İSTANBUL – With thousands in jail for criticising Erdoğan and his ruling clique in Turkey, and the body count across Kurdistan rising every day, every political act is risky business in the region, as all of our readers know.
But, and we cannot stress this strongly enough, nothing is quite as risky as a truly ruthless concrete criticism of all that exists. And the clandestine and illegal Bolşevik Parti (Kuzey Kürdistan-Türkiye) is well-known as the most ruthlessly critical voice of all the not-very-well-known ruthlessly critical voices in Kurdistan and Turkey.
So it came as little surprise this morning when our İstanbul correspondents awoke to text messages confirming that the Bolşevik Parti had claimed responsibility for a devastating string of criticisms delivered by e-mail from a no-longer-functioning e-mail address over the past week to targets ranging from HDP co-chair Sezai Temelli to Boğaziçi University Rector Mehmed Özkan.
Some targets, such as Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım, were shocked to discover their personal e-mail addresses (previously thought hidden from the public) were attacked by the high-level dialectical materialist theory of the rarest and most powerful school of İboculuk. Yıldırım, not accustomed to being made to read complete sentences, let alone Marxist theory, is reportedly in critical condition following the criticism of his conditions.
One target, Celal Şengör, was reportedly criticised so harshly that his head exploded from the realisation of how wrong he had been about Marxist epistemology, a subject about which Şengör had publicly pontificated repeatedly, incorrectly, and worst of all, uncritically in the past. Worker’s Spatula have dispatched a crack team to the morgue in an attempt to intercept Şengör’s organs before it is too late.
Other victims of the string of criticisms included Marxist groups, including fellow İbocu Pınar Aydınlar, whom they described as “a Menshevik songsmith”, Alp Altınörs of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP), for “opportunism” and possession of “an inferior moustache”, fellow obscure publication producers and frenemies KöZ for being “the castle of sectarianism”, the Turkish Labour Party (EMEP), for “dogmatism”, and TÖP, for “not being easy enough for us to criticise”.
No one has been formally charged with any crime in response to the criticisms, but anti-terror police are reported to have swept through Gazi Mahallesi, where they took every man over forty with a Stalin moustache into custody.
At time of press, the count of uncles named “Ali” who had been asked very specific Stefan Engel-related questions in police custody is rumoured to have exceeded 170.
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ANKARA – International hero of of the toiling masses and already designated Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2019 Max Zirngast has broken his silence after his release from Turkish Prison via the website triple-double-u period Twitter dot com. As noted Right Hegelian trendsetter Donald Trump has made Twitter the official source of all information, Left Hegelians like Comrade Max Zirngast have taken to the site to shout the truth to the heavens.
In his first tweet, Zirngast stated that he is “very glad to finally be recognised as the hero of the masses that I have always been. The masses are great, I just love them”. Following this initial affirmation of populism, the expected and extremely dialectical negation in the form of criticism followed, with Zirngast characterising the support he received from the masses in Turkey as “disappointing and insufficient”:
The fact that only I and some TÖP people were freed shows how much the masses in Turkey have frankly been slacking off. Freeing me was the easy part. Not only are tens of thousands still trapped in Turkish prisons, but this prison regime continues to stand. What about revolution, eh masses? When are you going to make one of those? Frankly, the least I could ask for, that my release be celebrated by the storming of a couple of government buildings, was not realised. SAD.
Subsequent tweets from the newly freed Austrian took credit for the “Yellow Jackets or WASPs or whatever, the French ones,” who were “clearly inspired to take to the streets by my own personal courage and leadership.”
Asked by a local Worker’s Spatula correspondent about who else he was disappointed in, Zirngast responded:
Who am I notdisappointed in? EMEP, the ESP, Alınteri… all the Hoxhaites, and even more than them, the Maoists. Oh, the IWW, ICOR, and especially the readers of Worker’s Spatula. None of you have shouldered the weight of my revolutionary responsibilities while I was in prison, and none of you did enough to free me. None of you are as brave as me, either, or you would have been in prison with me. Frankly, the DSA and the Austrian state are bolder than most of the internet left reading this.
