Yanis Varoufakis, the most famous veteran of the Syriza debacle, has taken a break from his prolific career as a male model to smugly host the 2020 Summit of the Progressive International, taking place, as everything else does lately, over Zoom and broadcast on YouTube.
Varoufakis, who dominated far too much of the Summit’s time with his self-important bullshit, spoke at great length about the importance of reforming capitalism maximally on its own terms, at a time when those terms are about to plunge us all into a global climate crisis the likes of which have yet to be seen.
Not content merely to take up so much of the actual audio and video time, he made sure that his pitiful, washed-up and frankly no longer relevant self was centred in discussion of the Summit in other news sources, even including extensive quotes from his prepared speech under that which he was expected to say.
Due to the Spatula’s perpetual commitment to combatting even the ghost of Nikita Khrushchev, Varoufakis’s hair-twin, we would remiss if we did not note that in a flagrant revisionism of class struggle, Varoufakis called for the problem of exploitation of workers to be addressed by converting each capitalist enterprise into “a corporation of all classes”.
Varoufakis also informed us that he personally does not shop on Amazon, and buys lots of fair trade coffee, or something.
The absolute highlight of the dismal Varoufakis Show where most of his guests were likewise held back by Keynesian cowardice from saying a single fucking thing of substance, was the appearance of Nick Estes, who is absolutely killing it on Twitter lately. In addition to a greatly Marxist call for land back to the Indigenous and a [planned?] economy for people and other such dank nugs, Estes heroically caused the one moment of tension by using the dreaded “s-word” which Varoufakis had clearly forbidden all guests from using.
“The name of the system we need to construct is socialism.” said Nick Estes, leaning forward for emphasis and staring into the camera. “Socialism. Socialism. Socialism.”
Varoufakis scrambled to regain control of the situation, lest he have to lose any sponsors for this unacceptably Stalinist turn of events: “Just so everyone out there knows, Progressive International doesn’t believe in any of that ‘actually existing socialism’, stuff, we’re just… we want to be beyond capitalism and critical of capitalism and contra-capitalist and everything else but allow me to emphasise that Mr. Estes is quite alone in his Enver Hoxha-esque call for ‘socialist construction’. No fucking way. No thank you.”
Before Estes or anyone else could interject any clarifying question or comment in response to this rant, Varoufakis nervously scratched his scalp and continued rambling: “I mean, if this were the Soviet Union, which thank God it’s not, I mean, that would be a really dystopic vision for the future, let me tell you, especially because I personally would be sent to GULAG. I mean I would. Me. Yanis Varoufakis. Imagine we’re in the Soviet Union now. I’d be the centre of attention then too, and Stalin couldn’t stand me getting all the attention, and so I’d have to go to GULAG. Is that what you want, Nick Estes? This is a fun game too, right?”
At time of press, [REDACTED] at the Worker’s Spatula Twitter was tweeting fantasies about an entirely different kind of summit with Varoufakis, if you catch my meaning, wink wink, nudge nudge.
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Point: We must build an anti-Westminster movement in England by Anthony Jones, writer at The Lever
As the economic crisis deepens, Europe is particularly gripped by contradictions between various imperialist powers. This is most saliently felt in the “Brexit” regime which has pitted sections of the British ruling classes against their French and German counterparts. However, we in Britain are still living through the contradictions of capitalism-imperialism headed by Westminster, and in particular, the national contradictions within Britain which have the potential to splinter the UK as the EU is being splintered.
Naturally, I am referring to the potential of rising Scottish and Welsh nationalism to weaken Westminster imperialism and the English bourgeoisie, but it is very important that we understand how the English bourgeoisie is actually ruling Britain under the guise of not doing so. Through cultural soft power and economic and military hard power, the English ruling classes whose seat of power is Westminster attempt to convince all the peoples of this island of a shared political identity as “British”. This lie must be exposed not only by the Welsh and Scottish proletariats who can carry the struggle against imperialism beyond the weak positions offered by our “own” bourgeoisies, but also by the English themselves.
It is not enough for the English working class to not identify with British imperialism: they must show how British imperialism is seeking to dominate the market through national oppression, even “at home”. To do this, a line of demarcation must be drawn and an English movement against Westminster must be born, roughly based on the weak historical trend of English republicanism, now potentially strengthened by economic crisis and sharpened by the knowledge of national contradictions in these islands.
