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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Overcoming the Whitegeist

“Why Trump? Why now? Why not Bernie?”

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!

Recommended further reading: How to be Class Conscious

*Although, you know, fuck white people.

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#SaveEBDSA: On Leadership and the Masses, or: Fuck Jeremy Gong pt. II

On behalf of the Worker’s Spatula Bay Area Detachment of Militant Correspondents and Fast Food Workers:

As everyone knows, Jeremy Gong wrote a shitty excuse piece for Medium about trading his soul to the Devil at the crossroads in exchange for being anointed Messiah of the Mass Socialist Movement to Come™. It was garbage and should be thrown out, but we cannot avoid responding to it before the election on April 29th, when, God willing, Jeremy Gong and his Bread and Roses clique will be cast out from the East Bay DSA Steering Committee by the revolutionary masses as Satan was cast “as a profane thing from the mountain of God” by God Almighty [Ezekiel 28:16], amen.

Damn thee, Satan! We rebuke thee and all of thy works! Thou art naught but the Antichrist, a liar, profaner of the DSA! May a healing fire sweep through the DSA and free us from thee and all of thy wicked followers, amen!

Amen!

Without further ado, behold how Jeremy Gong deceives the people:

On the one hand are those of us who are tired of both the useless compromise politics of the liberal center and the dead-end wheel-spinning of the activist left.

Here Jeremy Gong positions himself and his gaggle of shits as the only meaningful alternative both to self-congratulatory politics which do not connect to practical results for the masses, and the “compromise” politics which actually likewise produces no practical results for the masses. They are part of the totality of idealist “left” opposition to bourgeois politics in the imperialist United States of AmeriKKKa, eschewing material progress either by selling it out in exchange for bright lights or by disengaging from it in favour of feeling like a hip part of an elite club.

How are the Bread and Roses slate different from this? Well, in the first instance, because they do share some proposals for meaningful progress, namely, the Medicare For All campaign which is the fig leaf for their treachery.

Gong is particularly fond of routinely connecting this and his own personage to Bernie Sanders, who himself is known for being the target of near endless criticisms from the revolutionary left. But there are serious differences between Sanders and Gong, particularly with regard to claims to being “democratic” and “socialist”. Sanders stands for a shift to the left of the Democratic Party. Whatever our readers feel about this particular project, this means he is for more “socialism” in this party, which itself represents more “democratic” accountability to the Democratic Party’s base, who, since 2008, increasingly openly detest Wall Street rule.

By contrast, Gong stands for a shift back to the right of the DSA, for less “socialism”, as it were. From putting the brake on the brakelights campaign, to standing against the righteous reformist demand for police abolition popular in the local and endorsed at the “national”* level (very “democratic”!), Jeremy Gong and his frankly unpleasant friends stand for “one step forward” (in the form of the Medicare For All campaign) in order to legitimise as many steps back as possible.

And for all Gong’s attempts to link himself to Sanders’s “mass” “democratic” approach to “socialism”, how democratically minded is he? For all of our criticisms of Sanders, he is occasionally receptive to criticism, and will backpedal, with or without self-criticism. Charged with being soft on Israel, he refused to meet with AIPAC. Charged with not knowing how to engage with Black Lives Matter and Afro-Americans more broadly, he used the slogan “Black Lives Matter” during the debates with Clinton and travelled to Jackson, Mississippi, where Cooperation Jackson and the masses continue their ongoing struggles, and where he was well-received by the masses.

Jeremy Gong stands aloof from the masses and responds to criticism with defensive posturing about how he already represents the masses (because he says so!), instead of apologising to those he insults, he admits he has been offensive, before changing the subject as quickly as possible, and instead of acknowledging his complicity in racism and indeed reifying patronising views of the oppressed within an organisation opposed in word to oppression, he evades the point entirely and attempts to curry sympathy with reference to his disability.

All of this is to say: while Jeremy Gong is doing all this, he wants you to know that the “other” path must be the “middle path” between open opportunism (when Gong’s open opportunism and careerism are well-known) and sectarian “activism”. Given his assessment in the rest of the piece, it is already known that he ascribes to all of those who disagree with him identity with the latter trend. Not only on behalf of Spatula correspondents working within the DSA, but on behalf of the entire left wing of the DSA, we reject this in the strongest terms: our extreme willingness to compromise in order to achieve real results has been demonstrated again and again, and it is the Gongite clique’s unwillingness to allow for a democratic discussion within the East Bay DSA which prevents the many principled “left” elements of the East Bay DSA from demonstrating the falsehood of the blanket claims Jeremy Gong makes against his opponents in this slanderous hit piece, this FAKE NEWS.

Let’s read on:

these workers are part of a nascent working-class movement is making history across impoverished, austerity-wracked “red” states.

