Mariarosa Dalla Costa & Selma James: The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972)

In The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James argue that the domestic work of women is vital to capitalist production and that women’s refusal of domestic work should play a central role in the resistance to capitalism. Their argument goes far beyond any liberal-feminist assertion that we need to recognize that women work too. Drawing from the theories of the Italian extra-parliamentary left, James and Dalla Costa examine the role of women in what Mario Tronti termed the modern “social factory” and defend the political importance of “autonomous” women’s movements. Although they admit that many women work outside of the home and that some do no domestic work at all, James and Dalla Costa insist that the role of housewife “is the determinant for the position of all other women.” One might doubt whether this is still true today, but the social and economic functions that James and Dalla Costa associate with women definitely continue to exist, even if their location is no longer as clear-cut. The authors argue that the Left has failed to comprehend the nature of “social production” and therefore has not realized that “women in the home produce.” As capitalism destroyed older forms of community and production, women appeared to be excluded from the spaces of direct production, such as the factory floor. To most, women seemed exterior to capitalism’s exploitation of the male worker and extraction of surplus value. Those who have recognized that women do produce have tended to argue that women produce use-value, not surplus value. In her introduction, James singles out Ernest Mandel as an example of this argument that women produce items to be used by the family, not to be sold on the market. In contrast, James and Dalla Costa claim that women produce and reproduce a unique commodity: labor power. Capitalism could not survive without the work of women that produces the workers needed for production. “The community is the other half of capitalist organization, the other area of hidden capitalist exploitation, the other, hidden, source of surplus labor.” Because traditionally only men have been viewed as being productive, only men have been treated as “the subjects of social revolt.” In fact, women historically have often been viewed as being counterrevolutionary. The “unreliability” and “disengagement” of women – their failure to perform their domestic duties – impacts capitalist production by diminishing the quality of labor power. Yet women’s avoidance of domestic work has typically been treated as laziness rather than as a subversive act. Rejecting the ideology of the liberating effects of work, James and Dalla Costa claim that women’s “refusal of work” threatens “the social factory as organization of the reproduction of labor power” and that it “will increasingly be one of the decisive forms of the crisis in the systems of the factory and of the social factory.” Because of “the autonomy of their participation in spite of and because of their exclusion from direct production,” women were well ahead of the rest of the extra-parliamentary left, which in Italy in the early 1970s remained violently opposed to women’s claims to autonomy. James and Dalla Costa claim that women must take “the initiative in this struggle so that all those other excluded people, the children, the old and the ill, can re-appropriate the social wealth; to be re-integrated with us and all of us with men, not as dependents but autonomously.” Although women have provided vital support during the strikes of working men, they have also served as a “safety valve for the social tensions” caused by capitalism. During economic crises, “The family, this maternal cradle always ready to help and protect in time of need, has been in fact the best guarantee that the unemployed do not immediately become a horde of disruptive outsiders.” Though the authors don’t explicitly make such a claim, one might presume that women’s refusal of domestic work might accentuate capitalism’s crises and increase revolutionary pressures. James and Dalla Costa argue that women not only “must refuse housework as women’s work” but also “must reject the home.” They assert that it is necessary to “discover forms of struggle which immediately break the whole structure of domestic work, rejecting it absolutely,” and “to smash the entire role of housewife. The starting point is not how to do housework more efficiently, but how to find a place as protagonists in the struggle; that is, not a higher productivity of domestic labor but a higher subversiveness in the struggle.”

