Turning Money into Rebellion

Description

Blekingegade is a quiet Copenhagen street. It is also where, in May 1989, the police discovered an apartment that had served Denmark’s most notorious twentieth-century bank robbers as a hideaway for years. The Blekingegade Group members belonged to a communist organization and lived modest lives in the Danish capital. Over a period of almost two decades, they sent millions of dollars acquired in spectacular heists to Third World liberation movements, in particular the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In May 1991, seven of them were convicted and went to prison.

The story of the Blekingegade Group is one of the most puzzling and captivating chapters from the European anti-imperialist milieu of the 1970s and ’80s. Turning Money into Rebellion: The Unlikely Story of Denmark’s Revolutionary Bank Robbers is the first-ever account of the story in English, covering a fascinating journey from anti-war demonstrations in the late 1960s via travels to Middle Eastern capitals and African refugee camps to the group’s fateful last robbery that earned them a record haul and left a police officer dead.

The book includes historical documents, illustrations, and an exclusive interview with Torkil Lauesen and Jan Weimann, two of the group’s longest-standing members. It is a compelling tale of turning radical theory into action and concerns analysis and strategy as much as morality and political practice. Perhaps most importantly, it revolves around the cardinal question of revolutionary politics: What to do, and how to do it?

Sujets

• Political Advocacy
• Political Process
• Political Ideologies
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• Communism
• Scandinavia
• Communisme
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781604869941
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Turning Money into Rebellion:
The Unlikely Story of Denmark’s Revolutionary Bank Robbers
Edited and translated by Gabriel Kuhn
copyright PM Press, 2014
ISBN: 9781604863161
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013956927
Kersplebedeb Publishing and Distribution
CP 63560
CCCP Van Horne
Montreal, Quebec
Canada H3W 3H8
www.kersplebedeb.com
www.leftwingbooks.net
PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Layout by Kersplebedeb
Cover Design by John Yates
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of
Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan
www.thomsonshore.com
Contents
About the Authors
Craftsmen of World Revolution
Klaus Viehmann
Anti-imperialism Undercover: An Introduction to the Blekingegade Group
Gabriel Kuhn
It Is All About Politics
Niels Jørgensen, Torkil Lauesen, and Jan Weimann
Solidarity Is Something You Can Hold in Your Hands
Interview with Torkil Lauesen and Jan Weimann
Documents
Socialism and the Bourgeois Way of Life
Gotfred Appel (1966)
What Is KAK?
KAK (1974)
Manifest-Communist Working Group: A Short Introduction
M-KA (1986)
What Can Communists in the Imperialist Countries Do?
M-KA (1983)
Appendix
Acronyms of Political Organizations
Timeline
Convicted Blekingegade Group Members
Currency Conversion
Literature
About the Authors
Gabriel Kuhn is an Austrian-born author and translator living in Stockholm, Sweden. He has been involved in internationalist projects for twenty-five years. Among his publications with PM Press are Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy (2010), Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics (2010), and Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics (2011).
Klaus Viehmann was a member of the 2nd of June Movement, a German urban guerrilla group. He was arrested in 1978 and spent fifteen years in prison. Today, he lives as a typesetter and graphic designer in Berlin. PM Press and Kersplebedeb have published his pamphlet Prison Round Trip (2009).
Craftsmen of World Revolution
The essence of the Blekingegade Group was international solidarity. 1 A solidarity that "you can hold in your hands." Concretely, money. Lots of money. Acquired in robberies in the metropolitan North and passed on to the tricontinental South. 2 For many years. Respect!
Many have had the idea of taking money from the rich, revolutionaries among them. Indeed: amid palatial banks and abundant wealth it is easy to wonder why analyses of capitalism fill miles’ worth of bookshelves while big money is still flowing from the bottom to the top. Besides, an action to acquire money might be less humiliating than sending out yet another grant application. And wouldn’t it feel good to relieve a project in Latin America or a group in Southeast Asia from the eternal hunt for funds? Wasn’t there a man in Catalonia who took a big loan and passed the money on to political militants? Wasn’t there an anarchist who channeled millions to the movement by mastering the art of forging checks?
Unfortunately, among the side effects of "expropriation forte" are repression and prison sentences. A sustainable redistribution of funds needs solid craftsmanship if it wants to rest on golden floors. People engaging in such activities must have answers to a few questions: What do you want from life? Self-realization? Personal happiness? The happiness of others? Who are these others? How far away are they? Does solidarity end with your family, your friends, your country, or your continent? Is your aspiration to make a revolutionary commitment or to temporarily join a working group? Do you want to grow old with your political practice? The existential framework required for illegal practice is not always comfortable: organizational discipline instead of personal self-realization, continuity instead of spontaneity, a bourgeois facade instead of subcultural havens, solid convictions instead of discursive formations, secrecy instead of openness, selflessness instead of identity politics, and so on.
The individual motivation perhaps also the precondition for the craft of acquiring money is the hope that you are able to contribute to a new world, to effectively harm the powerful, to overcome capitalist alienation, to create meaningful ways of living instead of "being lived." This might sound terribly existentialist, but social being and political consciousness in other words, thinking and acting have never been one-way streets. To sever the dialectical relationship between practical experience and analytical reflection leads to a dead end, the consequence being either academic inaction or spontaneous actionism, neither of which provides a solid ground for organized solidarity. Inaction produces nothing that "can be held in your hands," and spontaneous actionism might be beautiful, but the struggle for liberation is long and not always exciting. The history of many movements suggests that each political generation only has the strength to rebel once, even if this strength lasts a long time in some individuals, probably because they are socially organized in a way that allows for extended collective reflection.
In an abstract sense, (international) solidarity means to establish a relationship between political subjects, people, and organizations. It is not based on projecting your visions of revolution onto objects of charity. In a proper relationship of solidarity, no one is stuck in awe worshiping "leaders," and no one allows others to make decisions for them. Discussions happen on a level playing field, and people give according to necessity and conviction without cutting deals. It is a relationship based on basic human interaction, not on formalities. Solidarity, in this sense, doesn’t mean searching for a new struggle every few years when you have become disillusioned with the last one; it doesn’t mean looking for the next best place "where things are happening," or for new "heroes," as soon as the former ones are gone or have proven themselves corrupted.