This is no appeal to a bourgeois English patriotism of the sort of the original English republicans, which itself sowed the seeds of capitalist-imperialist domination of Wales and Ireland. Rather the English revolutionaries must preemptively work to give up land dominated not only by the UK state as such, but even legally defined as England. As I have argued before, it is up to the English revolutionaries to begin this struggle against their ruling classes by continuing to question the borders of England itself. But whatever remains of England and Englishness after this investigation, must be realised as a particular site of struggle, and the “local” class struggle in England identified with the multinational proletariat imprisoned in and by England and Britain, in a united revolutionary struggle against the bourgeois dictatorship in Westminster.
Workers and oppressed peoples of the world – unite!
Counterpoint: Chas and Dave were English by RCG representative
The position put forth by Anthony Jones would at first glance appear to take a creative and original anti-imperialist stance against the English ruling classes, dividing English workers from their “own” ruling classes by uniting them with the anti-imperialist movements of various oppressed peoples in these islands and around the world.
But “Comrade” Anthony Jones is forgetting one crucial fact: Chas and Dave were English.
How can the revolutionary multi-national proletariat around the world put any faith in any of the classes which belong to a nation so reactionary that it produced such “art” as Chas and Dave? They certainly cannot.
So as to prevent a continuation of this “debate” with opportunists such as Anthony Jones, we want to head off potential responses to what we consider is already the end of the discussion: Anthony Jones might offer that many English people also agree that Chas and Dave are bad and reactionary shit. This is certainly true: we know many individual English people who never listen to Chas and Dave, or indeed, any English “musicians”. But breaking on an individual level with Chas and Dave cannot be mistaken for a decisive break by English workers with the labour aristocracy ideology best exemplified by Chas and Dave and their rubbish “music”.
Since Chas Hodges passed away (tragically altogether too late) earlier this year, Anthony Jones might offer that Chas and Dave represent a historical threat to proletarian internationalism, but not a contemporary one. However, the continued life of Dave Peacock… really? His surname is Peacock? Disgusting. Right, the fact that Dave is still alive represents a concrete obstacle that we are confident no victim of British imperialism could look beyond.
Imagine you are in Belfast, engaged in solidarity work with the 32 County Sovereignty Movement or the Irish Republican Socialist Party. On this nearest front line against British Imperialism, if you were in a pub, and Dave Peacock came on television, speaking in that horrendous accent of his, what Irish republican would not be justified in taking out their rage on any English person in sight?
Under such conditions, no meaningful international solidarity can be built on the basis of anti-imperialism between the victims of British imperialism and the English, the nightmare nation which incubated the “cultural” abomination known as Chas and Dave. Not even the most apparently revolutionary elements of the English working class will be able to overcome the contradiction of Chas and Dave and Chas and Dave-ism at least until some hero ends the life of Dave. Until then, we must maintain a national liberation strategy of the entire legitimate territory of Wales and Scotland from English oppression “at home” and strict anti-imperialist struggle against Britain abroad.
KNEES UP MOTHER BROWN.
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Don’t worry, US readers: this will not be yet another thinkpiece about how Donald Trump reflects the latent white supremacy of the settler-colonial Yankee national identity. This will not be yet another thinkpiece about how many of Donald Trump’s supporters are bourgeois. This will not be yet another thinkpiece which repeats that the Trump presidency is the means by which the crisis punishes all of the US for the victory of Clintonite status quo-ism over even the most modest reformism of Sanders.
You know these things already. The fact is, everyone knows these things. Everything under the sun is old and burnt.
Rather, let us dispense momentarily with a simple meditation, in lieu of a hot take. At this point, all but the most out-of-touch critic would agree that Bernie would, in fact, have won. But given that the objective conditions are such that Bernie did not in fact win, let us not forget how much of the blame lies precisely with political subjects such as Sanders and the Sandernistas for failing to see beyond the Whitegeist.
The Zeitgeist, as all of our readers know, is the spirit (Geist) of the age (Zeit). We are most concerned with the level of development of the masses, their collective consciousness and spirit. It does not suffice to consider oneself a meaningful political subject and not consider the objective reality of the development of the revolutionary masses. But who are the revolutionary masses In the United States? Quite simply, everyone except white people.
At this point, their biases against us confirmed, all the white leftists in the United States have stopped reading. But seriously, folks, nobody is actually preaching that there is no revolutionary potential in the struggles of “white” proletarians. And if such people do appear to exist, they’re just Worker’s Spatula psyops.
In fact, just to be safe, assume that everyone on left Twitter discussing such matters is either a Spatula writer or a sockpuppet which is part of a Spatula psyop, depending on whether or not we unironically share the views they espouse or not.