Regarding the motives for the Austrian state in helping to secure his release, Zirngast responded: “Obviously, every state has its own class interests. For my own rubbish homeland, the state’s hand was absolutely forced by the spectre of socialist revolution in Austria itself. Word got to us in Sincan that barricades were already being prepared in Viennese social housing projects in preparation and the call to arms was to take place on January 12th, my birthday. Only freeing me could take the pressure off.” Asked about his sources for this information he referenced “various Twitter personalities, the comments section of left-wing news sites, you know, all the most credible sources.” Concluding his remarks on the possibility of a Viennese insurrection, Zirngast was quoted as saying:
I don’t know all the details of this call to arms, since this information was being delivered to me in censored missives in a Turkish prison. But I think that I would not be going too far if I were to say that my prison letters served as the coded orders followed by guerrilla cells from Vienna to Innsbruck.
Regarding the question of what he has been up to since his release, Zirngast said:
Mostly what anyone would do in a similar situation, you know? Whenever you are released from prison, or start graduate school, or finish graduate school, or drop out of graduate school, or get elected President of the United States, your mentality is basically the same: you are overwhelmed at first and you have trouble adjusting yourself to the new circumstances. So you read Adorno, wander around at home in an open bathrobe, and randomly harass people on Twitter. It’s a solid, time-tested strategy, and it’s been serving me well.
Asked what he missed most about prison, his answer–given without hesitation–was “not having to read or be in any way reminded of the existence of Worker’s Spatula.”
[Note: shortly following the publication of our article, it was announced that Max Zirngast had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Revolutionary Leftism, with a Nobel Committee representative stating that “he’s a shoe-in, everyone agreed that he is second only to Spartacus himself on the list of historical heroes resisting oppressive rule”.]
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PAN-ALPINE GUERRILLA FRONT PATROL ROUTE, SOMEWHERE IN THE SWISS ALPS – Seated in plastic chairs in a snow-flecked mountain landscape under the blue Swiss sky, the video displays the heroic Central Committee of Worker’s Spatula, guns and spatulas raised in their clenched anti-fascist fists.
Cacophonously, the anthems of several rival Turkish anti-revisionist organisations begin playing simultaneously over shitty cell phone speakers which are clearly nowhere near the microphone. All of the assembled Worker’s Spatula Central Committee members attempt to sing along, off-key, for a few seconds before the video cuts forward to a speech by a representative of the group, already mid-speech:
“…an especially happy New Year to the now-free Max Zirngast, who is about as free as any of our friends trapped in the Republic of Reaction can be. Free them all!
We would like to begin this year’s New Year’s message, which usually would only contain our self-criticism, with a criticism of all of you. We would like to criticise all of our followers who were fooled by our 2018 April Fool’s joke. Shame on you for ever thinking the Spatula team would abandon you without the death, imprisonment, or otherwise neutralisation of our Central Committee.
Obviously, we would be shirking our duties if we did not add here that we must self-criticise for making light of the idea of the end of Worker’s Spatula, the vanguard of the vanguard of the vanguard of the world revolution. Such things are not to be joked about. Indeed, fuck “jokes”. Basically, everything we write is real. Raw dialectical materialism without the horse shit. No, we will NOT revise Marxism-Leninism. Worker’s Spatula. We live for this.”
At this juncture, the Yank is overcome with excitement and begins firing a Mosin into the air, after which the video cuts forward again, the Yank now disarmed and holding two spatulas instead of the rifle. The spokesperson continues:
“Continuing with our self-criticisms. 2018 was in many ways a year of setbacks. We suffered a split in our ranks on April 1st, and while unity has been achieved again, we are still rebuilding the structures which were lost in these difficult inter-Spatular conflicts. In particular, our Melbourne base of Hungry Jack’s workers has lost a fair number of good cadre, weakening the southern hemisphere work we had initially hoped to emphasise in 2018.”
Another cut, and the floor has been surrendered to two Welsh comrades, one of them speaking in Welsh, and the other providing simultaneous translation, providing a brief report on southern hemisphere work, including this self-critical section:
“Australia was meant to be our red base, it was, for the liberation of Papua and Argentina and all the rest of them mad winter-is-summer places, like. Well we cached that one up right proper, we won’t lie to you. And not being funny or nothing, like, but we’ll tell you for why: there’s no Marxist-Leninist discipline down there. No tradition of it, is there?
