Sandwich Theory

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

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

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

Is a hot dog a sandwich?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is an Onigiri a sandwich?

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

You’ve been called out, onigiri-haters.

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

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

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

Is a pie a sandwich?

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

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

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

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

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

It is, however, arguably very erotic.

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

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

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

A Pop-Tart is a sandwich.

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

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

A cheese and tomato sandwich.

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

Sandwich workers and oppressed
sandwiches of the world, unite!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the German press and public opinion,

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

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

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

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

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Trotskyites, Hoxhaites Declare Christmas Ceasefire for Tetsurō Watsuji’s Death

PARIS – In the spirit of the season, two of the most fanatical (and, according to outsiders to both factions, “dogmatic”) traditions in Leninism are coming together in an unexpected way: the ortho-Trotskyite IMT and the ortho-Hoxhaite ICMLPO (Unity & Struggle) are temporarily declaring a cessation of hostilities to gather in France, the least fun of all imperialist centres, to celebrate the death of Japanese philosopher Tetsurō Watsuji which took place on the 26th of December, 1960:

“The 59th Death Anniversary of the scoundrel Tetsurō Watsuji is a sort of dress rehearsal for all the dialectical materialists of the world to come together in 2020 and celebrate 60 glorious years without his obfuscationist reactionary nonsense,” declared the announcement of the planned festivities in France’s premiere Hoxhaite newspaper, La Forge.

Echoing the sentiment and posting the exact same schedule of events around Paris, Révolution, the publication representing local IMT affiliates, confirmed that both “Stalinists” and “genuine Bolshevik-Leninists” would be present at all levels of the celebrations of the passing of the long-dead Japanese philosopher: from speakers to musicians to stage-workers to the expected audience.

The PCOF sent a statement directly to the Spatula e-mail (mastursublator [at] gmail [dot] com) outlining the importance of a “principled, popular front struggle against the ghost of Tetsurō Watsuji”, with “any forces committed to pissing on his grave”:

As Worker’s Spatula know better than anyone, Tetsurō Watsuji introduced post-modernism to the Japanese people through Søren Kierkegaard, which itself is arguably a kind of crime. But from there, he went on to attack ‘individualism’ for reasons of Japanese nationalism which aided the ideological hegemony of the fascist Japanese state during WWII.

So he starts off as as an individualist, then instead of embracing the universal which creates the particular and the particular which creates the singular individual which then subjectively reshape their objective contexts in the grand dialectical totality which we all know to be true, he enshrines the particular, that of Japanese nationalism, as its own universality, and uses like, fucking Buddhism or some shit to cover up his disgusting narcissism just as he did with Kierkegaard before that.

In a way, you could view him as an individual manifestation of the sort of awful post-modernist graduate students who gush about Carl Schmitt while condemning Karl Marx, only in addition to getting to play Schmitt’s role for a real-world fascist regime, the hegemonic Japanese nationalist ideology is such that he got to seamlessly transition from being Schmitt right back to being a ‘harmless’ Schmitt-reading intellectual after the war.

Absolutely fuck that guy. Fuck him to hell.

As the PCOF statement already made clear, Worker’s Spatula cadre are fully familiar with who Testurō Watsuji is and why his death should be celebrated for days on end with song and dance and speeches and documentaries and everything else the French have planned for their foreign comrades. Our local correspondents had an entirely separate question: was it really possible that French people could be civil towards anyone, and further, that the fragmented French left could come together over anything, and most shocking of all, that the most extreme partisans of Trotsky and Stalin respectively could come together over something as arcane as Japanese philosophy?

Fortunately, one of our correspondents has an IMT co-worker, and was immediately asked to purchase a newspaper upon arriving at work. As usual, we will be leaving our readers in suspense as to whether or not the IMT newspaper sale was successful, but the ensuing conversation was none the less fruitful:

“Yes, we met with the PCOF, and we are co-hosting the event. It’s going to be a week-long conference, starting on the 25th of December, or ‘Tetsurō Watsuji’s Death Eve’, as all real defenders of our common Left Hegelian heritage refer to it, and continuing until the very last second of the year, when we plan to finish the conference by leaving accusing the other side of ‘betraying’ and ‘wrecking’, respectively.”

“Wonderful,” exclaimed our correspondent. “I’m so pleased to hear, how can I say this in a way that won’t offend either side… I’m so pleased to hear that our common struggle in the realm of philosophy is being pursued without the expected divisions over 20th century events that actually relate quite closely to the subject matter.”

