arguments at some length. Although an intelligent account, Maressin's major mistake was to assume that the crisis of capitalism was terminal and that the material basis of the present crisis, the displacement of productive labour and the impossibility of utilizing the labour set free meant the creation of a permanent "class of declasses" which capital either had to destroy or transform into pure consumers. Forced with this kind of crisis the capitalist system "is forced henceforth to base its survival on pure force" because "in this historic epoch, no matter what incident, even a very small one can have irreversible consequences". While Maressin, presumably having read his Grundrisse is right in envisaging a situation of permanent structural unemployment; his reaction is one of lurid catastrophism. This kind of neo-absolutism of stark alternatives is both unrealistic and dangerous. For instance, "pure force" more perhaps than ever, is unlikely to work in the advanced capitalisms. This catastrophism can so often be just the article of faith the terrorist needs.

But Maressin is too fly to be fully netted in the terrorist trap. Thus he can satirize, which he does well, the pretensions of most urban guerrilla groups while dismissing these pretensions as quite unimportant. Finally there is no choice in the matter ("men do not have a choice") and "the revolutionary character of the action of the Red Army Fraction shows that it has this character for other reasons than those it imagined."

On the road to revolution then no mistakes or very few are therefore possible. The game is won in advance and crackpot fictions can have revolutionary repercussions. A deterministic apocalypse thus coincides with a blind voluntarism, which in both cases virtually rules out errors. lt is interesting to note that Bommi Baumann in How it all Began notes the inability of R.A.F. (the Red Army Fraction) to stand back and reflect on the bullet ridden shreds of their programme and recognise it for what it is: a failure. Each shoot out seems to encourage a further act of vengeance in this OK Corral Gotterdammerung.

Maressin also assumes that though the concept of urban guerrilla came from Latin America, (c.f. his comments on Marighela and the Tupamaros) the class differences between the First and Third World inevitably alters the basic similarity of First and Third World guerrillas in their outlook because the class basis in the First World of a Leninist type organization is absent. That it was to become painfully true of the so-called Third World too, as the experience of the Chilean coup in 1973 was to show only too clearly, Maressin does not envisage. But the fact that Leninism has no contemporary basis in the highly developed economies is also the reason for the theoretical 'eclectism' of R.A.F. which permits it to include in "le patrommonie ideologique revolutionnaire" – "Blanqui, Korsch, the Anarchists, Luxembourg, Pannekoek and others" which means those references to Mao and Lenin can be taken with a pinch of salt and by no means signify a theoretical adherence to the primary need to create the vanguard party. Thus the R.A.F. cannot be charged with substitutionism and its

"tool is not a Leninist type party. The R.A.F. does not seek to substitute itself for the proletariat since in its eyes the question is to create armed clandestine militias who will do whatever is necessary in their sector."

Finally the isolation (and failure) of the R.A.F. "shall only be broken by a definitive rupture with Leninist concepts" and this rupture with Maoism / Leninism, is strikingly shown in their failed attempt to collaborate with Palestinian organisations.

"It has clearly shown to all those who have lived it that the objectives and the revolutionary means are absolutely different and even diverse according to whether one acts in developed or under-developed countries, It is from this event, from this concrete rupture with Third Worldism all more or less rotten that the R.A.F. was able to advance. It is by no means the effect of chance if it had been based on the return of this failed expedition."

From then on all should have been plain sailing. However we know that this was not the case and that it seems fairly safe to assume that there was, and is, some kind of rapprochement with Palestinian organisations even giving scope to a renascent anti-Semitism among German terrorists even as it is garbled in respectable anti-imperialist rhetoric.

Maressin has made too much of the difference between the First and Third World urban guerrilla where it concerns the end result. He says,

"If the Tupamaros are without doubt condemned to perish [?] in traditional Third Worldism it nevertheless remains that their experience is particularly rich in teaching us a few things. Their strategy and certain particularities of their tactics merit reflection and at times universalization".

What such a universalization is, it is difficult to imagine as nothing is specified.

