Riding up the hill to Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin on my way to teach English—freelance, no health insurance, no job security, and meagre wages. Like most artists I know, I feel as if the rug has been well and truly pulled now, and I’m scrambling in that moment of flight, ass over head, snatching vainly at the air for something to hold me from crashing coccyx down onto the hard cold ground.
I edge my bicycle to cross the road, but I get distracted by an image on a shining pill box mounted on the strip in the middle of the road. It is a perspex domino, upon which advertisements are plastered to wash the brains of the drivers whizzing northbound and south. The advertisement features a row of soldiers in fatigues and combat helmets, one soldier with a particularly blonde face in the middle. These camouflaged corpses-to-be hold rifles in their hands and stare at the camera, at me, through me, and chant in unison the blunt text emblazoned across the middle: ‘How far would you go to defend …’ Wait for it. Wait for it …
‘Democracy?’
If this were 1940, it could just as well have said ‘das Vaterland’, only now the master signifiers have been decanted and switched. The fathers are sterile but still they hold the strings. Their erect metaphors have transmogrified into an incandescently vapid simulacrum—’democracy—in whose name dark and inexorable futures await.
I stand gobsmacked, bicycle wheel trembling in the street gutter, as the soldiers holler silently at me: ‘How many people will you kill and maim to defend democracy? How many limbs will you shed, like dandelion tufts, in the name of freedom?’ Ironic that the military build-up carried out for democracy was enabled by an anti-democratic rat-fuck of the popular will. Germany has only Euros in its coffers to bloat its armed forces (and course with champagne the delicate the veins of Rheinmetall shareholders), because Germany’s grey now-Chancellor Merz wriggled a constitutional change through the corpse of a parliament that had been voted out and therefore had no mandate, nor authority. The parliamentarians were just there to keep the seats warm for the incoming members, not to flicker annihilation upon millions. But Democracy … Must be defended.
Then a shift: the soldiers begin to ascend to the heavens as if chosen by god’s greater rapture—or rather, they roll and coil away into a secret sanctum. For this particular propaganda pillbox is one of those ‘Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ models with a little whirring engine that grinds between one advertisement and another, juxtaposing images that have no connection to one another. Ostensibly.
The soldiers vanish and into their place floats the Google Pixel 10, the reigning progeny of Pixels 1 through 9, that will of course saturate the life of its owner with meaning. The owner of the phone is visible to me only as a hand with olive skin and very expensive looking finger nails that give off queer vibes somehow (whatever that means). ‘Well’, I think, ‘at least we got something from the last decade or so of struggle for justice stretching from Tahrir Square to the George Floyd uprisings’. Disembodied hands of colour in the advertisements of spooky tech firms with tentacles clutching at every detail of our individual lives and which churn the informational infrastructure of genocides happening in lands a few thousand miles to the south of Berlin, our demented nerve centre of empire.
I snap a photo and ride on, thinking of Lyndon B Johnson, who—with Kennedy’s brain-hollowed skull still warm—fuelled the Vietnam War with hordes more soldiers, and tonnes more napalm, with the slogan that the USA could thrive on both ‘Guns and Butter’. This was the president who courted the glistening demon of war and could walk the yellow brick road, hand in hand with the doughy divinity of the welfare state. Johnson’s ruddy-cheeked, corn-fed speeches pretended to give us the ‘Great Society’ where children get an education, the sick are cared for, those who can work labour with dignity, and those cannot are not left to starve.
This cunning sham would of course be shoved down the garbage compactor ten or so years down the line in Ronald Reagan’s roughshod revolution. Now the spectre of communism was so dilapidated that it was no longer necessary to pretend.
The myth of goons like Hayek and Friedman is that, despite its foundation in human greed, capitalism is the most moral system. In fact, these fumes of greed fire a dynamic system in which human desires are met. Think of all the Pixels we have! Not to mention the iPhones. Socialism on the other hand, by foregrounding the rights of ordinary people, ends up, in this recounting, producing forms of slavery and totalitarianism. And no Pixels at all.
Yet just last week, mere days after mooting the return of compulsory military service, Chancellor Merz announced that Germany would have to slash its social spending, saying that it simply cannot afford anything like a welfare state in its current form. To be honest, surveying these northern waste lands, things don’t look that crash hot. No, I see friends dying from drug overdoses and mental health crises, I see more and more humans sleeping rough, sitting on stoops, picking wounds, teachers bringing their own stationary to cash-starved schools. Yet apparently, according to Merz, this state of being is already far too luxurious. Rather than welfare, the unemployed will be corralled into the army.
Isn’t this an implicit acknowledgement that capitalism is failing? For if in Germany, one of the richest societies in the world, capitalism can’t produce a basic state of human wellbeing, what is the point? Profit of course, and the power to dominate that comes with that—but today’s ‘leaders’ are far too sly to say the quiet part out loud.
War and austerity are the only thing on the menu in Deutschland ’25. No, it’s not Guns and Butter, but Guns and Pixels, as long as you can afford them.