“Are you referring to whose fault it is that socialism never became a powerful trend in Japan? Yes, well, that’s the thing isn’t it? By blaming Testurō Watsuji for everything, we focus on the ideological and material reality of Japanese fascism during the WWII period and the ensuing post-war suppression of all republican, progressive, and socialist forces in that country by fascists who were ideologically poisoned, let’s face it, by Tetsurō fucking Watsuji. It’s all very Gramscian.”

“But wasn’t Gramsci a…”

“Don’t even say it! Or I’ll tell everyone your side ruined the unity!” warned the local Trot.

“I was going to say, wasn’t Gramsci a bit over-focused on the ideological role in suppressing proletarian unity in struggle? I mean, obviously Gramsci was a great Marxist-Le…err… Gramsci was a great Marxist. But we can’t discount the material role of fragmenting the proletariat as subjective political class even while growing their objective size as an economic class, as productive forces, and wasn’t Japanese imperialism among the most successful at this, ideological justifications for fascism in the country notwithstanding?”

“Was that a serious question? I mean, I can give you an answer about how the limitations of an extreme reading of Gramsci have been applied in the academy which has veered on idealism, but an extreme opposition to Gramsci often results in vulgar materialism, and… isn’t Worker’s Spatula a joke page?”

“Sorry, what I mean to say is, isn’t the conference sort of celebrating Watsuji’s magnum opus?”

“How’s that?”

“I mean, his mangum opus of dying, and staying dead. That was the crowning achievement of a career dedicated to the annihilation of self.”

FUCK TETSURŌ WATSUJI.

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Worker’s Spatula Suicide Watch Ongoing

CW: Depression, suicide

AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION – “It’s raining like hell out there,” noted the newcomer, striding into the apartment, his soaking windbreaker still hanging from him as he moved towards the kitchen, “how’s he doing?”

“Well he’s still saying he deserves to die, so it’s hard to say ‘good’, but he also claims he’s going to outlive Alan Woods out of spite, so that could mean anything,” explained the comrade on tea duty, motioning towards the bedroom with her nose as she distributed the latest round of tea. “How strong do you want your tea?”

“None for me, I’m trying to quit,” explained the drenched comrade, producing a small baggie full of dark powder and setting it down on the counter. “I get my tannins from snorting cinnamon now.”

“Any word from the Kurds?” asked a third comrade, emerging from the bedroom to retrieve his tea.

“Yeah, they’re as confused and disheartened as the rest of us. Give it time. We can’t do anything tonight,” responded our moist hero, taking a mighty snort of cinnamon through a rolled up five euro note. “Can I just go in?”

“If you’re up for it. Be my guest. Bring him this tea.”

Inside the bedroom, swaddled in a blanket and face wet with tears, sat the world’s saddest bisexual, already one of the world’s saddest demographic groups.

“How are you doing, man?” asked the newcomer, handing over the tea.

“How much do you already know?”

“They’re saying you swallowed a bunch of pills.”

“I threw them all up.”

“Yeah, because [REDACTED] forced them out of you. You were really gonna do it?”

Our depression-wracked comrade stared at the floor in silence, unable to answer. The newcomer sat down next to him and threw an arm over his shoulder as affectionately as heterosexual norms would allow him to do with another man.

“You know that the fact that she did that proves you wrong. Nobody agrees with you.”

“Agrees with me?”

“That your life isn’t worth anything. That’s what they told me you said. That you’re worthless, that nobody loves you. Where do you get this shit?”

Silence.

“I’m not trying to scold you, you know. It’s just…”

“I know, every one of you says the same things. To you these are just sick ideas with no connection to material reality. And if we changed places, I’d probably say the same things to you. I know it’s not rational. It’s not logical. It’s not Hegel or something.”

“Sure, it’s something in how you were socialised, long ago probably. But if this consciousness was socially constructed, it can be socially deconstructed.”

Our depressed comrade let out a soft chuckle. “Truly, Marxism-Leninism is a lofty ideology.”

The two of them stared at the television in the corner, which was predictably playing some particularly depraved gay erotica.

“How does he…?” asked the concerned heterosexual, unsure if a subject change was wise.

“Poppers, probably. That’s no easy feat, otherwise.”

“Huh.”

Our depressed comrade stood up from his blanket nest and walked to the window to smoke. He offered a clove cigarette back at his new guest, only to be politely rebuffed. Lighting up and exhaling out the window into the rainy night, he began to speak.

“I know I didn’t have the world’s worst childhood. I wasn’t beaten for speaking my own language like you, I wasn’t sexually abused like [REDACTED] or [REDACTED], but we all have our traumas.”

“Man, nobody has a mükemmel çocukluk. Trauma is normal. It’s not a competition, and it’s not a shame. But it’s also not a death sentence. It doesn’t have to be.”