In Uruguay its social peace has for "a long time earned it the surname of the Switzerland of Latin America." Also, "In this country the weight of the middle class is decisive" representing 64% of the population. But Uruguay has had since the 1920s a system of economic legislation both social and political (e.g. the Bank of the Republic is nationalized; in 1914 the insurance of the workers at the cost of the boss is made obligatory and in 1915 the eight hour day came into force). However, it is only in the context of the economic crises beginning in 1954 that the Tupamaros were born. "It is for that, that it has to be the nearest possible example of what should be an armed struggle operating in developed countries."

Maressin continues:

"In effect, this movement which does not escape from Third Worldism in that it is led to conceive itself an integral part of the anti imperialist movement surpasses it in finding in itself its own subject. Whilst Third Worldism has for its end to make the proletariat the object of history, in Uruguay one witnessed a proletarian attempt to pose itself as the subject of history. The anti-imperialist struggle is no longer the end in itself of combat; it is an objective consequence of it. And that by the simple fact that the armed revolutionary organization operates in the town where it expresses which furnishes it with a real anchorage"

- the ideology of the salaried middle class - "which embraces here the proletariat as a consumer and whilst it conceives itself as petite bourgeoisie but which nevertheless remains, in spite of what it may think, the bearer of socialist subversion."

"But there [Uruguay] it is only a question of a tendency. It is probable that the terrain on which it developed shan't be rich enough to lead it to real domination." However because the Tupamaro have taken to heart a certain number of Marx's affirmations which corresponded to reality (fort echo a la realite) they have broken with social democracy, which Leninism is only a tendency of.

"The Tupermaros do not seek to impose their conscience on the revolutionary class and in particular on the working class even if they still are the concrete manifestation of the exteriority of total consciousness even if they still are through this fact still separate from the class."...... "the Tupamaro movement does not seek at all to 'awaken' the masses or to conquer them - which means controlling them in a dictatorial fashion - in conquering them or seducing them with a programme or theoretical explanations." ..... "the Tupamaros have never lectured (fait la lecon) no one and have never pretended to be the soul depositories of revolutionary theory. In not pretending to have the monopoly of class-consciousness they do not have polemical exchanges with other traditional political organizations. In not colluding with them they exercised a growing influence on their most radical members thus avoiding isolation which would have been as fatal as sterile scholastic polemics source of division at the interior of the movement."

Whether Maressin has read too much into the Tupamaro phenomenon it is certain that a similar way of posing major questions led in the case of R.A.F. to unforeseen and grotesque results. In their pamphlet, On the Concept of the Urban Guerrilla, the R.A.F. said, "To put oneself theoretically on the side of the proletariat signifies also putting oneself there in practise" which of course they did not do. In rejecting their roles as teachers, journalists etc. which they genuinely despised, they fell into limbo and eventually supported the capitalist mode of production by giving their support to small national capitals struggling for recognition (Palestine) or small nations supposedly inhibited by imperial powers (The Irish Republic versus Ulster and Whitehall). In refusing the reproduction of capital on one level as professionals, they went on to reproduce it in another. They certainly lost their class in Germany's Social Democratic Republic but they never found the proletariat – even though the category into which they fell into - the surplus population - Marx also considered part of the working class.

What stopped them from making this so obvious discovery, which for a proletarian is structurally determined was their self appointed vanguardism – the inheritance of their upbringing - ratified by education and the leadership roles they were to assume. Without really grasping the hard social facts, for R.A.F. the proletariat was not capable of living up to their expectations of them and the class struggle would never give way to the classless society (c.f. "Sur le Conception" etc.) "The urban guerrilla can concretise proletarian internationalism by furnishing arms and money" but as Bommi Baumann was to so forlornly recount what became of the money was usually an intensified consumerism - the best Japanese radios etc – without having to work for the so-called goodies. The problem: was the trajectory of this development given from the start or, was it predicated on the failure of the working class to make a serious move in the direction of the abolition of the wages system, plus the refusal of the terrorist to relinquish their activist stance once they'd embarked on their generally ludicrous escapades? Once launched on an outlaw trajectory does it not also have its pre-determined path of development so that the end result is lost sight of in a welter of paranoia and illusions but the taste for a certain romantic danger remains? On reading the texts of R.A.F. what is most striking is the abyss between what they write and the noodles that they are. It seems looking back that there has been more at stake than the efficacy of pious wishes.