Guy Debord: The Real Split in the International (1972)

“[W]ere an unfazed SI to continue, in different circumstances, to function as it had done previously, it could well become the revolution’s last spectacular ideology, as well as the buttress for such an ideology. The SI might then have ended up hampering the real situationist movement: the revolution.” A collection of pieces (mostly authored by Guy Debord) about the breakup of the Situationist International (SI) in the aftermath of May ’68, The Real Split in the International may appear too obsessed with internal SI squabbles to be of general importance. Indeed, the appendixes – which make up more than half of the volume – contain an exhausting assault on individuals and movements that are largely forgotten today (Raoul Vaneigem would be the one exception). Although The Real Split in the International doesn’t compare to The Society of the Spectacle or even to one of the anthologies of the Situationist International, it still contains vital comments about the SI’s infamous style of communication, the problem of organization, and the temptation of revolutionary spectacle. Throughout the book, Debord takes for granted the role the SI played in the events that led up to May ’68 and demonstrates an optimism about the revolutionary movements of his time. While generously crediting the revolutionary importance of the SI, he denies the accusation that the SI manipulated or ideologically imposed itself on this “modern proletarian subversion.” Without any token gestures of modesty, Debord argues that the Situationist International anticipated and voiced the ideas of the revolutionary movement that exploded in May ‘68. He states, “We gave voices to the ideas that were necessarily already present in these proletarian minds, and by so doing we helped to activate these ideas, as well as to make critical action more theoretically aware and more determined to make time its own.” As a result of its success, the SI may have rendered itself obsolete. Debord claims, “The SI never presented itself as a model of revolutionary organization, but as a specific organization that devoted itself in a particular period to specific tasks.” Prior to the revolutionary upsurge of ’68, the few individuals who composed the SI were “ahead of their time” and functioned as a vanguard that articulated and communicated the proletariat’s “undiscovered theory” (needless to say, enormous questions of ideology and class consciousness are glided over in such claims). But when the revolution commences, “the masses of workers are of their time and must remain there as its sole possessors by mastering the use of all their theoretical and practical weapons, and particularly by refusing all delegation of power to a separate vanguard.” “From now on, situationists are everywhere, and so is their task.” Debord adds, “The very term ‘situationist’ was only used by us in order to pass on, with the resumption of the social war, a certain number of views and theses: now that this is done, this situationist label, in an age that still needs labels, may well be for the revolution of a whole era to keep, albeit in a totally different way.” Debord connects the tone of the SI’s writings (which a number of recent insurrections and their communiqués have clearly tried to reproduce) to the specific conjucture the SI faced in the first half of the 1960s. Confronted by society’s silence about revolution, the SI had to stylistically reach a point where it could be judged not on its scandalous acts but “on its essentially scandalous central truth. . . . The calm assertion of the most sweeping extremism, like the numerous expulsions of ineffectual or forbearing situationists were the SI’s weapons for this particular combat, and not in order to become an authority or power. Thus the tone of razor-sharp conceit not infrequently employed in some forms of situationist expression was legitimate; by reason too of the enormity of the task, and above all because it fulfilled its function by enabling the pursuit and eventual success of the latter. However, it ceased to be appropriate the moment the SI came to be acknowledged by a period which no longer regards its project as in any way implausible; it was, moreover, precisely because of the SI’s success in this respect that such a tone had become, for us if not for our spectators, outmoded.” Somewhere in this volume and other SI texts lies a theory and practice of organization that needs to be analyzed. The growing recognition of autonomous movements (the Italians are a regular concern of this book), which has generated a greater sensitivity to the consistency of non-hierarchical forms of organization, should be grounds for a re-examination of the SI’s infamous purges and organizational feuds. Debord frames the breakup of the SI not as a passive dissolution but as a continuation of its critical practice: “[I]t was a specific critical and practical activity we undertook in breaking up the SI.” Ever so modest, he even adds that this dismantling of the SI “constitutes one of its most important contributions to the revolutionary movement.” The success of the SI had led it to a dangerous point. Debord claims that the SI had begun to be “admired” and “contemplated” by “spectators,” such as the “pro-situs” whose numbers had increased during the last half of the 1960s. The SI risked becoming a spectacular form of revolutionary ideology, a “prestigious” component of the spectacle itself. Still confident about the post-’68 revolutionary movements, Debord predicts that “spectacular consumption of ideological radicality, both in its hope to set itself apart hierarchically from its neighbours and in its permanent disillusionment, is one with the actual consumption of every spectacular commodity, and like it doomed to disappear.” The apparent radicality of the writing of the pro-situs is belied by their everyday practices: “in this particular field, in order to write, you have to read, and in order to read, you have to know how to live.” The pro-situs attempt to hide this ineffectiveness by claiming they are “ontologically revolutionary.” But they will inevitably face disillusionment, especially when those who are students run out of government funding. Afterwards, “They will go to work. Some will be executives and the majority will be badly paid workers. Many of the latter will simple become resigned to their fate. Others will become revolutionary workers.”

