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On demos, democracy and rights

Joint Satement from the Internationalist Migrant Block


13/05/2026

The Berlin Senate and the police approved a route, blocked the way with concerts and festivals, and did not assist the people, creating the conditions for a tragedy. Only the people’s self-organization prevented deaths and serious injuries.

May 1st is a commemoration that has historically united the working class of the world in its different traditions: trade unions, cooperatives and political parties, anarchists, socialists and communists. A date of struggle and celebration, of discussion and resignification. And also a day that, beyond differences, unites us against a common enemy: the ruling classes that enrich themselves with our labor power. This May 1st in Berlin, that common enemy acted with an unprecedented irresponsibility that could have caused a tragedy.

In Berlin, mobilizations for Workers’ Day have been developing peacefully since 2021. The Revolutionary March organization officially advocates non-confrontation and non-escalation in the face of police aggression. For years, the existing repression has been generated by the police with the aim of demonizing the mobilization, but with each passing year, this tactic shows its inability to prevent tens of thousands from taking to the streets, and appears to civil society as a waste of valuable resources that could be used in other sectors (health, social assistance, education, etc.).

However, what we saw this May 1st, 2026, is something completely new in terms of the irresponsibility, inoperativeness and violence that the ruling classes and their representatives in the Berlin Senate and the police are willing to carry out in order to prevent the people from expressing their opinion.

A demonstration whose route had been approved by the police and the Berlin administration found parties and concerts blocking its path, causing tens of thousands of people to crowd into a few square meters with no possible exits. Panic seized the unorganized people, creating a situation that could have ended in tragedy. Thanks to the actions of the organizations present in the “Revolutionärer 1. Mai” demonstration, thousands of people were able to get out of this situation without having to mourn any deaths or serious injuries.

Meanwhile, the “plan” devised by the Berlin government directed people leaving the Die Linke festival at Mariannenplatz toward the place where the march was taking place. The side streets were open, cars were parked on Oranienstraße, and no one controlled where thousands of people were flowing. In addition, a concert was approved from a apartment window overlooking the demonstration street, which intensified the bottleneck and increased the risk.
At the same time, the police were waiting for the demonstrators in Görlitzer Park and by the canal, ready to repress, but never to help anyone.

There are hundreds of accounts of activists and militants helping people who fainted, people who were in panic or simply did not know how to react to a terrifying situation. The people helped each other to defend themselves from the inoperativeness or malice of the repressive forces and the Berlin administration.

On May 1st, 2026, in Kreuzberg, the police and the city administration cleared the neighborhood and turned it into a trap, deliberately leading the mobilization toward a potential tragedy. Never before have we been faced with such a perverse plan as the one we experienced on this date.

Now we see clearly that, given the loss of prestige that police repression of the May 1st demonstration had suffered in the eyes of society, they had to develop another tactic to delegitimize the protesters and prevent the discontent, the denunciation and the organization of the popular sectors from being seen in the center of the German capital (and of Europe), sectors that daily experience the austerity cuts and the results of militarization.

It sounds ridiculous, but in Germany and in Berlin under the CDU-SPD government, we are forced to remind everyone that demonstrating is a right enshrined in the constitution and should not be subject to manipulation, threats or repression. Having a guaranteed safe passage along the route approved by the police, no more and no less, is also part of that right. However, day by day, this right, together with others such as freedom of expression, is being curtailed by elites who, knowing that they are hated by the people, try to uphold a system whose legitimacy is being called into question by those from below.

Nevertheless, what happened will not prevent the people from taking to the streets. It will not prevent us migrants from making ourselves visible with our organizations and our demands. It will not prevent us from continuing to organize ourselves and fight for what belongs to us. Just as we did not stop doing when we were repressed in past May 1st demonstrations or deported for taking part in actions against the genocide in Palestine.

And we will continue to fight wherever we are: in our jobs, in elections, in schools, in universities and in the streets.

Only the people will save the people.

  • Alpas Pilipinas,
  • Auswärts Solidarity Group,
  • Bloque Latinoamericano,
  • Gabriela Germany,
  • Kali Feminists,
  • Solisur,
  • Todas las Sangres,
  • Worker’s Party of Turkey.

