Worker’s Spatula New Year’s Message and Self-Criticism

MUMBAI – The video message begins with a shot of the Antilia, which is suddenly consumed in a fiery explosion. As the smoke clears, a small gathering of masked figures approach the camera bearing spatulas, weapons, and sheets of paper with statements on them to be read, as is our New Year’s tradition. One of the comrades begins to read:

“Hear ye, o ye Workers and Oppressed of the World! Verily, ’tis us, the Worker’s Spatula! The Year of our LORD Two Thousand and Nineteen is at an End, and the Two Thousand and Twentieth bears upon us! Tremble, Revisionist and Reactionary alike!”

A second explosion rocks the background of the video, causing one of our number to drop their spatula and cry aloud: “God’s Wounds!”

“As can plainly be seen, we have ended this most atrocious of Years with some Fireworks of our own: we have destroyed the Antilia Building as an Act of Armed Propaganda against the reactionary Indian Bourgeoisie, and also because the Idea of castrating a bourgeois Phallus-Building with Fire seems so very much on Brand for us. A Pox and a Curse upon thee, Mukesh Ambani, thou Dog!”

A second spokesperson leans closer to the camera to interject:

“In case ye had not surmised, we have found our own Manner of Speech in 2019 altogether too accessible, now that all the Reds, and not just the Spatula–Vanguard of the Vanguard of the Vanguard of the World Revolution–are hailing their detested Foes with ‘Scoundrels’ and the Like. In Consequence, we have elected to affect even more archaic Forms of English going forward. Expect us to transform ourselves into communist Bēowulf by 2025.”

“Yeah motherfuckers!”, adds the Yank.

This latest Attack on the Class Enemy here in India is Naught but the Culmination of a Year of the most intensive practical Work: from Melbourne to Massachusetts, from Ankara to Edinburgh, from Brooklyn to Berlin, from Kerala to Caracas, our Forces have been thoroughgoing in all Efforts on Fronts both legal and illegal: we tire not, for we are on Cocaine.

Because we are so tireless and thoroughgoing and united and so forth, one might venture to ask, “Worker’s Spatula, have you no Self-Criticisms for us at the end of this Year?” That we have, o Comrades. That we most certainly fucking have.

Foremost in our Minds, we must Self-criticise for the flagrant Racism we have displayed towards the Italian People on Twitter dot com. This offensive Jesting and Japery is beneath such a serious Platform as Worker’s Spatula, who stand against all Manner of Chauvinism, particularly that towards the most oppressed of all Peoples: the Italians.

Not only is this Racism counter to our Ideology, it has impaired our heroic Practice: has even one Italian joined our heroic Guerrilla front in the Alpine Peaks against that most reactionary State Entity of Liechtenstein? We answer, nay! We have undermined the Sisterhood of the Peoples! Alienated the Italians from our midst with our Racism most foul! In Order that this Slight might be forgotten by the noble Italian Folk, we ask that our Readers refrain from any Repartee based upon our Joke that the Marxist-Leninist Theoretician Gramsci was an Italian. Let this humorous Lie ne’er yet be repeated, lest the Italians take Offence!

At this juncture, the Yank produces a banner which reads “Prisencólinensináinciúsol!” and waves it around.

Having brought up Liechtenstein, we pray that our Work in 2020 might result in more fruitful Struggle in the Microstates of the World: though Liechtenstein yet stands strong against our Assault, we will open up a new front of Guerrilla Struggle alongside the Italians we expect to flock to our Ranks against San Marino, and the Vatican, now an ally of Chinese Imperialism, has for too long escaped our Wrath!

Not content with stretching our Alpine Forces so thin, we are amassing Forces for yet more Microstate-based Fronts:

• to bring down the Stormont Regime in the Isle of Man, and finally liberate the Island such that Women may walk freely upon its long-forbidden Soil!
• to unite with the Cape Cod Faction of the PKK to establish a new Canton for Rojava in Massachusetts!
• and at long last to bring down the bourgeois Conch Republic to usher in a red Dawn on the People’s Republic of the Conch!