Though Maressin's book is the most sophisticated apology for terrorism yet to appear when it actually happens on his own doorstep as it were, he is quick to condemn it for class reasons contradicting sharply to his support for small group terrorisms elsewhere. The occasion was the assassination of a Maoist worker Pierre D'Ouverney by a Renault guard in I972. On the previous page to the hostile written footnote commenting upon the incident he says,

"The organization....shall guard itself from Leninist degeneration by envisaging different ends and in immediately finding in itself its subject. Integrated for its daily survival in the class that it expresses it shall be an integral part of it and its Being shall coincide with the Being of this class."

All very well and good but what Maressin fails to see time and time again until actually confronted with its reality is that terrorists groups - as we have said before very very rarely share the conditions of the proletariat, that they lose contact with its conditions of existence when driven underground into utmost secrecy relentlessly pursued by the police. In response to the shooting of Pierre D'Ouverney a Renault official named Nagrette was kidnapped by the Nouvelle Resistance Populaire, an arm of Gauche Proletarienne calling themselves "a new resistance" in the hope of awakening a nostalgic 'revolutionary' echo amongst older Communist party workers who still could remember the combative character on a national level - though not revolutionary occasion - of the original resistance movement. (c.f. Castoriadis). To kidnap Nagrette according to Maressin "was to offer to the counter revolution the sticks to fight with." The Maoists he continues... "to the degree that they are Leninist want to substitute themselves for the working class" but the workers do not feel directly involved in their actions even when they approve of them.... At Renault the kidnapping of Nagrette was not rejected but it wasn't approved of much either: it wasn't really any of the workers business." During the kidnapping and after, those Maoists who participated felt something of the dilemma too. Le Dantec for instance agonised over the kidnapping of Nagrette, which he thinks set the scene for other kidnappings which were to end in the assassination of Hannes Martin Schleyer (former SS officer and president of the German Employers Association) and Aldo Moro (PM of Italy and architect of the "Historic Compromise"). In a sense Le Dantec's agonizing became a liberal guilt trip about offing the top bourgeoisie because he does not discuss the validity of such action in terms of the perspective of the workers' movement and nowhere does he criticize it for its substitutionism. Ironically Maressin's final footnote apropos of the Nagrette abduction is on the penultimate page of La Bande a Baader. Perhaps the chickens had started already to come home to roost?

Terrorism and nationalism ..... Equals the social base for terrorism

Because Maressin identifies terrorist groups far too closely with the proletarian class subject it is doubtful if he would have been able to give a sensitive account of the liaison between national movements especially the Palestinians and the R.A.F. What happened subsequent to their (R.A.F.) initial failure at a rapprochement with the Palestinians is not allowed for in Maressin's analysis. He says,

"Another point of manifest rupture is decisive with Maoism-Leninism. The failure of the R.A.F. in its bid to collaborate with the Palestinians organizations is striking. It has clearly shown to all those who have experienced it that the objectives and the revolutionary means are absolutely different and even divergent according to whether one acts in a developed or under-developed country. It is from this occurrence, from this concrete rupture with Third Worldism that the R.A.F. has been able to advance. It is hardly a choice effect if this had been based on the return of this failed expedition."

However as many now know this was not the case though it is difficult to imagine or know the degree to which the R.A.F. is committed to the cause, (up to the hilt in all probability!) Certainly what has not gone unnoticed is the embarrassing reappearance of anti-Semitism among German terrorist groups. Apropos of Palestine, the infamous "cristal nacht" when the Nazis hounded the Jews in the German ghettoes was celebrated by some of the terrorists with the bombing of a synagogue and in one hijacking, In the disastrous Entebbe episode in Uganda no distinction was made even on the simplest level between rich and poor Jew - it was enough that one was Jewish to be singled out for special treatment. This is just the type of spectacularly wrong propaganda of the deed, which plays into the appalling hand of Zionism.