Partners in innovation (and whitewashing)

Charité announces collaboration with Israeli firm linked to the IDF


Something that doesn’t come up often enough when discussing the complicity of Germany’s governmental, cultural and academic institutions in the whitewashing of Israel’s violence is the complicity of its scientific and medical institutions – institutions we should hope have a fundamental respect for humanity at the core of their values. Sadly, as we’ve grown used to in Germany, this is not something that we can count on – at least not when it comes to Palestine.

In February earlier this year, Germany’s most important medical institution, Charité Universitätsmedizin, announced the creation of a new innovation center. “With the establishment of an ARC Innovation Center” the announcement reads “Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) are creating a new organizational framework to advance medical innovations rapidly and in a targeted manner.” This, however, is not just the result of a collaboration with the BIH but, most importantly, with Israel’s own most important medical institution: Sheba Medical Center – where the ARC concept itself was developed and, according to its website, has been so successful that “Sheba’s ARC is now establishing innovation centers in London, Berlin, Singapore, Australia, Canada and the United States.”

Sheba is not only one of the world’s top hospitals and what your friend’s entrepreneur friend would call a “hub of healthcare innovation”, it works closely with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) providing them with treatment, training and rehabilitation – even serving as an equipment distribution center for IDF medical units. It is also the recipient of huge donations from close Putin acquaintance, illegal settlement funder and target of international sanctions Roman Abramovich; as well as from Friends of the IDF (FIDF) a US nonprofit whose list of “friends” and major donors include Trump and Netanyahu billionaire supporters Miriam Adelson and Larry Ellison – Sheba and the FIDF, in fact, partnered to create a center where IDF soldiers with PTSD from taking part in war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon receive mental healthcare.

With all of this one would expect management at Charité to reconsider its collaboration agreements with Sheba, right? Well, dear reader, one would be wrong. I was initially made aware of Charité’s collaboration with Sheba by a Charité employee. “The question of collaboration with Israel increasingly reminds me of how, in many religions, even questioning the existence or actions of a deity is considered a deadly sin. Criticism is not seen as part of democratic discourse, but as completely illegitimate” she expressed at the start of our conversation. Particularly difficult for her to accept has been the fact that “there has been no clear statement from Charité and BIH following Israel’s illegal attack on Iran, nor any meaningful distancing from the genocidal war in Gaza or the settler violence in the West Bank.”

This is in “stark contrast” to the general response to Russias invasion of Ukraine, she pointed out. “Researchers collaborating with Russian institutions were immediately scrutinized, and Russian employees often became targets of suspicion.” It seemed to her that “all of a sudden, institutions argued that scientific cooperation could not be separated from state violence.” Yet in the case of Israel “the principle that governments must be differentiated from institutions and individuals is invoked selectively” it is only used “when it serves political convenience” she said. “This is the kind of inconsistency that really undermines the credibility of an institution’s claims about universal human rights, ethics, and neutrality.”

And although she recognizes the value and importance of international cooperation between medical and scientific institutions, she cannot agree with “a framework in which Israel will profit from innovations and research supported through the ARC Center at Charité” as they could “ultimately benefit other structures linked to the state while its human right violations continue without accountability or any kind of of consequences.”

To all of this a PR person for Charité might argue that, as stated in its website, Sheba’s guiding creed is “hope without boundaries” and that proof of this is that it takes in Palestinians and people from neighboring Arab countries for treatment. This is objectively true, but in the case of Palestinians, what they would be ignoring completely – as pointed out in this great report in Jewish Currents – is that in accordance with Article 56 of the 4th Geneva Convention “Israel as the occupying power has the primary responsibility to ensure respect, protection, and fulfillment of the right to health of Palestinians in Gaza” and not just in Gaza, but in the illegally occupied West Bank as well. Talking about “hope without boundaries” is repainting a responsibility under international law as an act of kindness – this is without mentioning that most of the expenses are actually covered by the Palestinian Authority, that Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure has been practically wiped out by the IDF, and the dystopian reality of securing a permit to get treatment outside of Gaza in the West Bank, East Jerusalem or Israel, a reality that is known to be exploited by Israel’s intelligence services as a way to get Palestinians to collaborate with them.