Can we all stop talking about the problem of imaginary leftists condemning labour strikes because of the skin colour of white workers? How often has this actually obstructed your practice, if you’re reading this and actually have any practice (since most of the internet left has neither theory nor practice)?
However, many white leftists in the United States, particularly the Sandernistas and large sections of the DSA, but also some anarchists and Marxist-Leninists, seem to think that chauvinism is found only in explicit statements of condemnation for oppressed nations and identities or movements addressing said oppression. Strasserite chauvinism finds its reflection in an obsession by more honest socialists with saving the soul of white workers, no matter how chauvinist those workers might be.
“Oh so you’re saying all white workers are chauvinists?” Hell yes we are, every single one of them is chauvinist trash, no different to the KKK, and all non-white workers are pure vessels for the revolution, whose only flaw is not kicking white workers out of their unions screaming “beat it, whitey!”
But seriously, the editing process for this piece was inordinately held back by debating how many times we should insert a joke about how we hate all white people* or there are no white workers or whatever. The hyper-sensitivity on this point by white communists (particularly in the US) is so obnoxious and we wonder when they will stop it. We assure you: we have considered the class implications.
We all know Trump voters are not disproportionately the disenfranchised in the US. We all also agree that there should be a unity of struggle between the white proletariat and the oppressed nationalities. The problem is, to build a sincere solidarity after literally centuries of harsh national oppression, which is not merely a scar on historical memory but which creates a real hierarchy in economic reality, we must do so on the terms of the more oppressed and impoverished oppressed nationalities.
Occupy Wall Street began in 2011. Afro-Americans have been struggling for their most basic democratic rights since before there was a United States. It is not unreasonable to expect that in uniting the two struggles, the one should show due deference to the other.
But what is the response of the white left? To scold others for bringing up the national question, to speak of “One United American Working Class™”, to compare George Washington to Robespierre, and other such thinly-veiled patriotic nonsense, right as the US Empire is weakening for the first time since the end of the Cold War!
It is not only the DSA, who speak of the US as a “nation”, who do this, but even many ostensible Marxist-Leninists! While the Whitegeist in the US may be one step ahead of Occupy Wall Street, the Zeitgeist of the oppressed nations in the US is one step ahead of Black Lives Matter, is in Cooperation Jackson, is speaking about “decolonisation”. We struggle to unite these struggles of course, but the Whitegeist must be brought up to the level of the heroic oppressed peoples in the US, the struggle of these oppressed peoples cannot be buried because the Whitegeist of the white working class (or intellectuals’ idealist conception thereof) is frightened of it!
Our hypocritical white US leftists insist that they support Black Lives Matter, that they “like” Malcolm X, that they name-drop Assata Shakur. Like anarchists, they use their individual lifestyle to cover up the essence of a more general theoretical critique; like social democrats, they assure us that Black America is on their mind, but we can’t divide the working class [vote?] by distracting precious white workers from their own precious white problems with anyone else’s “identitarian” non-white problems; like the liberals who worship Barack Obama, they want Black “allies” who validate their position as good white people and do not make them uncomfortable.
In short, these labour aristocratic settler-colonialist white leftists, who have yet to face their own history and social position, substitute their own consciousness for that of the revolutionary proletariat. They may be well-intentioned, but their good intentions are only an indication of of how far we can travel with them as individuals. They are no indication of the correctness of their analysis, which entirely substitutes their idealist and subjective conception of the working class for a critical dialectical process of material struggle of all workers and all oppressed.
There is a general tendency in the United States to characterise polemics such as this one, without using precisely this terminology, as “reverse racist”, or “anti-white”. The code-word used is “Third Worldist”. You would think, therefore, that those who demand that liberation of the oppressed be centred in the rhetoric of revolutionaries in the US are either idealists who don’t understand the material conditions of their own country, or foreign leftists who don’t understand that the objective conditions of struggle in the US are so undeveloped as to not be ready for this sort of revolutionary rhetoric.
And indeed, one of the writers who pushed this piece in committee did come from a country with wildly different economic conditions, political history, and culture.
Australia.
Yes, whatever you want to say about Socialist Alliance, and no Worker’s Spatula writer can pass up the chance to point out that Green Left Weekly, while a fine news source, simply has NOTHING TO SAY ABOUT HEGEL, but from the vantage point (Ollman lol) of Melbourne, it’s frankly startling to see how little the liberation of oppressed peoples means to white leftists in the US. It’s not as if we committed less genocide against the indigenous than the Yanks. If Yanks are under that impression, it’s simply because their settler-colonial society’s population has been bolstered by more immigration than ours.
