In 1887, Wilhelm Liebknecht, the founder of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), put out a flyer for the Reichstag elections: “Not one person and not one cent for militarism!” As Liebknecht explained: “Militarism is incompatible with the freedom and the prosperity of the peoples.” For many decades, until 1914, the social democrats refused any support for the government’s budget, even when increased social spending was offered as bait.

Now, some 140 years later, the always amusing dialectic of history has turned the SPD into Germany’s biggest proponent of military spending.

As the social democrats prepare to form a government with Friedrich Merz’s CDU, they have announced plans to amend the Basic Law. While maintaining the debt brake that mandates balanced budgets and permanent austerity, the emerging “Grand Coalition” wants to create two exceptions. Firstly, military spending will be exempted from the cap on borrowing — they are talking about 500 billion additional euros in the next decades. Secondly, a special trust of up to 500 billion euros for infrastructure will also not be counted as part of the regular budget.

In other words: all the parties, but especially the CDU, have insisted that there is no money to repair schools, to properly staff hospitals, or to keep the trains running. Yet in a few days, they conjure up a trillion euros (more or less) for weapons. The Nazis had a slogan for this: the nation needed “cannons instead of butter.”

Cynical in the extreme: CDU and SPD want to pass this constitutional reform at high speed, before the recently elected Bundestag constitutes itself on March 25. In the old parliament, they have the necessary two thirds majority together with the Greens; in the new parliament, with the FDP ejected and Die Linke strengthened, they would need support from a fourth party.

Cannons Not Butter

Half a trillion euros for infrastructure might sound like a good thing — but while there is talk of spending on schools, hospitals, and digitalization, much of the money will go to building Autobahnen and subsidizing fossil capital in other ways. And as previous wars have shown, highways and rail infrastructure are also part of military readiness.

Depressingly, a recent poll shows that rearmanent is quite popular, with 76 percent in favor. Even among supporters of Die Linke and BSW, two parties with (undeserved) reputations for opposing war, majorities support militarism. But this will shift as austerity, already underway, makes itself felt in people’s daily lives. Prices will continue going up as social services crumble, to pay for tanks and fighter jets.

The only good news is that no one wants to put their own bodies on the line. The Bundeswehr, like almost every imperialist army, faces extreme difficulties finding new recruits. As a Gallup poll from 2023 showed, some 57 percent of people in Germany could not see themselves fighting for their country. And why should we? This is a state of billionaires, by billionaires, and for billionaires — are we supposed to risk our lives for a system that doesn’t even give us decent housing?

Stop Putin? Defend Freedom?

The capitalist propaganda machine is running at high gear, telling us that if we don’t tighten our belts, Putin’s tanks will soon occupy Berlin. Watching the Russian army’s lackluster attempts to seize a sliver of Europe’s poorest country, this is not particularly convincing. 

Think of the historical precedent: as the European powers launched ever-greater armaments programs in the early 1900s, they promised their citizens that battleships and artillery would guarantee peace. Yet it turns out that they do not spend this much on weapons with no intention to use them. The First World War cost some 20 million lives.

It is ominous that Gregor Gysi of Die Linke has called for class collaboration between workers and capitalists to “defend our freedom” — this is an echo of the social democratic traitors who voted for “national defense” in 1914. Jan von Aken has also been signaling willingness to negotiate about more money for the Bundeswehr. Tens of thousands of young people joined Die Linke in the last few months — and they need to campaign against the army.

As capitalist governments inch toward new imperialist conflagrations, they can barely offer an explanation for what they’re fighting about. This is just a competition for which billionaires get to rule over the globe, and they’re not even bothering to hide it.

If they were really interested in “defending our freedom,” they could create a people’s militia — as Liebknecht proposed 140 years ago — under the control of working people, and not ordered around by capitalist officers. Opportunists will say it’s not possible to oppose militarism when majorities are in favor. But in 1887, the SPD, with its hard no to military spending, got 10 percent of the votes — its best result to date, and not much worse than the SPD today.

Red Flag is a weekly column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel Flakin has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears every Friday at The Left Berlin.