Well from now on, all of our Australian comrades are going straight to Turkish boot camp, reading Stalin and Hoxha and studying the culture, like. It’s no more of that mad upside-down rygbi or VB for them, only Turkish football and tea. Iechyd da, cymrodyr.”
The main representative concludes the self-criticism with a reference to the second Three-Year Plan announced in August of 2018:
“One last point of self-criticism before we get to our plans for 2019: as we already mentioned in the announcement of our second Three-Year Plan, we underestimated the strength of Swiss imperialism in the capitalist world-system. Liechtenstein have made us look like fools, and now they’re probably going to get to celebrate the 300th anniversary of their Nazi shithole homeland on the 23rd of January before we can even overthrow their parasitic regime. Fuck Liechtenstein.
But we are still here in the Swiss Alps. In December, we made a lot of progress in organising a Krampus union together with the Marxist-Leninist Group of Switzerland, and our guerrilla movement across the Alps grows stronger and more determined to fight for a new, Liechtenstein-less tomorrow each day. Death to Liechtenstein, whose fascist security forces are responsible for the martyrdom of Subcomandante Spatule on the 4th of April, 2018. Death to Swiss imperialism which protects the existence of Liechtenstein, as it has for 300 years.”
At this juncture, the flags of Liechtenstein and Switzerland are taken out, smeared with what appears to be faeces, and set on fire to cheers and applause from the assembled Central Committee. The representative continues:
“We are here in Switzerland, just as our invisible army of workers and intellectuals is to be found everywhere around the globe. We are in the Toblerone factories, the Toblerone mines, and the Toblerone fields, making Toblerone halal to troll the Christians, and making Toblerone Hegelian to troll the AKP.
In 2019 we hope to engage in more polemics with non-Marxist pages, as we finished off 2018 by doing to the revisionists at AboutIslam. You know we had to do it to them.
While joining the rest of you in dealing with the absolute shitshow that will be the beginning of the 2020 US Presidential Election campaigns which will start this coming year, we also plan to swing an election somewhere. Maybe a student election, maybe a municipal election, but we swear by Allah (SWT) that we will find some election with a candidate we support, make propaganda for them as the Spatula, and then take credit for the ensuing victory.
We will also continue building RaFFWU in Australia, as our deepest connections with the working class remain those with the fast food workers in Australia, who anyway are the single most revolutionary section of the international proletariat that exists.
We will of course continue posting pithy jokes to Twitter, memes to Facebook, and giving you the deep content you crave on this WordPress page. If the bastards at Facebook attempt to ban us again, we can just keep changing our URL. Top mathematicians in our ranks theorise that we can just keep adding one to the current number in the URL and achieve a larger whole number, perhaps infinitely.
We may also actually write an original joke, instead of repeating the same jokes over and over again in different combinations as a thin veneer for Marxist theory and criticism. But don’t hold your breath.
Regardless, we will continue to transform the internet left generation into serious Marxist-Leninist cadre with real praxis and build sincere revolutionary movements around the world.
No one can stop us: we are right, we will win.”
And with that, the Central Committee disappear over a mountain pass, the Alpine landscape disappears from the screen, and the video message concludes by displaying the text “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!”
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PHNOM PENH – CrimethInc., the most popular of all post-left anarchist “Ex-Workers Ex-Collective[s]” recently organised a talk on “the failures of Leninism” by Gilles Dauvé, their favourite “Marxist” thinker, delivered in the capital city of the country where his ideas on socialism were first put into practice all those years ago. The talk was attended by correspondents of Worker’s Spatula, the most popular of all “internationalist and anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist platform[s] for irreverent Marxist discourse”.
Owing to the scarcity of Dauvé’s public appearances, his readers from around the world have flocked to “the Pearl of Asia” to hear the premiere Communization theorist speak on his insightful criticisms of Leninist theory and practice, as well as the history of practical alternatives and the theoreticians associated therewith:
The failure of 20th century “Marxist” projects was that their programme of the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” was–in its essence–the programme of dictatorship over capital, which effectively constrained the real movement within the confines of the management of a particular mode of production: capitalist production in essence.
