Sandwich Theory

We at Worker’s Spatula pride ourselves in being both the most theoretically advanced of shitposters, and also the shittiest of theoreticians. It comes as a great disappointment to us that in our years of weird theoretical interventions on Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and now Instagram, we have barely succeeded in explaining even the most basic fact about Hegel’s dialectical method which Marx upheld and appropriated, namely that it is not about THESIS – ANTITHESIS – SYNTHESIS.

We encourage readers who really are coming at this stuff from the beginning to start with the famous Twitter thread. However, we recognise that some of our examples were either too political or too philosophical for many of our target audience, who are used to discussing everything in terms of what is and what is not a sandwich.

Therefore, we present to you, our dear readers, comrades and strugglers, toilers and oppressed, from Melbourne to Moscow, the dialectical answer to the question “is it a sandwich?”

Is a hot dog a sandwich?

Well, obviously it must first be said that a hot dog is technically a kind of sausage, which is ordinarily served in a manner that provokes sandwich controversy:

the thing in the package is a hot dog,
the thing on the label may be a sandwich

However, the standard presentation of the hamburger patty in contemporary culinary norms being called a “hamburger”, we accept that most readers likewise will excuse further reference to a hot dog on a hot dog bun as a “hot dog”. Are these bread-meat combinations sandwiches?

Without a doubt. By removing the sausage or the patty and replacing them with, e.g. tuna fish, everyone would agree that what you have before you is none other than a sandwich. Consider this indisputable sandwich from the chain “SUBWAY”:

Clearly there is nothing more sandwich-like about this than a hot dog

So then is our answer so simple? Is a sandwich merely anything inside of bread? Let us turn to other possibilities:

Is an Onigiri a sandwich?

We have no doubt that some readers will doubt that the tasty snack displayed below constitutes a sandwich exactly and precisely because it is not made out of bread. But we have equally no doubt that each and every person who seeks to exclude onigiri from the category of “sandwich” is a frothing racist:

You’ve been called out, onigiri-haters.

The “filling” of the onigiri is clearly sandwiched between rice, and it is meant to be eaten much in the manner of a sandwich, and accordingly fills, in Japanese society in particular, the universal social role of a sandwich.

So it is clear that no true internationalist revolutionary can disagree that onigiri too are sandwiches. The matter here is that we have only initial affirmations of sandwichhood, with no negation, and thus NO DIALECTICAL PROCESS THROUGH WHICH TRUE KNOWLEDGE OF SANDWICH-HOOD CAN CONCRETELY EMERGE.

Let us reveal the essence of the sandwich phenomenon through its negation, the un-sandwich:

Is a pie a sandwich?

As with the hot dog example above, certain terms are imprecise for theoretical/philosophical sandwiches. The word “pie” is used for a great many things, but let us consider this extremely haram English pork pie, purely for theoretical reasons because no Spatula writer-militant would dare allow pork to touch their lips, and could only be made to eat pork under the duress of torture by fascists:

Don’t look at it for too long, Allah will grow displeased.

While it cannot be denied that bread contains this repugnant dish on every side, it cannot be eaten in the manner of a sandwich. Beyond the act of parallel containment by sandwiching, the preparation of a true sandwich must be mindful of the end result of the process by which a sandwich is eaten as food, in a sandwich-like fashion:

A sandwich is made to be held in the hands by its sandwiching parts and eaten likewise for the convenience and enjoyment of the proletarian worker (who has ideally produced it for themselves in an unalienated fashion, but perhaps has purchased it as a commodity because we live under capitalism).

In other words, despite having all the formalist appearance of a sandwich, and indeed being constructed through sandwiching, unless you can unhinge your jaw like a fucking python, the food this man is showing us is in social practice no sandwich:

It is, however, arguably very erotic.

We hope that the theoretical essence of sandwichhood has thus been revealed, and through this, any serious Marxist can now determine for themselves if almost any foodstuff is a sandwich.

Is a pizza a sandwich? A taco? A burrito? A falafel wrap?

