Looting in Germany: social anger has no union to turn to

According to the BBC, Frankfurt police describe "violent riots" in the city centre, where shops were looted. Disturbances are also reported in Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne. The BBC headline links these events to protests against the cost of living. The dispatch is thin: we do not know how many people are involved, who called the protests, whether there are injuries or arrests, or what share of the demonstrators took part in the looting. Caution, then. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The expected first reflex: condemn the looting, then move on. Looting shops is reprehensible, and it can be said without hesitation: smashed shop windows have never raised a single wage, and it is often employees who pick up the bill. But stopping there means treating the symptom as the cause, and public order as an explanation.

For the underlying question is well known. When rents and energy rise faster than payslips, we witness what Marxism calls exploitation in its most mundane form: labour produces more, the share that returns to those who do the work stagnates, and the difference flows elsewhere. No cruel boss is needed; the mechanism is enough. Nothing in the dispatch allows us to measure this in Germany, but the headline does speak of the cost of living, and it is the bill knocking at the door.

Next, there is the channel. Trade unionism exists precisely so that anger over the price of labour and of life takes the form of negotiation, strikes and a readable balance of power. It has its limits: it corrects effects without touching the wage system itself. But it has one virtue: it organises. When that organisation is missing, or no longer speaks to those whose existence is becoming precarious, anger seeks other outlets. Rosa Luxemburg already observed that scattered struggles do not spontaneously become a common class action. Scattered, they remain splinters. We do not claim these riots are a mass strike: nothing in the dispatch says so. We say that the splinter is what remains when organised politics no longer offers any purchase.

And the state? It will respond, you can bet, with police, courts and communiqués on firmness. That is its role: to protect property above all. We await with equal impatience an answer on rents, energy and wages, but it is ever more delayed, and the Constitution, here as with us, has never promised social peace to the owners of shop windows alone.

The coming days will show who takes to the street, with what demands, and whether unions or parties respond. As long as we talk only of smashing, we will have silenced the alarm without looking at where the smoke comes from.