By not reconsidering the partnership it started with Sheba back in 2022, Charité has decided to partner with a medical establishment that, according to important members of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, has barely criticized, much less opposed, what even Israeli scholars like Omer Bartov and Amos Goldberg – as well as Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem – have called a genocide. It has decided to indirectly associate itself with organizations like FIDF, billionaire supporters of both Trump and Netanyahu, and corrupt Russian oligarchs who directly fund settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.In helping Sheba sell its illusion of “hope without boundaries” Charité is directly engaging in what anthropologist Avram Bornstein calls “medical hasbara” and whitewashing the realities of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, its genocide in Gaza and its wars in Iran and Lebanon.

19 May 1895: Cuban revolutionary Jose Martí is killed in action

This week in working class history


“Con los pobres de la tierra quiero yo mi suerte echar.”
“With the poor of the earth I will cast my lot.”

On May 19th, 1895, the Cuban national hero José Martí was killed in action during the Cuban war of independence against the Spanish. He was 42 years old. As the preeminent political theorist on Cuban nationalism at the time, his organising work galvanised Cubans at home and abroad to ultimately expel the Spanish, a day he did not live to see. His legacy post-martyrdom is co-opted by all strains of the Cuban political spectrum, a reflection of his radical anti-imperialist positioning vis-a-vis today’s mainstream liberal politics.

Martí was born in Cuban capital city, Havana, to Spanish parents and spent part of his childhood in Spain before returning to the island. He was politicised during the first Cuban war of independence against Spain–also called the Ten Years War–which was centered around the abolition of slavery and mobilised slaves and workers in sugar plantations, the primary colonial crop in Cuba. It was during this time that he published his first political writings, which were generally anti-imperialist and anti-slavery in nature. This led to him being exiled to Spain by the colonial authorities, from where his serious work on building internationalist solidarity for the Cuban independence cause took form.

His exile took him through Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, the West Indies, and the United States where he spent time teaching, writing, uniting, and working with Cuban exiles and the diaspora. The Cuban expatriates in Florida–polar opposite from what they are now–were exiles seeking political asylum and tobacco workers, whom he rallied for the cause of the plantation workers back in Cuba. In 1895, Martí organised an armed expedition from abroad, setting sail to Cuba, in order to start an uprising, a revolutionary move that would be the “intellectual author” of a similar expedition in 1953 by Fidel Castro and comrades. It is in this uprising that he was eventually killed, at the Battle of Dos Rios.

Martí’s most famous essay, “Nuestra America”, argued that Cubans should not look outside of Cuba for their solution, as all problems were fomented outside. He saw the oppressed in Cuba as the real leaders of the revolution and warned against what would turn out to be an accurate reading of US imperialist interests in the West Indies and eventually Cuba. At the same time, Martí was wary of Marx and communism, and saw US liberal democratic society at the time as a blueprint for Latin America. Moving away from what would now be contemporarily termed decolonial, Martí also saw merit in working with European and American society for reforms essential for Latin America to detach themselves from Spanish subjugation. These juxtapositions simmer of course, from a contemporary positioning of Martí.

Martí’s politics played a pivotal foundational role in politics post the revolution in 1959 and is equally appropriated by socialists and their critics alike. Several parks and streets are named in his honour today, including Havana’s airport.

Martí was also a famous poet. His political vision of the world can best be summarised in one of his most famous poems “Cultivo una rosa blanca” (I cultivate a white rose), which is interestingly the possible inspiration behind the name “The White Rose”, a student resistance movement in Munich in 1942-43 led by Sophie Scholl and others.

Cultivo una rosa blanca
en julio como en enero
para el amigo sincero
que me da su mano franca.

Pero para el cruel que me arranca
el corazón con que vivo,
cardo ni ortiga cultivo…
cultivo una rosa blanca.

Translated to English:

I cultivate a white rose
In July as in January
For the sincere friend
Who gives me his hand frankly.

And for the cruel person who tears out
the heart with which I live,
I cultivate neither nettles nor thorns:
I cultivate a white rose.

Austerity produces monsters

Social Democrats and the fall of the cordon sanitaire in Romania


There is a political phrase that every Romanian will encounter in school. It refers to Alexandru Ioan Cuza, who in 1859 was elected prince of both Moldavia and Wallachia, a de facto union that was the first step in the formation of the modern Romanian state. Cuza went on to enact radical liberal reforms against the interests of the boyars. An increasingly isolated enlightened autocrat, Cuza was ousted in 1866 by Conservatives and Liberals working together. To this day, this is known as the “monstrous coalition.”

