Worker’s Spatula Suicide Watch Ongoing

CW: Depression, suicide

AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION – “It’s raining like hell out there,” noted the newcomer, striding into the apartment, his soaking windbreaker still hanging from him as he moved towards the kitchen, “how’s he doing?”

“Well he’s still saying he deserves to die, so it’s hard to say ‘good’, but he also claims he’s going to outlive Alan Woods out of spite, so that could mean anything,” explained the comrade on tea duty, motioning towards the bedroom with her nose as she distributed the latest round of tea. “How strong do you want your tea?”

“None for me, I’m trying to quit,” explained the drenched comrade, producing a small baggie full of dark powder and setting it down on the counter. “I get my tannins from snorting cinnamon now.”

“Any word from the Kurds?” asked a third comrade, emerging from the bedroom to retrieve his tea.

“Yeah, they’re as confused and disheartened as the rest of us. Give it time. We can’t do anything tonight,” responded our moist hero, taking a mighty snort of cinnamon through a rolled up five euro note. “Can I just go in?”

“If you’re up for it. Be my guest. Bring him this tea.”

Inside the bedroom, swaddled in a blanket and face wet with tears, sat the world’s saddest bisexual, already one of the world’s saddest demographic groups.

“How are you doing, man?” asked the newcomer, handing over the tea.

“How much do you already know?”

“They’re saying you swallowed a bunch of pills.”

“I threw them all up.”

“Yeah, because [REDACTED] forced them out of you. You were really gonna do it?”

Our depression-wracked comrade stared at the floor in silence, unable to answer. The newcomer sat down next to him and threw an arm over his shoulder as affectionately as heterosexual norms would allow him to do with another man.

“You know that the fact that she did that proves you wrong. Nobody agrees with you.”

“Agrees with me?”

“That your life isn’t worth anything. That’s what they told me you said. That you’re worthless, that nobody loves you. Where do you get this shit?”

Silence.

“I’m not trying to scold you, you know. It’s just…”

“I know, every one of you says the same things. To you these are just sick ideas with no connection to material reality. And if we changed places, I’d probably say the same things to you. I know it’s not rational. It’s not logical. It’s not Hegel or something.”

“Sure, it’s something in how you were socialised, long ago probably. But if this consciousness was socially constructed, it can be socially deconstructed.”

Our depressed comrade let out a soft chuckle. “Truly, Marxism-Leninism is a lofty ideology.”

The two of them stared at the television in the corner, which was predictably playing some particularly depraved gay erotica.

“How does he…?” asked the concerned heterosexual, unsure if a subject change was wise.

“Poppers, probably. That’s no easy feat, otherwise.”

“Huh.”

Our depressed comrade stood up from his blanket nest and walked to the window to smoke. He offered a clove cigarette back at his new guest, only to be politely rebuffed. Lighting up and exhaling out the window into the rainy night, he began to speak.

“I know I didn’t have the world’s worst childhood. I wasn’t beaten for speaking my own language like you, I wasn’t sexually abused like [REDACTED] or [REDACTED], but we all have our traumas.”

“Man, nobody has a mükemmel çocukluk. Trauma is normal. It’s not a competition, and it’s not a shame. But it’s also not a death sentence. It doesn’t have to be.”

“What was your dad like? I always logically understood mine was just a neglectful parent, and that was his problem. But emotionally, the fact that he was never there, and when he was there, he ignored me, you can’t help but internalise that.”

“Sure man. I mean if you’re asking, my dad was never there at all. Maybe I’m lucky compared to you in that sense. Maybe not. But your dad isn’t in charge of your life. Artık büyük insansın, kendi hayatın var. You have to aş some of that shit. Look, you can see from tonight that you have, just in this city, a fair few friends who will run to your side at the most ungodly hour because you’re in danger. If you would tell us when you need help before you’re guzzling a bunch of fucking pills…”

Comrade Depression turned sharply away and finished his clove cigarette out the window. Silently, he shut the window and returned to his blanket nest on the ground. Feeling regret for his tone, his still rain-drenched comrade softened his voice and began to speak again.

“Look, you know we all value you. You know we want you around. Not even the movement or whatever, your friends need you. We’re all in this together. You know everything I’m going to say because we all keep saying it, and I know we all keep saying it, not because we rehearsed this, but because it’s true. But you don’t feel it. And that hurts you, and seeing you hurting hurts us. #Dialectics.”