Pier Vittorio Aureli: The Project of Autonomy (2008)

Mario Tronti: “[T]he tasks of the workers’ party are: not to support capitalism’s needs, not even in the form of workers’ demands; to force the capitalists to present their objective necessities and then subjectively refuse them; to force the bosses to ask so that the workers can actively – that is, in organized forms – reply to them: no.” In The Project of Autonomy, Pier Vittorio Aureli, an Italian architect, takes issue with how Italian Autonomia has been presented outside of Italy. He associates Negri’s version of Autonomia with a cultural postmodernism that is more than congruous with contemporary capitalism and academic complacency. He claims, “If outside of Italy the reference to ‘autonomia’ evokes cutting-edge politics, inside it is still associated with the political disarming of the Left and the general depoliticization of postmodern society.” To enable an excavation of a more valuable legacy, Aureli divides the Italian autonomous movement into three periods: “Operaism (early 1960s-1968), Poeter Operaio (Workers’ Power, 1967-1973); and Autonomia Operaia (Workers Autonomy, 1976-1978). The first movement was characterized by intense theoretical production; the second by a radical but less original elaboration of the premises of the first, especially reflecting Negri’s post-Communist position; the third by militancy over theoretical speculation.” Aureli argues that the first period, Operaia, remains the most neglected and misunderstood, especially in the English-speaking world. Aureli claims that Operaism “should be seen as the progenitor of the Autonomia groups but also as something completely independent of them.” He explains, “The fundamental difference between them is that Operaism developed entirely within a communist perspective of politics and power, while Autonomia took a radically anti-communist stance, to the point of conflating itself with the many forms of postpolitical subjectivity that emerged with the crisis of political representation of the 1980s.” Aureli does not extensively (or adequately) support his dismissal of what he terms Autonomia’s “postpolitical practice;” but this may be fortunate, since instead of adding one more critique of Hardt & Negri’s Empire, Aureli devotes the first half of his short book to the Operaist period he does value and to an exegesis of the work of Operaism’s two primary theoreticians, Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti. According to Aureli, the question of autonomy emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in two journals: Socialism ou barbarie / Socialism or barbarism (led by Castoriadis and Lefort) and Quaderni rossi / Red notebooks (founded by Panzieri). Both journals sought “a renewal of working-class analysis and politics distinct from that of the Communist Party establishment,” but the Socialism ou barbarie group eventually rejected much of the legacy of Marxism-Leninism whereas the intellectuals around Quaderni rossi more fully embraced it, critiquing both Soviet Russia and the communist movements in liberal democratic countries for failing to maintain a revolutionary perspective. The Operaists portrayed the working class as a “culturally and politically innovative and creative collective subject” and conceptualized “the struggle between the working class and capitalism not from the standpoint of capitalist development, but from that of the working-class struggle.” Italy in the 1950s and 1960s saw a strong wave of economic planning as the nation adopted the monopolistic forms of control and Fordist mode of regulation that had appeared in the U.S. in the 1930s. The Operaists termed this economic integration of society “neocapitalism,” and developed a theory of autonomy as the struggle “against from within” such structures. In essays published in Quaderni rossi, Panzieri claimed that neocapitalism portrayed both the development of the forces of production and technological innovation as rational and neutral. This ideology of capitalism’s rationality made political struggle appear as merely an interference with capitalism’s increasing ability to produce abundance for all, and it greatly supported the compromises communist parties and trade unions made with the State. For Panzieri, “In the face of this capitalist ‘rationality,’ there could be no weapon other than the political subjectivity of the workers – that is, nothing except a bid for power by those who produced and therefore demanded ‘not rationality, but control; not technical programming, but a plan to empower the associated producers.’” “[I[n the context of capitalism’s increasingly greater economic integration of society, autonomy meant demystification of technological development and the taking of control of this development by the workers per via politica.” According to Panzieri, workers should resist capitalism’s appropriation of their cooperation by asserting “workers’ control,” or “antagonism at the level of the centers of production.” Aureli claims that Panzieri failed to concretely develop this proposal for “workers’ control,” but the 1962 “Piazza Statuto protest revealed to the Operaists . . . the features of the new political subject: the mass worker.” Panzieri expressed reservations about the importance of the protest, whereas Tronti, who had been involved with Quaderni rossi from its beginning, saw in it a new possibility for revolutionary practice. Along with Negri, Cacciari, and others, Tronti founded in 1964 the journal Classe Operaia / Working class. In “Factory and society” (published in Quaderni rossi), Tronti, drawing from Panzieri’s description of neocapitalism’s integration of society, claimed that capitalist production had extended to cover the whole of society: “At the highest point of capitalist development, social production becomes a moment of the process of production, which means that all of society lives within the factory, and the factory extends its dominion over the whole of society.” In other words, “Society was a factory.” Whereas