BAADER- MEINHOF BRIGADE

The rounding up of the German urban guerrilla band which called itself the Red Army Factionknown as the BaaderMeinhof group after its main leaders—has provided sensational copy for the world's press.

The group was responsible for a spectacular series of bomb of the Federal Repubic parts of the Federal Republic revenge for during May, Nixon's bombing carried out in offensive in North Vietnam.

One shook the Springer press building in Hamburg. Others took place in other cities and were aimed at American army barracks and police stations. Three American soldiers were among those killed and injured.

After these exploits, the West German police, which had been hunting for Baader and his accomplices for months with increasing frenzy, was ordered to stop at nothing to bring in the group dead or alive.

Huge forces were mobilized to comb the country in a show of police strength unprecedented even under the Nazi regime. Meanwhile, in the press, a hate campaign was carried on, reflecting and encouraging the fears of the middle class.

Early in June Baader and some of his friends were tracked down to a hide-out in a Frankfurt garage. Police shot and wounded Baader and dragged them out, half naked, to waiting police vehicles. The action was photographed for the delectation of readers of Europe's scandal sheets.

Later in June police were given the tip-off by a contact at whose house Ulrike Meinhof was staying in Hanover. Another leading woman member Gudvun Enslinn was picked up after an assistant in a boutique had seen a pistol inside her coat.

Their appetite whetted, and spurred on the Springer press and other gutter papers which abound in West Germany, police pounced on most of the remaining members of the group, about 30 all told Then came a final bloody episode. Police enquires had by an odd chain of circumstances, linked a young Scottish businessman lain Macleod, living in Stuttgart, to the Baader-Meinhof group. Early one morning armed police stormed up to his fhat and shot him in the back with a machine pistol while he was standing naked in his bedroom.

In the hysterical atmosphere generated by the crisis in West Germany a police officer had obviously been intent on shooting first and asking questions afterwards. Inquiries soon showed that Macleod had nothing to do with the Baader-Meinhof group but was living it up in the best style of the consumer society' which they professed to hate.

By an ironic twist of fate, through the gun of a triggerhappy cop, the Baader group had killed one of their enemies.

The fevered imagination of one West German journalist tried to make out that Macleod was an agent of British intelligence, latter-day James Bond, though what interest he would have in playing the agent provocateur such a situation is not clear.

But in all likelihood the group was riddled with police agents and provocateurs. The trials which will take place as the heavy machinery of the German courts get to work may throw some light on this.

Macleod's only connection with the affair appears to be that he had once occupied a flat later rented by a suspect connected with the group. A little police work, after his death, soon established this. If nothing else, the BaaderMeinhof group's activities have shown the depth of hysteria to which Willy Brandt's Reich can sink. To deal with this group -a small fraction in terms of numbers of, say 150,000 heavily-armed the IRA in Ulsterover armoured cars and machine guns.

Hundreds of homes have been searched. Road blocks have been set up all over the country. Towns have been put under a virtual state of siege.

A massive apparatus for the preservation of internal security in West Germany obviously exists. Tried out against this tiny group of terrorists, in reality it is aimed against the working class. Workers are coming back onto the scene, as was shown by the powerful meta workers strike at the end of last year and the mass demonstrations on the streets when Brandt's government appeared be threatened.

The origins of the BaaderMeinhof group lay in the student movement in West Germany which assumed vast proportions in 1968-1969 and then receded almost as quickly. Under petty-bourgeois leaders who saw the working class not as a revolutionary force but as passive beneficiaries of the consumer society, it was unable to link up with the awakening working class in the factories.

The turn to terrorism was only the most extreme expression of the demoralization which set in. The small band of dedicated terrorists with their guns and bombs and their 'exemplary' actions substituted themselves for mass movement.

The Baader-Meinhofs resembled the Russian students and intellectuals who, 1n Tsarist Russia, hoped to further revolution by assassinating the Tsar or hated officials. Lenin and the Bolsheviks fought long theoretical struggle against such trends. After all, Lenin's own brother had sacrificed his life in a terrorist attack and he recognized the courage of such people while explaining how they could never defeat reaction.