The real essence of communism – which is an eternally dynamic real-historic movement towards the wholesale abolition of the current state of things–fundamentally irreconcilable with the management of production–was thus lost.
The talk proceeded that way for some time, with Dauvé going on about abolishing value production as a prerequisite for the Communization process–something that is definitely compatible with capitalism’s continued existence as an international mode of production–and the “revisionism” of communism displayed in those who speak of a socialist transition called the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, since “only he is a communist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the immediate building of communist society as such”, as emphasized by the great Communization theorist Saloth Sâr.
The question and answer period of the talk was dominated by critical “questions” delivered in the form of screamed Marx quotes by an unlikely alliance of Hoxhaites and Bordigaists, who waved crumpled pamphlets and pounded on the covers of ancient Italian and Balkan hardcovers, as is their tradition.
Dauvé–who, if it is not yet obvious, we are comparing to Pol Pot; and who has written a “theoretical” defence of paedophilia–responded to these criticisms by referring to the assembled Marxist-Leninists and Marx-literate leftcoms as “edgelords” and “power fetishists” whose commitment to abolishing capitalism is “suspect at best”.
That’s it. That’s the joke.
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MELBOURNE – Sources close to Tyler Cheng, a suburban anti-capitalist in Melbourne and proud owner of all the DVDs and weed you could want if you’re thinking to come by his place later, have confirmed that in spite of his flirting with the self-designation of “communist”, he hypocritically owns a smartphone which he neither uses to read Marxist theory nor to spread communist propaganda.
“Ugh, Tyler’s so annoying. He’s always talking about anything that annoys him in terms of it being ‘capitalist’, but he doesn’t even seem to grasp that his comfortable life is made possible by an internationalised mode of production held up by monopoly-controlled imperialist powers which produce the goods and services he takes for granted. So you can imagine I never see him organising accordingly,” explained friend and classmate Jaswinder Kaur.
“Yeah, for sure, I hate when I see his stupid hammer and sickle background photo on his smartphone. What a hypocrite. Does he realise that the capitalist mode of production is a material reality that can’t be fought by idealism and formalism, but only by materialist dialectics as the theoretical basis for revolutionary practice?” concurred fellow classmate and Jaswinder’s partner Peter Smith.
Tyler’s Sociology professor Nancy Gold had this to say about Tyler’s outbursts in class, which we’re told never go beyond class as he’s too busy getting high all the fucking time to interact with anyone who isn’t explicitly asking for engagement as she does: “Tyler always shouts out something about capitalist society being stupid and responsible for the terrible essays I ‘make’ him write, but capitalism is amazing when you think about it: it puts in the palm of his hand a device which allows him to read diverse critical theoretical texts written over a timespan of over a hundred years on sites like Marxists Internet Archive and communicate with people in diverse social conditions, and he passes all that up in favour of looking edgy and stupid all the fucking time. I’m going to fail him.”
Tyler’s girlfriend Sharon Wong confessed that she too has become tired of her boyfriend’s posturing: “He’s always writing these papers for class which claim to criticise all actually existing conditions, but he never publishes them outside class or does any other propaganda work. It’s like, you go to a good university, you wear nice clothes made in sweatshops, you own a smartphone made by exploited workers the world over, all of these things place you within a respected social context such that you could reach dozens of young people in your own environment for the purpose of organisation. And yet, you’d rather just intellectually masturbate when you could go join RaFFWU and start a reading group with the other organisers or something useful.
“Do you know what communists actually believe? They don’t believe in you spending all your time on Facebook. They believe in you spending a few hours a day of your time on Facebook explaining how the capitalist society which produced Facebook is itself a product of generations of social development within class society, a state of affairs which could be overturned, but not if people like you just uncritically accept your own social belonging and fail to organise against it.
“It’s like, you live in Australia, Tyler. You can’t be a communist. Not without grasping our society’s objective existence as a parasitic settler-colony atop the oppressed Aboriginal people and within a system of international exploitation which includes the countries from which our parents hailed and is the material reason for our existence here.”
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BUENOS AIRES – Our top secret Argentine source reports that the almost-ICOR member/affiliate PCR (Revolutionary Communist Party) of Argentina continues to exist, according to extremely credible information passed to them by the PCR itself, stating, and we quote “we are still holding it down for all the clowns in this bourgeois town”.