“I can’t feel it. Because the problems aren’t with any of you, or even with our interactions. I’m living my whole life through the lens of this depression. I hate myself, and that colours every interaction. It starts with one thing* and it just keeps building up into this dark fantasy version of reality where I’ve ruined everything and every perceived failure is a charge on a list of crimes I can only atone for with my own death. I can’t feel the social reality like you all feel because I’ve got a twisted perspective. This is a weak self-criticism, but I’m a weak person.”

“No man, you’re not. You’re really strong. You’re strong if you can hold on just because some tiny part of you still has hope, in spite of having such overwhelmingly negative feelings about yourself and life. That’s a strong hope. Lean on it. That’s where you start.”

“Leaning on hope to stand up? Umut dimdik ayakta, yani?” chuckled the blanket-covered sadboi, quite Stalinistly.

Just then, [REDACTED] poked her head into the bedroom. “Listen, [REDACTED], can you take over tea duty? I want to beat the shit out of our friend for scaring us all, and making me personally force him to vomit up those pills and clean up the vomit all by myself.”

“Hey, consider yourself lucky you got access to my throat without taking me on a date first,” winked the increasingly chipper comrade, before [REDACTED] kicked him in the stomach.

“I wasn’t joking. Don’t ever do that shit ever again.”

Seriously, don’t kill yourself.
Call a friend right now to talk,
before the feelings get worse.

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*Admit it, you thought “I don’t know why, it doesn’t even matter how hard you try” when you read this.

a suicide note from the living

what happens when you lose another comrade to the abyss?

is it worse

or the same

as falling on the front?

CW: suicide, depression

1) suicide demoralises the dead: the pills, the noose, the siren call of the sidewalk from up above, because we are all already always falling, and the sidewalk offers a choice to stop the fall

why not take them? when someone dies, it is a tragedy to us because we love life. to lose someone to the struggle is a heroic act because life has value. to choose death, for its own sake, to end life and for no other reason, terrifies because it makes us question what we know: but it also takes a small amount of the power out of a hero’s death, cut down by the fascist enemy.

if death is desirable, did the enemy do any harm? did our fallen make any sacrifice?

those who commit suicide wish they could go back in time, and they can: they can go back mock the struggles of the martyrs in their very last moments, as they faced death for the great life that could be:

“life is stupid, death is easy”, say the suicides, to the martyrs.

2) the final struggle session: the dead can give no self-criticisms, but can we criticise them? can we look at our friend in a coffin and scream at them that they have failed the collective? what could be more cold, colder than the coldest corpse?

but why did they leave us? the pain was too great? their regrets were too many? could this pain, this regret, match with the pain of losing someone who we actually loved, or the regret of loving someone who could take that love away from us so easily?

it’s easy to view the dead as perfect, but let us break this taboo: our friends who kill themselves deserve our anger. they were not perfect, just as they knew, but they were not disposable, as they feared.

by killing themselves, they took away only the good, and did not spare us the bad: whatever regrets they had now live on in the huge pain and trauma they have left behind, which can not only not be forgotten, it cannot be made up for, anymore.

3) what is there to live for? the truly depressed don’t care about the political ramifications of their suicides. we cannot just explain suicide away, but must act to change it. this text may save no lives.

nobody can be strong all the time. none of us can be there enough for everyone who needs us. you will read this and you will think, rightly: “i must look after my friends, i must make sure they know how much they mean to me, i must help them if they need help before it’s too late”. and you should try and do this.

but then some of you will do this and do this until you cannot anymore. you will not know why you’re doing it because it becomes a pathological giving. you will give of yourself until there is nothing left to give, and then you too will think of the exit door to an exhausting life.

is the only thing worth living for a revolution which will make life possible? before that point, are we all precariously balancing ourselves on the edge of oblivion, holding hands to try to hold each other up? who will fall, who will pull, who will accidentally push others over?

