Second Hunger Strike

Our January/February hunger strike was unsuccessful. The baw’s promise to end our isolation was bullshit. We are again on hunger strike.

We demand:

that political prisoners be placed with all of the other prisoners!


free access to political information for all prisoners—including from the media of the apo.

No more, no less. Now.

Enough of the dirty dealing—time is on your side; we won’t be duped.

Eat shit or die! That’s the law of the system. There’s profit to be made. Every child, every woman, every man must be threatened, intimidated, and terrified into submission. Every option in this system ends in evil.

Either be integrated into the existing capitalist system—

the assembly line chews up people and spits out profits—

the office chews up people and spits out bosses—

the schools chew up people and spit out a labor force—

the universities chew up people and spit out robots—

or face starvation, marginalization, suicide.

Whoever doesn’t accept the available options, doesn’t internalize them; whoever, after 10, 15, 20 years of being socialized to conform to the capitalist system of exploitation, still has dreams, still speaks up to protest, still has the strength to resist—can no longer keep up with the tempo of work—cracks—is sick—beats his boss instead of his wife and kids—would rather himself rob and beat, then let himself be subjected to the laws of thieves and murderers—(really people, Springer makes 100 million in profits ever year!)—or develops ideas about workers’ power—counterviolence—organizes revolutionary politics and resistance—will be criminalized or declared insane.

It’s been like that since your great-grandfather’s time, since the beginning of bourgeois society: workhouses, poorhouses, prisons, reform schools, judges, cops, doctors, psychiatrists, priests.

Whoever doesn’t accept the hidden relationship of war—the bourgeoisie against the people—as a natural state of affairs, as the only possible reality—will be ground down in chains in the system’s prison camps. Those who can be resocialized, that is to say, those who can be stripped of their will to resist and adapted to the capitalist production process, will be spit back out—those who can’t will be destroyed.

Amongst them are the prisoners who serve as the system’s alibi: the white-collar criminals and a few convicted ss pigs.

The more the people’s revolt shakes the system’s morale and its concept of property rights, the greater the existing crisis, the more the people’s dreams for the future are replaced with desires for material rewards… the more important prisons will be for a system that has always candidly recognized the need to terrorize and destroy a section of the proletariat—Treblinka, Maidanek and Sobibór are extreme examples—to break the resistance against the exploitation of a large majority of the people—prisons and extermination camps as the next-to-final and final measures against all forms of resistance—as effectively, systematically, and intentionally as ever.

The pigs have the prisons firmly in their grip. With every reform the prison system is made more extensive.

They have everything necessary: violence, isolation, transfers, corruption, privileges, partially open, two-thirds open, and fully open prisons, infiltrators, torture, clemency—and the closed structure: justice/police/prisons/psychiatry/media (newspapers, tv, radio); for greater efficiency: disgusting conditions and toilet-size cells; against prison breakdown: murder/“suicide”; for less grotesque coercion: clubs/bread and water/bondage/silent cells; for friendly brainwashing: psychiatry/police therapists/valium; for slicker and blander structural violence: removing the prisoners’ remaining contact with reality (e.g., the exercise cages on the 5th and 7th floors of the new building at Frankfurt-Preungesheim)—in lieu of the terrible screams of broken prisoners.

The pigs’ humanism in a word: hygiene.

The Social Democrat’s reform program in a sentence: nip revolt in the bud through flexible measures.

The political prisoners, those who have developed a political understanding of their reality and have acted upon it and embraced it—who understand the inhumanity of their situation and of the system—who feel hate and outrage—who, in this all out war, resist the pigs, the prison authorities, the social ideologues, the dilettantes and jerk-offs, the green fascists[1]—who act in solidarity and ask for solidarity in return: they are kept in isolation, which is to say, they are socially exterminated.

On the other side, the entire justice system talks endless shit about human rights and the Constitution—and to the degree that those can’t be manipulated, don’t count out the shot to the back of the head.

Resocialization means manipulation and training. Prisoners are obliged to live with walls, cops, regulations, compulsion, threats, fear, hope, and restricted movement until they have internalized this shit and are only capable of behaving as if they are behind bars.

