OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA – Student socialist and activist Jason Kwong has left local Maoist theory group “Little Red Reading Club” over a disenchantment with the Maoists’ supposedly arcane and insular language. Kwong, who feels that the Maoists’ “alienated” him from the reading group by making him read texts that don’t just “get to the point”, is a self-identified fan of the theories of Karl Marx, a man who once expressed the idea that money can be used to buy different things by referring to it as “the reflection of the relationships of all other commodities”.
The straw that broke the camel’s back, or as the Maoists put it: “the change in quantity which effected a change in quality”, was the assignment of Mao’s “On Contradiction”. According to Kwong, who claims to idolise the Young Hegelian and radical materialist dialectician Karl Marx, complained that Section II, “the Universality of Contradiction”, was “jargony and obscure”, and “tried to advance a theory of everything in the world in terms of some abstract binary”.
Witnesses from within the “Little Red Reading Club”, however, insisted that Kwong’s distaste for their rhetorical proclivities predated the encounter with Mao’s more explicitly philosophical work: “We’re not sure if he has done anything more than skim any Marxist texts, but he objected pretty much any time any of us said anything with more theoretical depth than to object to capitalism as ‘exploitative’.”
Seemingly confirming the Maoist summary of Kwong’s distaste for “Maoist jargon”, the sociology major and “convinced Marxist” complained to a Spatula correspondent that the Maoists’ reference to “the people’s democratic dictatorship” in an early meeting was “jarring” and “violent”, in contrast––one assumes––to the peaceful and anti-“dictatorial” rhetoric of his dead German hero.
“It’s also weird that they’re so obtuse and intellectual when they’re all such third-worldists,” continued Kwong, the future vanguard of the toiling classes: “I mean, obviously the proletariat doesn’t have time for any academic jargon, but can you imagine Marx talking about the dangers of ‘capitalist roaders’ and whether or not one divides into two and basing his politics around people in the sort of undeveloped countries they’re obsessed with? What could these first world communists with their weird academic interests have in common politically with people in these underdeveloped countries?”
At this juncture, Kwong paused to update his Twitter, a website on which his personal logo is a photo of the 19th century German intellectual who was writing treatises on mathematics near the end of his revolutionary life in which he declared the Irish liberation struggle was to be “the lever” for an English proletarian revolution.
Finishing his tweeting under the Twitter handle @MarxReborn, Kwong looked up at our correspondent, sighed, and said: “I should’ve known when the first meeting I went to they were talking about ‘combatting liberalism’. What sort of leftist attacks liberalism? I guess beneath all the rebel rhetoric and fancy words, they’re nothing but conservatives.”
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