Berlin: Generation Z marches against the cost of living as arms budgets climb

According to Al Jazeera, thousands of people marched through Berlin this Saturday, and young Germans of the "Generation Z" are preparing demonstrations in some thirty cities across the country. The Qatari broadcaster describes a movement fed by the mobilisations sweeping across Europe, and by the anger of a young generation confronted with rising living costs, just as military spending grows. We have, at this stage, no precise figures on turnout, nor any detail on the demands or the organisers. The rest is our reading.

Let us start with a point of vocabulary. In most reports, "inflation is climbing" and "prices demand it", as if the weather had taken charge of the pasta aisle. This is what Marx called the fetishism of the commodity: relations between people take on the appearance of relations between things. Yet a rent, a supermarket receipt or a line in the defence budget are decisions, taken by landlords, companies and states. What the Berlin streets are saying is precisely this: there are hands behind the figures.

The underlying question is one of distribution. A society produces each year a surplus, that is, what remains once labour has been paid enough to reproduce itself. This surplus is the reservoir from which profits draw, but also, through taxation and debt, the state. When a government raises its arms spending without wages keeping pace with prices, it is making a choice: a larger share of social output goes to military orders, and the bill is spread elsewhere, through taxation, debt, cuts to social spending or the erosion of purchasing power. Nothing in the dispatch shows which channel the German government is using. But the anger of the protesters indicates who, in their eyes, is settling the bill.

There is an irony that capital knows well. Crises are born of overaccumulation: more is produced than can be sold at a profit. Public arms orders are a providential outlet, financed by those whose real wages are, meanwhile, eroding. The order books of industrialists fill up while household budgets empty. In the textbooks, this is called redistribution upwards, and nobody needs to be cruel for it to work: the mechanism is enough.

Young people also occupy a particular position: they enter a labour market where insecurity serves as discipline. A precarious workforce is a reserve army that keeps wage demands in check. That they take to the streets rather than waiting to be told they are "resilient" is, in itself, a piece of information.

What exactly the marchers are demanding, and whether the movement will last beyond one Saturday in October, remains to be seen. For now, the question they pose is simple, and it is rarely asked at press conferences: rearmament, who is paying for it?