This time around, it sat in my post box on April, 29th, – the new “brand eins”.
It sprawls on the hunting-leopard’s fur – capitalism. There is a black ribbon running horizontally over the page – and on it, they wrote with red ink: No Half-Measures.
And underneath:
Focus capitalism.
After relevance in March!
Is there a special meaning to the red ink? Will “brand eins” become a leftist inflammatory pamphlet, like the Bavarian Constitution?
See my article on the world-wide financial crisis (Texte zur Weltfinanzkrise).
To be sure, we are now approaching the end of late capitalism. Is that why “brand eins” now has the focus on capitalism? Well, I quickly open the magazine and take a closer look.
The editorial by Frau Fischer calms me down. She is right: many things are topsy-turvy in this world. But there are worse things than capitalism. Even if it is to some degree responsible for what went wrong. Just like its small brother, communism. Well, it died already. Or at least, it disappeared (because the corpse has not yet been discovered).
No matter how you see it, capitalism is currently without competition. We all know the absence of competition makes you weak, but capitalism will survive even this phase. And it will change and always be resurrected. Because humans have this late-capitalistic gene.
“brand eins” in April tries to explain why so many people (I think by now it is the absolute majority) feel uncomfortable and are scared. And why we are so worried because of our extremely late-capitalist economic habits and the radically non-sustainable consequences. How, with gruesome thoroughness, we exploit everything, really everything that seems even the tiniest bit worth exploiting. We do this without any regard to loss and totally ignore all better knowledge to the contrary.
The few articles I managed to read yesterday want to explain the uncomfortable feeling. Speaking for myself, I must say they rather heightened my uncomfortable feeling, instead of lessening it. I find it great that a business magazine is courageous enough to look upon the system that, after all – just like we all – “brand eins” depends on for survival, from a totally different, critical perspective.
Consequently, even if it is quite heavy, the magazine will be part of my bike luggage when I go to Munich Central Station tonight. At the station, a late-capitalist, feudal 1st class compartment with its own shower will be waiting to bring me to Rome. I already look forward to occasionally, at the end of a beautiful bike day, taking “brand eins” out in the evening when I stay in a nice Hotel between Naples and Palermo and enjoying a good glass of wine. Surrounded by mafia environment, I am sure I will think a lot about how late capitalism makes sense or not!
😉 And, of course, I will also think about how I can best profit from it…
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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