4) dum spiro spero: what if the workers and oppressed do not unite? what if you can only live to see a world of isolation and alienation, which screams to each and every one of us “you’re not worth enough, jump, jump, JUMP!”?

what if you never get better?

we have said before, don’t let them win. the revolution is worth living for just as it is worth dying for. stay alive and fight until the end. but what if this fight is just exhaustion, politically and psychologically? who can be blamed for turning their weapons on themselves?

we are here to say: you can make it. humans find a way. we cannot promise you communism. but we have spoken to enough people to tell you: for every person who has taken the easy way out, there is someone who kept going and is glad they did.

they are not starry eyed optimists. many of them do not believe the world will change. but they are going to keep going as far as they are able. and they are not better than you. we are all the same.

because we are all the same, we CAN find an answer. together we can rescue the big “us”. and if we cannot, you will not be sorry you tried. for every bit of pain and regret you accrue by staying alive, you have so many moments of joy and insight and connection. you are building good things, that you do not even see. you are valuable to people who love you. but when they tell you, you don’t believe them.

you have to believe them. how can you so arrogantly call their declarations of love a lie?

fine, don’t believe them. don’t believe us. believe your own self-hatred: believe it when it says that you are sabotaging yourself and bringing yourself pain as you live. but if you believe that, you must also see that these thoughts are part of your self-sabotage, they are the pain you’re bringing yourself, directly and indirectly.

please, try to see it this way. if we cannot convince you, we cannot convince you. but you are a logical person. you can read and think. you must know you are not the only one with this pain. and the others say, they scream to you: “you do not have to be like this, you can be stronger than this ugly world, you can take care of yourself, and if you do that, you can be the sort of person you think deserves to live.”

the next time you talk to a child, do not think of them as someone who hasn’t yet had to experience your pain. think of them as someone you can teach the truth to to make them stronger, and someone who can teach you how to be happier, which will make you stronger.

it is hard to be a person living in the world. but it’s all we have.

don’t die yet.

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Humourless Marxist Reviews: the Notebook (2004)

“The Notebook” (2004) is a romantic melodrama starring master Hegelian dialectician and known smexy binch Ryan Gosling as Noah, alongside significantly less sexy but equally Hegelian philosopher Rachel McAdams as Allie. The two leads characters are young lovers in 1940s South Carolina, that tells the story of how they came to be together, in the form of an older Noah reading the story to a dementia-stricken Allie.

It is a sweet, sentimental, sad movie, mostly sad because of the constant background of the national oppression of Afro-America.

You thought that we would review some sappy film starring white northerners which takes place in the US south and *not* use it as an excuse to talk about the Achilles’ Heel of US imperialism? Fuck that. Don’t you know Worker’s Spatula?

We’re talking about freeing that land.

First things first, it’s South Carolina. The Black Belt. In the 1940s. What else can this possibly call to mind other than the great tragedy of the abandonment of sharecroppers union organisation by the Browderite revisionists? As if to underscore the importance of this historical betrayal and its contemporary relevance, Afro-American labour is omnipresent in the background of a privileged white romance:

• • • In the modern day, the nursing home where Noah and Allie live is entirely staffed by Afro-American nurses and orderlies, while those living there (for whom the former toil) are mostly white.
    • When Noah visits Allie’s family at their estate, the servants are all Afro-American.
    • Allie’s fiancé, Lon, proposes to her while an all-Afro-American jazz band provides entertainment to a white audience playing music created by Afro-Americans and looked down upon and disparaged by white society until they literally commodified it as something they could own.
    • Allie’s fiancé is the wealthy heir to Hamilton cotton, cotton grown and picked and baled by Afro-American peasantry working in the Black Belt.
    • Noah builds Allie’s dream house on an old plantation where Afro-American slaves lived and died, producing obscene profits for which they were not even paid wages, sacrificing unthinkable amounts of their blood, sweat, and tears. It’s all in Capital, Vol. I.

How many Allies and Noahs lived on that plantation, with their lives and loves shattered by the cruelties of slavery? How many Afro-American Allies and Noahs have existed throughout history, only to have their dreams shattered by US imperialism and national oppression? Why can’t Nicholas Sparks sell their stories?!

Racism, that’s why. If this isn’t what you were thinking about when you watched this movie, other than Ryan Gosling’s doubtless impressive phallus, you’re probably a racist yourself.

This isn’t satire, by the way. Think about what is implied by the art you consume. Break out of your own myopic lives for a split second and think about how the entire world is a complex historical network of exploitation and oppression in which we are all implicitly complicit every single day, or you don’t deserve romantic melodramas, much less ones starring Ryan Gosling.

God, he’s really very attractive.

Oh and when Allie leaves to go to college at Sarah Lawrence? Yeah that’s representative of the alliance between Yankee capital and the Bourbon planters to carry out the imperialist exploitation and oppression of New Afrika. Obviously.

