English translation: Martin's "Greetings from illegality"

"Greetings from illegality

to family, friends, comrades, allies, trailerpark residents1. to everyone who wants to engage with my and our point of view.

Legal, illegal, whatever2. On February 26 of this year, Daniela Klette was arrested in Berlin. Journalists who had willingly served as auxiliary police officers and helped to add to the increasingly authoritarian state the state and social community of investigators and informers had used AI technology to track down images of Daniela on the Internet. The historical merit of these podcast-journalistic informers will have been to have provided proof at the right moment of the alleged necessity of biometric control through facial recognition on the way to a totalitarian control state.

Deceiving the public

The subsequent police manhunt against Volker Staub and me has been characterized by lies and agitation since that moment. The police and the bourgeois media say that we are violent criminals or terrorists who would not shy away from killing for money. The house where Daniela had lived was evacuated, as were the neighboring houses, due to allegedly dangerous explosives. Measures were taken to mobilize the population for a manhunt and psychological warfare operations began. It is now known that one grenade and one bazooka that were found were dummies. The police must have known this from the beginning. This whole action over several days was an operation to deceive and manipulate the public.

The constant propagation of our violence and dangerousness, the martial-style searches of houses and trailerparks, armoured vehicles and MP-armed police officers as if war had broken out, checks and arrests with the deliberately created images are nothing but the assertion of the necessity of police militarization and a staging to mobilize the population for a manhunt.

Above all, however, by creating an image of violent criminals, they aim to depoliticize and denounce the history of the fundamental opposition - the history of the historical attempt to contribute to liberation from the violent relations of capitalism, which emerged from the resistance of the (19)68 movement and was linked to the worldwide revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles.

26 years ago, the urban guerrilla project RAF ended. However, for us, who were persecuted as militants of the RAF, life in illegality did not end: the image of us that is tried to be created describes a violently marauding band of robbers3 who are dangerous to the general public and are also prepared to kill - and only for money. For us, however, it is out of the question to use deadly or physical violence against people for money. Any traumatization of employees of cash offices or money transporters is to be regretted, and there is no reason to believe anything the police or judicial apparatuses say, because they are driven by the desire to delegitimize fundamental opposition and to 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 beneath everyday bourgeois life, in the militarization of “internal security”, in its relationship of exploitation” (Peter Brückner 1976)

State violence affects many - the poor, the exploited, the marginalized. It is directed against those who protest or against those who defend themselves against this normal state of affairs and do not accept it as a given. These are those who demonstrate against the genocide in Gaza and against a German government that supplies the weapons for it, and are therefore exposed to an authoritarian and violent mixture of police batons, imprisonment, threats from the judiciary, threats of deportation, loss of employment and secret service surveillance, or whose demonstrations are banned altogether. They are the ones who occupy universities and are beaten down by police violence. Those who have something to say at Palestine events and are banned from entering the country, or artists, writers and academics from all over the world whose exhibitions, lectures or events are canceled because they have the “wrong” opinion. It is the Jewish activists who are branded as anti-Semitic because they do not represent the German raison d'état and are therefore maltreated with this form of anti-Semitism by those in power.

They are the ones who organized themselves on the streets to demonstrate against the destruction of all life on this planet by capitalism and are declared terrorists or sentenced to prison for it. They are the ones who are driven out of their villages because energy companies want to make profits from the fossil fuels there. It is those who oppose this overexploitation of capitalism and the destruction of the climate that comes with it. They are the ones who confront the companies’ excavators and therefore are subjected to police violence. They are the ones in the South who today, as a result, are being forced to flee in their millions, because the capitalist system is enforcing the corporations’ profits by the police baton in the metropolises, making entire regions of the world devastated and uninhabitable.

It is those who have realized that the state has taken Corona as an opportunity to advance the formation of the authoritarian state, and are being denounced for it.

It is those who fight in Antifa against fascism and Nazis and are therefore – under threats of police and judiciary - in illegality or locked up in prisons. It is the comrades who organize themselves against the oppression of Kurds, who oppose the madness that arises from the wars of Western states, the IS, and who stand up for the liberation of patriarchal structures and for democratic confederalism in Kurdistan and are persecuted as PKK members by the German judiciary and locked up in prison for years.