The reasons for the use of English to correspond between Argentine and Argentine could not be ascertained. Top dialecticians at the Spatula suspect that the PCR is so incredibly cognisant of the totality of class struggle that they foresaw that this statement would be significant to the Spatula, and would have to be translated to English accordingly.
Alternatively, perhaps we made up the quote for a gag on our stupid page.
Confirming that they “still hate Deng and everything” and “Trots should get shot”, the elusive and ROL-friendly Argentine Maoists sent in several photographs of themselves talking to the masses, which were very impressive, proletarian, and dialectical.
We did see a photo of them drinking wine, but it’s Argentina, so that’s proletarian there, right? In Turkey alcohol is so expensive that even the cheapest of beer reeks of petty bourgeois decadence, and in the rest of the normal world, wine is a bit French, innit?
Despite repeated e-mails, by time of press, no confirmation could be found that the hardest Argentine guerrillas of all time, the ex-Trots of PRT-ERP, still exist in any meaningful sense. But our PCR friends assured us that the People’s War™ in Perú continues, and will spread to Argentina around the same time “our people learn to speak proper Spanish”.
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Behzat Ç is a Turkish police drama about the existential crises of a detective investigating murders in the Turkish capital Ankara, which would not seem the usual target for a Humourless Marxist Review, particularly written by an Australian comrade, but here we are, aren’t we?
Why did I spend the past three years learning Turkish through this programme as my only form of international theory or practice, while my only domestic practice, organising fast food workers within RaFFWU, dwindled to nothing? Because the Worker’s Spatula Central Committee ordered me to do so, and if the vanguard of the vanguard of the vanguard of the world revolution tells you to watch some Turkish guy with a messy haircut run around in the dark punching criminals and being sad about it, you fucking do it, comrade.
When [REDACTED] first discovered me, I was just a low-level member of Socialist Alliance trying to organise the fast food workers of Melbourne. Now I speak fluent Turkish and am intimately familiar with Turkish drinking culture, and also I’m on my way to “Angara” to join the (Birleşik) Devrimci Parti’nin saflarına. All thanks to three seasons of a show about a cop.
Obviously, this is no communist show. The hero is an officer of the bourgeois state, after all. But the portrayal of the police in the show is consistently revealing of the limitations of “justice” in class society: driven by an honest conscience, whenever Behzat and his friends try to do the right thing, they are either forced to go against the explicit orders of the state bureaucracy and struggle against the actual forces of the state, or they find themselves undermined, and the unjust order uses the police force at large to protect the bourgeois individuals and class interests which, in the final instance, command them.
It’s easy to miss this theme, even for many critical Turkish viewers. In the service of gaining a more total understanding of Ankara society in all its diverse class and social contradictions than any Turkish person, merely from watching this television show, I have not left the house in the past six months, surviving on cigarettes, tea, and rakı, just like Behzat and his friends.
I’m told that a lot of Turkish “diziler” are fixated on the toiling lower classes, and Behzat Ç. is no exception, with many scenes portraying working class neighbourhoods, and even militant leftist organisations. The portrayal of these groups is in many ways inaccurate, but it is broadly sympathetic, and leftist viewers will certainly be interested in this theme.
The gender politics are also not perfect, as one might expect from a show so dominated by men, but it is interesting to watch how even in this context, men have the ability to show emotional vulnerability and cry, etc. Presumably, this show influenced the US programme Steven Universe, which combines Harun’s love of snacks with the more emotionally healthy and gender-progressive men characters to create the titular Steven Universe, the Ankara cop of Anglo children’s TV heroes.
I have reported to [REDACTED] that I finished this series, and would recommend it to others trying to acclimate themselves with the Turkish language and the Ankara culture; she replied that I ought to write this review and publish it on the Spatula page. She then presented me with a thumb drive full of other Turkish “diziler” which she recommends for my flight to Turkey, including “Masum”, “Leyla ile Mecnun”, and “Şahsiyet”.
When I asked if these series were also about Ankara, or were about left politics in Turkey, she replied “no, they’re just really good for binge-watching”.