Let our Struggle in these shitty wee Lands inspire all of our Readers near and far to Action in their own social Contexts, or to join us in these Battles in the Flesh!

At this juncture, a South Asian Comrade raises a banner with the unmistakeable visage of Chairman Mao, causing one of the Turks to grimace and reluctantly take hold of one of the sheets of paper and begin reading:

I’m not doing the weird dialect stuff. So our Central Committee used to all be pro-Enver Hoxha against the Maoists, right? Well the Maoists talked their way in. Our Central Committee now consists both of partisans of Enver Hoxha and Maoist elements who reject the revisionist Theory of the Three Worlds and generally otherwise hold to similar positions as the old Central Committee. We’ve always been against excessive criticism of the Maoists in spite of our disagreements, so… this is the logical continuation of that, I suppose.

Our Central Committee, as you can see, represents diverse oppressed identities and is now a clear minority of men. This will be hopefully reflected in even more militancy on gender, sexuality, and disabled issues.

A comrade in a wheelchair unfurls a banner reading “cripples of the world, rejoice!”, before the Turkish Hoxhaite continues reading.

Now that we have so deeply penetrated the South Asian communist left, we expect to be read regularly by as much as 0.1% of the communist population of the subcontinent, which is to say, 30,000 people, almost all Hill Country Tamils and irony-poisoned Malayalams. In other words, more South Asians read Worker’s Spatula than read all Trotskyite publications from the subcontinent combined since the IMT lost Pakistan.

Whoops, we hurt the IMT’s feelings before 2020 even started. Our bad.

We’re going to have more of the Bad Leftist Poetry too, that seems like it has some promise, as a bit.

Anyway, other than that, it’s all pretty much what you’d expect. We’re going to keep being the best and most sincere Marxist-Leninist platform on social media while also being the worst and most irony-poisoned, because #Dialectics.

As the sound of sirens grows in the distance, the masked figures raise their fists as Stalinistly as humanly possible and scream in unison: “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!” before scattering into the crowded Mumbai streets.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

Point/Counterpoint: Stalin was Non-Binary

What follows is a debate between two Worker’s Spatula cadre at a closed Spatula conference on gender politics which took place in an undisclosed location. As the comrade arguing the initial “Point” represented a Maoist tradition, and the comrade arguing the follow-up “Counterpoint” represented a “Hoxhaite” tradition, they will be identified as such for the purposes of publication:

Point: Stalin was non-binary because Jughashvili was a Georgian
by a queer Maoist

There is, as everyone knows, a prolific online discourse as to whether Joseph Stalin was trans or not. Naturally, as with all such discussions, we as anti-revisionists assume that the side which wishes to associate Stalin with conservativism and reaction are nothing more than agents of the cishet patriarchal capitalist-imperialist-fascist enemy, who wish to sow confusion and division in our movement.

However, as Chairman Mao famously said: “no googling, no right to tweet”.

Googling reveals a startling pattern: Russian sources consistently refer to Joseph Stalin with the masculine pronouns in use in the Russian language, and no Russian sources mention that Stalin was a trans man, or any other kind of AFAB individual. Could Joseph Stalin have been cis?

The problem, of course, with consulting Russian sources is that they’re in Russian and by Russians. How can this imperialist language with its patriarchal pronouns capture the fullness of Stalin’s personhood? To discover the answer, I became fluent in the Georgian language, memorising its complex verbal morphology and becoming a master Georgian calligrapher, so that I could blend in to the indigenous culture of Georgian Orthodoxy and understand how gender was expressed among the Georgian people before capitalism and Russian Tsarism penetrated their country and imposed the cishet patriarchy on these noble people.

While reading the diaries of Stalin’s seminary friends, I discovered something startling: the same pronoun was used for “Soso” as for the Virgin Mary. That’s right: Stalin used the Georgian equivalent of they/them pronouns, because the indigenous Georgian culture doesn’t have gender.

