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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Hypocritical “Communist” Owns Smartphone, Doesn’t Use it to Read Marxist Theory and Spread Propaganda

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.”

Image expropriated from Kriffed.

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Point/Counterpoint: Yelling About Hegel

The First Annual Clandestine Worker’s Spatula Marxist Theory Symposium and Dance-a-Thon was held at an undisclosed part of York University campus in Toronto, Canada last night. Attendees who arrived thanks to secret invitations came from locations as diverse as Australia, China, Turkey, India, and Argentina to debate topics ranging from economics to gender politics to philosophy.

The highlight of the evening, according to all in attendance, was the debate on “Yelling About Hegel”, which consisted of York University’s own J. Moufawad Paul, who swiped the keys to get us all into the [REDACTED] building, and a Worker’s Spatula representative who is hot for Hegel. What follows is a 100% factual and 100% accurate transcript, and if J. Moufawad Paul seeks to object in any way, we can only assume his account has been hacked by the Russians, as is traditional in North America.

Moderator: Well, I see we have a packed room for this panel. Expected, I suppose, because if there’s one thing that draws the big crowds, it’s heated arguments about Hegel. You all know the rules: each participant is permitted to yell until they run out of breath, at which point the other begins yelling until they run out of breath. If I start yelling, everyone else has to stop yelling until I finish what I’m saying. The debate is over when somebody flips the table like TİKB did during the Toblerone conference in London. Any preliminary, non-yelled remarks from either of you?

WS: First of all, since we’re going to be yelling about Hegel, I want to give a shout-out to Arif Çelebi. Secondly, on behalf of all of our cadre taking part in the Ramadan fast, I wanted to thank J. Moufawad-Paul for his thoughtful choice of bream for this evening’s iftar. He has been nothing if not a gracious host to us, and has made me personally rethink my prejudiced view that all white settler-colonial English Canadians are hypocritical liberal scum.

JMP: Please, comrade. I also love bream. But I’m glad that I could prove that not all individuals from settler-colonial Canadian society are roughly as culturally sensitive as Justin Trudeau, if not to his right. I hope that this event will be the first in many occasions for meaningful exchange between revolutionary trends across the world. By the way, is there any chance you’d like to accept that Maoism is the third and hi…

Moderator: …AND WITH THAT, WE’RE OFF! START YELLING!

JMP: Oh, is it… is it time for me to start yelling? Okay: WHERE DO I BEGIN? MY POSITION IS ALMOST TOO OBVIOUS: HEGEL IS AN IDEALIST PHILOSOPHER, AND THE REPEATED IMPLICATION BY WORKER’S SPATULA THAT HEGEL IS ON PAR WITH MARX WAS ALWAYS INTERPRETED AS A JOKE UP UNTIL THIS POINT. IS IT ACTUALLY WORKER’S SPATULA’S POSITION THAT, AND I QUOTE, “MARXISM-LENINISM, MORE LIKE HEGELIANISM-LENINISM, AMIRITE?”?(?)

WS: YEAH SURE, WHY NOT? I’M NOT GOING TO GET IN TROUBLE FOR SAYING THAT. YOU CAN’T BE A MARXIST WITHOUT HEGEL. IT’S NOT A FUCKING COINCIDENCE THAT EVERY MODERN REVISIONIST YOU TALK TO CAN’T SUMMARISE THE UNIVERSAL MOTION OF DIALECTICS ON EVEN THE MOST BASIC LEVEL. YOU CAN’T JUST IGNORE DIALECTICS AS A MARXIST.

JMP: I NEVER SAID DIALECTICS WASN’T AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THE MARXIST WORLDVIEW, I WROTE A FUCKING DIAMAT MANUAL. BUT IN THE DIALECTICAL INTERPLAY BETWEEN BEING AND CONSCIOUSNESS, THE BEING IS PRIMARY, AND HEGEL’S SHORTCOMING WAS PRECISELY IN HIS FAILURE TO GRASP THIS.