Members of the BaaderMeinhof group come from impeccable social backgrounds of the middle or upper middle class. Their revolt against the injustices, abuses and philistinism of West German society is not accidental.

It has much in common with the hysterical reaction of the respectable German middle class. Its roots lie in the prolonged crisis of German society which opened with World War I and has gone through a whole experience of revolution, inflation, depression, war, fascism, defeat, fragile prosperity and now the fear of a new economic collapse.

The betrayals of Stalinism in the early 1930s, which opened the way for Hitler, and again after 1945, bear a heavy responsibility. They made possible the pulverization of the German working class by the Nazis. Then came the defeat and impoverishment, followed by a long period of the so-called economic miracle' in which the working class saw absolutely no political prospective and in which the old social-democratic bureaucracy was able to re-establish its grip.

In such a deep social crisis, manifestations such as individual terrorism, the revival of fascism and the rise of new cults of all sorts appealing to the middle class, and especially its most energetic layers in the student youth, would be expected.

In the late 1960s there was an opportunity to link it up with the working class. This required the assimilation of Marxism and a struggle to build a revolutionary party on the programme of the Fourth International.

The student leaders, such as Rudi Dutschke, deliberately turned their back on such a perspective. They wrote off the working class as a revolutionary force. They sought a short cut which satisfied more directly their individualism and impatience.

The result was that the student movement moved into futile confrontations with the police and remained entirely isolated from the working class.

Degenerating into a protest movement, it declined just when the working class was coming back onto the scene with demands of its own, asserting its own demands against German capitalism, now struck by the world economic crisis.

The turn of people like Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof to individual terrorism in its modern form of urban guerrilla activity was a product of this period.

In a deeper sense, however, it expresses the contradictions of German historical development-the impotence of the middle class, the betrayals of the workins class, the impact of fascism and war, the division of the country after World War II.

Baader and Meinhof turned instinctively to destroy the bourgeois society which had produced them and to which they irrevocably belonged.

They have become scapegoats for the German middle class. More, they become the excuse for the building up of an enormous machine of repression under the Social Democrat, Willy Brandt, ready to do battle with the working class and for a red scare which can prepare the way for a new reactionary, Bonapartist state.

The lesson of the history of the Baader-Meinhof group is the need to build a revolutionary party based on the working class in the country which was the first to have a mass party based on Marxism. WEINNSF Ulrike Meinhof (top left) was born in 1935 into a middle-class Social Democratic family which sheltered communists and other oppositionists under the Nazis. Her first political activity was in the 1950s in protests against the atom bomb. In 1958 she met Röhol, the publisher of a left-wing student magazine, 'Konkret'. He made her editor. She married him and for ten years they lived the life of radical intellectuals. The betrayals of Social Democracy (joining the Grand Coalition and supporting the so-called Emergency Powers Act) and then the shooting of the student Benno Ohnesorg by the Berlin police at a demonstration in 1967, finally drove her, towards the extraparliamentary opposition. She left Röhol and her comfortable life. In line with the theories of Herbert Marcuse she turned towards the drop-outs of society as the bearers of the revolutionary flag. Further disillusionment finally took her toward violent attacks on bourgeois society. She joined Baader and Ensslin and became the group's "brains'. BAADER Andreas Baader (top right) was born in 1943 into a middle-class home which, however, did not have the same intellectual tradition as those of Meinhoff and Ensslin. After an undistinguished school career he went to Berlin in 1963. He lived a Bohemian life with two painters who gave him enough to live on. (He has never worked for more than three weeks in his life.) He got to know Gudrun Ensslin and they burnt down a Frankfurt department store. In court he said: 'We saw the dangers of being eaten up and digested by the system if we did not go into action ourselves.' After 14 months' prison they were let out and immediately became famous in the student underground. In November 1969 they disappeared from view after another court overturned the decision to free them. In April 1970 Baader was betrayed by police spy Peter Urbach. Six weeks fater he was freed in a daring escape master-minded by Ulrike Meinhof. This was the beginning of the Baader-Meinhof ENSSUN Gudrun Ensslin (centre) was born in 1940 into a strongly National Socialist family (now CDU). Her father is a pastor. She did well at school and university. In 1962 she joined forces with Bernwald Vesper, the son of a Nazi writer, to start a small publishing venture. It was not a success. In the 1965 elections they campaigned for the SPD, writing speeches for among others Karl Schiller (the present Economics Minister). The failure of the SPD at the election and its decision to enter the 'Grand Coalition' the following year was a shock for Ensslin. As she said later: 'We realized that the leaders of the SPD itself had become prisoners of the system' The shooting of Benno Ohnesorg finally drove her towards extra - parliamentary activity. She began to read Marcuse and joined in the mass student demonstrations. In 1968 she helped Baader burn down a Frankfurt department store and from then on her life has been completely bound up with that of Andreas Baader and the group.