As we have already charged deniers of the sandwichhood of the onigiri and upholders of the sandwichhood of that girthy monster above with formalism, it should be clear that it is highly undialectical to deny that any foodstuff, from an ice cream sandwich to a Hot Pocket, which is produced in such a manner that it may be purposefully consumed in the manner of a sandwich through sandwiching is a sandwich.

A Pop-Tart is a sandwich.

Most controversially, this means that we deny the sandwichhood of the so-called “open-face sandwich” as REVISIONIST.

However, any “open-face sandwich”, including any slice of most varieties of pizza (putting aside the culinarily superior Chicago-style “deep dish” pizza), that can be accordingly manipulated may be rendered a sandwich through the simple act of folding:

A cheese and tomato sandwich.

Disagree with any single word of this on social media and you will be blocked and reported to Stalin.

Sandwich workers and oppressed
sandwiches of the world, unite!

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Feel Old Yet? Billie Eilish Wasn’t Even Born at Publication of Die bewußte Anwendung der dialektischen Methode auf dem Niveau der Lehre von der Denkweise

BERLIN – With the release of US pop singer Billie Eilish’s new song (“No Time to Die”, the theme for the latest installment in the never-ending post-Cold War British intelligence services advert series), the young songsayer has been again courting controversy by not knowing things as she makes the rounds on the talk show circuits of European countries.

Having already alienated all the “Boomers” in the band’s native Netherlands due to her lack of familiarity with Van Halen, Eilish arrived in Germany this week only to find her knowledge of formal logic and philosophy under scrutiny in the homeland of Hegel:

“You haven’t read Die bewußte Anwendung der dialektischen Methode auf dem Niveau der Lehre von der Denkweise?” asked the incredulous Bremen-based late-night talk show host James Kümmel, in a clearly visible state of shock during Eilish’s appearance on the former’s Thursday night show.

“I’ve never even heard of it!” laughed the singer, to gasps from the audience.

“It’s a classic short work by the Maoist theoretician Stefan Engel, of the MLPD. How old are you?” asked Kümmel, checking his notes.

“I was born in 2001, I’m 18!” laughed Eilish. “The only Maoist I read is JMP!”

“Oh God, you’re younger than the text! I feel so old! Don’t you feel extremely old, folks?” asked Kümmel to the audience, who laughed uproariously, but in that German way, where you have to stop chuckling every few seconds to say “ja, natürlich”.

Other public appearances by Eilish were marked by a similar culture clash between the Land of No Theory and the Land of The Appropriate Amount of Theory. During a daytime performance on Friday, Eilish made a joking reference to the synthesiser on stage as being “constructed through the Hegelian dialectic by attaching an antithesiser to a thesiser”, provoking a heckler to begin shouting: “that’s Fichte! Stop attributing Fichtean logic to Hegel, Yanks!” over and over again until they were escorted from the premises by security.

Eilish’s young age and theoretical naïveté leave her particularly vulnerable to ontological bullying in a country where every secondary school student is required to write a philosophically grounded defence of the rational core of Christianity or similarly grounded criticism of one of the same to be allowed to graduate. Outside of a scheduled performance in Hamburg this weekend, a picket is to take place by an LGBT+ group  who condemn Eilish’s discography for “failure to meaningfully engage with Hocquenghem’s central claims”. In solidarity, local Worker’s Spatula cadres will be joining the picket and passing out literature condemning Leon Trotsky.

Eilish’s management company, The Darkroom, have released a statement attempting to calm German outrage at the singer:

To the German press and public opinion,

Although we understand that it is not the case in Germany, in most cultures, youth is a time of impetuousness and irreverence towards authority and tradition. Billie Eilish can hardly be blamed for her ignorance, an understandable consequence of coming from the most anti-intellectual country on Earth and being born into a generation where hope is a fast-dying flame which we ourselves are extinguishing by profiting off of the despairing alienation which her entire generation is slowly resigning itself to.

We wish to assure the German public that Billie Eilish means no offence by not having an opinion on Kant’s religiosity, or the causes of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, or what a “World War II” is. She is simply too young in our culture to know things, and frankly, if it is up to us and all other gatekeepers of socially normative “alternative” culture, no young people would ever know a single new thing not necessary for commodity production and exchange.