Anyone who claims Stalin was a “cis man” doesn’t only impose on Stalin a gender identity which Stalin never chose, but because they are imposing this identity which apparently doesn’t even exist in Georgia, anyone who claims Stalin was a “cis man” is actually a racist.

I rest my case. Stalin’s pronouns are “ის/მან”, Stalin and the entire Georgian people are non-binary.

Counterpoint: Stalin was non-binary because Stalin represented the multi-gendered masses
by a queer Hoxhaite

While it’s definitely true that we have to critically reexamine any Russian sources of the Soviet Union as unrepresentative of the reality of the minority nationalities, particularly after decades of revisionism and known national oppression, we need not resort to Cuğaşvili’s national origins to deny the slanderous revisionist lie that Stalin was a “cis man”.

Even if Cuğaşvili would fit into our understanding of what a “cis man” is, Cuğaşvili was not Stalin, and Stalin was not Cuğaşvili. Before Soviet power was lost, Stalin was the symbol of soviet power, and as such, Stalin was at least bigender.

Oh, that’s right: if you consider Stalin–a symbolic representative figure based on the real hero but none the less fully human person Cuğaşvili, a figure expressing the political consciousness and will of the revolutionary proletariat in its totality–could possibly have just been a “man”, then you are effectively excluding women from your understanding of the proletariat which is, in addition to being grossly sexist, revisionist as all fuckhell.

Both of these people are equally Stalin.

So, accepting that the Stalin figure to whom all anti-revisionists pray to intercede on their behalf to the Dialectic of History was effectively “bigender” in the Russian-dominated official Soviet system, we must further surmise that today, in an online discourse that encompasses gender expressions of diverse kinds from diverse cultural traditions, Stalin, who lives on in our struggle, is extremely genderfluid.

We can safely say that if Stalin were on Twitter, Stalin would post pronouns as “any pronouns”: whether she/her, he/him, they/them, ze/zir, xe/xem, etc.

Stalin’s pronouns are whatever your pronouns are, you beautiful Stalin you.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

Trotskyites, Hoxhaites Declare Christmas Ceasefire for Tetsurō Watsuji’s Death

PARIS – In the spirit of the season, two of the most fanatical (and, according to outsiders to both factions, “dogmatic”) traditions in Leninism are coming together in an unexpected way: the ortho-Trotskyite IMT and the ortho-Hoxhaite ICMLPO (Unity & Struggle) are temporarily declaring a cessation of hostilities to gather in France, the least fun of all imperialist centres, to celebrate the death of Japanese philosopher Tetsurō Watsuji which took place on the 26th of December, 1960:

“The 59th Death Anniversary of the scoundrel Tetsurō Watsuji is a sort of dress rehearsal for all the dialectical materialists of the world to come together in 2020 and celebrate 60 glorious years without his obfuscationist reactionary nonsense,” declared the announcement of the planned festivities in France’s premiere Hoxhaite newspaper, La Forge.

Echoing the sentiment and posting the exact same schedule of events around Paris, Révolution, the publication representing local IMT affiliates, confirmed that both “Stalinists” and “genuine Bolshevik-Leninists” would be present at all levels of the celebrations of the passing of the long-dead Japanese philosopher: from speakers to musicians to stage-workers to the expected audience.

The PCOF sent a statement directly to the Spatula e-mail (mastursublator [at] gmail [dot] com) outlining the importance of a “principled, popular front struggle against the ghost of Tetsurō Watsuji”, with “any forces committed to pissing on his grave”:

As Worker’s Spatula know better than anyone, Tetsurō Watsuji introduced post-modernism to the Japanese people through Søren Kierkegaard, which itself is arguably a kind of crime. But from there, he went on to attack ‘individualism’ for reasons of Japanese nationalism which aided the ideological hegemony of the fascist Japanese state during WWII.