and Vanzetti were arrested on May 5, 1920. I out a few minutes after midnight on Augus : of capitalist justice is revealed. Reprinted fro Sacco carrier naturı Part 2. A period of sharp opposites What was the history the period? What were the specifics of the struggle of the two colossal forces in society' which forced the ruling class to create increasingly reactionary and dictatorial measures to beat back the offensive of the working class?

The period of 1914-1920 must be examined in its whole. It must be seen as a period of sharp opposites in absolute conflict with each other but, at the same time, in unity with each other under the capitalist system.. Bourgeois historians have always ignored the opposites that exist in any given period and have given only a one-sided view of that period.

Thus, the period from 1904. 1916 has been characterized as the Progressive Era and the 1920s seen as the 'Era of Normalcy', a time of extreme complacency and conservatism. By delineating only one opposite in each successive stage of history, these academthe so-called Progressive bra, in scores of reactionary laws were passed and the seeds of future repression were sown.

Neither can they explain how, in the so-called period of complacency, the working class was moving forward, engaged in fundamental battles and was mobilized throughout the world in the defence of What were the opposites in 1914-1920? As always within capitalism, the absolute opposites were the movement of the ruling class.

Thus, the growth of the trade union movement, of militant syndicalism and of anarchism was occurring against the background of increasing unemployment wages tied to productivity, and anti-union laws passed by the government.

Technological advances this period brought a marked increase of unemployment. Because of the increasing crisis within the capitalist system, employers introduced speed-up and productivity as a way to diminish the work force and increase their profits.

In addition, inflation was rampant throughout the period In the single year, 1919-1920 the cost of living index rose from 178 to 206.

The economic crisis was manifest in the declining value of the dollar. Between 1914. 1917, the purchasing power of dollar fell from 136.6 to 107.4. By 1918, it had dropped to a new low of 92.5. Thus between the outbreak of World War I and its end, the value of the dollar had dropped 37.6 per cent.

Whole areas of the country were being devastated by unemployment. In New England, almost the entire textile industry was wiped out by the employers' ruthless desire for greater profits. Because the working class was more organized in New England and had exhibited their potential strength in successful strikes, the textile owners decided to close down and re-establish their plants in the south.

At the same time that unemployment was increasing, the trade union movement was growing. The number of workers organized in the trade unions doubled in the four year period from 1913-1918. In the year 1918-1919, there Top: a Wobblies meeting in Not York. Above: Justice Tafthanded down countless decisions against unions was tremendous leap in union membership to four what it had been in 1913.

The growth of union membership demonstrated the growing consciousness among the working class that it was only through the organized power of the trade unions that their rights could be won and then defended. With this consciousness came the understanding that the strike was the weapon which could bring victory.

Thus, between 1914-1918 the number of strikes tripled and the number of workers involved in these strikes increased to 300,000. The real leap in strike activity came between 1919-1920 when more than 4 million workers were involved. The militant, syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, led by Vincent St. John, became a real force in this period.

Reflecting the enormous fear of the ruling class in the face of the offensive of the working class, the government began to initiate a series of anti-union manoeuvres. When these failed, the government then resorted to its power as the state and passed vicious anti-strike laws.