Panzieri made “technological development” primary and workers’ struggle secondary, Tronti in his essay “Lenin in England” (published in Classe Operaia) reversed the order and claimed that capitalist development was “subordinated to working-class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned.” The working class was a continuous threat to capitalism because the latter depended on the former for value creation. Tronti saw emancipatory potential in the workers’ ability to refuse work: “The strength of the working class was embodied not in the constructive positivity of work but rather in its refusal to be work; in other words, in an obstinate, destructive negativity, in a de facto demonstration of its intransigence toward its own transformation into wage labor.” “Thus working-class nihilism toward forms of corporate society did not mean destruction for its own sake, but instead a real theoretical and strategic project of attaining emancipation and power through refusal and autonomy rather than adaptation and reform.” Tronti termed “strategy of refusal” “the workers’ threat to negate their own essential mediation in the whole system of capitalist social relations.” Aureli claims that although Negri’s influence on Autonomia led to this “strategy of refusal” being deployed in an “anarchic, individualistic” manner, Tronti’s original political conception of it was quite different. Drawing from Carl Schmitt, Tronti introduced the “concept of the political” into his Marxist analysis. He aimed to analyze “the autonomy of political power tout court with respect to economic determinations.” Workers’ refusal was an “instance of political autonomy” that created “a state of exception” that called forth a political response from capitalism and the State. The development of the economy was historically crisscrossed by such autonomous political decisions by workers and the State: “Economic continuity and political discontinuity together: this is the history of Capital.” With Negri, Cacciari, and others, Tronti founded in 1968 the journal Contropiano / Counterplan to develop a “Marxist-Communist ‘counterplan’ to the one of liberal capitalism.” Yet Tronti took his analysis of the autonomy of the political in a direction that led Negri to leave the journal after one issue. Whereas Lenin and other Marxist writers had dismissed 19th-century German Social Democracy as reformist and reactionary, Tronti “affirmed German Social Democracy as the paradigm of autonomous politics.” Tronti argued that Social Democracy was not a passive adaptation but rather the product of an autonomous political tactic that was able to “take the content of the workers’ struggle and translate it immediately into politics at the level of State institutions.” Tronti’s subsequent extension of this argument about the “instrumentalization of party politics” to the Italian Communist Party strongly conflicted with Negri’s conception of worker autonomy. Aureli explains, “Negri’s concept of the workers’ refusal was incompatible with any process of political integration, first and foremost integration within the Communist Party. Tronti, however, never conceived his political extremism outside the framework of the party. It was political action within the institution, and eventually against it as the party made compromises against its own class interests, that constitute the very core of the Operaist philosophy.” Contropiano published Massimo Cacciari’s article “On the genesis of negative thought,” which drew from Tronti’s claims about the autonomy of the political and argued that “it was the instrumentalization of crisis, not the institution of rules, that enabled the bourgeoisie to control the political forces of capitalism.” Capitalism’s capability for “negative thought,” its “ability to absorb the negative,” allowed it to “absorb and finally resolve every crisis within its structures.” Antagonistic culture therefore needed a “counterplan” that would “make use of this mechanism productively and deliberately, even when such use would seem to have a regressive horizon.” According to Cacciari, antagonistic culture needed a “theory of the use of the critical effects of capitalism.” The last half of Aureli’s book turns to some Italian architects who were around and affected by the intellectual milieu described in the first half of the book. Aureli’s primary focus here is Aldo Rossi, whom Aureli claims saw “the city as a site of political choices” that contested the technocratic planning of space. The capitalist rationalization of space led Italian planners in the early 1960s to propose the concept of the “city-territory,” the functional reorganization of entire regions to serve capitalism’s circuits. Against such theories, Rossi constructed an architectural theory around the idea of the “locus,” the (universal) singularity of architectural events. Rossi suggested “that there was a possibility of looking at the city as an arena of decisive and singular events whose defined forms could pose a challenge to the urban phenomena and flux surrounding them.” Rossi was particularly hostile toward the new concepts of the “open project” and the “network,” which seemed too complicit with the form of city-territory planning. Rossi claimed: “they are a mystifications in view of the fact that any design intervention addresses a problem by means of a form. It is only the possibility of a closed, defined form that permits other forms to emerge.” Aureli argues Rossi’s “rigid grammar of forms. . . . shifted attention to the locus as a symbolic and geographic singularity, a state of exception within the city, posing a challenge to the open-ended space of the capitalist city-territory. Analogous to Tronti’s autonomy of the political, which was an inquiry directed not at the autonomy of one part of society with respect to another but at the autonomy of power itself, Rossi’s autonomy of architecture was above all the establishment of urban concepts that posited the supremacy of politics over the city’s accelerating economic development.”

