Workers Must Probe State Murders

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Jan-Carl certainly Tuesday Raspe, were almost murdered by West state agents on 18 October.

1hat 1s the only conclusion we 11_ can draw from the evidence surrounding their "suicides in Stammheim top security jail.

Irmgard Moller, another member of the gang, although stabbed near the heart is expected to survive.

The deaths came only hours after the joint German/British raid on the hi-jacked airliner in Somalia.

The media throughout West Germany reacted predictably, using the "celebration' to stir up anti-terrorist and anti-communist hysteria.

CLAMP The success of the raid signalled the time for yet another clamp down on already eroded basic rights. Since the kidnapping of the employers' leader Schleyer (a Nazi who was a friend of Goring and organised concentration camp labour) the German government has mounted a massive scurity campaign against the left.

The bourgeois press the world over welcomed the "destruction of the gang". . It was, the Times said, "a good day for Germany".

Germany's Social Democratic government were given maximum support during the operation by British Prime Minister Callaghan and his lapdog David Owen.

Not only did they give the strongest moral support to the first West German military operation abroad since 1945, they also loaned members of the British Special _Air Service and British equipment for the raid.

It is clear that the imperialists (after recent joint meetings in London) have decided to make these military operations the standard response to anything they choose to label as "terrorism"

REWARD

The Mogadishu raid got the full cooperation of the "Marxist" military government of Somalia, acting in the expectation of reward in the form of arms supplies from West Germany, Saudi Arabia and other imperialist countries.

Urgent tasks now face the workers movement in Germany. It should demand that Irmgard Moller be transferred to a normal hospital at once and freed upon recovery. All charges against her must be dropped. The evidence she can give must be taken up by an independent workers' enquiry set up to ascertain the events leading up to the deaths.

The 'crime' which the RAF were accused of is one of attacking the symbols of imperialism. But it is the Schmidt government-which viciously attacks even the most basiç rights, that expels immigrant workers at will, that blacklists militants and that harbours Nazi war criminals such as Schleyer-that is guilty of the real terrorism.

For the past years the four victims were incarcerated in Stammheim, with no access to the outside world. Two weeks ago a vicious new law was rushed through parliament which allows political prisoners to be held in total isolation, even from their lawyers. This attack on democratic rights was so naked it even led to token protests from one or two "left' social democratic MPs.

SOLIDARITY

The RAF members have been constantly harassed, degraded and tortured; yet still they have stubbornly refused to waver in their commitment to the cause of armed struggle against the state. They will be remembered for their courage in the face of this attack.

But they will also be remembered as tragic proof that individual terrorism and attempts to substitute for the mass actions of the working class are bound to fail.

What their fate can teach us is not new. Much of the history of the pre-Marxist movement was the history of organisations with aims and methods similar to the RAF's.

Organisations such as Babeuf's Conspiracy of Equals, the Carbonari, the Buonarroti and Auguste Blanqui's Secret Societies all shared what Engels called the "fantastic idea of overturning an entire society by the action of a small group of conspirators.

CHOSEN FEW

Instead of open agitation amongst the masses leading to largescale mobilisation, these early 'Baader-Meinhofs' opted for agitation behind the backs of the working class, agitation generally confined to the chosen few who themselves kept secret their Lenin, too, had to wage a harsh struggle against conspiratorial traditions amongst sections of the Russian masses.

Under the Tsarist dictatorship the Russian social democrats:

... had never dreamed of being able, to form a workers' party in Russia legally . . • they always thought that this fight must be waged not by conspiracy but by a revolutionary party based on the working class movmeent. They think that the fight against the autocracy must consist not in organising conspiracies, but in education, disciplining and organising the proletariat". (The Tasks of the Russian Social Chancellor Schmidt urban guerrillas turn to other layers to lead the revolution, and in the case of the RAF to carry it out single-handed, is that they share a total blindness to the power of the working class.

Because they see no prospects of harnessing this power by galvan-