They are the ones who under the name K.O.M.I.T.E.E. are said to have opposed militarism and the racist deportation regime and have been persecuted and forced into exile by the judiciary for almost 30 years.

They are the ones who have been evicted in Berlin in recent years: Syndikat, Liebig 34, Meuterei, Potse-Drugstore, Köpi Wagenplatz. Police terror and displacement for the profit of criminal investors and against the utopia of collective and solidary living. It is those who can no longer afford the rent for their apartment who are being evicted by the police.

Those who are evicted every day because they have to live in tents or under bridges in the midst of wealth. They are the ones who know that they have every moral right in the world, in times when the masses can no longer afford rents, to simply appropriate houses by squatting and no longer accept the law of the property of the few - but would end up in the mills of the police and justice system for doing so. It is the masses in precarious employment. Those who have to sell their labor cheaply. Those who are squeezed from morning to night and whose wages are barely enough to live on in the end.

They are those who are locked away in solitary confinement in prisons or closed psychiatric wards, even though solitary confinement is internationally outlawed as white torture.

It is those who are threatened daily by the racism of the German police or Oury Jalloh, who was burned alive in the Dessau police station, hands and feet cuffed and without the slightest possibility of movement, because he was black. It is the desperate refugee teenager Mouhamed Dramé, who died shot through by a machine gun in a hail of bullets from the Dortmund police, and who was not a danger to his murderers for a second. 16-year-old, unarmed teenager Halim Dener, who was murdered by a police officer shooting him in the back because he had put up a poster for the Kurdish liberation movement. Those people who were murdered by the NSU because they came from migrant families - for years undisturbed and free from state persecution and with proven links to German secret services.

It is those who are forced to migrate due to wars, climate destruction and poverty and who drown by the thousands in the Mediterranean, are turned away at German and EU borders or end up in deportation prisons.

It is the thousands in the former Yugoslavia whose lives were extinguished by NATO bombers, carried and ordered by the German government with the abused 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 the German Bundeswehr soldier Klein, who ordered this even though he had previously been informed by the US military that the 141 people were civilians, and who was promoted to general by the German government for this.

It is the tens of thousands or more who can no longer stand it all, who flee into addiction to hard drugs or prefer to end their lives themselves.

It is all those who oppose the war, who oppose the fascization and militarization of the capitalist normality. Those who do not want to simply accept all this. Those who fight back. Those who do not resign themselves, but stand up for a world liberated from all domination without a top and a bottom and without the violence of the police and the military, who protect the top from the bottom.

There are countless people who can sing a song about the true conditions of violence in the capitalist system

However, it is those apologists of capitalism who have a common interest, that there must be no alternative to capitalism, who particularly like to talk about the alleged violence of those who rebel wherever they are in the world, whose grief and anger becomes collective resistance. However, they almost never talk about their own violence - the structural and brutal violence of the capitalist system.

It is this violence that should be talked about.

Structural violence of capitalism - revolutionary self-defense – liberation

As part of the revolutionary left, we were - and I say: we are - convinced that a system based on violence has no legitimacy and that its emancipatory overcoming 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 ending the violence of capitalism, the domination of man over man, exploitation, militarism and war and to transform it into a different social reality. We were part of all those who rebelled in the history of struggles for human emancipation, freedom and self-determination.

We started from this premise: Anyone who poses the question of a non-violent society that is not committed to the profit of the few, the division of people into black and white, rich and poor or male and female, must inevitably at some point confront the question of structural violence of the system, revolutionary counter-movement and revolutionary self-defense.

The martial appearance of the state security apparatus against us in the context of the crisis

The martial appearance against us takes place in the context of the present social development, in which the question of the anti-capitalist alternative system is actualized. Therefore, any thought of and any history of fundamental opposition to the capitalist and imperialist system should be discredited. The capitalist system has fallen into a comprehensive and multi-layered crisis. Its possibilities for growth, which are existentially necessary for capitalism, are increasingly reaching their limits. The consequences are and will continue to increase significantly: Poverty, mass company layoffs and the dismantling of welfare state programs.

The crisis is not being paid for by the top ten thousand but by those at the bottom: 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 need even more precarious jobs in order to survive; the unemployed, who are to be disciplined with every new tightening of the job center system; the junkies, the young people (especially those in the poorer parts of the city) and those who have to live on the streets. Or those affected by violence and many others whose spaces where they had received support or could meet are being closed.