“What was your dad like? I always logically understood mine was just a neglectful parent, and that was his problem. But emotionally, the fact that he was never there, and when he was there, he ignored me, you can’t help but internalise that.”

“Sure man. I mean if you’re asking, my dad was never there at all. Maybe I’m lucky compared to you in that sense. Maybe not. But your dad isn’t in charge of your life. Artık büyük insansın, kendi hayatın var. You have to aş some of that shit. Look, you can see from tonight that you have, just in this city, a fair few friends who will run to your side at the most ungodly hour because you’re in danger. If you would tell us when you need help before you’re guzzling a bunch of fucking pills…”

Comrade Depression turned sharply away and finished his clove cigarette out the window. Silently, he shut the window and returned to his blanket nest on the ground. Feeling regret for his tone, his still rain-drenched comrade softened his voice and began to speak again.

“Look, you know we all value you. You know we want you around. Not even the movement or whatever, your friends need you. We’re all in this together. You know everything I’m going to say because we all keep saying it, and I know we all keep saying it, not because we rehearsed this, but because it’s true. But you don’t feel it. And that hurts you, and seeing you hurting hurts us. #Dialectics.”

“I can’t feel it. Because the problems aren’t with any of you, or even with our interactions. I’m living my whole life through the lens of this depression. I hate myself, and that colours every interaction. It starts with one thing* and it just keeps building up into this dark fantasy version of reality where I’ve ruined everything and every perceived failure is a charge on a list of crimes I can only atone for with my own death. I can’t feel the social reality like you all feel because I’ve got a twisted perspective. This is a weak self-criticism, but I’m a weak person.”

“No man, you’re not. You’re really strong. You’re strong if you can hold on just because some tiny part of you still has hope, in spite of having such overwhelmingly negative feelings about yourself and life. That’s a strong hope. Lean on it. That’s where you start.”

“Leaning on hope to stand up? Umut dimdik ayakta, yani?” chuckled the blanket-covered sadboi, quite Stalinistly.

Just then, [REDACTED] poked her head into the bedroom. “Listen, [REDACTED], can you take over tea duty? I want to beat the shit out of our friend for scaring us all, and making me personally force him to vomit up those pills and clean up the vomit all by myself.”

“Hey, consider yourself lucky you got access to my throat without taking me on a date first,” winked the increasingly chipper comrade, before [REDACTED] kicked him in the stomach.

“I wasn’t joking. Don’t ever do that shit ever again.”

Seriously, don’t kill yourself.
Call a friend right now to talk,
before the feelings get worse.

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*Admit it, you thought “I don’t know why, it doesn’t even matter how hard you try” when you read this.

Humourless Marxist Reviews: the Notebook (2004)

“The Notebook” (2004) is a romantic melodrama starring master Hegelian dialectician and known smexy binch Ryan Gosling as Noah, alongside significantly less sexy but equally Hegelian philosopher Rachel McAdams as Allie. The two leads characters are young lovers in 1940s South Carolina, that tells the story of how they came to be together, in the form of an older Noah reading the story to a dementia-stricken Allie.

It is a sweet, sentimental, sad movie, mostly sad because of the constant background of the national oppression of Afro-America.

You thought that we would review some sappy film starring white northerners which takes place in the US south and *not* use it as an excuse to talk about the Achilles’ Heel of US imperialism? Fuck that. Don’t you know Worker’s Spatula?

We’re talking about freeing that land.

First things first, it’s South Carolina. The Black Belt. In the 1940s. What else can this possibly call to mind other than the great tragedy of the abandonment of sharecroppers union organisation by the Browderite revisionists? As if to underscore the importance of this historical betrayal and its contemporary relevance, Afro-American labour is omnipresent in the background of a privileged white romance:

• • • In the modern day, the nursing home where Noah and Allie live is entirely staffed by Afro-American nurses and orderlies, while those living there (for whom the former toil) are mostly white.
    • When Noah visits Allie’s family at their estate, the servants are all Afro-American.
    • Allie’s fiancé, Lon, proposes to her while an all-Afro-American jazz band provides entertainment to a white audience playing music created by Afro-Americans and looked down upon and disparaged by white society until they literally commodified it as something they could own.
    • Allie’s fiancé is the wealthy heir to Hamilton cotton, cotton grown and picked and baled by Afro-American peasantry working in the Black Belt.
    • Noah builds Allie’s dream house on an old plantation where Afro-American slaves lived and died, producing obscene profits for which they were not even paid wages, sacrificing unthinkable amounts of their blood, sweat, and tears. It’s all in Capital, Vol. I.

