On behalf of the Worker’s Spatula Bay Area Detachment of Militant Correspondents and Fast Food Workers, we greet you, dear friends and comrades of the East Bay DSA.
We want to begin by saying:
We are sorry.
We are sorry we didn’t gather forces in the East Bay quicker, just as we are sorry we are still gathering friends around the world, the invisible army of the poor and oppressed that is Worker’s Spatula. Further, one of our heroic writers had been insisting we direct our time and resources towards the Working-Class Unity and Power slate of the East Bay DSA for some time, and only near the very end did we take up this important task of real-world politics. Had we intervened earlier, perhaps we would have had a more favourable result.
There are those who would blame the extremely undemocratic means the East Bay DSA had been run, under the dictatorial control of the bastard and shit Jeremy Gong, for any losses on our side, or, put another way, for any single victory by the crypto-fascist Bread and Roses clique. These people are objectively right, and the fact that all of the DSA’s resources, from its propaganda on the internet to organisation-internal communication channels and information crucial to recruitment certainly contributed to the favourable result these absolute villains achieved. Further, we dispute the validity of every single absentee/”proxy” vote which was across the board in favour of the treasonous Bread and Roses slate.
Definitely we agree with this general take, that they had everything and we had nothing, and that’s why they won. You may recognise this as exactly what happened to Sanders when he went up against Clinton.
However, we must also see our own subjective role in this. It was inevitable that the enemy, being in their totality an enemy force, and not merely some misguided friends (even if some within may individually seem to be mere misguided friends), would use every method in their hands to advance their goal of selfish sabotage of the project of the collective. Why should they not? We know that they have never loved the people and never sought to criticise all existing conditions (including themselves) for the good of the people. That is our goal, and we too will use every method in our disposal (“any means necessary”, if you will) to advance and defend the interest of all poor and oppressed and empower them in unity and struggle.
When we started, our About page had a joke about how we will “take credit for any revolutionary success anywhere in the world” but “will disavow any responsibility for failure”, or something to that effect. During an internal criticism session, it was pointed out that even as a joke, this had the effect of encouraging the extremely wrong tendency among leftists of every tradition to see their own agency in victories but see the agency of the enemy in their failures. “We lost the Cold War because of the imperialists!” “We won WWII because Stalin was so strong!”
One could easily claim the reverse, however, that we lost the Cold War because of our mistakes (there is much truth in this), and that we won WWII because of weaknesses of the Nazis which Stalin exploited (again, not untrue).
It is this contradiction between various subjectivities that makes up the totality of ideological and political struggle. Once again, we as the Spatula must make clear that had we in particular intervened much earlier, the result could have been more positive, and therefore we take responsibility for every single inch of ground which the crypto-fascist Bread and Roses clique held onto. We apologise to all of our friends and comrades in the East Bay DSA and pledge to continue working with them from here on out to the best of our ability. We will build stronger networks, we will help with propaganda, we commit our resources to helping build and advance real revolutionary and socialist solidarity in the East Bay.
And this is the essential point of criticism, comrades. We criticise and self-criticise because we want to do better. Criticism is a most revolutionary intervention into any sphere of life, but especially politics. By criticising in a correct Marxist-Leninist fashion, we can in fact elevate our political practice. And let us be clear: we have already achieved some victories through this campaign.
Firstly, of course, there is the general question of propaganda. Our enemies, the Bread and Roses clique, who probably deny the Armenian Genocide so as to not alienate potential Republican Turkish voters in New Jersey or something, have exercised a dictatorial control of the East Bay DSA channels of propaganda and internal communication, not only against minority dissenters, but even on quite popular points where their narrow clique is isolated but holds political power and thus feels it can dictate the truth from above, like Allah revealing the Noble Qur’ān to the Prophet Muhammad (SAW).
Such a belief is, of course, a form of shirk, and contrary to Islamic belief. As devout Ja’faris and partisans of Ali, Vicegerent of Allah, we sought the guidance of Ayatollah Sheikh Mohammad Al-Yaqoobi on this important question, and he advised us to use our own propaganda channels to carry out counter-propaganda against this crypto-fascist clique who mock our religion and our politics with their very existence.