So he starts off as as an individualist, then instead of embracing the universal which creates the particular and the particular which creates the singular individual which then subjectively reshape their objective contexts in the grand dialectical totality which we all know to be true, he enshrines the particular, that of Japanese nationalism, as its own universality, and uses like, fucking Buddhism or some shit to cover up his disgusting narcissism just as he did with Kierkegaard before that.

In a way, you could view him as an individual manifestation of the sort of awful post-modernist graduate students who gush about Carl Schmitt while condemning Karl Marx, only in addition to getting to play Schmitt’s role for a real-world fascist regime, the hegemonic Japanese nationalist ideology is such that he got to seamlessly transition from being Schmitt right back to being a ‘harmless’ Schmitt-reading intellectual after the war.

Absolutely fuck that guy. Fuck him to hell.

As the PCOF statement already made clear, Worker’s Spatula cadre are fully familiar with who Testurō Watsuji is and why his death should be celebrated for days on end with song and dance and speeches and documentaries and everything else the French have planned for their foreign comrades. Our local correspondents had an entirely separate question: was it really possible that French people could be civil towards anyone, and further, that the fragmented French left could come together over anything, and most shocking of all, that the most extreme partisans of Trotsky and Stalin respectively could come together over something as arcane as Japanese philosophy?

Fortunately, one of our correspondents has an IMT co-worker, and was immediately asked to purchase a newspaper upon arriving at work. As usual, we will be leaving our readers in suspense as to whether or not the IMT newspaper sale was successful, but the ensuing conversation was none the less fruitful:

“Yes, we met with the PCOF, and we are co-hosting the event. It’s going to be a week-long conference, starting on the 25th of December, or ‘Tetsurō Watsuji’s Death Eve’, as all real defenders of our common Left Hegelian heritage refer to it, and continuing until the very last second of the year, when we plan to finish the conference by leaving accusing the other side of ‘betraying’ and ‘wrecking’, respectively.”

“Wonderful,” exclaimed our correspondent. “I’m so pleased to hear, how can I say this in a way that won’t offend either side… I’m so pleased to hear that our common struggle in the realm of philosophy is being pursued without the expected divisions over 20th century events that actually relate quite closely to the subject matter.”

“Are you referring to whose fault it is that socialism never became a powerful trend in Japan? Yes, well, that’s the thing isn’t it? By blaming Testurō Watsuji for everything, we focus on the ideological and material reality of Japanese fascism during the WWII period and the ensuing post-war suppression of all republican, progressive, and socialist forces in that country by fascists who were ideologically poisoned, let’s face it, by Tetsurō fucking Watsuji. It’s all very Gramscian.”

“But wasn’t Gramsci a…”

“Don’t even say it! Or I’ll tell everyone your side ruined the unity!” warned the local Trot.

“I was going to say, wasn’t Gramsci a bit over-focused on the ideological role in suppressing proletarian unity in struggle? I mean, obviously Gramsci was a great Marxist-Le…err… Gramsci was a great Marxist. But we can’t discount the material role of fragmenting the proletariat as subjective political class even while growing their objective size as an economic class, as productive forces, and wasn’t Japanese imperialism among the most successful at this, ideological justifications for fascism in the country notwithstanding?”

“Was that a serious question? I mean, I can give you an answer about how the limitations of an extreme reading of Gramsci have been applied in the academy which has veered on idealism, but an extreme opposition to Gramsci often results in vulgar materialism, and… isn’t Worker’s Spatula a joke page?”

“Sorry, what I mean to say is, isn’t the conference sort of celebrating Watsuji’s magnum opus?”

“How’s that?”

“I mean, his mangum opus of dying, and staying dead. That was the crowning achievement of a career dedicated to the annihilation of self.”

