Yuletide Eve in the Holding Cell

“Hey!” yelled Joseph through the bars at the passing guard, “will you be charging us with something and keeping us here, or deporting us, and if so, to where?”

Joseph winced and tried to cover his face to prevent spittle from hitting him as the guard screamed a response at him. He turned heel and sat back on the cot he and his cellmate were sharing.

“What did he say?” asked Leon.

“I don’t know, I don’t speak Japanese.”

“Probably this was one of the shortcomings to our plan,” said Leon, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Attempting to sail into Japan, illegally, under COVID-19 conditions, without speaking Japanese, to travel to the gender neutral toilet in Kamakura.”

“I appreciate your acknowledgement of the gender neutral quality of the toilet in question,” said Joseph, looking his friend in the eye. “Very progressive.”

“And I appreciate you, friend.”

The two friends laid down in a spooning formation on the narrow cot and held each other for warmth. Leon, the big spoon, wrapped his arms tenderly around Joseph as they pressed into each other.

“I wish we had a blanket,” lamented Joseph.

“I know,” said Leon, planting a tender kiss on Joseph’s cheek. “What do you think our comrades are up to right now?”

“Probably huddled around the burning effigy drinking hot toddies and chanting ‘takbir’s. I wish we were with them,” Joseph sighed.

“Alan told me there’d be a piñata as well as a burned effigy this year. He said they’re going to get Stefan Engel drunker than usual, blindfold him, and make him crack it open with his bare fists.”

“What’s inside the piñata?”

“Several kilos of vegan okonomiyaki.”

Joseph turned around to face his friend. “I wish we had a blanket or something, it’s so cold and if we could at least cover ourselves from the waist down we could…”

“I know, hun. Try not to think about it,” said Leon.

“I just hate it!” Joseph yelped, a little tear rolling down his cheek. “We couldn’t complete our mission to urinate on Tetsurō Watsuji’s grave, just like we couldn’t build socialist construction up to a level that would allow humanity to pass from necessity into freedom, I just feel like a failure, and I just want to get drunk and get off with you right now, and we can’t even do that!”

Leon stroked his cheek tenderly as he looked out the tiny window of their holding cell at the moon shining over coastal Japan. “I know, Joseph. It’s hard to live with failure. Trust me, I know.”

“Yeah,” said Joseph. “We’ll still win though, right?”

“Inshallah.” said Leon. “Let’s try to focus on the reason for the season, and not put ourselves down right now.”

“You’re right,” said Joseph. “It’s December 25th, the eve of Tetsurō Watsuji’s death, and we should be focusing on that.”

“Did you read what [REDACTED] wrote? That Watsuji is actually a dialectical materialist, because of all the ningen stuff about society?” scoffed Leon.

“Absurd!” muttered Joseph, sitting upright. “The entire point of Watsuji’s work in every period is essentially anti-universalist, and his purported self-criticism about his past individualism is actually worse because of its real social context as academic propaganda for fascist Japanese nationalism!”

“You don’t have to tell me,” said Leon, standing and pacing in front of him. “It’s also deeply disturbing how Watsuji is held up as a sort of philosopher of Buddhism in this sense. The entire obsession with geography as a basis for social belonging has a clear Shinto origin, for starters, but more than that, it all builds into obvious Japanese nationalism which is completely at odds with the quest for Buddhahood that genuine Buddhists pursue.”

“It’s actually quite perverse,” agreed Joseph, tearing open two cigarettes and packing himself a pipe to smoke with the contents. “Every time Watsuji lauds the state, and in particular, the imperial Japanese state with its caste structures and racial supremacism, when he considers social rebellion to be an egotistical act, he forgets that non-conformity, social rebellion, and in particular social rebellion against outdated and superstitious structures are, in addition to being the source of development of human society from stage to stage in general, at the core of how Buddhism first became revealed as a great world religion!”

“Sure,” said Leon. “But this dual allegiance of the sangha to Buddha and king has a long history in every Buddhist society. Watsuji didn’t invent these problems in the Japanese academy, he simply worked hard to legitimise them there.”

Joseph nodded, “as with every religious tradition, the relationship between its ideal aim of universal consciousness and overcoming of the contradiction between self and other through spiritual transcendence is at odds with its material reliance on the state, which is an oppressive class structure and geographically and culturally limited in its particularity.”

“Word,” said Leon. “Do you want to make out and do some over-the-pants rubbing? All this philosophy talk has really got me going.”

“Yeah, all right.”

FUCK TETSURŌ WATSUJI.

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Capitalist Overseer “Treats” Exploited Toilers

MELBOURNE – In a move sure to appease the remainder of workers whose jobs have been spared the COVID-19 sackings, local Myer manager Roy Kelly has decided to “treat” his exhausted underlings to a “free lunch”.