That is the training.

The prisoners’ cooperation is obviously desirable—it shortens the process and makes it irreversible. There is one thing the prisoners completely forget about in this process, in fact, they must forget about it: self-esteem.

That is the manipulation.

The more liberal the approach taken to this shit—the more discreet—the more casual—the more pleasant—the more underhanded—the more slick—in short, the more psychological—the more effective and the more profound the destruction of the prisoner’s personality.

The political prisoners are the deadly enemies of the psycho-cops—because the psycho-pigs don’t want the prisoners to see through it all—through the therapeutic and helpful facade, past the little shits, the piglets, to the thugs—and the political prisoners do see through it all.

The central point in modern imprisonment is: a political and psychological orientation to prisons—our isolation now and concentration camps later—whether administered by green or white[2] terror troops—the end result: extermination camps—reform Treblinkas—reform Buchenwalds—the “final solution.” That’s what’s happening.

We demand free access to political information for all prisoners, because consciousness is necessary for politicization. We’re not demanding anything from them that is not already available in prison—standardized wages for work, education/training, protection for families, autonomy—because this is not some prisoner-organized reformist claptrap that can be demobilized and politically neutralized with promises of reform, that is integrated into the prison pigs’ dictatorship and made into a kind of “Kraft durch Freude.”[3] What we want is political solidarity—not just ideas, but real solidarity.

Our hunger strike is simply our only option for collective resistance in isolation. Without power, the violence of the streets, without the mobilization of antifascist citizens to intercede for human rights and against torture, presuming they have not already sworn allegiance to the pigs—our hunger strike will not be enough to break through our powerlessness.

Our demands are as such an appeal to you, comrades.

The pigs only win if one of us eventually buys the farm. We are depending on you to support our demands and to force them through—now while you still can: before you yourselves become prisoners.

And comrades: simply talking about torture without struggling will serve neither our interests nor your own—meaning: you will only be helping the pigs to build up their defenses.

Your actions in January/February[4]—the demonstration in Karlsruhe, attacking Jessel, the go-ins at Norddeutschen Rundfunk[5] and at the offices of a few pigs from the justice system, a few examples of stone throwing—good. No teach-in, no go-in at the pen Club,[6] nothing at the writers’ union, nothing addressing the churches, which have since taken up the question of torture and human rights, no demonstrations in Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, no sign of militant actions—bad.

We are confronting the pigs with their own laws—we are rubbing their noses in the contradiction between what they say: defense of humanity—and what they do: extermination.

Every moment hangs between life and death—us or them—they for themselves or us for ourselves.

On February22, 1973, the federal Attorney General Pig Martin[7] stated that there was no solution to this contradiction, which could only end in death:

“Prison conditions will be adjusted to the specific physical and psychological needs of the various prisoners!”—that’s for sure. Oxygen levels will be automatically adjusted—there’s food three times a day—and there’s the tactic of allowing visits from relatives when one has reached a point of ice-cold clarity, to throw sand in one’s eyes. The final word from the highest level of the oppressive authority clique: extermination.

Everything is clear. The program is in motion.

Pressure the pigs from the outside, and we will pressure them from the inside.

Solidarity will determine the balance of power.

All power to the people!

United people’s power against the system based on

prison/reform school/the psychiatric asylum

[1] A term for the police, whose uniforms were green.

[2] Greens being police, whites are presumably psychiatrists.

[3]Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Happiness) was a Nazi organization within the Arbeitsfront (Work Front), the Nazi “company” union. Kraft durch Freude organized vacations and leisure activities for the working class.

[4] The period during which the raf was on its first hunger strike—what follows is a list of solidarity actions about which the editors of this volume sadly have no further details.

[5] North German Radio, a chain of radio stations serving north-western Germany and headquartered in Hamburg.

[6]pen is an international organization promoting literacy and defending literary works from censorship. It’s president between 1971 and 1974 was Heinrich Böll.

[7] Ludwig Martin, Attorney General from April7, 1963, until April30, 1974.