WS: DID HEGEL MAKE MISTAKES? OF COURSE HE DID. IN SO LONG A PERIOD FILLED WITH HEROISM, TRIALS, STRUGGLE, TRIUMPHS, IT IS INEVITABLE NOT ONLY FOR HEGEL PERSONALLY BUT ALSO FOR GERMAN IDEALISM AS A WHOLE TO MAKE MISTAKES.

MODERATOR: FOUL! No paraphrasing Enver Hoxha or Mao Zedong quotes defending Stalin! That joke is for Twitter only.

WS: Sorry, force of habit.

MODERATOR: That’s fine, just try to make sure it doesn’t happen again. JMP? Can we get your word that you won’t do the same?

JMP: Hey, I never do that anyway.

MODERATOR: Very well. Comrade, would you like to yell a more original and substantial response?

WS: LENIN SAID “INTELLIGENT IDEALISM IS CLOSER TO INTELLIGENT MATERIALISM THAN STUPID MATERIALISM”. WE CAN’T GO THE DIRECTION WHERE WE PAINT HEGEL AS AN ENEMY OF MARXISM!

JMP: I’M A FUCKING PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR! I THINK PEOPLE SHOULD READ HEGEL, AND I’VE READ HEGEL, AND I’VE TAUGHT HEGEL! I KNOW FULL WELL ALL THE WAYS HEGEL IS MISREPRESENTED, BUT MARX EXPLICITLY IDENTIFIES HEGELIAN DIALECTICS AS BEING DEFICIENT IN ITS IDEALISM, AND THE ANTI-REVISIONIST TRADITION IS REPLETE WITH BREAKS FROM HEGELIANISM AS SUCH, JUST AS MODERN REVISIONISM IS REPLETE WITH BREAKS WITH DIALECTICS AS SUCH.

DIALECTICS IS NOT SIMPLY DEFINED AS HEGELIANISM. THE FACT THAT IN THE MILIEU OF GERMAN IDEALISM A CERTAIN LANGUAGE EMERGED THAT WAS USEFUL FOR MARX IS NOT SOMETHING ANYONE HERE DENIES. THE ISSUE IS THAT YOU COULD JUST KEEP GOING BACK WITH THAT: DO WE NEED KANT TO UNDERSTAND HEGEL?

WS: LENIN ALSO SAID: “IT IS IMPOSSIBLE COMPLETELY TO UNDERSTAND MARX’S CAPITAL, AND ESPECIALLY ITS FIRST CHAPTER, WITHOUT HAVING THOROUGHLY STUDIED AND UNDERSTOOD THE WHOLE OF HEGEL’S LOGIC. CONSEQUENTLY, HALF A CENTURY LATER NONE OF THE MARXISTS UNDERSTOOD MARX!!” DID HE EVER SAY THAT SHIT ABOUT KANT?

MODERATOR: FUCKING FOUL! That’s two quotes from Lenin talking about Hegel in a row! Stop relying on Lenin to make your argumentation. JMP, your turn to yell.

JMP: LENIN IS NOT AN INFALLIBLE SOURCE FOR UNDERSTANDING THE MARXIST METHOD! I HALF-EXPECTED YOU TO QUOTE ENGELS NEXT. AS I ARGUE IN MY BOOK, WHICH YOU’D KNOW IF YOU READ IT, I AM NOT ONLY AGAINST VULGAR MATERIALISM AND PSEUDO DIALECTICS, BUT ALSO AGAINST IDEALIST DIALECTICS IN THE FORM OF “PURE HEGELIANISM”, EVEN AS FOUND IN MARXISM! THIS WAS MAO’S FUNDAMENTAL BREAKTHROUGH: THE NEGATION OF THE NEGATION IS ITSELF A FORM OF IDEALISM!

WS: Yeah, the SMF said the same thing when asked about the Abstrakt piece about Maoist dialectics.

JMP: The SMF?

WS: They’re supposedly a front for the [REDACTED].

JMP: Ah. Well, you see? MLMs.

MODERATOR: You’re not yelling.