First the history, now the farce. On the anniversary of Cuza’s election, Ilie Bolojan, Romania’s Prime Minister, drew a parallel between his time and 1859. Now, as then, Romania requires modernizing reforms pushed through by strong men with the clarity of purpose to go against the grain of society. A few months later, Bolojan met his own monstrous coalition.

The Social Democratic Party (PSD) broke off from the government led by Bolojan’s National Liberal Party (PNL) and allied with the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). PSD and AUR proposed a vote of no-confidence, which passed on May 5 with 281 parliamentary votes, well over the 233 it needed. Bolojan now only heads a caretaker government, and a new cabinet has to be formed in June.

Some commentators have gone as far as to call this a coup. But Bolojan is not Cuza. The latter introduced free compulsory education to the Romanian states and redistributed land from the boyars and monasteries to the peasants. Bolojan’s progress consists of austerity and cuts, a vision that begins and ends with the budget deficit. And this enabled a coalition more monstrous than a liberal-conservative alliance. PSD’s willingness to work with AUR is one of the worst trespasses of the cordon sanitaire against the far right in Europe, one that prefigures a grim future.

The Straight Man

Bolojan came to power as a problem-solver. The problem was straightforward: Romania’s budget deficit. At the beginning of his tenure, the deficit was 9.3% of the country’s GDP, the highest in the EU. Bolojan’s administration brought it down to 7.9%, and the deficit was forecasted to reach 6.2% by the end of the year. Still high, but manageable.

Much hangs in the balance when it comes to budget deficits in the EU, especially for the Union’s less powerful economies. The threat of a downgrade of Romania’s credit rating, scaring off investors, looms large over capitalists’ heads. The Romanian dream of joining the OECD shatters against accusations of fiscal irresponsibility. EU funding, such as the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) or Romania’s recovery and resilience plan (PNRR), is conditioned on reaching fiscal balance, among other legislative reforms.

In Romania, these mechanisms have become promises of progress and necessary reform, invoked constantly to the point of the absurd. In a recent address meant to calm Romanians, President Nicușor Dan rambled off acronyms like magic words: “There is agreement on major policies: OECD, SAFE, PNRR. There is agreement on Romania’s fiscal trajectory.”

But the President and the caretaker Prime Minister lose sight of, or simply don’t care about, a simple fact: as one commentator put it, country ratings are abstract concerns for the average Romanian. More tangible than a letter grade assigned by economists at Moody’s is how Romania’s fiscal trajectory is changing daily life. And on this front, Bolojan’s administration has been a disaster.

After a series of political crises in which Romania twice came close to a far-right president, Dan and Bolojan took office as liberal saviors. A former teacher-activist and independent mayor of Bucharest, Dan soon lost his shine, playing close to both the far right and PSD. Bolojan, on the other hand, took his role seriously. As prefect of a Transylvanian county, he gained a reputation as a ruthlessly efficient administrator who was not afraid to cut funding, fire superfluous employees, and fight against corrupt interests. Exactly the tight ship that the national government needed.

The Prime Minister quickly got to work. Going against Dan’s explicit electoral promise, he raised the VAT. He eliminated the caps on energy prices. He shrunk the coverage of public health insurance. He increased teachers’ workloads and reduced or eliminated state employees’ bonuses, while their base salaries were frozen. Pensions were also frozen, and the threshold over which retired Romanians have to pay for health insurance was lowered. And he constantly threatened to fire tens of thousands of state employees.

Romania’s deficit decreased, and the country avoided a credit rating downgrade. At the cost, however, of the highest inflation in the EU and of a decrease in consumption and in purchasing power. This is a country with one of the highest poverty rates in the Union and marked by historic inequality and major regional disparities. It is no wonder, then, that Romanians are more pessimistic than the EU average about their personal and national economic security and that they went out on the streets to protest against austerity, to little effect. According to Bolojan, he is in power “to do what he has to, not what is popular.”

