Ask any old shop steward what happens when the brass starts talking about invisible saboteurs in the supply chain, and they will tell you straight: check your locker and watch your back. Bosses never buy padlocks to keep the ghosts out; they buy them to lock the rank-and-file in. Word out of Berlin this week that the German federal government is handing sweeping new powers to its domestic and foreign intelligence apparatus follows that exact, tired choreography. Under the glossy banner of countering hybrid threats, foreign espionage, and infrastructural disruption, the state is sharpening the claws of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz and the Bundesnachrichtendienst. They want the public to picture trench-coated foreign operatives cutting undersea cables with hacksaws, but anyone with an ounce of class consciousness knows who actually ends up on the receiving end of an expanded security state.
The legislation greases the wheels for state agents to poke through private bank accounts, intercept communications with lower thresholds of suspicion, and conduct covert counter-operations. The official justification is wrapped in the fashionable jargon of modern Atlanticist anxiety: defending critical infrastructure against geopolitical adversaries. It sounds reasonable enough to the well-heeled burghers in the Bundestag who never had to worry about their phone numbers ending up on an employer blacklist. Yet the definitions of sabotage and state-sponsored disruption have a funny habit of stretching like cheap work boots. When an oil refinery stops pumping or the freight trains grind to a halt, the difference between hostile foreign subversion and an effective wildcat strike often depends entirely on who is writing the police report.
We must look at the material reality of Germany today to understand why the state is reaching for its truncheon. The so-called locomotive of European capitalism is sputtering, choked by deindustrialization, ruinous energy costs, and an unyielding commitment to fiscal austerity that treats social spending like a mortal sin. Chemical plants are shuttering, automotive giants are threatening mass layoffs, and the German working class—battered by years of inflation—is growing restless. From local transit workers walking off the job to engineering unions flexing their collective muscle, the post-war social partnership between capital and labor is fraying at the edges. When the factory floor starts grumbling, the boardrooms panic, and when the boardrooms panic, the state reaches for its armor.
It was Antonio Gramsci who noted from his fascist prison cell that the state is best understood as hegemony protected by the armor of coercion. When the ruling class can no longer secure consent through rising wages and the promise of a comfortable pension, the ideological veneer cracks, and the iron fist underneath has to show itself. These surveillance reforms are precisely that iron reinforcement. As the interregnum deepens and the old economic certainties die, the German state is preparing the coercive tools it needs to police the fallout. They call it national defense, but it is ultimately the defense of a crumbling neoliberal consensus against any disruption from below.
Let us not pretend the German security services possess a pristine, neutral pedigree. The domestic intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, has spent decades casting a blind eye toward armed fascist networks festering in barracks and police stations, all while relentlessly keeping files on anti-fascist organizers, trade union militants, and anti-war activists. Handing these same spooks enhanced mandates to monitor financial flows and disrupt networks under the vague pretext of national resilience is an open invitation for political policing. It requires a staggering amount of willful amnesia to believe these surveillance tools will remain strictly focused on foreign agents and never migrate to the organizers picketing defense contractors or blocking access to coal mines.
On the shop floor, we used to have a saying about the company installing new cameras in the breakroom: if they are watching the door, they are watching you. The working class has no dog in the fight between competing capitalist blocs, and it should offer no cheers for the expansion of secret police powers under the guise of geopolitical rivalry. Berlin is arming its spymasters because it fears the instability of its own economic model far more than it fears any shadowy foreign infiltrator. The German trade union movement needs to wake up, see this maneuver for the class discipline that it is, and refuse to let national security hysteria become the pretext for its own containment.