Literally nobody is opposed to these strikes and Jeremy Gong must know it, and he must likewise know that he and his hand-wringing crypto-liberal pseudo-socialist cronies cannot claim these strikes as their sole property, or as only possible through a DSA under their control. What we defend is not selling out all other struggles in the service of tailing the worst caricature of “red” state white workers. What we defend is raising high the banner of all poor and oppressed, not only those who are already in a relatively strong position with regard to established legal politics. The only principled stance is to try to unite such workers with all other poor and oppressed on the basis of their unity and not on the basis of chauvinistic dismissal! However difficult Jeremy Gong imagines this goal to be is irrelevant: history has shown how quickly such “socialists” are co-opted by the fascist movement.

Quite apart from this general picture, Jeremy Gong does not live in or organise in such an “austerity-wracked ‘red’ state”. He lives in the East Bay, where, as we all know, one is able to articulate ideas FAR to the left of the US average and still be taken seriously. What’s more, he lives in Oakland, a city where it is nakedly obvious to any but the most oblivious or right-wing resident that the evils of capitalism are to be seen particularly in the victims of gentrification and police violence, whom Jeremy Gong seems only willing to stand up for on the terms of total congruence with the needs of the relatively privileged sectors of Oakland society. He is like the “cool” “local” roommate the tech bros keep around, almost as a pet, at reduced rent. Where is the platform of socialists that speaks uncomfortable truths to that Oakland? Nowhere near the clean lips of Jeremy Gong!

Why should a “leader” in the most mainstream socialist organisation in the US demand that this organisation in this social context move to the right of the US average for this same organisation? Because he is a shameful wrecker bent on holding back the righteous anger of the youth, of the poor, of the oppressed, returning them to subservience to their Wall Street masters, no matter his words to the contrary! He can trot out Frances Reade’s “disillusionment” with the Democratic Party, but Frances Reade and Jeremy Gong owe the downtrodden masses of Oakland a reason to not be “disillusioned” with empty white saviourism, which they seem to think is only possible by not helping fix brakelights or otherwise organically connecting to the needs and struggles of the actual toiling classes!

Jeremy Gong then inspires us with a quote from his insipid faction’s tepid analysis document:

To build the power of the working class today, East Bay DSA should pursue mass action as our strategic orientation. This means gearing our activities toward the diverse working-class majority not yet in DSA — through canvassing, demonstrations, town halls, rank-and-file unionism, independent media, and more — and bringing them into open conflict with landlords, bosses, and their political functionaries.

Notice that this liar and deceiver’s idea of “mass action” only works when he controls the action of the mass. He can say:

We are a “big tent” organization and a democracy, meaning there is no party line we must adhere to, no cabal of leaders deciding our direction.

But the moment something slips even slightly out of his comfort zone, something runs contrary to the decided “direction” of the “party line” of his little “cabal of leaders”, like the completely legal brakelights campaign, or the popular police abolition platform, he patronisingly speaks for communities with which he has no contact, he shuts down all debate within the branch (so much for “independent media” if it’s independent of Jeremy Gong!), and ensures that no one can question the Gospel of Gong. He behaves, despite all pretense, like the Democratic National Convention, or Bob Avakian! Democratic in word, dictatorial in deed! Democratic in form, the form of the election which the Democratic Party already practises, dictatorial in essence!

But there’s one thing that the villain Jeremy Gong did not count on: Worker’s Spatula, the official press organ of the revolution, who have been gathering our forces in the East Bay for over a year and will now fight tooth and nail to expose this wrecker activity and liberate the East Bay DSA for the good of the progress of the revolution of all the poor and oppressed!

We will stand together with whatever forces are building such a real movement among the revolutionary masses, organising everyday life in all spheres on the terms of the needs of the people, led by them and leading them, not patronisingly passing down bureaucratic dictats to the people on what is and what is not democratic and what is and what is not socialism in the eyes of their natural-born saviour!

What does Jeremy Gong have to say about such a line, that he calls “The Inward DSA” (when it is his “outward” clique who will not face outward to the masses, and who turn inward to their inner circle at the slightest conflict)? Let us turn back to the document signed in his name, which was doubtless written by someone at Jacobin or some other Kautskyite, as evidenced by his complete lack of ability to respond to Worker’s Spatula’s rightful public critiques of his reactionary line. First Jeremy Gong points a finger of blame unrelated to the actual political line at the Boston DSA:

Friday afternoon, a Boston DSAer’s Twitter account published links and a series of screenshots showing private documents for the Bread & Roses slate written by me and some other East Bay DSA comrades marked in bold, “Not for circulation — do not share.” Because we are organizers, we had a Google Drive full of organizing documents, tools, and spreadsheets.