FUCK TETSURŌ WATSUJI.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

Bad Leftist Poetry: Nicking the Revolution

Nicking the Revolution

I can’t nick you the revolution, but I can try

I can run down to the Tesco Express and nick you some nice crisps
Crisps of revolution
Maybe I can nick some lager as well

And we could drink and talk about the future
If it even exists

What even is the future?
You can’t shoplift the future from the Tesco Express
They don’t stock it next to the jams and condiments, or whatever
The manager only stocks the present, and the past
in accordance with his petty bourgeois class interests

You can nick those things, but you wouldn’t want to
The whole symbolism would be wrong

I can’t nick you a packet of fags
They keep them back there where we can’t reach
Sort of like Tesco Express is the state, and the fags are the means of production

Can you nick the laughter of children?

Can you nick unity?

Can you nick liberation?

Can you nick back the alienated hours of your life stolen by capital in pursuit of profit?

“You cannot nick those things,” is the answer, that you hear, from the dialectic of history, speaking in the voice of young woman next to you, stuffing a box of tampons into her bag and sneaking out, like the last chance, for an answer, to a question, that you didn’t ask, and frankly think is stupid

Let’s go down to the Tesco Express, and shoplift hope.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

“Max Zirngast Maoist or Something” –BVT

VIENNA, MAY ALLAH HAVE MERCY UPON US ALL, WE’RE BACK IN VIENNA – As is now widely known across the German-speaking world, the Austrian BVT (Counterterrorism Office), not content to merely collaborate with the Turkish state’s farcical case against Turkish TÖP cadre and their friend Max Zirngast, apparently decided to commit the much-greater crime of mixing up unrelated factions of the Turkish left.

Yes, not only was Max’s closeness while in Ankara to TÖP understood as a real link to the “TKP/K” even though the latter organisation’s actual existence is in doubt according to previous Turkish court cases, but the Liechtenstein-backed puppet government in Vienna decided that “TKP/K” was some varient of the TKP-ML, and therefore that TÖP has an armed wing engaging in Maoist people’s war: TİKKO.

While allegedly Max Zirngast is no longer being investigated for his alleged alleged alleged alleged links to TİKKO, the story represented a huge scandal not only in the alleged left scene in Austria, but across Europe including in countries which actually matter. Following German-language press briefly referring to Zirngast as “Europe’s most famous contemporary Maoist”, Maoists in other German-speaking countries took issue with the breadth of this claim:

“Europe’s most famous?” asked an incredulous Stefan Engel, grabbing hold of the nearest television camera in a Marx-level drunken rage at 7 AM, local time. “Maybe Austria, sure. But how can you ignore Stefan Engel? Everything is about Stefan Engel, author of only the finest books about Maoism! I regret stepping down from my chair position, if this is how you’re all going to treat me.”

“And I’m being told he’s not even really a Maoist? What a joke country Austria is, that they don’t even check the prolific analytical output of any given Marxist prior to discussing them in the news media. That would make sense in an English-speaking country, where your Marxists read and write about as much Marxist theory as your average fascist, but we expect a higher standard here in Germany,” concluded the livid Bavarian, with the same completely not-nationalist drunken tone that Marx used over a century prior.

Response from one of Germany’s wildly inferior western neighbours was similarly swift, with the Philippine-origin Jose Maria Sison holding a press conference noting that it was “beyond dispute” that he was “the most famous and best Maoist in the world today”, and that his exclusion from consideration in the German-language press doubtless reflected the “typical German obsession with race” simply because of his “Asian origins”.

The TKP-ML itself felt compelled to issue a statement, denying any “organic connection” to “the alleged individual known as Max Zirngast”. The statement did however attempt to reach a point of solidarity with the embattled Austrian, stating that “the people of Dersim feel a deep connection to the people of Hatay, for whom Zirngast is a symbol of hope”, and that further “the bogus terror charges which MİT throws out will never be remembered as anything more than the desperate cries of a doomed fascist regime”, and finally that “like Max Zirngast, the TKP-ML is a legitimate political party which, in a people’s democracy, will finally be allowed to speak“.

Max Zirngast could not be reached for comment, as he was unavoidably detained with urgent business on behalf of his girlfriend/owner, involving the latter’s foot being lodged deep in Zirngast’s mouth, where it belongs.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!