And while it’s true that in Australia, Aboriginals are a greater portion of the population than the Indigenous nations in the United States, it’s equally true that the Afro-American people, who are subject to similar national oppression, are a much greater percentage of the overall population of the United States than the Aboriginals in Australia. Thus we can see that it is not that the white left are ignoring the oppressed peoples within “their own” borders based on irrelevance, but out of a chauvinism that even other settler-colonial peoples, such as the arch-racist white Australian society, are capable of overcoming on the radical left.
Compare the CPA to the CPUSA and despair.
This is a clear example of the role subjectivity plays in shaping objectivity. If the white left in the US insists on tailing the Whitegeist, then they will see no objective need to embrace the liberation struggles of the oppressed peoples. If the white left in Australia overcome the Whitegeist, suddenly it becomes completely objectively obvious to them that there is a pressing need to embrace the struggle of the Aboriginals.
In fact, whether or not we had written this screed, things are in motion in the white left, and the Whitegeist itself is developing. Different elements of the white working class in the US will be driven towards fascism whether we intervene or those with a less full analysis intervene with a more vulgar class politics. But to intervene most correctly we hope all interested comrades will grasp the limitations into which they were socialised, struggle to overcome them, and take on the struggle of the oppressed peoples as their own, and by doing so, become themselves a living connection.
Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!
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Worker’s Spatula have recently received a response from Jordan Peterson to our invitation to a debate on “Marxism and modernity”, stating that Mr. Peterson “feels he has already sufficiently expressed his views in his upcoming debate with the most serious Marxist thinker alive today, Slavoj Žižek, so completely it does not need to take place, and so he certainly does not need to engage with fanatical Stalinists just because they have their own blogs”. We consider this to be a clear statement of intellectual cowardice by a fraudulent “thinker” who refuses to engage in critical discourse to arrive at the truth. In short, we hold that Mr. Peterson is trying to create a “safe space” around himself where he does not have to be confronted by new ideas.
The debate was proposed to take place in the form of our first ever live Facebook video broadcast at one of our Spatula iftar dinners which we hold every night of Ramadan here in Vienna, where our central committee are plotting our next move in our ongoing campaign against the existence of Liechtenstein, the worst country in the world, and very likely Peterson’s model for a perfect society.
Jordan Peterson, for those who are not aware, is a “famous” “Canadian” “intellectual”, who tragically and accurately represents English Canada as a settler-colonial reproduction of England in all its imperialist economic “progress” and political reaction, a vulgar, undialectical, intellectually destitute cultural wasteland which will hopefully be cleansed by the healing fire of the righteous liberation movements of the downtrodden Indigenous masses, just as England will hopefully be destroyed by y Mab Darogan.
In case any of them are reading this, unaware of who we are and what we do, unlike Jordan Peterson and his followers, Worker’s Spatula are a weird cult which doesn’t believe in assigning women to men under the rubric of “enforced monogamy”, but on the contrary, believes that the only acceptable cishet relationship is that of a woman who owns multiple men who are subordinate to her ownership over them until gender is overcome in full communism. Allow us to quote from our model of how to fix the “chaos” of gender politics under the bourgeois patriarchy in the throes of capitalist crisis:
that baby was conceived the natural way for cishets: by a woman who was head of her own matriarchal harem in which the men she controls stay in their place, and give her dick when she asks for it, and do not let their eyes stray to other women. “Who’s the father?” a nurse asks the heroic mother of this rebel baby, motioning towards her man-harem on the other side of the room. “I don’t know,” she replies, “some man,” she laughs, and the nurse laughs, and the doctor laughs, and the baby laughs, but the men do not laugh, because it is shameful for a man to laugh in public, for it may arouse the desires of strange women.
While we regret that we cannot bring our loyal readers such a thrilling debate which captures the exciting Zeitgeist of the ideological struggles being waged over the midst of capitalist-imperialist modernity in the midst of crisis, we would nonetheless like to share our original letter to Jordan Peterson. It follows in unedited format:
In the name Allāh, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, in the name of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin (SAW), we seek refuge in the dialectic of history from Trotsky, the accursed.
We write to you on behalf of Worker’s Spatula, the intellectual vanguard of the vanguard of the vanguard of world revolution on behalf of all poor and oppressed. Despite the fact that we have been completely ignored by the bourgeois press, we are widely recognised as the premiere source of anti-revisionist communism on the internet, and if the scoundrel and reactionary Jordan Peterson is not afraid to have his arguments “calmly destroyed” by us, he will confront us in the form of debate.