Also the R.A.F. was deluded about the social nature of many under-developed countries. They swallowed the entire leftist shit about the Third World. Living in an ideal world of 'National Principles', for the terrorists the reality of diplomacy, the ability of the great powers to twist the arm of the nominally 'Marxist' republics entirely escaped their notice and eventually cost some of them their lives at Mogadishu. Believing the gutter and 'respectable' press nonsense about 'Marxist Governments', the hi-jacked plane made first for Aden which two years previously had received the plane containing freed German terrorists and the Deputy, Konrad Lorenz, However in the meantime, Aden had relinquished some of its autonomy to Moscow who was prepared to give any assistance it could to bringing down the terrorists. So onto Somalia and Mogadishu then before the onset of the war, practising a bit of sabre rattling with Ethiopia and the Dirgue. What is so obviously striking - overwhelmingly so is the utter naivety of the R.A.F. and their almost childlike innocence when faced with national and international realities. The international co-operation against the hijackers, the teams of special counter-terrorist groups drawn from several nations working hand in glove with each other reads like a parodic nightmare wish-fulfillment of Andreas Baader and Ulriche Meinhof's predictions on the future of German social democracy. According to an article they wrote as late as I976 in Stammheim prison, German social democracy along with American Imperialism is the major threat to world peace.

Terrorism and the surplus population

Maressin says: "Now these fractions expelled [from production] tend to constitute a large middle class from the point of view of their situation and the relations of production." This conception differs from Marx who considered the surplus population part of the proletariat too. However Maressin's statements merits further consideration. The surplus population are a fearfully atomized mass who relate to production only on the level of consumption and their impotence and rage easily leads them to laying down the social security card (if they're lucky enough to have one as in the UK) and picking up the bomb in a single handed bid to abolish capitalism. The second generation of Red Brigade terrorists in Italy after scanty employment in factories partially at least now occupies this marginal proletarian position though Maressin sketches in the conditions that gave rise to Leninism and its substitutionist perspective and practise, he seems not to be aware that the particular conditions of the surplus population can also give rise to this irrespective of the Leninist type party.

In Maressin's book one finds abstract conceptualisation alongside everyday naivety.

Things should really not have turned out the way they did. Is it reality that's at fault or the theory? To pose the question in this way really shows how damaging Maressin's finality was in precluding an absolutely haywire trajectory for the R.A.F. When the book became known in England circa 1973-74 it was given a favourable reception but its support for terrorism was universally condemned among the very few who read - more nearly - flicked through the book. Though Marxist concepts were only slowly been clarified – productive / unproductive labour, constant / variable capital etc, there was a reservoir of personal experience on which to draw which was highly critical of terrorism, of breakdown, madness, media infected supermen and women and above all that class distance in England which caused militantism to be quickly conceived as something like an extended public school romp which was far removed from spontaneous, aggressive direct action of those living life at the sharp end.

Maressin and the student milieu

Maressin believes that today's Leninists "more and more resemble priests or social workers" because in refusing to face contemporary reality (instead of the socialization of misery it is the socialization of riches today) they must of necessity seek to implant themselves in the most 'backward' layers left out of account by capitalism - the old, prisoners, racial or sexual minorities etc. However one can say the same of today's ex-Maoists and yesterdays Maoists and for some reason, Maressin is far kinder to Maoists than to Leninists without developing the link between the two. Maressin's book is also deeply imbued with post 1968 euphoria. The world is trembling on the brink. Though he attempts a serious analysis of the place of students in society and their often uneasy accord with other class fractions he does not free himself of vanguardist notions. The world is waiting for the spark and minorities can provide it.

"The social crises at all levels shall result in a confrontation of unheard of violence - one has only to see what happened as a result of an explosion of a single structure, the university in May '68 to be able to imagine what shall happen as a result of an explosion in the totality of structures."

This insight - that the students weren't very sparkling at all - was also one of the causes of the rampant opportunism post the late 1960s amongst intellectuals in the UK and elsewhere too. Better by far to be a struck match in comfort than a dead one in forbidding poverty. Yet the latter path was finally to yield more genuinely revolutionary insights as those who took that path more and more were forced into living the real life where coherent subversion can take place.

Then the real bombshell: A few years after Champ Libre brought out La Bande de Baader, Debord and Sanguinetti very recently published their theses on state created / manipulated terrorism especially in relation to the Red Brigades in Italy meaning Maressin's incomplete, rather premature critique is now inevitably found wanting.