Free The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History by J Smith

imperialism and liberation. In other words, all around the world imperialism’s instability produces a situation whereby it could slide into a final systemic crisis if it is defeated at any point in the global system or loses its dominance in some area—whether a strategic military position (Southern Africa, the Middle East), an economic component (such as oil, strategic mineral resources, or technological superiority), or the political domination of a geographic region (such as Central America or the Gulf).
    Since Vietnam, the conflict has shifted from a confrontation between the center and the liberation struggles, the front and the hinterland, to a situation where the front line cuts across every sector and every country. Any sector, due to its specific point of integration and its unique significance in the overall system, could disrupt the balance of power—and, as a result, any sector could become a front in the liberation war.
    To put it bluntly, imperialism must react by centralizing its power: the state, the unified structure of the U.S. chain of states, the reconstruction of its capacity for military, economic, and political action, and of its instruments of domination. In an attempt to get global developments back under control, they will intervene everywhere: in the existing struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in the emergent national states, in the East-West conflict, and in Western Europe, with the goal of using this generalized offensive to reestablish their hegemonic position.
    Faced with united imperialist reaction, it is necessary for the anti-imperialist struggle to carry out parallel struggles on all fronts. They are all different sectors of a single front. And, as struggles that must be carried out side by side, each sector—and this includes the West European sector—will, on the basis of its own strengths, its own particular development, and its own specific current and historical conditions, be able to form an actual front that can shake imperialism.
    This is why the dialectic of the ‘77 confrontation led to qualitatively new subjective conditions of struggle here and to the definitive integration of contradictions in the center into the development, the imperative, and the possibility of international class war. In this sense, it came at the right time.
    In fact, this is also the context in which the state found itself in ‘77. Faced with the end of the U.S. chain of states’ first stage of development, our defeat provided it with an opportunity to put on a show of force that was meant to show that it was not acting within the context of the national state, but on the level of the global counterrevolutionary project. In other words, it was acting as the key European power, which, in keeping with its function within the U.S. chain of states, will be politicallycompelled to act both domestically and throughout Western Europe against all forms of resistance, so as to facilitate the international attack. But by doing this it has helped define the lines along which the decisive struggle will develop: the unified struggle of the West European states against the guerilla has made the concept of a West European guerilla front a reality, and, at the most basic social level, as a result of the FRG’s laws and its history, a profound chasm has opened between society and the state, making the revolutionary front a realistic option here.
    There is no longer any point in analyzing the internal changes here as isolated phenomena. As a result of their attitude and experiences, those who have been struggling for some time have already internalized the new situation and have accepted it as a turning point. What we are saying is that the system is faced with unprecedented fundamental opposition. Cold, without illusions, expecting nothing from the state. It’s no longer about “changing the system” or an “alternative model” of the state. All of that