Politicians and the police like to talk about migrant clans as if they were the problem of society. However, they never talk about the clans of the Hohenzollerns or the Quants, even though they represent the madness of capitalism with their immense wealth and its distribution and are partly responsible for this madness. Worldwide, the richest 85 people own as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest people combined.

Fear, pressure and discipline for obedience - class justice

The judiciary is sentencing more and more people in the course of the authoritarian state crisis response: The poor wretches also “gladly” end up in prison from time to time because they supposedly or actually want to take some of the cake. Those who allegedly or actually receive a few euros “unjustly” from the job center or those who shout the “wrong” slogan at demonstrations in the interests of those in power are judicially sentenced. However, the rich and powerful, such as the capitalists, billionaires and politicians involved in the cum-ex affair, who have made millions on their websites, are not condemned.

The authoritarian crisis state prioritizes internal militarization - the arming of the police and secret services as well as external militarization. This means that huge sums of money flow into the police, military, arms industry and wars. By contrast, less and less reaches those affected by poverty or any kind of need - a gigantic process of redistribution from the bottom to the top. The rulers' crisis management is aimed at revitalizing the “national community” and “tightening the belt” for the masses. This is what they call it when they speak of impoverishment and social erosion as consequences of their policy of rule and of decimating the right to asylum until there is hardly anything left of it or only those who are exploitable for capital have a right to live in the metropolis.

Two stabbings - those in Solingen and Mannheim - were enough to justify a comprehensive police build-up, border controls, further steps in the process of abolishing the right to asylum and mass deportations. 360 femicides in 2023, on the other hand, did not move those in power to do anything. Today, the Muslim population and refugees are enemy images desired and created from above that can be used to construct a “national community”. By claiming that they are the cause of the problems, those in power divide and channel the discontent of broad sections of the population and conceal the fact that they themselves and capitalism are the cause of the fundamental problems.

Enemy stereotypes can be used to justify authoritarian, repressive policies and create a broad consensus. This works particularly well in times when a relevant social revolutionary and anti-capitalist left is absent. The consensus of the neo-fascist right and the entire bourgeois spectrum is obvious.

The great problems of humanity: the destruction of ecological living conditions, nationalism, war and poverty cannot be objectively solved under capitalism. Anti-fascism is anti-capitalist, or it remains ineffective.

The rise of the radical right across Europe is an expression of the ongoing and growing crisis of capitalism, and the right-wing parties that are being integrated into the ruling elites in more and more EU countries - Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, France and at EU level - are rallying behind them a section of those who have been left behind or who are afraid of social decline, with bogus solutions that do not call capitalism into question. The European elites and right-wing parties have long had the same crisis solution in their program: an authoritarian state against the disobedient, dismantling the welfare state, massive armament and increasing the ability to wage war, arming the police and expanding their powers as well as police and secret service control of society, nationalism, migrants as scapegoats for the crisis and mass deportations.

All parties of the neo-fascist right and the so-called center in Germany - from the AFD to the Greens - agree on this. It is an illusion to hope that the racism and the vision of the “German people's community” of the neo-fascist right can be meaningfully countered with the racism and the same visions of the bourgeois state. The visions of the AFD and other European right-wing parties have long been the consensus of those in power and mark their path into the future.

The major problems facing humanity - the destruction of ecological living conditions, war and poverty - cannot be objectively solved within capitalism. The comprehensive crisis of the present is the catalyst for all of this and is driving the world towards a possible military, nuclear and climatic abyss. The solution can only be sought in an anti-capitalist and domination-free organization of humanity, freed from the compulsion of growth inherent in capitalism. From this perspective, the radicalization of state and society that is emerging with the crisis can only be countered by searching for ways to find an alternative system. The social question, resistance to war and militarization both internally and externally, resistance to the ecological destruction of the planet by capitalism and the organization of solidary internationalism necessarily mark this path together.

In the West's fight against the threat of losing its global hegemony, those in power are relying on militarization and are planning war on the scale of World War 3.