Régis Debray: Revolution in the Revolution? (1967)

Revolution in the Revolution? is a study of the “Cuban insurrectional process” that places guerrilla warfare and armed struggle at the center of the revolutionary process. Published while Debray was in a Bolivian prison and based upon his interviews with Fidel Castro and other leaders of the Cuban Revolution, the book argues that older revolutionary models are no longer relevant to the contemporary conjuncture, at least in Latin America. As a former student of Althusser, Debray explains this “revolution in the revolution” as a shift in problematics: “In philosophical language, a certain problématique has vanished since the Cuban Revolution, that is to say, a certain way of posing questions which governs the meaning of all possible answers. And it is not the answers that must be changed, but the questions themselves.” Throughout the book, Debray defends the practices of the Cuban Revolution against what he sees as a Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy that is bound to an outdated model of the Party and to the corrupting influence of the State and reformism: “These ‘Marxist-Leninist’ fractions or parties operate within the problématique which is imposed by the bourgeoisie. . . . they are bogged down in false problems and are accomplices of the opportunistic problématique, quarrels over precedence or office-holding in left organizations, electoral fronts, trade union maneuvers, blackmail against their own members. . . . In order to escape it, there must be a change in terrain, in every sense of the word.” But rather than propose a turn toward autonomous, extra-parliamentary movements, Debray of course promotes the guerrilla foco, or armed struggle as the catalyst of revolution. Debray’s attack on leftists who adhere to an outdated problematic is paired with a general attack on an intellectual attitude that tries “to grasp the present through preconceived ideological constructs and live it through books.” For Debray, actual guerrilla practice immediately reveals the falsity of both: he reduces reality to the everyday struggles of the guerrilla, a questionable move that swiftly renders all previous political and intellectual positions obsolete or illusory. The core of the book is a refutation of misconceptions of the Cuban Revolution and revolutionary struggle. Debray’s first target is the idea of armed self-defense, the revolutionary occupation and defense of part of the territory, which might range from a factory to an entire rural region. Debray objects that armed self-defense “frequently suffers from a profusion of admirable sacrifices, of wasted heroism leading nowhere – that is, leading anywhere except to the conquest of political power. It is therefore better to speak of armed spontaneity.” Armed self-defense denies the autonomy of the armed unit from the rest of the people and fails to aspire to military supremacy: “Self-defense is partial; revolutionary guerrilla warfare aims at total war by combining under its hegemony all forms of struggle at all points within the territory.” Debray claims that the “Troskyist conception of insurrection resembles self-defense,” and proceeds to dismiss Trotskyism as “a metaphysic paved with good intentions,” a metaphysic that in maintaining faith in the working class pays no attention to history: “Has anyone ever seen a concrete analysis of a concrete situation from the pen of a Trotskyite?” On a more practical level, armed self-defense interferes with the “mobility” and “flexibility” from which the guerrilla foco draws its strength. In contemporary jargon, one might say that Debray emphasizes that the guerrilla unit exploits not a territorial but a network logic. When later dismissing the idea of establishing a guerrilla base, he returns to this logic and claims that until the Revolution has come close to success, “the guerrilla base is, according to an expression of Fidel, the territory within which the guerrilla happens to be moving; it goes where he goes. In the initial stage the base of support is in the guerrilla fighter’s knapsack.” Debray’s next target is the idea of “armed propaganda.” Debray argues that armed propaganda should not precede military conflict: “the most important form of propaganda is successful military action.” Debray claims, “The guerrillo . . . must use his strength in order to show it, since he has little to show but his determination and his ability to make use of his limited resources.” He adds, “The destruction of a troop transport truck or the public execution of a police torturer is a more effective propaganda for the local population than a hundred speeches. Such conduct convinces them of the essential: that the Revolution is on the march, that the enemy is no longer invulnerable.” Such passages surely must have influenced the Weather Underground and the various Red Army groups, adding to their impatience with political debate. Debray’s most substantial target is the vanguard Party and the idea that the military unit must be subordinated to a political one. He argues that the subjection of the guerrilla unit to an urban political party is practically disastrous (leading to risky meetings, delayed decisions, mutual ignorance, etc.) and morally destructive (it undermines