We, Worker’s Spatula, request, nay, demand that Jordan Peterson travel to Vienna to be taken, blindfolded, to our Anti-Liechtenstein Marxist-Leninist Headquarters for Hegel and Qur’ān Studies to take part in a debate over an iftar dinner, as we are fasting during Ramadan. This debate will naturally be broadcast live over the internet, and will consist of members of our editorial staff rebutting his mistaken ideas in a proper dialectical and materialist fashion.
We propose the following topics for debate, to which Mr. Peterson or his representatives may propose revisions or additions:
–Has Jordan Peterson actually read Marx with any more closeness than your average Canadian university student forced to do so for a class taught by a sociology professor who probably doesn’t have any revolutionary commitments to begin with? The simplicity of his “rebuttals” is matched only by the dishonesty of his mischaracterisations. “Pop quiz”-style questions about basic assertions of Marx’s theoretical approach will be peppered throughout the debate, delivered in a cartoonish falsetto by a leftcom.
–Subjectivity and objectivity, specifically Jordan Peterson’s commitment to a supposedly objective truth, but a priori imposes his own subjective views, interests, etc. as necessary conditions for reasonable inclusion in ideological discourse. Like that fucking trick he pulls where he insists universities are for being confronted by “often horrible” ideas, as if students are demanding a form of censorship by objecting to ideological indoctrination by people who think like him, while simultaneously demanding the defunding of academic subjects who are unlike him.
–Where do lobster witches live? Since witches are a Jungian archetype from which we cannot escape, and human social life can be explained entirely through analogies gleaned from your expert knowledge about lobsters, are there swamp lobsters or… how does that work?
–Why? Why few women?
We hope that we will receive a prompt response, and we further hope that Mr. Peterson will not take the coward’s way out, and will defend his ideals of hierarchical western civilisation or whatever.
In struggle (against you),
–Worker’s Spatula
We hope that our regular readers, as well as Jordan Peterson’s fans, will sign the petition based on this original e-mail to make this debate happen and settle, once and for all, who is right: Stalin or Jordan Peterson? (it’s Stalin)
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Comrades, like all of you, I am troubled by the ongoing wars and repression in the Middle East, the rising fascist tide in western imperialist countries, and the general atmosphere brought on by the crisis more broadly.
Like all of you, I long to see the broad masses bring down this corrupt order, but feel powerless to bring this necessary change about. I think all of us lately have been kept up late at night wondering how we can strengthen the democratic and socialist forces and stop the bloodshed in Syria.
Part of the problem doubtless lies with the fact that the popular Syrian opposition to this horrific war and most of the actors in it is unable to express itself over the sound of guns and bombs. Few would deny this terrible truth.
All of us long for a time when Arabs in particular were flooding the streets from Morocco to Bahrain against the various dictators who oppress them, backed by the forces of imperialism. But we cannot travel through time. How can we recreate the necessary conditions for this wave of mass dissent?
I too had no idea of the answer until last night, comrades, when it came to me in a dream. I bolted awake in bed at 3 am and have been up since then, retweeting every single tweet about the Arab Spring.
It’s as brilliant as it is simple: these peaceful protests were the direct result of social media activism and sustained themselves entirely through this medium. In fact, considering that most people on the internet are not Arabs, it stands to reason that the Arab Spring was primarily the result of non-Arabs who dominate Twitter becoming aware of the possibility of democracy in Arab countries in late 2010 and responding by tweeting and retweeting things.
You look skeptical, and at first glance, the numbers would imply that there are more Arabs than non-Arabs. The population of Egypt, the most populous Arab state, is almost 100,000,000, about 4 times as much as Australia. But Egypt, unlike Australia, is full, and Egyptians are fucking off at an alarming rate, many of them to Australia, where we must welcome them with open arms, as our tweets don’t seem to work on our own population.
What’s more, Australia is not even the most populous English-speaking country, and there may be as many as four other languages other than Arabic or English, I couldn’t say with all certainty, thanks to my knowledge of human social variation coming to me entirely through the Australian educational system.
Even if I am wrong and we non-Arabs were not single-handedly responsible for the Arab Spring, we can certainly do our part to bring it back, right?
What’s that you say? You’ve already retweeted every single Arab Spring related tweet, and are thus unable to contribute to this noble project? That’s the talk of the enemy coming out of your mouth, comrade! I myself had made sure to go through all tweets from 2010 on which were in the Arabic language or which contained the name of any Arab country or which contained the letter “Q” followed by anything but the letter “U” regardless of context or language. You’d think there was nothing more I could do, eh?
