Oct 3: Their crisis, our resistance! (Rally)

Weapons for profits, cuts for us?

Against rearmament and social austerity!

We are living in a time of crisis, with one piece of bad news following another: wages are stagnating or falling, rents and heating costs are rising, and food is getting more and more expensive. Jobs are being rationalized away, and social benefits are being cut or scrapped. The retirement age is set to be raised, while health insurance benefits are being whittled down. Every day, people die in one of the many wars around the world – often fueled by German weapons. Millions are fleeing due to war and poverty. Forest fires and droughts, heavy rain and floods are ruining harvests and destroying livelihoods: climate change is no longer something we can ignore. And although cuts are supposedly necessary at every turn, massive rearmament is taking place in Germany, and society is being prepared for war.

Why are we experiencing this endless sequence of crisis, war, and destruction, and what can we do about it? Merz and his cohorts want us to believe that we’re just too lazy and that we all need to work even harder. Or that either refugees or the recipients of citizens‘ benefits are to blame, as the AfD claims, too. A look at the billion-euro profits of VW or Rheinmetall shows who is really profiting from this system. The incitement against the most vulnerable is meant to distract from the fact that a small minority (German corporations) is profiting, while the vast majority (wage earners, the self-employed, refugees, the youth, and pensioners) are footing the bill. We are not only suffering from rising living costs and social cuts, but we may even be expected to risk our lives in military service. To this end, Russia is once again being demonized as an enemy against whom we supposedly should all stand together. Meanwhile, other repressive regimes are being supplied with weapons, for example Israel to the tune of 800 million euros this year alone. In Germany specifically, state repression and surveillance are increasing against those who protest against the current state of affairs, such as the Palestine movement or young people protesting against military conscription.

Many of us see these problems and know that they are systemic rather than isolated glitches. And this system is called capitalism. All parties from the CDU to the SPD, Die Grünen, BSW, Die Linke, promise us a better life, but once they are in power, they point to „practical constraints,“ their coalition partners, or the federal level to justify cuts and shortages. And the AfD, which presents itself as the only opposition, in reality represents a neoliberal program, too, that benefits only corporations and has nothing to offer to ordinary people besides inciting even more hatred against migrants and minorities.

The „practical constraints“ are real, because in our current economic system it doesn’t matter if everyone is doing well. The only thing that matters is corporate profits. This system inevitably produces war and crises, regardless of who is in government. But we refuse to bear the cost of their crises, nor do we want to die in a war for the interests of a small minority. We do not want our labor power to be used to produce and finance weapons so that people like us are forced to kill other people like us, whether in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Afghanistan, or in Sudan. Let us stand against this together, let us get organized! Our individual life situations and those of others may differ. But when we pose the question what our problems have in common and who profits in the end, we realize that we are all affected as working people. And it is as this working class that we can best organize and resist – from mutual support, to protests and demonstrations, to strikes and more.

Come to our rally on October 3, 2026, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. near Luisenplatz in Potsdam.

Together with other organizations, we plan to gather, exchange ideas, and pool our strengths.