“No need for all that!” announced Mr. Kelly, unceremoniously snatching a brown bag lunch brought by cashier Michelle Lo from her hands and tossing it into the bin. “I’ve brought lunch for the lot of you!” he announced, presumably smiling one of those idiotic smiles of his behind his ill-fitting face mask.

Other workers rushed to hide their own lunches before Mr. Kelly could get to them as they spied him wheeling out a trolley of Macca’s bags.

“Fuck off.” reported cosmetics section worker Khalid Farooqi to our correspondent as he spotted the trolley being rolled out. “Go fuck yourself.”

Mr. Kelly opened the first bag to reveal that it was worse than anyone could have predicted: the entire bag was filled with Chicken McBites purchased off the Loose Change menu, which he began distributing to each of the workers in turn.

“Can I still have my regular lunch, seeing as I’m vegan?” enquired Jenny Smith from children’s clothing, hoping beyond hope her boss wouldn’t check the tupperware in her hand too closely, which was in fact a homemade fish stew.

“No worries, missy!” exclaimed Mr. Kelly, grabbing the tupperware from her hands and replacing it with chips from the Loose Change menu, “you can have that back at the end of the day, we’re all enjoying a hot meal courtesy of your favourite boss together today!”

At time of press, all the workers were eating their Macca’s separately in accordance with social distance in the back of the store, in silence, as Mr. Kelly patrolled amongst them to make sure nobody came too close to 1.5 metres of one another.

“All right, lunch break’s over, back to work!”

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Sparts Need Attention Again

LONDON – The Spartacist League of Britain, the Trotskyite sect that everybody loves to hate, feel that they haven’t united the entire global left in condemnation of them enough lately, and have decided to weigh in on what they call “the so-called ‘Coronavirus'”.

Claiming that COVID-19 “is obviously not real”, the purposefully provocative piece in Workers Hammer cast doubt on almost every single claim since the outbreak, laying out an elaborate conspiracy by which China have agreed to go along with the conspiracy in exchange for an increase in USAID, Korea being fooled by reports from China and the puppet regime in the occupied south of the country, and various sections of the US ruling classes, who of course are pulling all the strings, are variously lying or telling the truth about what they do or don’t know, and to make a long story short, Herman Cain was assassinated because he learned the truth.

No word on why the lone truth-tellers of Workers Hammer don’t fear being targeted for their usual bravery in being the only ones to say whatever nonsense pops into their deluded Trotskyite heads.

The Sparts none the less emphasise their “critical support” for the “fake virus” on the grounds that this particular hoax “has none the less exposed deep contradictions in the ruling classes and is plunging capital into ever greater depths of crisis”, out of which “the revolutionary vanguard represented by the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) can finally organise the working class for our long-planned first Trotskyist revolution”.

Trump’s “alleged” infection in particular is being held up as proof that the virus “cannot be genuine”, and therefore as a “warning to all of our many readers about the limitations in putting too much faith in fake bourgeois viruses to effect revolutionary change that only the working class can deliver”, on the grounds that “despite promises, this reformist ‘virus’ didn’t even kill the President of the United States”, a task which can only be completed “by a virus designed and spread by the class-conscious proletariat of the United States, organised and agitated under the leadership of our sister organisation and known virus experts, the Spartacist League of the US”.

As the entire world is rocked with the release of every single statement by any Trotskyite organisation, it comes as no surprise that responses were swift. Rivals in Trotskyism, the IMT, have released a statement of their own which the Sparts, for their part, have preemptively refused to read “as social distancing prevents us from using it as an excuse to show up and ruin one of their events”.

In said statement released on marxist.com and reprinted on all the other various similarly named IMT sources, it was emphasised that with over a million deaths worldwide COVID-19 need “do anything more to separate itself out from demonstrably false bourgeois propaganda, like Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, or ‘the Big Bang’.”

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Humourless Marxist Reviews: Tiger King

Tiger King is that new Netflix series that everyone seems to be watching, inexplicably. Well, perhaps inexplicably is the wrong word. The explanations are well known: the series follows the true story of outrageous characters who lived already dangerous lives making even more dangerous decisions, and was released in suspiciously good timing for the COVID-19 outbreak. So, not inexplicably, but unfortunately it’s the series that everyone seems to be watching, and here’s your review, you content-hungry jackanapes!

The series follows Joe Exotic, one of these horrible people who professionally imprisons and enslaves animals, in this case tigers, as the series’s name implies. Joe Exotic is gay, but not in a cool way, like Worker’s Spatula writers are required to be, but in a douche-y way.