Wrong. I’ve been going back through my retweets, one at a time, unretweeting and reretweeting them, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll reunretweet them and rereretweet them and then reunretweet them again, or rereunretweet them, before rereretweeting them, all to bring the Arab masses to the street!
If that doesn’t work, there’s nothing more that I can do. That is the most political organising possible for any human individual.
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ANTARCTICA – Following a fortnight-long writing retreat to the Pole of Inaccessibility, Worker’s Spatula staff have conceded that January of 2018 is simply “too bleak” a month for the writing of internet satire for communists.
“Honestly if we had wanted to have Lenin looking down and judging us in sub-zero temperatures while we got nothing of any value done, there are plenty of places in the Northern Hemisphere we could’ve gone,” opined the Yank in between drags on his cigarette.
“It wouldn’t have mattered anyway,” replied one of the English. “We tried to write about the things people in those places were upset about, and we got nothing. The crisis is deepening, the war is claiming the lives of more innocent young poor people, Malcolm Turnbull remains an intolerable Kantian cunt, nobody has recorded a truly great album in over ten years, and we have writer’s block.”
The reality TV-style video diaries revealed more introspective takes on the inactivity of the world’s greatest anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist satire page:
“Life is pain, and we will all die. All humour basically emerges from these facts. But lately, every time the ghost of a smile creeps across my face, news from Turkey intervenes,” explained the Hamburger contingent. “Literally we have lost friends to prison and to the Reaper. Presently a town is being bombed unprovoked by the same fascist regime that took our friends from us. You have to laugh to keep from crying, but you’re only so strong, you know?”
This theme was expanded upon by one of the Turkish comrades: “When the day of liberation comes, and Erdoğan is put on trial, one of the crimes I want him charged with will be the continuous crushing of any glimmer of joy in my life, personally.
“Still: umut dimdik ayakta.”
The Australian had this to share: “I had a joke! I had a joke but they wouldn’t listen to me! I wanted to write about Invasion Day, which brought out a lot of people this year! I wanted to do something about Tsipras travelling to Australia in the hope of seizing power on the back of the Invasion Day protests. Pauline Hanson was going to say something about the wogs colluding with the Aboriginals against White Australia, and Syriza and the Liberal Party form a coalition. It was all going to culminate in a plug for the Green Left Weekly crowd.”
“Yeah, I remember her joke,” explained our Balkan correspondent upon being reminded of the Australia-Greece crossover joke. “Too soon, comrade. Too soon…”
“…not too soon to mock Syriza, mind you. They deserve it. But we’ve been burned by too many white Anglo leftist trends recently. Socialist Alliance is going to have to split like three times over arcane theoretical-historical points before we’re ready to trust them even as much as we trust the Maoists. Marxism isn’t about having good positions you know! It’s about being really angry about Hegel.”
“Too angry to write jokes about Hegel, at least this month,” concluded our Balkan hero before returning to taping notebook pages together to continue drawing the longest upward spiral possible, moving towards the Antarctic horizon…
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PARIS – The City of Lights, the Big Apple, the Paris of the East: the French capital goes by many names, and is famous as the home of the commune, and the Whopper. But for the past two days, Paris has also hosted the fourth annual International Radical Has-Been Conference.
The move to Paris follows three consecutive years in Wellington, New Zealand, which had been chosen for its extreme safety for our retired radical friends. The pivot to Paris followed a decision at the end of the third conference to relocate to a city whose best years were far behind it.
Hippies, punks, and various breeds of Marxists whose claim to fame and legitimacy is some token act or personal relationship from at least a decade prior which proves they are real radicals; all of these came together to reiterate their pretext for avoiding all contemporary political struggle and organisation.
“I was Lukács’s goddamn student!” explained Andrew Arato, during his keynote speech at the extremely white and overwhelmingly male gathering. “I was, okay? Who could possibly know more about communism, or be more serious about it than me? I have tonnes of other old academic friends you can ask if you doubt me!”
“But mostly, I knew fuckin’ Lukács! You fuckin’ idiots!” he concluded, to raucous applause from the room full of tattooed men who prefer the company of a rotating harem of impressionable younger women who are easily impressed by boastful stories of personal heroism to knowing, in a sexual or (heaven forfend) non-sexual capacity, a single woman who might endanger their ego by engaging in a serious discussion about theory and practice.
A series of panels with very similar titles were held on the second day in the morning: “Heroes of the Arab Spring”, “Heroes of Gezi”, “Heroes of Occupy Wall Street”, and of course, “Heroes of the 2010 Student Protests”. None of the panels contained any single statement that could distinguish any of those present by theoretical commitment, though our correspondent was able to ascertain that self-identified anarchists, Marxist-Leninists, “MLMs”, narodniks, and left communists were all represented in the ranks of the panelists.
