Gas: Europe on a Knife-Edge, and the Bill Already Sent to Households

According to Mediapart, the French investigative outlet, European gas stocks are at their lowest and prices are soaring: never, the paper writes, has Europe entered winter in such conditions. Beyond the geopolitical shock, Mediapart points to the irresponsibility of the German groups in charge of the stocks, which it says put their short-term interest ahead of the continent's security.

That is the facts as reported. The dispatch is thin: we have here neither the volumes, nor the price levels, nor the detail of the decisions being blamed on these groups. Everything that follows is our reading, not an established finding.

First point: the phrase "prices soar" is a small masterpiece of grammar. Prices act, on their own, like the weather. Marx called this the fetishism of the commodity: relations between people (who buys, who stores, who bets on the timing) appear as relations between things. Yet, if we believe Mediapart, there are decision-makers here, trade-offs and balance sheets. A low stock is not a natural phenomenon; it is, in part, a management choice.

Second point, more down to earth: who cashes in? If operators have emptied or under-filled their reserves because it paid in the short term, the logic is crystal clear. Energy capital reasons in quarterly returns, not in security of supply. A vital good, heating, is treated like any commodity whose margin is being optimised. Scarcity, whether manufactured or endured, then becomes a source of income for those who hold gas, and a forced expense for those who have only their radiator. What remains to be known, and the dispatch does not say, is which groups actually gained what.

Third point: the distribution of the cost of winter. Marx noted that capital knows how to shift its "faux frais" (its overheads, in his term), for the most part, from its own shoulders onto those of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie (our translation, Capital, Book I). Transposed: when the risk has been taken by private groups, any loss tends to be socialised, through household bills, public subsidies, or the austerity that pays for those subsidies, while the gain stays firmly privatised. We do not yet know what support measures will be decided; yet that is where the real stakes lie.

No doubt we will hear that "Europe" must tighten its belt, as if Europe were a single household with one purse. But a belt does not tighten the same way for someone who owns a refinery as for someone in a poorly insulated two-room flat. Speaking of collective effort means erasing the questions of who decided, who profited, and who will pay.

The real question, then, is not "how much will gas cost this winter?" but "who has the right to decide on this stock, and on whose behalf?" As long as energy security rests on the profitability of a handful of operators, winter will be, for them, an accounting season. For everyone else, it will simply be a season.