Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

Boil 1.91

Last month Germany's real-life Robin Hood gang struck again, stealing a trolley of luxury food. But who are they - and why do they do it? And how did Luke Harding manage to track them down when the police couldn't?
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Late last month Sievers's shop, Frische Paradies in Hamburg, was the victim of one of the most inventive - and possibly the funniest, though not to him - raids in German criminal history. At 10.15am on April 28, a group of activists dressed as superheroes burst into his gourmet supermarket. Wearing carnival masks and calling themselves names such as Spider Mum, Multiflex, Sante Guevara and Operaistorix, they made off with a trolley loaded with luxury goods.
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In a note posted on the internet the gang said it had distributed the food among Germany's new underclass - interns who worked for months in glamorous publishing houses without being paid, low-wage nursery assistants, mums forced to take part-time jobs as cleaning ladies and "one-euro jobbers", performing menial tasks under a German government welfare scheme. The gang said it didn't merely object to capitalism. Instead it was making a stand against Prekarisierung or "precariousness" - the uncertainty facing 20- and lower 30somethings as they try to navigate their way through Europe's gloomy neo-liberal jobs market.
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But unlike these older leftists, Hamburg Umsonst is a newer movement, loosely affiliated to a growing network of young anti-capitalist protesters from across Europe. The movement started off in Milan in 2001. It has now spread to more than a dozen European cities, including Paris, Palermo, Stockholm, Helsinki and London [...]

posted by Geist @ 12:35 pm