His reforms, however, also proved unpopular among his own partners in government. The grand coalition of PSD and PNL was always marked by tensions, which reached the tipping point with the government’s plans to list shares from several state companies on the financial markets. Another plan to make quick cash, increase efficiency, and make the numbers look better, while ignoring longer-term solutions.

Privatization has never been a silver bullet for postsocialist economies. On the contrary, it made industrial production and employment subject to the whims of shareholders and market forces. One example is the Mangalia shipyard. Owned by Daewoo, the shipyard was sold by the Korean company due to indebtedness. The Romanian state bought back a controlling share of 51%, with 49% going to the Dutch firm Damen. But Damen directed foreign contracts to shipyards where it was the majority owner, leaving Mangalia to go bankrupt. Now the shipyard will possibly be taken over by Rheinmetall for military production.

Militarization is one sector that is thriving in Romania, at the expense of social spending. Not that the bar is high. Despite liberal cries of waste, inefficiency, and overspending, Romania’s social state has actually been dismantled over the last decades. Social spending is among the lowest in Europe, and the impact of Romanian social transfers is particularly inefficient for reducing poverty. The Romanian administration is, admittedly, a mess, but it also has the lowest level of public-sector staffing in the EU, relative to both the country’s total workforce and to the population.

So if it is not so much a problem of spending, why is there a deficit? Romania’s most pressing problem is tax collection. Romania has the largest gap in VAT collection in the EU. Bringing this to the EU average would save more than twice as much as Bolojan’s austerity measures—not to mention corporate tax collection. 

Right before the vote of no-confidence, the Minister of Finance announced a much-promised reform of the National Agency for Fiscal Administration (ANAF). However, the plan is not to increase collection, but to cut in the name of efficiency: around half of local ANAF offices are slated to be closed. 

This is a clear example of Bolojan’s approach to the Romanian economy. His ambition is not to improve and fix, to increase the overall welfare, but to catch the freeloaders, the corrupt, the lazy. In his own controversial phrasing, he claimed to have spied the rats in the pantry, and he is out to get them. Without the rats, Romania will become a lean, clean Western capitalist machine.

The Monsters

The rat comparisons and the privatizations were the breaking point for the social democrats and the far right. They accused Bolojan of using dehumanizing, Nazi-like language and selling away the country. PSD and AUR came together to stop the disastrous effects of Bolojan’s economic plans. Or so they claim.

The alliance between the two parties is more likely than it appears at first. Virtually all of Romania’s mainstream parties lean toward conservatism and nationalism, and PSD is no exception. One of its most important leaders, Lia Olguța Vasilescu, was a founding member of the Greater Romania Party, the last far-right party to reach prominence before AUR, and the party is strongly conservative on social issues. Economically, it supports some redistributive policies and increases in social spending, but does not hesitate to pull the rug from under the vulnerable to bolster its own crony capitalist network.

The alliance between PSD and AUR makes sense not only ideologically, but economically as well. While PNL and the neoliberal USR party are affiliated with transnational, mobile capital, both AUR and PSD represent the interests of national capital. That is not to say that they are disconnected from international circuits. On the day of the vote of no confidence, AUR leader George Simion was observed texting with a representative of an international mining corporation. The privatization of mining state companies had been one of the key points of the controversy surrounding the government’s plan.

This was, then, the ideal scenario for PSD and AUR to finally come together. The threat against state companies was an encroachment on PSD’s traditional source of institutional leverage and financial benefits. For AUR, it represented a clear chance to reassert their economic nationalism, as against EU-imposed regulations and conditions. A stronger national economy that takes care of Romanians is the future that this alliance sees after the Bolojan government.

The shape of the next government is messy and uncertain. But the economic suffering imposed by the Bolojan government means that the combined appeal of the Social Democrats and the far-right stands a chance of becoming the basis of a stable coalition. For now, PSD leader Sorin Grindeanu has excluded the possibility of governing together with AUR. Simion, in turn, waffles about AUR taking the reins of government, as the party thrives in opposition. But he is less final about a coalition with PSD: “Never say never.”

At the end of the day, Simion is right. Although Romania does not have a far-right president, in part due to a Constitutional Court decision that seriously undermined democracy, AUR is undeniably a major player in Romanian politics. For them, everything is on the table. Victoria Stoiciu, the only PSD member of Parliament who was publicly against the collaboration with AUR, points out that mainstream parties seem not to have internalised how close AUR is to power.