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AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION IN THE SWISS ALPS – Coming up on the third anniversary of the founding of Worker’s Spatula on the 16th of this month, Worker’s Spatula’s Central Committee have convened in a village in the Swiss Alps to appraise the successes and failures of the first Three-Year Plan and outline the second one, to be put into action immediately.
The Three-Year Plan was originally conceived of as a rough guide to the collective’s interventions for the coming period, both in terms of the process and the desired results. Following our general criticism of the 20th century experience as having been insufficiently dialectical, we chose a three-year period over a five-year period on the grounds that a change in quantity would effect a change in quality, and also Lenin: “Better Fewer, But Better”.
Several members spoke of their appraisal of our achievements with regard to our initial ambitions:
“Obviously the greatest success has been the high level of theoretical development of our cadres within the Spatula’s network, as well as our many readers scattered across all continents,” began one German representative, passing around some cigars procured on his recent trip to Haiti, the homeland of the Lordship–Bondage dialectic (citation: Susan Buck-Morss). “We are completely ahead of schedule on that front. Our original stated goal was to exceed Žižek’s level of Hegel-fetishism by 2018, we have actually transformed the international anti-revisionist movement into an invisible army of Hegel scholars. Praise the dialectic of history!”
“Typical German idealism,” hastily interjected an English representative. “Our greatest success has been material, namely our transformation of Worker’s Spatula from a backwards website into a great industrial power able to economically outproduce Great Moments in Leftism, and to do so relying principally on Turkish resources, against the vulgar economist predictions of the leftcom scoundrels.”
“Comrades, comrades,” interrupted a sobering voice with a Turkish accent from the back of the room, “it is the accepted thing at congresses to speak of achievements. That we have achievements is beyond question. They, these achievements, are, of course, not inconsiderable, and there is no reason to hide them. But, comrades, it has become a practice with us lately to talk so much of achievements, and sometimes so affectedly, that one loses all desire to speak of them once again. Allow me, therefore, to depart from the general practice and to say a few words not about our achievements, but about our weaknesses and our tasks in connection with these weaknesses.”
Recognising the Stalin quote, several Central Committee members present shifted uncomfortably in their seats, preparing for accusations of bureaucratisation.
With each week that brings us closer to 2019 and the 300th anniversary of the Nazi Nightmareland which is Liechtenstein, it becomes more and more obvious that no matter which tactics we employ, we are utterly powerless to bring down this regime. Nobody dares say it, but since we are all thinking it, I will stake my reputation on telling the truth: Liechtenstein imperialism is so impervious to our efforts to bring it down precisely because there is another, more powerful imperialist country defending it. I speak of course of Swiss imperialism.
At the beginning of our first Three-Year Plan, we determined that there was a need to grasp the Leninist assertion that imperialism is in fact the highest stage in the development of capitalism, and to retheorise this against the economically ignorant misconceptions which have become predominant in our movement. Our attacks on Liechtenstein have, in this light, been very correct and crucial for world revolution. But we cannot ignore the fact that we have spent considerable resources in 2018, suffering splits and even sacrificing martyrs to ensure the downfall of Liechtenstein from our base here in Switzerland, when it is the objective social and economic relations within Switzerland, and not our subjectivity as anti-Liechtenstein guerrillas, which have been holding back this revolutionary war.
We cannot hold this criticism back until the New Year’s Message and Self-Criticism: the head of global imperialism is Swiss monopoly capital, a force more powerful even than Liechtenstein. Our next Three-Year Plan must include a commitment to the theoretical and practical development of the revolutionary movement within Switzerland itself. Only thus can we construct a revolutionary movement actually capable of confronting these two greatest imperialist powers: Switzerland and Liechtenstein, who together prop up all others and indeed the entire capitalist world-system.
After a tense moment of silence, this speech was greeted with applause, and chants in support of the construction of a “pan-Alpine guerrilla movement” by August 2021.
Other criticisms of the first Three-Year Plan were that the seriousness of our commitment to Marxism has also weakened our ability to intervene in the sphere of internet content. The second Three-Year Plan is to include a commitment to gaining at least one new content-creator for every four people who have to stop contributing because of the demands of our real-world politics.
