Those who conform, go with the flow, and say little in opposition rise to the top. Those who are not yet sufficiently conformist are corrupted. A great deal of lobbying is carried out to bring members of parliament into line and make them vote the way they want them to. Then the revolving door starts turning, so that after their political career, they get a comfortable, warm, and well-paid job.
The accomplices
If we want a democracy that deserves the name, politicians must be removed from parliament.
What is wrong with our democracy and our politicians? Are they the ones who determine policy in this country, or are they controlled by outside forces? In any case, democracy does not seem to be the intention. Politicians like to pretend that they are the real decision-makers, that they lead a country and set the course, but in reality, this is all just a myth. In reality, they have no say. They work in undemocratic parties that are only needed as mouthpieces for the 1 percent, because they are the real owners of the state, the politicians, the companies, and the media. And this allows them to impose their ideology on us, the population, and reduce us to mere work machines that increase their wealth.
by Tobias Augenbraun
[This article posted on 3/5/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/die-erfullungsgehilfen.]
Political parties serve to delude the people into believing that they have a say. In reality, the structures of political parties themselves are undemocratic. You can’t even decide who gets on the electoral lists and have to follow a party line, regardless of whether you think it’s worth supporting or not. Those who conform, go with the flow, and say little in opposition rise to the top. Those who are not yet sufficiently conformist are corrupted. A great deal of lobbying is carried out to bring members of parliament into line and make them vote the way they want them to. Then the revolving door starts turning, so that after their political career, they get a comfortable, warm, and well-paid job.
Thus, parties are a big part of the problem and not part of the solution. Joana Cotar, an independent member of the Bundestag, described the problem with parties in her last Bundestag speech as follows:
“Everyone sitting here has made the state their prey. They profit from millions in party funding, from a well-oiled network of connections, allowances and pensions, privileges and collusion, and yet there are donation scandals and corruption scandals, consultant scandals, because some people can’t get enough. It’s rarely about Germany. It’s about money, power and re-election.”
We live in a simulation of democracy, where we are controlled through our emotions and thus distracted from relevant issues. A population on orange alert is easy to control.
Anger about the state of affairs and one’s own deteriorating living conditions can be channeled in certain directions, for example against migrants or welfare recipients. Basically, against anything that does not challenge the capitalist system. This is how a large part of the system-critical left has been turned woke, because it does not shake the system in any way, quite the contrary. Capitalism markets the whole thing and even makes a profit out of it. A left that is critical of capitalism should actually be somewhat surprised at this point.
It is no wonder that the CDU, CSU, SPD, and Greens have become a “unity party,” as philosopher Michael Andrick puts it, because they serve the same masters. However, it goes beyond this unity party. So we have the “chancellor of the banksters” Olaf Scholz, as the junge Welt newspaper headlined, who is deeply involved in the Cum-Ex scandal and was blackmailable throughout his entire chancellorship, the millionaire Friedrich BlackRock Merz, but also Alice Weidel, who does not belong to the unity party and worked for Goldman Sachs and Allianz Global Investors. German politics in the grip of the banks.
But what is the goal of this financial power? Quite simply: more for themselves, less for everyone else. This is how the state functions as a machine for enriching a few rich people and their accomplices, also known as politicians. And no party will be able to change anything in this system, except within the narrow confines of the guidelines set for them. The question of the system must never be asked.
The state serves the interests of the rich and has continuously expanded surveillance and repression in order to command, judge, and punish us. The anarchist Erich Mühsam, who was killed in the Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934, wrote about the state in the satirical newspaper Der Komet in 1911:
“Imagine the state as a cage in which birds are tied to perches. Some have the feeding trough right in front of their beaks, while most have to watch as the privileged ones eat from it.”
Armament
War is a huge business. It promises huge profits. That is why the parties outbid each other in their demands for armament. For what? Against what? It doesn’t matter!