How many Allies and Noahs lived on that plantation, with their lives and loves shattered by the cruelties of slavery? How many Afro-American Allies and Noahs have existed throughout history, only to have their dreams shattered by US imperialism and national oppression? Why can’t Nicholas Sparks sell their stories?!

Racism, that’s why. If this isn’t what you were thinking about when you watched this movie, other than Ryan Gosling’s doubtless impressive phallus, you’re probably a racist yourself.

This isn’t satire, by the way. Think about what is implied by the art you consume. Break out of your own myopic lives for a split second and think about how the entire world is a complex historical network of exploitation and oppression in which we are all implicitly complicit every single day, or you don’t deserve romantic melodramas, much less ones starring Ryan Gosling.

God, he’s really very attractive.

Oh and when Allie leaves to go to college at Sarah Lawrence? Yeah that’s representative of the alliance between Yankee capital and the Bourbon planters to carry out the imperialist exploitation and oppression of New Afrika. Obviously.

Read your goddamn Harry Haywood, you ingrates.

The only thing greater than Allie and Noah’s love is the love the Afro-American people have for their homeland and their people. It is that revolutionary love that will be the spark that sets the prairie fire, a fire that will burn the US empire down and leave a free and liberated life in a free homeland, an independent and socialist New Afrika, rising from the ashes.

FREE THE LAND!

LAND AND STATE POWER IN THE BLACK BELT SOUTH!
INDEPENDENCE AND SOCIALISM FOR THE OPPRESSED AFRO-AMERICAN NATION!

As for the film’s value for “Netflix and chill”: if you and your date still want to get busy after thinking about and discussing this stuff, well, then you earned it. Go nuts, kids.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Max Zirngast Free, Disappointed in You

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 not disappointed 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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Worker’s Spatula New Year’s Message and Self-Criticism

 

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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Worker’s Spatula Begin Second Three-Year Plan

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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A Revolutionary Eid to All!

On behalf of all Worker’s Spatula fast food workers around the world, fighting for the principled unity of all fast food workers under the revolutionary line of Hegelism-Gramscism, I wish all of our readers the most blessed and revolutionary Eid! To all of you who have been fasting, forgoing food and water and leather shoes, we say: it’s over now. You don’t have to do it again for another year, almost.

Eid (or Bayram in Turkish, the language of the final prophet of Hegelism-Gramscism, İbrahim Kaypakkaya) has been a favourite time of year for me personally ever since I was a little girl. Some of our comrades in Vienna have only been fasting since their reversion to Islam upon joining Worker’s Spatula. As one of the comrades most learned in theology, it fell to me to explain the Worker’s Spatula line on Ramadan to several new recruits.

I remember when one comrade, let’s call him “Jakobi”, joined our ranks. He asked me, “Comrade Ayşe, why do we fast on Ramadan?”, to which I responded “we fast because Allah has commanded it, and so that we might develop steel discipline, and compassion for the less fortunate.”

Mashallah, Comrade Jakobi responded “but Comrade Ayşe, I work to develop steel discipline like that of Stalin every day, and my entire politics is based upon compassion for the less fortunate, who are never to be found far from my thoughts! Why does not Allah command everyone to fast all year ’round?” A truly great and critically Marxist answer, but unfortunately it was also an immodest answer which implied a human could judge better than Allah. I explained this to him in a comradely fashion as I beat him with my shoe.

Three Spatular Ramadans have passed now, and our unity is higher than ever. Worker’s Spatula began as a shitty collection of satire writers at the lowest levels of organisation, gradually developed as we drew in more and better elements, and have overcome our original “competition” to become the most respected voice in anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist internet satire as well as a widely-read source of other irreverent interventions. Our WordPress page is now an unparalleled theoretical şölen, and you all know there’s no one else to turn to. You might as well all convert to Islam too, and fast every Ramadan with us, and read Freire on the job like Comrade Anita does. We’re the fucking future, mate. Get in touch. Join us.

What can we promise between Eid and the Roman New Year’s at which we give our annual New Year’s message and self-criticism? More diverse and more developed interventions on the WordPress page. Those will continue to be quite wordy, so you can also expect more memes on the Facebook page, and mini satire pieces on the Twitter page, as we recently took a decision to return to simple satire on that platform.

Also we will bring down Liechtenstein before they celebrate 300 years of their existence as an international terror-state in 2019, leading to the immediate and inevitable liberation of all oppressed people, who are held down only by the spectre of Liechtensteinism, and then the workers of the world will unite and abolish class society, and then we all get to enjoy full communism. Fingers crossed for that!

–Comrade “Ayşe”, Hungry Jack’s, Roxburgh Park (Melbourne)

Image credit: Brother James Randall

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