JMP: WHETHER OR NOT THE NEGATION OF THE NEGATION IS A HEGELIAN CONCEPT THAT HAS NO PLACE IN MARXISM OR NOT, IT’S NOT THE CASE THAT A KNOWLEDGE OF HEGEL ALONE IS A THEORETICAL DEFENCE FROM REVISIONISM: ŽIŽEK IS A FINE CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLE, HE DEFENDS THE RATIONAL CORE OF HEGELIANISM AS A BASIS FOR MARXIST THOUGHT MORE STRONGLY THAN ANYONE, MORE THAN YOU EVEN, AND YET HE ALSO DEVIATES CONSTANTLY TO THE RIGHT, YOU DON’T NEED ME TO LIST ALL OF HIS ERRORS, YOU’VE MOCKED HIS IDIOCY MORE THAN ALMOST ANYONE.

AND WITHIN ACTUALLY EXISTING SOCIALISM: MANY OF THE CAPITALIST-ROADERS DEFENDED A SORT OF CONSERVATIVE HEGELIANISM, A “RIGHT HEGELIANISM”. HELL, THE FACT THAT YOU EVEN FREQUENTLY EMPLOY THE TERM “LEFT HEGELIANISM” IS A TELL: YOU’RE FULLY AWARE HOW FORMAL HEGELIANISM CAN BE REACTIONARY, JUST AS YOU MUST AGREE THAT THE THEORETICALLY UNDEVELOPED MOTION OF THE MASSES HAS A GREATER REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL THAN ANY THEORY NOT APPLIED IN PRACTICE!

WS: FINALLY WE GET TO THE MEAT OF THE MATTER! FIRSTLY: IT’S DEFINITELY TRUE THAT THERE ARE RIGHT HEGELIANS AND THAT OPPORTUNISM AND REACTION HAVE BEEN AIDED BY PEOPLE WHO FORMALLY DEFENDED HEGEL WITHIN REVOLUTIONARY CONTEXTS, BUT WOULD YOU REALLY ARGUE THAT MAO’S CAPITALIST-ROADER OPPONENTS HAD A FIRM GRASP ON DIALECTICS, IDEALIST OR OTHERWISE, GIVEN THAT THEIR FUNDAMENTAL AIM WAS TO CONCEAL RATHER THAN REVEAL CONTRADICTIONS?

REGARDLESS, THIS IS THE SAME AS TRYING TO BRUSH ASIDE MARX BY POINTING OUT THAT OVER 90% OF FORMALLY DECLARED MARXISTS ARE CHARLATANS, FRAUDS, SCOUNDRELS, RENEGADES, AND OTHER INSULTS LENIN WOULD’VE USED. OUR DEFENCE OF MARXISM AS A METHOD AGAINST FORMALIST APPROPRIATIONS OF MARXISM, EITHER IN THE FORM OF A WORSHIP OF ICONOGRAPHY OR A SORT OF RELIGIOUS TEXTUALISM MASQUERADING AS ACADEMIC MARXISM: THIS IS FUNDAMENTALLY THE SAME AS OUR DEFENCE OF HEGELIANISM, WHICH AGAIN, WE CLAIM IT IS NO COINCIDENCE WAS MARX’S PRIMARY POINT OF THEORETICAL REFERENCE.

THIRDLY, YOU MAKE REFERENCE TO THE MASSES: WE DEFINITELY AGREE THAT THERE MUST BE A DIALECTICAL PROCESS BETWEEN MASS AND ORGANISATION, THAT AN ORGANISATION WHICH FAILS TO UNDERSTAND ITS SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE MASSES CAN NEVER BE REVOLUTIONARY, BUT THE VERY FACT OF BUILDING SUCH AN ORGANISATION IS A SUBJECTIVE MANIFESTATION OF TRYING TO DEVELOP A REVOLUTIONARY THEORY WHICH, I PRESUME YOU WOULD ALSO AGREE, IN THE FINAL INSTANCE IS A NECESSITY FOR TRULY REVOLUTIONARY PRACTICE!

