A-Infos (en) Germany, LIKOS: Rally "No One Is Fair Game" - Speech (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

On July 27th, approximately 250 people gathered to commemorate the 
attack on a homeless person on Johannisstraße in Osnabrück in June. --- 
Together with other groups and organizations, we called for this rally, 
where we delivered the following speech: --- More than a month has 
passed since a homeless person was brutally beaten in downtown 
Osnabrück. The police took a long time to even react. Only when a video 
of the attack reached the police via the press was action deemed 
necessary. Let's not kid ourselves - acts of violence like this are 
commonplace and usually go unnoticed by the public, the police, or the 
justice system. Only the brazen and reckless stupidity of the young 
perpetrators is what's causing this case to receive attention. And we 
can promise you: it will soon be forgotten. Just like violence against 
homeless people always is. This isn't just lamenting societal 
coldness-the violence, the performative outrage, and its repression into 
the societal unconscious are systemic.

Police crime statistics don't even deem it necessary to explicitly 
record these incidents. Only the victim status is recorded, provided the 
perpetrators' motive suggests that they committed their crime for that 
reason. In the eyes of the state, homeless people are simply not 
considered whole human beings.

Yet even this inadequate recording provides a sobering glimpse into the 
trend. While there were 602 recorded offenses in 2011, this number has 
steadily increased since then. In 2018, we reached 1,560; by 2025, it 
will have risen to 2,194. This impression is based on a more than flawed 
police data collection system. Not to mention the staggering number of 
unreported crimes and the abysmal clearance rate.

But we are also placing our trust in the police and the justice 
system-that's the first mistake. Police officers don't usually treat 
homeless people with kindness; quite the opposite. Far more common are 
confrontations like the one around Johannisstraße, where for the past 
two years homeless people have been harassed, displaced, and humiliated. 
With every action, every arrest, every punishment, people are entrenched 
in their poverty. This isn't limited to the weapons and alcohol ban 
zone. Everything beyond mere visual existence, all actions taken to 
maintain it, are criminalized and met with repression. There are no 
legal places to sleep, no legal way to relieve oneself. The police are 
not guardians of justice, but rather watchdogs of the property order and 
thus of the class system. Their violence is no different from that of 
the young people on June 20th, because it is just as much an expression 
of the ever-present threat of "work, or else...".

... The bourgeois "outrage" is hypocrisy and operates on the principle 
of "Guys, we'll sort out the homelessness issue within the bounds of the 
rule of law, don't get involved."

Because the violence expressed here, both in terms of the two groups, is 
not simply "hatred of the poor." It stems from an economic and class 
order that must present wage earners with a tangible threat to force 
them to sell their labor on the market. This coercion combines such acts 
of violence with laws like the weapons and alcohol bans in the city 
center. The situation is currently exacerbated by the unprecedented 
attack on the welfare state. It is obvious that there is no direct 
economic benefit behind this - countless examples from the past have 
shown that this benefit is minimal at best, if not detrimental. That's 
not the point. The benefit lies in intensifying the underlying threat of 
capital. Poverty and homelessness are not a failure of the system, but 
rather an expression of the conditions of its reality.

The dehumanization of homeless people is therefore not a purely social 
phenomenon, not a moral decay playing out on the surface of society, but 
is fundamentally rooted in capitalism. The growing racism, fascism, and 
increasing hatred of poor people ("social parasites") are not isolated 
or isolable developments, but rather have their origins in the crisis of 
capital, which, in its pursuit of never-ending expansion, demands ever 
more from our lives, even death on the front lines. And so, when a 
homeless person is beaten up in downtown Osnabrück, it concerns us all. 
It is the realization of a threat that can affect us all.

And this violence is omnipresent, even if it superficially takes on 
other forms. It is present when Friedrich Merz speaks of a cityscape 
that needs redesign. It is present when, in the name of security, AI 
surveillance technology is added to the police's toolkit. It is present 
when the latent fear of downward mobility is projected onto refugees. It 
is manifest when a homeless person is beaten up because they are not 
only not a "productive" part of society, but a thorn in the side of the 
much-vaunted meritocracy, a burden on it, and therefore forfeiting their 
humanity. And it can find its final, irreversible expression in 
annihilation, in the camps of the Third Reich.

Therefore, if we want to combat this violence, it is not enough to 
simply turn the wheel of reform and patch up the cracks in the social 
order with duct tape. We must tackle the problem at its root.

The endless lamenting, the perpetual, clumsy symptom-treating of 
reformist politics is no solution; at best, it merely postpones the 
final consequence, slightly widening the divide. It's about preserving a 
social conscience, under whose acknowledgment one can occasionally feel 
better when policies become somewhat more socially just for marginalized 
people. In short, it perpetuates this sick system and its associated 
costs, measured in human lives. It's no solution-just as simply 
developing an awareness of systemic violence and dimensions of 
oppression-something now branded as wokeness-is no solution.

The solution is a break with what breeds this violence. A break with the 
myth that capitalism can be sufficiently reined in to prevent its most 
horrific excesses from exhausting their destructive, inhumane potential. 
A break with the illusion that it can be changed from within. A break 
with the state, whose purpose is to secure the property order by force. 
We must stop grasping at straws within the system and instead shatter 
its boundaries. Organize yourselves! Against the state, the nation, and 
capital!

https://likos.noblogs.org/2026/07/29/kundgebung-kein-mensch-ist-freiwild-redebeitrag/
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