guerrilla self-reliance). He argues that the urban radical and rural guerrilla’s intellectual and political differences stem from material circumstances: there is “an irreducible difference in conditions of living, [and] therefore in thought and behavior.” One might then assume that it would be necessary for the urban radical and rural guerrilla to dialectically criticize each other's ideology, but Debray creates asymmetry when he describes the guerrilla as having contact with a kind of material truth that the urban radical does not have access to. A particularly glaring example appears when he describes guerrilla practices: “Here the political word is abruptly made flesh. The revolutionary ideal emerges from the gray shadow of formula and acquires substance in the full light of day. This transubstantiation comes as a surprise.” While showing how the guerrilla is mostly free of the reformist temptations, intellectual hypocrisies, and political contradictions of the city, Debray ends up coming close to equating guerrilla warfare with truth, a dangerous slippage that must be kept in mind while reading the following argument that places the guerrilla unit at the center of the revolutionary struggle. Though guerrilla life is clearly removed from many of capitalism’s contradictions and makes practice central, this doesn’t prove that the brutal existence of the guerrilla must give rise to a socialist political program instead of a Hobbesian state of war. Debray argues that the military unit should have its own strong central command (such as Fidel Castro) that prioritizes action, not the preservation of existing political institutions. In fact, Debray denies the distinction between military action and political organization: “guerrilla warfare is essentially political, and that for this reason the political cannot be counterposed to the military.” Unlike the orthodox view of revolution, the military unit is not merely an instrument used to implement the political party’s content. More strongly stated, this means that “There is . . . no metaphysical equation in which vanguard = Marxist-Leninist party; there are merely dialectical conjunctions between a given function – that of the vanguard in history – and a given form of organization – that of the Marxist-Leninist party.” Rejecting the relevance of pre-Cuban models of revolution, Debray claims that the revolutionary movement must start with the small guerrilla foco and build up to a national revolution. “One creates a front around something extant, not only around a program of liberation. It is the ‘small motor’ that sets the ‘big motor’ of the masses in motion and precipitates the formation of a front, as the victories won by the small motor increase.” This image of the small moving the large no doubt appealed to those groups in the U.S. and Europe that turned to armed insurrection in the early 1970s. Debray concludes the book: “at the present juncture, the principle stress must be laid on the development of guerrilla warfare and not on the strengthening of existing parties or the creation of new parties. That is why insurrectional activity is today the number one political activity.”

Ulrike Meinhof: Everybody Talks about the Weather...We Don't

“Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this any more. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too. That was more or less what a black speaker from the Black Power movement said at the Vietnam Conference in February in Berlin. The students are not rehearsing for a rebellion, they are engaging in resistance.” Everybody Talks about the Weather . . . We Don’t collects the columns Ulrike Meinhof – co-founder of the Red Army Faction (RAF) / Baader-Meinhof Gang – published in konkret between 1960 and 1969, the years leading up to her leap into political violence. It is practically impossible not to read these columns (especially when packaged in an edition such as this) teleologically, as blindly moving down a path toward violent resistance. Without any real surprises, the columns collected here clearly show that progression, and Meinhof’s rhetorical incisiveness, especially when driven by her increasing militancy, remains a striking model of political writing. Her writings begin in liberal-Left territory, focusing on the antinuclear movement, Germany’s Nazi past (and continued ex-Nazi leadership), and, perhaps most importantly, the difficulties women face in a class society. Meinhof’s tone reaches a new level of boldness in the ironic “Open Letter to Farah Diba,” (1967) which attacks the Persian queen for the hypocrisy of her printed statements. But it is the (perhaps Mao-influenced) “Water Cannons: Against Women, Too” (1968) that breaks new ground in openly admitting conflict, instead of mere debate, into politics. In that text, Meinhof asserts, “People are no longer just playing the roles of adversaries in order to be nice to each other again afterward.” She adds, “Conflicts are becoming visible, personal conflicts are increasingly being ascribed to social ones, or seen as an expression of social conflicts.” Others columns from this period attack merely “symbolic” or apparent forms of action and resistance or struggle to recognize the significant advances of the proto-autonomous communes