SO: IF WE DEFEND HEGEL IN TERMS OF A THEORETICAL BASIS, IT IS NOT BECAUSE WE ARE “IDEALISTS”, ANY MORE THAN YOU ARE FOR DEFENDING “MAOIST DIALECTICS”, OUR ARGUMENT IS THAT TO DEVELOP A CORRECT THEORETICAL LINE, WE NEED BOTH A MATERIAL ENGAGEMENT AND A FIRM GRASP ON WHAT DIALECTICS IS!

JMP: BUT YOUR ARGUMENT ON THE DEFINITION OF DIALECTICS IS BASED ENTIRELY ON HEGEL SIMPLY BECAUSE OF A FORMAL COMMITMENT TO HEGEL’S HISTORICAL ROLE WITHIN THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION AT THE POINT OF MARX’S WRITING!

Tragically, the debate was cut short at this juncture when a DHKP-C guerrilla who had infiltrated the symposium began firing a small handgun into the air and screaming: “FEUERBACH ÜZERİNE 11. TEZ!” over and over again whilst the entire crowd fled the room to retrieve their own weapons.

UPDATE: J. Moufawad-Paul has agreed to continue the discussion in an even more private location with the proceedings to be published later this Ramadan. Worker’s Spatula would like to apologise as usual on behalf of the Turkish left for the Mahircis being so goddamned Mahirci all the time.

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Charles Mingus is the Rosa Luxemburg of Jazz

As all of our neighbours in Vienna are aware by now, we at Worker’s Spatula headquarters have replaced the traditional Turkish method of waking our comrades for sahur with a davulcu [drummer] with the more innovative method of waking our comrades and half the neighbourhood with loud 20th century Afro-American music.

No, you shut the fuck up, Laurenz. It’s Ramadan. We need to get our sahur in before a busy day of communism with nothing to eat or drink.

Some of the songs have been purely inspirational, such as “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” by Nina Simone, who famously defecated on a microphone. Others, such as Public Enemy’s “Can’t Truss It”, have focused on burning questions such as the veracity of bourgeois imperialist propaganda, or “fake news”, as settler-colonial White AmeriKKKa refers to it.

We are, however, moving into a more theoretical phase of Ramadan as we draw ever closer to Laylat al-Qadr, and thus this morning we woke up to the rousing sound of Charles Mingus’s “Moanin'”.

Some of you may wonder what Charles Mingus’s swinging sound has to do with Marxist theory. To that we say: Rosa Luxemburg.

Yes, Mingus intended his career as a composer of great jazz as an allegorical polemic against both spontaneist and commandist deviations in Marxist political practice. We all know how Mingus was eager to take part in the movement to develop jazz composition to a higher level, and took active part in workshops geared towards this goal. However, being a Ryan Gosling-level dialectician, Mingus was quickly disenchanted with the formalist errors of his fellow jazz composers, who rejected any allowance for improvisation in their sheet music. Mingus, on the other hand, understood perfectly well that the dialectic between performer and composer is as central to jazz as it is to the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism.

Among Mingus’s most famous outbursts, scarcely less famous than “Itzhak Perlman doesn’t have to put up with this type of shit!”, is the time he stormed out of a workshop and berated his “Trotskyite” colleagues for “imposing vulgar commandism on the revolutionary jazz masses”.

Ever since then, pieces like “Moanin'” haven proven through their numerous recordings and performances by diverse artists Mingus’s ability to compose great jazz of a complex and universal nature, allowing for the dynamic subjectivity of diverse performers in their particular material contexts, without deviating into the Kautskyite spontaneism which characterises that most revisionist of all jazz styles, free jazz.

We hope all comrades have enjoyed this brief lecture on the theoretical importance of Charles Mingus. For our comrades in Vienna, tomorrow’s sahur music and lecture will also centre on the dynamics of the social movement, as expressed in “Stand Up” by Ludacris.

Image source: FablesOfFabus on imgur, captioning Mingus on getting evicted, full quote: “I hope that uh… the communists blow you people up, man. You dig? That’s where I am. Red China.”

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