To finance all this armament, cuts in social welfare are “naturally” necessary. After all, the poor have only themselves to blame for their failure. Actually, it would be better if they died, then they would no longer be a burden on the taxpayer. What is forgotten is that the rich would never be rich without workers and poor people. Or, in the words of Emma Goldman:
“It is private ownership of things that forces millions of people into nothingness, turning them into living bodies that no longer possess originality and initiative, into human machines of flesh and blood that create mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with their own gray, dull, and miserable existence.”
Armament is antisocial. It exacerbates existing social divisions and problems. Keywords: affordable housing, pensions, heating costs, homelessness and deindustrialization, with the accompanying job losses and wage cuts, privatization of the health sector and the deterioration of infrastructure, a dilapidated education system.
None of this is a problem, as it boosts the profits of a select few. A redistribution from the bottom to the top, into private hands.
In short: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
Deindustrialization
These cuts to social systems and the impoverishment of society will accelerate the deindustrialization of Europe and Germany in particular. People will no longer be able to afford products because they will face salary cuts due to plummeting corporate profits, which in turn will lead to further company bankruptcies, job losses, and even faster deindustrialization.
The deindustrialization of Germany, whose economic strength is actually based on industrial production, began with globalization and the relocation of production to low-wage countries, but really gained momentum with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. Although US President Joe Biden announced, standing next to Olaf Scholz, that the US would shut down Nord Stream if Russia started a war in Ukraine, the media was completely at a loss as to who could have done this. The war in Ukraine may have been necessary to weaken Europe, and Germany in particular, with the attack on the pipelines. This goal of the war has been achieved.
In his last major interview as Secretary of State with the New York Times, in which he reviewed the great “successes” of the Biden administration, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that Germany and China were on the verge of signing a treaty on deeper economic cooperation and that the US had successfully “prevented” this. One might add: by blowing up Nord Stream.
By eliminating Nord Stream, the US has succeeded in bringing Europe, especially Germany, back under US economic hegemony. The sanctions imposed by the US and Europe against Russia led to fracking gas being sourced from the US to replace Russian gas, which is still being sourced from third countries, but now at a much higher price.
German companies relocated to the US to remain competitive. More and more companies are going bankrupt. The main beneficiaries are the US and its financial elite, asset managers such as BlackRock and Co. In a kind of hostile takeover, they can buy up German and European production and possibly reindustrialize themselves. The desire of US investor Stephen Lynch to buy Nord Stream is an example of this. The US has also outsourced industrial production, and economic strength and power are in the hands of financial capitalists.
It is obvious that this is not to Germany’s advantage. The accompanying accelerated impoverishment of the European population will lead to protests and uprisings. In this sense, rearmament has once again paid off for an authoritarian security state. Not against an external enemy, but against an internal one: its own population.
Enough is enough!
We no longer need these politicians and their financial elite whisperers. We can organize ourselves, but not centrally, rather decentralized in communities and municipalities. With the people who live there, who know best what is needed locally. To this end, citizens’ parliaments or councils, or whatever you want to call them, could be formed. The members of the council could be selected by lottery for each issue. How exactly this could be organized needs to be debated urgently. And most importantly, it must be tried out.
We don’t need to have a ready-made plan in our drawers. The Zapatistas in Mexico have a motto that we should take to heart: We move forward by asking questions.
There are no ready-made answers, but we must begin to ask ourselves how we want to live together. Let’s not allow ourselves to be fooled any longer by politicians, parties, and the media. They do not represent our interests. The street musician Klaus der Geiger sang in one of his songs:
“No, no, we don’t want your world,
we don’t want your power,
we don’t want your money,
We don’t want to hear any of your lies,
we want to destroy your lies!”
Therefore: Politicians out of parliament! For a world where there is room for many worlds! Let’s set the birds free and remove the cage.
Tobias Augenbraun, born in 1986, gained his first journalistic experience at Uni Bonn TV. After training as a driver for Deutsche Bahn, he joined Free21 in 2019, where he is currently deputy editor-in-chief. More articles by him can be found at free21.org.