Indeed, if there’s one word that could describe Joe Exotic, the “Tiger King”, it would certainly be “douche-y”. We almost never use the word “douche” here at Worker’s Spatula, but the word so perfectly encapsulated the energy that Joe Exotic radiates that a special committee was convened to determine if necessity dictated that we publish a piece calling out Joe Exotic for the douchey douche he is.

As you might have gathered, the committee affirmed that you must all be forewarned that if you watch this series, you would be exposed to ours of this fucking douche.

Actually, almost all of the human characters in this series could be described as being at least somewhat douchey. As COVID-19 has practically imprisoned some of our readers in their homes, and even workers forced to go out to be exploited for their labour are deprived of as much time outdoors during their social reproduction time, we can say with great certainty that the most relatable characters will be the tigers. Also, like the imprisoned tigers, our loyal readership are some truly fierce binches.

That’s right, we’re publishing the word “binch” again. This is a pandemic and we had to watch Tiger King, we’re breaking out all the weird nouns we have to, and you’re just going to have to deal with it.

Almost every single human character is problematic, unlikeable, and/or suspect in some way. To be honest, we even believe Carole Baskin did feed her husband’s corpse to some big cats. That’s definitely the most believable thing about that video.

Would we recommend our readers actually watch this series? No, but we don’t recommend you consume a lot of media that we can’t stop you from consuming. None the less, if any of our readers want to consume some documentary media centered around a likeable main character?

We humbly recommend the works of Grover Furr.

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Britain’s Most Advanced Communist Thwarted by COVID-19

KING’S LYNN, NORFOLK – We regret to inform the proletarian masses of Britain that the infamous ‘Comrade X’, the Lenin of East Anglia who lives in the shadows and contains within her incomparable mind the totality of proletarian science, has been thwarted in her nigh-successful quest to build a vanguard cadre organisation for proletarian revolution by being placed on mandatory 12-week isolation due to the global pandemic COVID-19.

“I was really going to do it this time,” she informed our correspondent via messenger pigeon. “I’ve been traveling on weekends around the region, sussing various contacts to see how trustworthy they are, carefully providing contact information… we were really building.”

“But then the fucking Tories botched the whole Coronavirus job, and now I’m in isolation forever so… blame the objective conditions.”

Upon being informed that “that sounds like the sort of cop-out the Trotskyites might give us”, ‘Comrade X’ called our correspondent by WhatsApp video chat to furiously respond:

Don’t even jokingly compare me with that cult, Worker’s Spatula. I know I’ve made some excuses in the past, but things were really going well for a change. I was meeting with some promising trade unionists. I was coordinating with people close to the Lever and some ICOR representatives. I had made contact with some people experienced in [REDACTED] and we went together to [REDACTED] to set up a training [REDACTED] for [REDACTED] who [REDACTED] in case [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] or [REDACTED].

I put in the hours, door to door. But literally what am I supposed to do in mandatory social isolation? I’m not a Trotskyite… the coronavirus is.

Noting that her practical work had made her “feel more alive than ever before”, and with each passing day in social isolation, she can “feel the fighting spirit diminish”, ‘Comrade X’ emphasised that “if I had just had a few more days, we could have built a functional organisation that would have survived the outbreak, but it’s too late now.”

‘Comrade X’ also noted the extremely unlikelihood of rebuilding potential organisational links when COVID-19 blows over: “the post-Corbyn period was perfect, because Corbyn’s contrarian and controversy-courting style of social democracy really did a lot to radicalise the kids, and then he got undermined by the system, leaving a small segment of the youth with a high potential for radicalisation. But as this COVID-19 nonsense wears on, the British state is going to realise that just as the Corbyn phenomenon had a potential to undermine the British state, it also had the potential to legitimise and preserve it that Boris just doesn’t have.”

“Once they realise that, they’re going to position some ‘just critical enough’ Labour politician that Corbyn and company can anoint who can fix the COVID-19 mess and return us to business as usual with a couple more compromises from the state’s side, and then they’ll make the kids fight tooth and nail to maintain that.”

Her bleak but practically speaking not absurd prediction caused ‘Comrade X’ to light up a cigarette in distress, a habit she had kicked during her weeks of regular organising work, signalling a likely return to being relegated to her own bed save for trips to the door to pick up the delivery she ordered.

“There’s no use trying to organise British people anyway. If things are going to kick off, it’s going to be in Ireland, and I have faith in them to change the world in the ways I’m too depressed to take part in because the world has made me the sort of person who’s too depressed to change it.”

At time of press, ‘Comrade X’ was forlornly stroking a photo of Ethem Sarısülük and mouthing the words “I have failed you”.

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