Read your goddamn Harry Haywood, you ingrates.

The only thing greater than Allie and Noah’s love is the love the Afro-American people have for their homeland and their people. It is that revolutionary love that will be the spark that sets the prairie fire, a fire that will burn the US empire down and leave a free and liberated life in a free homeland, an independent and socialist New Afrika, rising from the ashes.

FREE THE LAND!

LAND AND STATE POWER IN THE BLACK BELT SOUTH!
INDEPENDENCE AND SOCIALISM FOR THE OPPRESSED AFRO-AMERICAN NATION!

As for the film’s value for “Netflix and chill”: if you and your date still want to get busy after thinking about and discussing this stuff, well, then you earned it. Go nuts, kids.

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Humourless Marxist Reviews: Joker (2019), as Reviewed by @WASBAPPIN

What follows is a guest review by the most prominent critic of leftists, who is also, dialectically, the self-proclaimed sole actual leftist: @WASBAPPIN

Where to begin? Where can one begin? Obviously I’m not the only one who sees it, right?

This film is clearly intended as a personal attack directed at me for my principled anti-fascist stance, the obvious handiwork of the red-brown Assadist left that already persecutes me on Twitter, just as they persecute Turkish people in Turkey.

I am sorry that everyone else had to sit through this elaborate attempt at mocking me by the most evil and oppressive gaslighters the world has ever known: the left. But in the interest of responding to the prominent leftist and Assadist (I know, that’s redundant) Todd Philipps, and due to the timing of the film’s release, I have penned this review of the subject matter.

There can be no question that even if this film were not about me personally (ha!), it is clearly about Syria. Everyone knows that as 2019 draws to a close, attempts to discredit the Free Syrian Army and the moderate and therefore democratic brand of Islamism it represents are being pushed ever more frequently in the Saudiphobic media, from the new, oddly sectarian Shi’ite albums by KMFDM and Kanye West, to the Assadist show This Is Us.

But as anyone who’s been paying attention can see, in each of these media, some character or theme is inserted, sometimes as minute as my legal first name or something that sounds like “bap”, which is intended to attack me, in a pathetic and vain attempt to silence me from speaking the truth, namely that the left is responsible for every single wrongdoing and evil act the world over, including things done by the US and its government.

But none of these have been so blatant as the new Joker film. The name itself, “Joker”, is clear a reference to all the people on twitter who call me a “joke”. The fact that the Joker character is a failed comedian is also a reference to how my enemies think of my tweets as “funny”, and me as a “failure”. From these two simple facts, it’s already so crystal clear to anyone not already brainwashed by fascism that I am the centre of attention.

But wait, there’s more! Joker is not only portrayed as “The Problem” (who does that remind you of?) for trying to expose the red-brown left (I think that’s what the movie was about, since that’s what everything’s about), but he’s also portrayed as starting a kind of “joker cult”, just like how everyone on Twitter accuses me of being a cult leader, even though the real cult is the left, which is a cult of Assad.

I’m not The Problem, Twitter. Bashar al-Assad, the Adolf Hitler of the 21st century, and his defenders/deniers, the entire left, are the problem.

Speaking of Assad, I assume everyone else noticed the parallel between Joker as killer of Thomas Wayne [spoiler alert: Brett Cullen plays Thomas Wayne, whose character in this film is an archetypical leftist like Donald Trump], and the fact that I killed Hafez al-Assad? Are we all going to just pretend that’s a coincidence too? Of all the portrayals of the Batman origin story, this is the one that most focuses on my personal parallels with the Joker and the fact that the left views Bashar al-Assad as Batman.

Did you know that in Syria, there are no lions? So Syrians refer to the bats which dwell in the cave where Bashar al-Assad lives as “winged lions”? Hence, Bashar al-Batsad, the Bat of Syria: Lionman. Lion-O, the Thundering One, that’s what the Kurds call him.

Also let’s not forget that they removed Harley Quinn from this film to reinforce claims that I’m an “incel”. I hope bad things happen to all of you.

Oh all the pieces are falling into place now. You all see it now, don’t you? I’m not The Problem.

None the less, I did want to say that Joaquin Phoenix’s performance was stellar, and the music by Hildur Guðnadóttir was also very appropriate. Credit where credit’s due.

Lawrence Sher’s cinematography, as always, left a lot to be desired.

You’re a fascist.

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