The Boston DSA are known to be mostly controlled by US ICOR affiliate ROL at this point. Those of us who have met Ray know that he would never let such unscrupulous and undisciplined behaviour go uncriticised, and the lack of any public self-criticism by the Boston DSA therefore stands more or less as proof of the falsehood of these claims. But nonetheless, let’s hear more of Gong’s sob story:

How these documents were accessed by strangers isn’t totally clear, but the intention of the people who did it is: they seek to intimidate members of DSA from engaging in the most basic democratic organizing within our organization and to give us all the sense that even in pursuing ordinary political goals in a political organization, we are subject to a climate of hostile surveillance and attacks

Oh, saints preserve us! You would think that Jeremy Gong was not himself intimidating, harassing, and silencing all of his critics on any subject up to this point. The way he sanctimoniously condemns this leak as contrary to “the most basic democratic organizing” and “a climate of hostile surveillance and attacks”, you would think he was living under the equivalent of the fascist rule of the Turkish AKP (whose rhetoric is indistinguishable from Jeremy Gong’s in any way, particularly due to their shared hatred of the Kurdish liberation movement). But to give Gong his due, such a theft of documents would be very difficult to justify and defend. If it had happened.

If Jeremy Gong, dictator of the East Bay DSA, were not controlling his local with the iron fist of Erdoğan himself, everyone would have already read the real story behind this “theft”. For those curious, it can be read here, but the short version is that the documents were publicly accessible when they were sent out together with the claim that the DSA stands only for Jeremy Gong’s re-election. There was no hacking, there was no theft, Jeremy Gong simply sends out mass e-mails with his horrific politics in them, and when he includes more than he likes and discovers he’s not as popular as he imagines, he cries foul for public criticisms.

We could go on, but we have other things to do on a Tuesday night. We repeat again our support for the Working-Class Unity and Power slate in the upcoming April 29th elections, to which we hope all of you bring a spatula, and our hope that Hasan will be elected and Jeremy Gong will not, and further pray to Jesus, who is the Christ, that the entire Bread and Roses slate will not only go unelected, but will be made to answer for their crimes against the DSA, the poor, the oppressed, the youth, humanity, and God.

If this does not happen, it’s patently obvious why. As the Spatula has now intervened to expose Jeremy Gong as the servant of darkness which he is to the entire East Bay DSA, any real democratic process would quickly right the wrong of the Bread and Roses clique’s undemocratic dominance of the East Bay DSA, and subsequently all internal East Bay DSA channels would be democratised. If this does not happen, it can only be because the April 29th election was rigged, or Jeremy Gong uses his known connections to the Oakland Police Department to silence his critics within the Spatula and the East Bay DSA. We cannot allow this to happen. Jeremy Gong must be stopped by any means necessary.

Fuck Jeremy Gong.

–Worker’s Spatula Bay Area Detachment of Militant Correspondents and Fast Food Workers (MORE COMMUNICATIONS TO FOLLOW)

*Here we must, as always, register our displeasure with reference to pan-US activities being referred to as “national”. The United States of AmeriKKKa is a multinational imperialist state, composed not only of the formally legally recognised indigenous nations and nationalities still yearning for freedom and decolonisation, but also an oppressed Afro-American nation separate from the oppressor Yankee nation who are all Jeremy Gong and his racist cohorts can see. This point is pertinent to be raised even among our fellow travellers in the Working-Class Unity and Power slate, who have not yet accepted the importance of explicit and open support for national liberation for the Afro-American nation including land and popular political power in the Black Belt South, although the “national” DSA Twitter account referred to support for “the right to self determination like MXGM’s Jackson Plan”, so we are hopeful for such developments in the future.

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RCPUSA Apparently Having Christological Debate about Bob Avakian Now

[LOCATION REDACTED]* – Unnoticed by anyone not trapped in a conversation with one of their members, the RCPUSA apparently kicked off the new year by debating the essence of Bob Avakian, namely, whether he was “in two natures”, or “of two natures”, the two natures in question being “chairman” and “party member”.

The debate is fierce, with the so-called “Orthodox” camp upholding the “of two natures” thesis threatening a schism from the cadres upholding that Bob Avakian is “in two natures”.

Leader of the “of two natures” camp, Raymond Lotta, agreed to speak with Worker’s Spatula’s New York correspondent, after taking him to Bob Avakian’s secret hideout*, blindfolded: “This is an important issue, and it’s true that we have threatened schism because we consider such a division of Bob Avakian to be heretical, but I also want outsiders to understand: Both camps still agree on the fundamentals of our creed, and that Bob Avakian’s New Synthesis is indeed still the one true path to socialism.”

Sunsara Taylor, the de facto leader of the “in two natures” camp, also agreed to speak with us by Skype: “What we are basically upholding is Maoist dialectics. One becomes two. We’re not dividing Bob Avakian. Bob Avakian has divided himself, in his infinite wisdom.”

“On a related note, I just wanted to say that as difficult as this is and as much as I hope that no schism does occur, this is an issue we had to address a long time ago. We all knew deep down that Bob Avakian was greater than the party, or pretty much anything else in life, but we had to deal with the implications. Now at least we can discuss the true nature of the dialectical relationship between the party and its chairman, instead of wasting time on secondary contradictions like the one between the party and the masses.”

*It’s Brooklyn, in case you’re curious.