“So then a fucking cop comes around the corner, right? And my buddy, Mike, he’s scared as shit, I can see it in his eyes, but I just charge him and kick him. He clubbed us both pretty bad, but at one point I even knocked him down. That was fuckin’ awesome,” explained one speaker on the Occupy Wall Street panel to the thinly populated room.
“You fuckin’ liar! You were the one who was scared! I was the one who knocked down that cop!” interjected the speaker’s friend Mike, leaping self-righteously from his chair and storming from the conference hall in to go purchase some halal fast food from a Tunisian “who probably has to serve racist French people all day, I’m probably the only white person who’s ever said ‘ahlan’ to him.”
The conference wrapped up with a talk on “Prospects for Revolution Today: Why Bother?” by an Israeli leftist who was jailed for his refusal to serve in the Zionist occupation army in like, the ’90s or something.
“As the crisis deepens, we see waves of resistance across the world, from Rojava to South Africa. If you’re anything like me, the first thing this makes you ask yourself is: ‘Wasn’t I really brave when I stood my ground against state repression, years ago? Why can’t people today do something as cool as that one thing I did?’
“The reason is simple. They’re all dumb kids. There’s no point talking to a single one of them, because they haven’t seen what I’ve seen, man. They just take part in stupid projects that aren’t as cool as I was.
“Yeah sure, some of them go so far as to actually face death on the front lines against fascists. But they’re line-jumpers. I’ve yet to hear one martyr pay their respects to heroes like me who paved the way for their posturing. And they’re naïve, they don’t know what I know, and what I can’t teach anyone, because everyone’s so unworthy of my brilliant insights.
“God, it’s so annoying to hear all the apolitical assholes who I’m inexplicably surrounded by talk about the MLKP and TKP/ML like what they’re doing is so impressive. What I did was impressive too, okay? And yet Israel still exists, so what’s the fucking point of anything?
“I’m done, I tell you. I got myself a nice NGO job, I’m building myself a little Ottoman-style harem, and I’m going to live out my days telling anyone who will listen how important my one contribution to struggle is, at any given opportunity. Anything else would just mean tainting my purity by talking to other people, particularly young people.
“Cynics of the world, divide and go home: you have nothing to gain, and a lot of time to waste.”
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BILBAO – Following an announcement of a unilateral decommissioning of arms by the left-wing Basque national liberation group known as ETA (Basque Country and Freedom), the Spanish state, fearing increasing economic instability as the EU begins to disintegrate around them, are apparently trying to convince their enemies to rearm.
“We’ve received dozens of letters from various PSOE and PP politicians urging us to set off a bomb or shoot a cop or something. At first we thought it was some kind of joke, and then we remembered the reason why we’re disarming in the first place: we’re supposedly delegitimising the Abertzale left,” explained our masked interlocutor, as he poured boxes full of bullets into a roaring bonfire.
“Now whenever I wake up and find a bomb on my doorstep, I understand it’s not a threat, but a gift from the PP who are concerned about their own electoral future.”
“EYYY Spain, don’t think we don’t know what you’re doing!” exclaimed Erdoğan, in a televised interview where he explained international politics in his usual accurate fashion to the population of Turkey. “The Spanish are having the Basques give their guns to the Kurds because they’re jealous of our world class bridges! If the Spanish respected their Turkish-Andalusian heritage, they would blow some Basque town off the map!”
At this juncture, most non-Turkish readers probably assume that we’re just ascribing a random selection of words to Turkish president Erdoğan, rather than giving a fairly accurate impression of how his speeches usually go. We assure you, this is how Erdoğan actually talks and behaves.
However, in stark contrast to the usual treatment of Erdoğan’s outbursts by state representatives abroad, Erdoğan’s advice is being considered quite seriously in Madrid. Our source in Madrid spoke to several ministers and their aides on condition of anonymity, and apparently launching a pointless war is in the cards for the PP-led government.
“We’re already on the verge of losing Gibraltar,” explained one anonymous source, “and nobody wants to risk losing Catalonia and the Basque Country too. But they refuse to acknowledge our modest demand to allow the Spanish state to determine its own future, and therefore we may be forced to take up arms against them.”
“Our main concern,” explained another source, “is that if we pull an Erdoğan and just launch a military operation against a group which has unilaterally declared a ceasefire, well in our case it’s worse, they’re disarming… it may backfire. Rather than delegitimising left Basque nationalism, it may relegitimise ETA itself.