The Blekingegade Group was a child of the late 1960s. Its members were Marxists-Leninists, even if of a special kind. The persistency with which they supported "national liberation movements" and refugee camps for almost twenty years distinguished their practice from the kind of solidarity whizzing across the globe: Vietnam, Palestine, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Chile, Portugal, Spain, Nicaragua … The group’s members were more determined than the proletarian impersonators of the 1970s who soon retreated to the "alternative middle class."
As far as we know, no other Marxist-Leninist group has maintained a clandestine infrastructure for illegal actions and the acquisition of money for so long. And no other has propagated the so-called "parasite state theory," which, essentially, brought together two theses: first, the ("Maoist") one expressed in Che Guevara’s speech at the Tricontinental Conference, with the "Third World" being the engine of world revolution and "villages encircling cities." This view became particularly popular following the period of decolonization and the defeat of the USA in Vietnam. The second thesis contended that the working class in the metropole had been "muted" and pacified by the imperialist bourgeoisie, which handed to the metropolitan workers a portion of the superprofits from the exploitation of human and natural resources in the tricont. This resulted in a "labor aristocracy" (Lenin) that had already rallied around the concept of the "nation" during World War I and showed the same reaction in the global context of the 1970s. "Social Partnership" was more important than solidarity with working-class peers in the tricont.
The Blekingegade Group’s strategy derived from combining these two assumptions. Any attempt by a revolutionary minority to mobilize the "masses" in the metropole was considered futile as long as the superprofits were flowing in. Hence, the flow needed to be stopped, which required strengthening movements in the tricont and enabling them to win. This is the reason for the Blekingegade Group turning its attention to such movements in the early 1970s, particularly in the Middle East and in Southern Africa, and for supplying them with money and material for years. (The fact that the Palestinian PFLP became the group’s most important partner was likely due to the PFLP’s presence in Western Europe and its aggressive socialist/internationalist orientation.)
The Blekingegade Group always reflected on the political-economic conditions for their anti-imperialist money transfers, at times adopting notions that were uncharacteristic for Marxist-Leninist groups. For example, they felt that the relationship between the metropole and the tricont was defined by "unequal exchange," and advocated the "delinking" of decolonized countries from the global market. Surprisingly, there was less reflection on crucial questions of revolutionary strategy, or at least this is how it appears in retrospect. For example, one of the conclusions drawn by members doing factory work in Frankfurt in 1974 was that workers in Western Europe weren’t interested in left-wing leaflets; this was taken as yet another reason for prioritizing the support of liberation movements. Fine. However, had the Blekingegade Group brought left-wing leaflets instead o