PNL and Dan continue their austerity programs, further immiserating and alienating AUR’s voting base. PSD either considers that it can use and control the far-right, a dangerous gamble, or is simply moving toward the economic nationalism and nativist redistributism that AUR claims to support. The far-right is adept at naming people’s legitimate grievances, but seeks to aggravate and mobilize them, not to solve them. For social democracy to play on that terrain is a disaster that ends in fascism.

The Lesson?

What happened in Romania is bound to happen again. Like Romanian liberals who learned nothing, it is evident that mainstream parties throughout Europe try to continue their fiscal trajectories. With AfD always rising in the polls, Friedrich Merz attacks German health insurance, labor regulations, and social protections. Keir Starmer’s austerity budget led to historic wins for Reform in local elections.

The alternative seems to be to try to play the game of the far-right, from anti-migration politics to loosening green regulations. Hungary, for instance, finally ousted Viktor Orbán, but might fall back into the far-right trap if it continues appealing to nationalist values and policies. In the European Parliament, both the center-right and the social democrats voted together with the far right in the recent past.

But the PSD-AUR vote of no confidence is a new, different type of blow against the cordon sanitaire supposed to keep the far-right parties at a distance. It is an example of going beyond voting together to actively work with the far right in order to plan an impactful political move. This means not only normalization, but an open willingness to legitimize and cede political ground. This willingness is not an isolated, Eastern European aberration. The Party of European Socialists, of which PSD is part, lent their full support to PSD’s choice.

If there are any lessons to be taken from Romania, besides a daunting awareness of the seemingly inevitable decay into fascism, these are two: to reject the geopolitical framing and to understand the limits of social-democratic parties. In this case, as always, the fight against the far right has been framed as a clash of European or Western values against Russian influence. But European civilization is a right-wing project, built on exploitation, racism, and geopolitical divides. Parties like AUR rightfully claim to mark a return to the core of Europeanness, and are embedded in networks across the EU. Solving internal social problems and ditching austerity will do much more toward mitigating their rise than seeing Russian hybrid wars everywhere. Vague appeals to the importance of a European orientation have no power and only serve to aggravate those who feel like the losers of Europeanization.

PSD ultimately chose to ally itself with AUR because of its investments in a specific type of Romanian capitalism, one that was under attack. Both parties had something to preserve and to gain against Bolojan’s austerity program. The coalition was monstrous not because it was against nature, but because it revealed the deep common structure that both the social democrats and the far right share. It also showed that, at least in Romania, there is as yet no true alternative to austerity that does not lead to something worse. Austerity ran wild under Bolojan, and then it was stopped by the only ones with the power to stop it. In both cases, however, there were monstrous results that were and will be felt by those most vulnerable.

What the hell is “Gerechtigkeit”?

The debate over its meaning is obscuring that we are all fighting over the wrong pie


11/05/2026

The German term “Gerechtigkeit” translates roughly to fairness, justice, or equity. It’s become a catchword in German political discourse, resurfaced by the SPD during the 2017 federal elections, late in the hour of neoliberalism’s longue durée during the 2017 federal elections (proving that as usual, and for good or bad, Germany is 10 years behind America, where social justice rhetoric exploded in the wake of the Great Recession).

Now everyone is clamoring for more of it. The market radical Freie Demokraten (FDP) hold up the banner of “chance fairness” and decry welfare recipients as harming equity by taking away from those who actually work. A group of young CDU MPs almost torpedoed their own party’s social security reforms last winter, claiming that it wasn’t fair or just to force young people to pay disproportionate amounts to shore up the retirement of millions of pensioners.

As inequality skyrockets, precarity becomes the norm, and as Germany’s export-oriented economic model fails, fairness and equity are no longer rhetorical questions. The debate over the meaning of Gerechtigkeit becomes a material battleground for various groups vying for a smaller and smaller pie. Germany, stuck in its uniquely punitive version of austerity since at least 2005, refuses to expand that definition of fairness and justice through direct support and stimulus. Which means that debates on this topic can only move in one direction: towards a debate about who pays for what and is most deserving. In short, what should be a shared responsibility gets twisted into a cold individual accounting and moralistic framing.