We have arrived in the age of the increasingly authoritarian state. This is undoubtedly a threatening social condition. But it also speaks for an increased degree of instability in capitalism. In its greed for profit, it needs the possibilities of accumulation, which are becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. It lurches from crisis to crisis. It is the age of wars, social upheaval and reactionary reflection on the people and the nation. But it also suggests that things could be slipping away from those in power and the question arises: What to do? Will class struggles develop in the future that question and fight the conditions of exploitation and oppression in collective processes? In an age of social and economic erosion, increasing military renegotiation of power and irreversible ecological destruction of the planet, the questions of how social transformation can be achieved are more existential and topical than ever.

The circle closes

The revolutionary concepts of history could not provide the answers to overcoming capitalism. Nevertheless, we are fundamentally faced with the same questions under changed conditions.

The state relies on division

Illegality, solidarity and “terrorists”

We have met many people in decades of illegality. Friends, allies, neighbors, my fellow residents of the Wagenplatz and many more. I lived for many years with people who didn't know what kind of history I came from. As an illegal, it is not possible to talk about your own illegality. Please forgive me for that.

With the end of this time together came repression for them. Car parking lots and house searches: local war simulations - something I never wanted, but in the end was no longer in my hands. Revolutionary and emancipatory struggles are followed by repression - and so it will be until the struggle for emancipation triumphs over injustice. We are part of the history of worldwide rebellions that have existed ever since there has been domination and slaves. That have existed since patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism have been the evil of humanity. From this perspective, the responsibility for repression lies with the rulers and no one else; repression is an instrument of domination. In my view - and that would be our view - there is only one answer: solidarity.

Unite against today's repression against Daniela!

Create (counter) publicity! Show solidarity!

We are the way we were and are the way many people got to know us during the long period of illegality. Confrontations about violent relationships - patriarchal violence, poverty and racism - like many other things, were echoed in encounters and friendships with people during this time and are part of my and our lives. Much of what we had to do with others in the decades of our illegality, the paths we took with others, tell of the search for a solidary and emancipatory reality beyond capitalist relations of violence. The connection with others during this time is the mirror of our reality - of how and who we are.

In the historiography of those in power, there is fundamental resistance to the capitalist system: crime, violence and terror. The image created is intended to replace reality and conceal the fact that it is the structural violence of the system that is the great problem of humanity. The manufactured image of the “terrorist” is intended to depoliticize the history of resistance against the capitalist relations of violence, to divide, to obscure the fact that state violence and the violent relations of the capitalist system are really only terror for many people in the world.

“Peace to the huts! War to the palaces!” (Georg Büchner – 1834)

Anyone who goes from protest to resistance can be stylized as a “terrorist”. The countless stories of rebellions and resistance tell of this: Klaus Störtebecker, Thomas Müntzer, Georg Büchner; the social revolutionary, anarchist and insurgent against the reactionary German empire August Reinsdorf, executed in 1885; Karl Plättner, the council communist, critic of the KPD, Red Aid activist, author of the first concept of an urban guerrilla and militant of the uprisings of the workers' movement 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 the Paris Communue or the Black Jacobins - the people enslaved by European colonialism who fought for liberation in today's Haiti in the anti-colonial revolution from 1791; whether partisans in many European countries against Nazi fascism or CNT anarchists in Spain against the military dictatorship, whether the revolutionary struggle of the Black Panthers, the June 2nd Movement, the Red Zora or the ANC's resistance against apartheid - they were all “terrorists” in the propaganda of those in power.

Terror has nothing to do with us, but a lot to do with the rulers and the capitalist system

The term terror has nothing to do with revolutionary counter-violence, which is revolutionary self-defense, of the emancipatory movements of history, which is directed exclusively and specifically against those in power. Terror describes indiscriminate violence to enforce rule or secure it. The term “terrorists” in bourgeois society would, among other things, take on reality as a self-incrimination and description of those in power and would then be a meaningful term instead of a manipulative phrase. Today, the term “terrorist” is above all a means of domination. Exploitation, repression, the Frontex regime, class INJUSTICE????? justice and the prison system; hunger, wars, coups and military dictatorships under the direction of the capitalist centers and with the historical responsibility of every German government: the millions of dead can no longer be counted - terror has nothing to do with us, but a lot to do with them and their system.

Solidarity has no limits

In a situation of weakness, it has meant a lot and it has given us courage: the solidarity demonstration in March in Berlin for Daniela's freedom and solidarity with us illegal immigrants WHY ARE THEY IMMIGRANTS????, against the car parking and house searches, against the agitation and all the state terror; the solidarity rallies at the prison in Vechta, the wall slogans and the solidarity rallies in various European countries.