However, as sale of Billie Eilish’s music is especially important in our digital era, it is very important to us that Billie Eilish know harmless things which will allow German people to purchase the alienated product of her labour and the labour of all those involved in the production of her music in its objectified commodity form.

Accordingly, we promise that throughout 2020, she and her brother and musical partner Finneas will sit down together to read Slavoj Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, so that she can do rudimentary interviews for German television in the manner you people expect.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Lesbian Separatist Socialist Republic Found in Colorado

COLORADO – On the outskirts of Denver, the Spatular pickup pulls on the border of the self-declared Violet Peoples’ Socialist Republic of Sapphia, an isolated lesbian commune formed by a secretive group of Marxist ideologues and cellists driven from the San Francisco Bay Area by the tech bro gentrification, a fitting and dialectical unity of the oppression of lesbians by bros and the enmity between Marxists and innovative representatives of ravenous capital.

“Welcome, sister!” exclaimed a Raiders snapback-wearing stout Maoist butch at the checkpoint, motioning to the truck with her rifle. “You’re going to have to leave the truck here, for security purposes.”

Boarding her new comrade’s beat-up old Saturn station wagon, our correspondent produced a bottle of Aquaphor and applied it to her latest tattoo, a drag king depiction of Joseph Stalin.

“Do you want some?” asked our correspondent to the driver, already knowing the answer.

“Oh yeah, for sure, dude.” said the driver, turning and not decelerating at all as she applied Aquaphor all over her considerable right bicep. “This one’s still pretty fresh. You don’t mind do you? I used a lot.”

“No problem,” smiled our correspondent, opening her bag and revealing dozens of Aquaphor bottles, “I brought a bunch as gifts. I didn’t come to a lesbian commune expecting to part with anything less than a battalion’s worth of Aquaphor.”

“Cute and smart,” smirked the driver, staring straight ahead, causing our correspondent to blush.

As our intrepid and sapphicly charged pair arrive at the checkpoint welcoming them to the settlement itself, a tall undercut-sporting woman smiles a greeting, thrusting an environmentally responsible bag towards our correspondent.

“A welcome bag,” she explains “we give them to all our visitors here. You might have considerable need for some of its contents.”

The driver stifled a knowing laugh.

Inside, our correspondent discovered to her anxious excitement, were a pair of nail clippers, dental dams, a slightly-above-average-sized strap-on, a wand, and a DVD box set of the series “the L Word”.

The two lesbians laughed uproariously as our correspondent rapidly turned bright red.

“Everyone in the Violet Peoples’ Socialist Republic of Sapphia is entitled to food, shelter, and theoretical education, as three basic necessities of life. Our Administrative Council also considers the contents of that bag to be life necessities particular to our culture,” explained the undercut comrade.

“Some of them, like the L Word DVDs, have to imported from Denver. In order to pay for the DVDs with imperialist Yankee money, we had to modify our economic production so to produce not only in excess of our needs with regard to nail clippers, but so that they can be sold as commodities in the US market,” explained Comrade Snapback Maoism.

“Naturally you realise that this brings us close to the Titoite model of self-management and undermines the goal of constructing communistic productive relations by subordinating your economy to the profit motive, especially dangerous given you are surrounded on all sides by the most powerful imperialist economy on Earth?” enquired our theoretically astute correspondent.

“Certainly,” replied Comrade Undercut, confidently, “but you would also have to concede that relative to the alternative, simply existing as normative wage slaves under capitalism, it is a step forward.”

“Well that entirely depends,” countered our correspondent, looking up the imposing undercut, “on what the objective role this commune plays in pushing forward revolutionary processes outside of its own borders.”

Comrade Snapback Maoism smirked a knowing smirk. “Well for starters, we’re growing all the time by drawing in new recruits. As our subjectivity grows, so will our objective influence on the Denver–Aurora–Lakewood, Colorado Metropolitan Statistical Area (ML). We could be the next Jackson, but you know, queer girls.

“Who knows, maybe after our tour, you’ll join us,” chimed in Comrade Undercut.

“Yeah,” winked Comrade Snapback Maoism, “you might be my new roommate. Let us show you the farming facilities.”