This cold framing turns rights and guarantees into conditionals based on individual behavior and contribution. This is nothing new for Germany’s social system, which integrates its non-universal healthcare system directly into your job and capacity to work. For some, the system is not restrictive enough, though.

Like Carla Neuhaus, for example, editor for Die Zeit’s economic section. In an article from 24 March titled, “Stop rewarding the stay-at-home wife marriage!” she argues that getting “free” health insurance from your working married partner when you’re unemployed is a privilege that sets the wrong incentives. Neuhaus asserts that such benefits are almost always claimed by women. Families should be able to decide who takes care of the kids, but not at the cost of the community. That’s why it’s right for moms to have to pay 225 euros a month if they’d prefer to not work and take over childcare. The fee will give women the opportunity to work, even if part-time, since it eliminates a cliff where women earn less due to the monetary benefit.

In most states in Germany, childcare is only free at age 3 and many municipalities set fees based on income. Reports estimate that there are over 300,000 spots lacking in public childcare facilities; better earners avail themselves of higher-quality private centers to avoid long waiting lists. For public facilities in Köln, for example, families pay up to 341 euros a month, lunch fees not included. Berlin is the only state with free childcare. Across Germany, waiting times of over a year are common and many give up despite a legal right to a childcare spot.

A part-time worker earning minimum wage in Germany takes home roughly 850 euros a month. Subtract childcare and lunch fees and that number can drop to around 600 euros a month. For married women who would rather stay at home and look after the kids themselves, they will now be charged 225 a month.

What an opportunity indeed. Low-earning German women who hope to benefit from this fairness initiative can now spend months trying to secure a childcare spot, pay for the entitlement, and then restructure their entire lives. We can’t have those stay-at-home moms getting something they don’t deserve, after all.

Neuhaus’s argument assumes there is something waiting for these women on the other side—a labor market that rewards participation, wages that grow, a society that lifts those who work hard. That Germany has not existed for two decades. For sociologist Oliver Nachtwey, Germany’s “Elevator Society” of guaranteed mobility is now a “Downward Escalator” where individuals struggle to maintain their current living standards rather than ever improve them.

The current debate is also a categorical error: we are arguing over who deserves what is happening entirely within one pie, while the other pie sits untouched. You see, the ultrarich in this country are doing extraordinarily well. 3,900 people with assets over 100 million euros own about 25 percent of Germany’s total wealth. Middle-class families pay a tax rate of around 43 percent while billionaires sit at 26 percent. The one pie is salary, the other is investments and profit. Different pies, different rates.

To the commentariat and all mainstream political parties, minus Die Linke, this other pie doesn’t even exist. The ethics of responsibility, thrift, and individual contribution obscure the systemic failings that Germany’s deeply unjust and unequal system has produced. This is a country that pocketed decades of trade surpluses and funneled it up to the top—to villas on Sylt, bonuses for executives, and dividends for shareholders. Despite all that, the supposed hole in the budget to pay for infrastructure and increasing healthcare costs and defense spending needs to be filled by stay-at-home moms, disabled people, and welfare cuts.

At least the average German is sensing something rotten is happening. 81 percent of Germans believe that wealth is unfairly distributed in this country, and 64 percent want the re-introduction of a wealth tax. The lukewarm SPD response is to target “Spitzenverdiener” (top earners); again, for mainstream politicians, the second pie does not exist. And they say lefties are removed from reality.

Germany’s crumbling bridges and inequality are most definitely matters of Gerechtigkeit. They’re also a matter of uneven contribution to this society. But the problem isn’t salaried employees in any sense: it’s the rich abdicating their social responsibility and doing what the rich do—extract short-term gain and externalize the costs. Twenty years of austerity and accumulation at the top have left the bottom desiccated and worn out. Squeezing the dregs of this society will not work. Everyone’s talking about Gerechtigkeit, but the term has been dragged through the mud and hollowed out to cover for a state that can no longer fulfill promises of a dignified and prosperous life; its ruling class has blocked every avenue of shared responsibility, wealth, and renewal. At this point, I’m done with my shitty pie. I want one pie and I want all of it. That starts with taking from the rich—first with taxation and then expropriation.