For more than three decades, we were able to organize ourselves collectively outside of the paths determined for us by bourgeois society, which had nothing planned for us but to be locked up or shot. We were able to find ways to lead a life in which, through all the ups and downs, a social reality other than the capitalist normality of alienation, isolation and exploitation could emerge. No one can take that away from us. It will remain part of the historiography from below.

Solidarity among us - with those who rebelled, are rebelling or will rebel against this system yesterday, today or tomorrow

Daniela - locked in a prison cell day after day. And this despite the abysmal reality of the situation: they may have some of their laws on their side, but they do not have the legitimacy. The historical attempts of countless people over many centuries to overcome these conditions - against the violence of those who want everything to remain as it is, who declare human emancipation and liberation to be wrong and injustice to be right - were and are completely legitimate.

The judiciary of the Nazi successor state, which hardly ever convicted the Nazis of Nazi fascism, is now planning years of show trials against Daniela, in which she is to be sentenced as a representative of the history of the fundamental opposition and locked away in prison for many years. The state is focusing on deterrence, targeting not only Daniela but all those who do not comply, who do not accept that humanity has no alternative to capitalism and thus to the destruction of the planet. A farce that affects everyone - regardless of their history or point of view - for whom capitalism should not remain the last word in history.

Show solidarity!

Making the impossible possible, as Che Guevara said, has an existential meaning for humanity today: against the abysses of the “turn of an era”, learning to rethink the alternative system in collective processes and to fight for it collectively and internationally; breaking through the logic of those in power that there is no alternative to capitalism - “there is no alternative” - in us and in all relations. The historical window of epochal change - systemic and social erosion of capitalism - is currently opening wider and wider. A new age of barbarism is lurking in the continuing intensification of relations. Only the struggles of a social revolutionary counter-movement could provide an alternative.

'Socialism or barbarism' - as Rosa Luxemburg predicted in 1919, accurately predicting the historical reality: after the First World War and the global economic crisis of the time, the window of eroding capitalism and revolution opened. From 1918 to 1923, the workers' movement, revolutionary feminists, anarchists and communists in Germany attempted to implement the socialist revolution. At the same time, a large part of humanity rose up in revolts on five continents. In Germany, the insurgent workers' movement's attempt to overcome capitalism failed. It would have been the only way to avert the subsequent era of barbarism. The attempt at socialist revolution was crushed, and what remained was capitalism, which in Germany took the form of Nazi fascism and led to the Second World War and Auschwitz.

With today's profound crisis of capitalism and the global epochal changes, the historical moment of 'either or' of 'socialism or barbarism' could arise again with a clear tendency and increasing speed. The fixation on bourgeois-fascist-capitalist parties will not be able to prevent the development of the German crisis state and the EU into growing authoritarianism and war. There is nothing to save. Only an abolition of capitalism fought for from below in the process of transformation will be able to put an end to this development.

Today, the social-revolutionary alternative to the progressive fascization of the capitalist system, spreading poverty in the metropolis, the coming global war and the ecological destruction of the planet would be a socialism that learns from the mistakes of history and thus offers the possibility of building a liberated society - for a world of collectivity, freedom from patriarchy, exploitation, domination and nation, and the survival of nature.

This world will not be possible without a militant, creative and diverse movement that is present in the increasing crisis and in the rapidly growing social struggles of the future. This would be the reconstruction of the capacity for action of an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary and internationalist left that works beyond its own borders. The end of the Sleeping Beauty sleep: it is time - it is time - to move.

Solidarity with Daniela!

Solidarity with the comrades in exile, all those in underground and the prisoners from the struggles of the Antifa, the resistance, the Kurdish and Turkish comrades, the climate movement and all other emancipatory struggles in the world!

The demand for Daniela's immediate release is justified.

Martin
(Burkhard Garweg)"

1 Martin refers to a form of collective living in trailerparks that is quite common in Berlin. He lived at such a trailerpark before Daniela Klette's arrest and his subsequent decision to be on the run again

2 Here Martin quotes to a common german slogan of the movement of the 80s and 90s

3 The three are accused of a series of bank and supermarket robberies after the RAF was dissolved