“Our only hope,” our source explained, looking over their shoulder to make sure no one was listening before finishing, “is to blame the Russians. That seems to be working very well for left-liberals in the US against Trump, and we’re confident it can save Spain as well.”
BOSTON – Following news of famous judgerman Antonin Scalia’s death, the central committee of the editorial staff of Worker’s Spatula hastily convened to choose a successor that the AmeriKKKan People™ could be proud of. Someone who could make the Supreme Court great again.
Of course, Worker’s Spatula supports Bob Avakian in this historic moment.
Bob Avakian™s Revolutionary New Synthesis™ of Communism™™™ is the answer to the jurisprudential crisis which is so strongly felt by the peoples of the United States at present, as it is the answer to all problems in life.
Worker’s Spatula is confident that faced with any legal case, Bob Avakian will deliver a just ruling, consisting of throwing out the case and advocating a new legal system, and indeed, a new social system, based on a cult of personality around his personage.
Worker’s Spatula would like to emphasise that while it did choose Bob Avakian to endorse for this important task because he is some kind of freaky Maoist, he was not our first choice for freaky Maoist Supreme Court Justice. Obviously, if possible, we would have endorsed Chairman Mao himself, and our second choice would have been Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, who at least had a cool Mao-like book of quotations.
Even among living US Maoists, we had briefly considered APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela, who has a better book of quotations than Chairman Bob. However, it was eventually determined that President Obama’s fear of black militancy would render him less likely to follow our advice if it was to appoint Chairman Omali.
We expect that, following our endorsement, Chairman Bob will be appointed as the newest Supreme Court Justice of the United States. Failure to comply with our most reasonable request will result in the full force of Bob Avakian’s people’s army being unleashed upon military targets across the United States. You have been warned.
The James “007” Bond franchise has been around for 20 years, since its first instalment, “Goldeneye”, was released to rave reviews in 1995. Most critics and fans of the franchise agree, no Bond film will ever top “Goldeneye”, and to date, in terms of quality as cinema, no Bond film has.
However, the action franchise’s political significance has long been noted. When “Goldeneye” came out, the Cold War had ended, and the last socialist state, Albania, had fallen. Communism had been relegated to “the dustbin of history” in the popular consciousness, and “Goldeneye” encapsulated this Zeitgeist.
“Goldeneye”, which took place largely in the new Russia, was filled with moments in which Russian characters would stop James Bond in the street during chase scenes and expound at length about their appreciation for the work of Milton Friedman, heightening the tension of the chase as Bond would struggle to simultaneously agree and evade the henchmen of the ghost of Stalin who were pursuing him. In the film’s climax, James Bond and a woman named “Svetlana Freemarket” make passionate love atop a fallen statue of Lenin while agreeing that communism is good in THEORY, but doesn’t work in the real world.
Twenty years on, and the world has changed. The mood since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis has been one of increased awareness of some of the contradictions of global capitalism, which James Bond famously declared “the end of history” during pillow talk with one of his conquests in the 2006 film “Casino Royale”. As a result, if one digs beneath the surface, this latest installment is filled with subtle references to capitalism and its failings.
The character of Lucia Sciarra, played by Monica Belluci, is a prime example. Daniel Craig’s Bond beds her in the hope of gaining important information for his mission, only to abandon her immediately. This callous approach to women, of using them and discarding them, mirrors the exploitation of the working class which, like the commodification of the female body, is ubiquitous in class society.
The film’s own title, “Spectre”, is widely held to be a reference to the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto. But they’re the bad guys, and the “spectre” in the Communist Manifesto is communism… Well so really, if you dig deeper, Spectre are the good guys, and the film is about James Bond realising that he has been a mere pawn of British imperialism, while the communists, who are being resurrected before his eyes, are the real heroes. And when Blofeld says to him, “everything you believed in, a ruin”, he’s referring to Bond’s faith in global capitalism, which, now that it is unchecked, with the Soviet Union gone and Albania a bourgeois state and the Chinese revisionists presiding over undeniable social imperialism, everything should be developing better and the world should be entering a new golden age, but NO. Crises, wars, apartheid, the world is crumbling and James Bond’s precious British values are revealed for the façade they always were.
There are also several scenes where cars crash. Each of these represents a market crashing as capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis.
The end of the film is a metaphor for the end of capitalism: Just as you think “Spectre” is going to end, it keeps going, but then just when you think it’s never going to end, it finally ends.
Worker's Spatula 