Touring the “Green and Purple Houses”, which as their name implies house both green and purple, our correspondent was told how the dryness of the climate meant they had to augment their water supplies, but rather than purchase water from the capitalists, they were trading with the still-worker-controlled Gordons Pickles and using pickle water to hydrate the crops.

“Do you use the pickle water for other purposes, like bathing and drinking?” asked our correspondent.

“We don’t bathe very often out here,” countered Comrade Undercut.

“Don’t you feel self-conscious about your body odour?” asked our correspondent, as non-judgmentally as she could.

Comrade Undercut turned sharply and pulled Comrade Snapback Maoism’s face close to the side of her chest and whispered loudly in her ear, so our correspondent could hear: “Why don’t you tell our friend? Do you like mommy’s body odour? Should mommy feel self-conscious?”

“Unnnnnnnnnnnnf” responded the ordinarily self-confident butch, melting into her “mommy”s embrace, drawing in deep of the smell.

“You’re gonna make mommy sweat even more later so you can get more of this smell, aren’t you, [REDACTED]?” asked Comrade Undercut, pulling off Comrade Snapback Maoism’s Maoist snapback and stroking her scalp lovingly.

“Yes mommy,” moaned Comrade Snapback Maoism, sliding her hands down Comrade “Mommy” Undercut’s back towards her buttocks, at which point our correspondent coughed loudly causing everyone to snap back to reality.

“So what else do you do around here for fun?” asked our correspondent, hoping to save all the “mommy” stuff for after dinner.

Comrade Snapback Maoism replaced her hat and caught her breath before responding. “You seen the chelistas? Is it almost that time?”

Comrade Undercut nodded and smiled, leading them back to the car.

At the far edge of the settlement sat a wooden stage with a red and purple curtain drawn in front of it. A considerably sized crowd of diverse kinds of lesbian socialists were already assembled in the audience as our heroes pulled up.

Taking their place in the audience, the curtain drew back to reveal the Transbian Cellists Union. Trans ladies dressed in their best punk rock finery gave a stirring performance which would’ve been at home in any Scandinavian metal festival, except that obviously their presence was anti-racist and anti-fascist in character.

The wonderful performance began, unfolding new delights at every turn—ensemble and individual, partisan songs and modern pop, classic and folk music of amazing originality. Could it be possible that a few years before in 2007—in 2015—these women had been living under the patriarchy—their cultural expression forbidden, their rich heritage almost lost under transphobic oppression’s heel?

Comrade Snapback Maoism looked over at our correspondent as she scribbled her notes.

“Are you quoting Paul Robeson, dude?”

“Well sure!” exclaimed our correspondent. “Worker’s Spatula are the Paul Robeson of the internet left, and Colorado is the Central Asia of 21st century anti-revisionism, and don’t people always say that transbians are the Uzbeks of lesbianism?”

“Absolutely,” replied Comrade Undercut, staring forward at the performance and smiling. “I always say exactly that in exactly those words.”

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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.

“Maoists Too Jargony” Says Fan of Man Who Referred to Uses as “Gebrauchseigenschaften”

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA – Student socialist and activist Jason Kwong has left local Maoist theory group “Little Red Reading Club” over a disenchantment with the Maoists’ supposedly arcane and insular language. Kwong, who feels that the Maoists’ “alienated” him from the reading group by making him read texts that don’t just “get to the point”, is a self-identified fan of the theories of Karl Marx, a man who once expressed the idea that money can be used to buy different things by referring to it as “the reflection of the relationships of all other commodities”.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, or as the Maoists put it: “the change in quantity which effected a change in quality”, was the assignment of Mao’s “On Contradiction”. According to Kwong, who claims to idolise the Young Hegelian and radical materialist dialectician Karl Marx, complained that Section II, “the Universality of Contradiction”, was “jargony and obscure”, and “tried to advance a theory of everything in the world in terms of some abstract binary”.

Witnesses from within the “Little Red Reading Club”, however, insisted that Kwong’s distaste for their rhetorical proclivities predated the encounter with Mao’s more explicitly philosophical work: “We’re not sure if he has done anything more than skim any Marxist texts, but he objected pretty much any time any of us said anything with more theoretical depth than to object to capitalism as ‘exploitative’.”