that were creating “models of what to do.” In one column, Meinhof claims that the attack on Left leader “Rudi Dutschke marked the first time that people massively crossed the boundary between verbal protest and physical resistance. . . . they crossed it really and truly, not just symbolically.” That is, “There are people who have decided to not only name what is intolerable but to oppose it. . . . “ Viewing the violent protest against the Springer publisher that occurred in response to the attack on Dutschke, she concludes, “we can and must discuss violence and counter-violence anew and from the very beginning.” Considering the department store fire set by a group led by Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin (with whom Meinhof would later form the Red Army Faction), she notes that such destruction actually served capitalism by helping it overcome over-accumulation, but still praises the criminal act for revealing the hypocritical laws of property. The final column collected here, “Columnism,” contains an attack on the subordination of journalism to market interests that make political activism into an exception, a personality trait of the star columnist rather than an expression of a collective political movement. The editor’s decision not to include any of the collectively-authored Red Army Faction texts that followed is politically and practically understandable, but it does result in a false conclusion to Meinhof’s textual output, a silencing of her political expression at its moment of utmost intensity (of course, that silence may have been self-inflicted). Karin Bauer’s long biographical essay on Meinhof’s life is perhaps as interesting as the columns collected here. Opposing those (like Meinhof’s own daughter) who view Meinhof as a Communist pawn, Bauer argues that Meinhof was “a gifted writer with a dream, a tragic figure who now stands for the thwarted ideals and the frustration of a generation.” Bauer describes Meinhof’s early writing/political career, including her long relationship with Klaus Rainer Röhl, who published konkret, the left magazine for which Meinhof eventually became a well-known columnist. konkret was secretly subsidized by East Germany, and the magazine shared many of the views of that country. Although accepting Communist funding for his publication, “Röhl, not a dogmatic Marxist, did not fit the mold of a loyal Communist toeing the party line. He was a flamboyant bon vivant, known as an adventurer and a cynic. His motto was ‘Enjoy capitalism, because socialism will be tough.’” Ideological conflicts between konkret and East Germany in 1964 led to an end of the subsidy and a change in direction for the magazine, which began to encourage, if not exploit, the sexual revolution in its pages. By this point Meinhof had a regular column: “She had become, in essence, a brand. Meinhof stood for the serious side of konkret’s blend of culture and politics.” Meinhof gained access to the wealthy that were enchanted with radical chic, and also became a radio and television journalist. Her success pushed her toward a bourgeois environment that conspicuously conflicted with her political beliefs. The murder of the student Benno Ohnesorg by the police at a protest against a visit by the Shah of Iran in 1967 radicalized the West German Left and sparked widespread discussion of the uses of political violence, and konkret mostly celebrated this new fervor in the Left. But when Röhl opened a Berlin office of konkret, he rejected Meinhof and the other writers’ plan to create a writing collective that would anonymously publish articles in the magazine. The bitter fight that ensued between Röhl and Meinhof ended with the latter quitting. Meinhof used her new free time to produce a television documentary, Bambule, which focused on a woman’s public home (the film was not shown because of Meinhof’s subsequent illegal activities). In early 1970, Baader and Ensslin, fugitives from the law, began staying at Meinhof’s large house, where they created an atmosphere of political debate and planning. When Baader was re-arrested for driving without a license, Meinhof used her journalist credentials to arrange a meeting with Baader about a book on marginalized youth. The meeting was actually a cover to assist Ensslin and others in freeing Baader, and Meinhof hoped to appear as an innocent bystander rather than an accomplice. No violence was planned, but when a “professional” that the group had hired for help shot a librarian, Meinhof fled with everyone else and the RAF was truly born. Soon after the first RAF communiqué, “Build up the Red Army!,” appeared (unfortunately these RAF documents are not collected in this volume). According to Bauer, “Likely, Meinhof was the primary author of the communiqué, but all public communications of the group were said to be written collectively, and no doubt, there was some truth to that. Meinhof had finally achieved what she had been denied by konkret: collective authorship as an alternative mode of producing texts from discussion. This process of text production literally wrote the RAF into existence. Although the group was advocating the propaganda of deeds, communication was of prime importance and was needed to make the group’s actions readable to the public.”