In 1917 Woodrow Wilson, They die in t 22, 927. In the cou se of tho: m the •Bull etin' (April 1972), that so-called progressive President, set up a tripartite board for the purpose of settling labour disputes during the war. This board, like its successor today, included representatives of 'the public,' labour, and the Secretary of War.

The treacherous role of the labour bureaucracy, in the person of Samuel Gompers, then President of the American Federation of Labour, paved the way for the government's anti-union action. In fact, Gompers. must be held responsible for the later setbacks that besieged the labour movement in the 1920s.

It was Gompers who sat on the War Labour Conference Board-the Board of the employers-and pledged the organized labour would not engage in industrial disputes during the war. He thus retreated at the very moment when the real power of the labour movement could have been brought to bear. It had the advantage due to the scarcity of labour power available and should have used this to seek recognition and the extension of collective bargaining.

In order to facilitate their ultimate objective (which was to break the power of the trade unions), the Board offered up some concessions to labour. Of course, these concessions were accepted hook, line and sinker by the bureaucracy. Thus, when the Board made the eight-hour day a law, the bureaucrats applauded loudly and congratulated themselves for taking the moderate position because obviously, it proved to be correct.

However, when that law was never applied, the complete fraud of the concessions was revealed. In fact, the then Secretary of War, Baker, urged Wilson not to press the eight-hour day in steel, because as the electric chair e seven years, on rgan of the Work he stated: "That would be a revolutionary change and the unwillingness of the workers' employers to yield the point might provoke strikes.' Unlike the bureaucrats, however, the rank-and-file workers refused to be driven back. In fact, as has been shown, strike activity increased tremendously in this period.

The creation of two more boards in one month indicated the government's panic in the face of the resolute determination of the working class to win what was rightfully theirs.

Thus, a War Labour Policies Board was established with that liberal Felix Frankfurter at its head. Two weeks later, the the National War Labour Board (NWLB) came into being, with former President Taft and labour lawyer Frank P. Walsh as co-chairmen. No specific guidelines were established as to the nature of the Board's power but rather, it was given almost unlimited authority to mediate, conciliate or arbitrate as it wished.

At the same time that the National War Labour Board was created, the legislature passed a series of vicious anti-union laws. The most reactionary of them was the one attached to the powers of the NWLB. This gave the President the power to seize any plant which was being struck if the NWLB thought the parties involved were being recalcitrant.

Wilson used this power to take over Western Union in August of 1918 as well as a Bridgeport small arms factory when its workers refused to accept a War Labour Board decision.

In 1919, Wilson called an Industrial Conference at the high point of the United Steelworkers of America's strike which involved 350,000 workers. The Conference was designed to. provide measures April 9, 1927 and that sentence was : of the most glaring exposés of ers League of US. By Nancy Field to stop the offensive of As usual, the labour bureauemployers and the public to aid in this task. The employers controlled the conference and refused to offer any concessions to the public. They insisted on retaining absolute control of the employment process and refused to acknowledge the right to independent collective bargaining. The real meaning of Gompers' "peaceful coexistence' policy of class collaboration during the war was revealed.

At the same time, the Supreme Court, which the bourgeoisie likes to represent as being above the class struggle, was handing down a series of decisions against labour.

These decisions consistently ruled in favour of the employers and against the trade unions. For example in Duplex v. Deering, Chief Justice Taft's opinion forbade the International Association of Machinists to seek the support of workers in related trades in its struggle against the employer. Furthermore, the court struck down even the most minimal legislation which had been passed in an attempt to stop some of the more barbarous methods of child labour.

In addition, laws were passed making syndicalism a crime and the state vigorously used these laws to break the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In 1918, many of its leaders were tried under the Sedition Act. In 1917 one of the founders of the IWW and militant leader of the Western Federation of Miners, Frank Little, was hung. Also in 1917, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, leaders in the IWW, received life sentences on framed up charges. CONTINUED TOMORROW

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