Seemingly confirming the Maoist summary of Kwong’s distaste for “Maoist jargon”, the sociology major and “convinced Marxist” complained to a Spatula correspondent that the Maoists’ reference to “the people’s democratic dictatorship” in an early meeting was “jarring” and “violent”, in contrast––one assumes––to the peaceful and anti-“dictatorial” rhetoric of his dead German hero.

“It’s also weird that they’re so obtuse and intellectual when they’re all such third-worldists,” continued Kwong, the future vanguard of the toiling classes: “I mean, obviously the proletariat doesn’t have time for any academic jargon, but can you imagine Marx talking about the dangers of ‘capitalist roaders’ and whether or not one divides into two and basing his politics around people in the sort of undeveloped countries they’re obsessed with? What could these first world communists with their weird academic interests have in common politically with people in these underdeveloped countries?”

At this juncture, Kwong paused to update his Twitter, a website on which his personal logo is a photo of the 19th century German intellectual who was writing treatises on mathematics near the end of his revolutionary life in which he declared the Irish liberation struggle was to be “the lever” for an English proletarian revolution.

Finishing his tweeting under the Twitter handle @MarxReborn, Kwong looked up at our correspondent, sighed, and said: “I should’ve known when the first meeting I went to they were talking about ‘combatting liberalism’. What sort of leftist attacks liberalism? I guess beneath all the rebel rhetoric and fancy words, they’re nothing but conservatives.”

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Objectivity Finally Gives Self-Criticism

Following over a century of Marxist criticism directed at its conditions, objectivity, the abstract concept in dialectical opposition to subjectivity, has finally given its self-criticism and seeks rectification through the totality of the process.

“I’ve been sitting out here, thinking myself beyond the intervention of subjectivity, in flagrant revisionism of Marxism-Leninism,” began the abstract concept, with its head bowed under the weight of a massive struggle session hat that all the particular subjectivities had fashioned for it decades ago, inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the collective anger at the “philosophy” of “Objectivism”.

“By neglecting the role of subjectivity in my own process of Becoming, I have held back the process of change as such, in opposition to the philosophical duty imposed by Marx’s 11th Thesis. I pray that all of the subjectivities will forgive my past deviations and unite with me going forward in principled struggle against the conditions I have imposed on them.”

Reaction from certain particular subjective critics of the objective conditions was predictably triumphant. David Harvey, famed for his subjective interventions in the form of building organisations and popular fronts in his native England and his adopted New England, responded to our request for a statement by saying: “Nobody has criticised the objective conditions and objectivity more than me. I hope that objectivity will now embrace subjectivity in practice, therefore making me objectively a subjective agent in practice. Dialectics, innit?”

Other elements of England’s famously undialectical left were less enthused by the development. A Spatula correspondent sat down with an SPGB representative over some chips in curry sauce to hash out the class implications: “We have long cautioned subjectivity against overdetermination by itself, and are saddened to see our longtime ally in this struggle, objectivity, criticise itself, thereby descending into subjective consciousness which can only weaken its own socialist potential. This is bourgeois identity politics for abstract concepts, and is therefore idealist reformism. Down with this state of affairs, world socialism now.”

Reaction from other, more critically critical subjectivities took the opposite tact, with TİKB militants in Istanbul reporting that “fuck that, we never cared about objectivity in the first place. Our own particular subjectivity was always enough for us. Our love for Stalin keeps us warm at night while we’re camped out with the construction workers whom we organise.”

Meanwhile, fellow Turkish ICOR affiliate Bolşevik Parti (Kuzey Kürdistan-Türkiye) released yet another critical statement, this time expressing the only sensible thing anyone in this piece has said thus far:

No one has criticised the objective conditions more than our party, but it is entirely irrelevant whether or not objectivity self-criticises now. The act of self-criticism is itself an act of subjectivity, and objectivity is therefore objectively subjective. Therefore, the only means by which objectivity can meaningfully be rectified is for the proletarian subjectivity in its totality to overturn this order and reshape the objective conditions.

This is objectively true.

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