As the meeting rounded up, other aspects of the second Three-Year Plan were agreed upon in a democratic centralist fashion. By 2021, Worker’s Spatula expect to have:
Achieved full vegetarianism of the Central Committee and achieved majority vegetarianism by all Worker’s Spatula contributors. Bream will be phased out last among meats, and all meat-eating readers are encouraged to spend the next year transitioning through a bream-based diet to a vegetarian diet as quickly as possible.
Re-educated all cishet man comrades to never accept any relationship with a woman other than one based upon the heroic principles of socialist matriarchal polyandry.
Spatular agents within every single ICOR affiliate, a broad influence on other international anti-revisionist projects.
Recognition not only as the pinnacle of Marxist-Leninist internet content and the vanguard of the vanguard of the vanguard of the revolution, but also take over all those other communist meme pages on Facebook, directly or indirectly.
Used Twitter to make the sort of jokes we used to make on WordPress, then as the character count increases on that site, gradually turn the Twitter content into the sort of lengthy screeds which are now normative on the WordPress site, and by the end of the Three-Year Plan have to find another platform for dumb jokes on.
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ADELAIDE – Ex-CPA member and local piece of shit Mick Anderson has resurfaced in the activist scene after months of conspicuous absence following allegations of physical abuse of his then-girlfriend, [REDACTED].
Local CPA cadre were quick to distance themselves from Anderson, who, in further proof of the ubiquity of contradiction, has apparently distanced himself from the CPA on grounds of their “revisionism”.
Following Worker’s Spatula’s own suspicion of any organisation whose main international connections are the IMCWP as having deviated from an essential Marxist analytical method, we sought to gain impressions from locals in Adelaide to determine the dynamics of theoretical discourse in which this abuser seeks to position himself.
“Yeah he says China is capitalist now, but he never said anything like that even during his last days with us,” explained local CPA representative Jack Vogt, “he definitely didn’t split with us over theory, even if that’s what he says. The last time we saw him was the night of the incident, when [REDACTED] called [REDACTED] over to help protect her. Now he pops up talking like CPA(ML) or something, maybe he’s with them now? They call us ‘revisionists’ constantly.”
CPA(ML) representative Chelsea Greene denied Anderson’s affiliation with their organisation: “we were in brief contact, but he’s not interested in Mao Zedong Thought or our criticisms of economic development in China at all. He mostly just complains about Chinese immigrants to Australia.”
“Yeah,” concurred Adelaide anarchist John Balendra. “He really hates immigrants. He’s really REALLY strongly opposed to migrant solidarity work. Says it’s ‘a plot by the bourgeoisie’.”
“It would help if he read Engels on immigrant labour in Manchester a century ago, or anything at all,” interjected Greene. “But when I said that to him, he said ‘you Maoists are all just anarchists anyway, you need to tank down in Tank Town’. We’ve got a committee working on decoding that one.”
“Yeah he keeps saying LGBT people and Rojava and feminism and everything else is ‘post-modern’ or ‘crypto-anarchism’. Really good at reminding me why I’m an anarchist, I suppose”, concluded Balendra.
Deciding we had to confront Anderson himself, we found him in a local drinking establishment, half-pissed and barely past lunch. Our correspondent launched into a series of rapidly delivered critical questions about Anderson’s past behaviour and present isolation within the Australian socialist movement:
“It’s all LIES, SLANDER, LIBEL, what they say about me. I’ll tell you what, why they don’t, what they don’t like about me!” exclaimed Anderson, whose surly voice seemed to fill the entire pub, itself otherwise empty. “They’ve all been fooled by the post-modernists and the Trots and the anarchists, with their BULLSHIT theories! Me? I’m a real Stalinist, I’m all about the FACTS of working class, who I’m organising! I’m in a bloody union! What do you do?”
“RaFFWU? Real cute, sweetheart. Do you know how much I have to lift every day? Look at me muscles! I’M THE BLOODY WORKING CLASS! BLOODY… BLOODY, SWEATY, TEARSY! MARXISM-LENINISM! MARXISM-LENINISM! MARXISM-LENINISM! MARXISM-LENINISM!” he bellowed loudly enough for passers-by to hear from outside the pub.
“You’re a fucking labour aristocracy, is what you are!” he screamed, throwing his beer to the floor and lunging for our correspondent, who made a quick move for the door.
To be continued…
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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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