The capitalist fetish object par excellence: the car. The more climate-damaging, the better.
Foto: IMAGO/imagebroker
At Christmas we won’t buy again, how stupid, no, we’ll also donate. But the view that one does good but remains silent about it has long been out of fashion. Now “Fritze Merz” (Olaf Scholz), Christian Lindner and Lars Klingbeil are forced in front of the camera to give away a few alms for the Bild newspaper campaign “A Heart for Children” so that poor children are just a little bit less poor. The fact that the poverty of these children is caused primarily by a policy that these gentlemen otherwise always demand – for free! Because not only do you do good things and talk about it everywhere, you hardly ever do anything good. If a person with the salary of a member of the Bundestag donates a few thousand euros, which he may even be able to deduct from his taxes, it is not worth mentioning – it should be a matter of course for a Christian, and that is how you present yourself as such.
Being altruistic is anything but natural in this world. The dictum “Get rich or die on the way to wealth” is the death of the neoliberal monads, which is always about an unattainable end goal – the accumulation of even more wealth. Elon Musk is also pursuing this goal, which is completely unattainable for him, even if he apparently supports right-wing political campaigns with hundreds of millions, which at least he himself could assume would improve the world. But he doesn’t think so. His donations are about the implementation of his capitalist goals, i.e. tax exemption and the reduction of bureaucracy, and in no way about the state, nation or any kind of community. Ultimately, his donations are an investment. And in fact, Musk leaves no doubt that he expects immediate benefits for his money. As has recently been shown, even more liberal multi-billionaires like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg do not hesitate when Trump expects support from them.
What all these people have in common is that they have completely internalized Margret Thatcher’s saying that there is no such thing as a society. “Everyone is the blacksmith of his own happiness,” is the popular saying that is often used to make the world beautiful, and ignores the fact that a blacksmith also needs a hammer, an anvil, great heat, iron or steel and, last but not least, training to practice his profession to be able to pursue his craft. People who demand inclusion services, financial support, education or even functioning public transport are seen as scroungers by Thatcher supporters who cannot understand that freedom is a roaring Porsche engine on the motorway. They ignore the fact that the highway is also being built with tax money, as well as the fact that poverty arises when wealth is not distributed. They believe like Marie Antoinette once did: If they don’t have bread, then they should eat cake!
We-don’t-give-each-other anything
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