The opportunist scoundrels and careerist idiots of the wrecker Bread and Roses clique fear our heroic propaganda because it tells the truth. They silence all dissent within the East Bay DSA and close off all channels to the heroic dissenters who speak for the revolutionary masses from Fruitvale to Fremont. This organisation-internal dictatorship, however, masks a deep insecurity which is obvious from the lack of reaction to Worker’s Spatula’s heroic interventions.
Jeremy Gong and his Bread and Roses clique can never respond to Worker’s Spatula because they know that they do not command either the popular support in the revolutionary movement at large nor the theoretical and practical knowledge of Marxism, the world, and politics to go toe to toe with such a mighty force as Worker’s Spatula. Respond to our critiques? They dare not speak our name! Yet we have continued our propaganda assault, and we will continue it, until enough forces have been gathered and a concrete strategy is formulated to take down this wrecker clique once and for all, and rebuild a platform for popular front activity for all revolutionaries and socialists in the East Bay.
This day will come. Already, little by little, the revolutionary masses are waking up to the unique threat of Jeremy Gong, and the universal opportunist-careerist-wrecker-crypto-fascist politics he represents within our movement. More and more, the mere mention of his name evokes revulsion by the youth. High school students hiss and jeer as he passes. Elementary school students throw garbage at him. The day will come soon when a baby is born in Oakland, and their first words as they are handed to their adoring mother for the first time in the hospital will be “fuck Jeremy Gong” as they raise an adorable little middle finger to the sky, only to shift it over into a victory sign, and then clench a tiny little fist of anti-fascist anger.
That is one cute baby. What’s more, that baby was conceived the natural way for cishets: by a woman who was head of her own matriarchal harem in which the men she controls stay in their place, and give her dick when she asks for it, and do not let their eyes stray to other women. “Who’s the father?” a nurse asks the heroic mother of this rebel baby, motioning towards her man-harem on the other side of the room. “I don’t know,” she replies, “some man,” she laughs, and the nurse laughs, and the doctor laughs, and the baby laughs, but the men do not laugh, because it is shameful for a man to laugh in public, for it may arouse the desires of strange women.
Deal with that, patriarchy. Deal with that, Jeremy Gong.
At any rate, Jeremy Gong is not happy with this result either. He is like Erdoğan when he won that election, but it was obvious he didn’t have the whole country in his pocket like he thought. He now has to work with two Working-Class Unity and Power people, including our dear friend Hasan. We are exposing Jeremy Gong as the most hated person in the DSA every day. Bear witness to the poll where people were asked “Who is a bigger fraud and scoundrel as a ‘socialist’?” between Jeremy Gong and known unpopular guy Phil Greaves. No matter how hated Phil Greaves is, Jeremy Gong hangs tight with him. We could’ve lost every single seat in that election, but he can’t make the reality that people hate him as much as the most hated “leftist” on Twitter go away.
Further, they are exposing themselves at the same time. Jeremy Gong gave perhaps the least confident and most patronising “left” speech ever delivered in the history of the DSA. There was no vision, only desperate hatred for everyone but himself. One of the other Bread and Roses scoundrels also suggested that the DSA should be running candidates in the South as Republicans. This goes against their supposed “hero” Sanders’s plan for a “50-state strategy”, a reference to the voter suppression of Afro-Americans in the Black Belt South: they want to abandon Afro-Americans who are desperate to take part in the legal electoral democratic politics the DSA as a whole is focused on, and desperate to do so in a way that would objectively pull local politics “left”, simply because the Bread and Roses slate thinks only white people matter no matter what. It is good that this was exposed and we must continue to emphasise this point which should make even the most reformist Democrat squirm, and if they do not issue an official retraction we must assume they have no firm line on whether or not racist voter suppression by the Republican Party is wrong or not.
Yes, the convention handed a propaganda victory to us through Bread and Roses’s own rhetoric by calling into question whether or not they support Jim Crow.
The Steering Committee results are now in, and yes, most of the seats went to the hated Bread and Roses clique, in line with the earlier Priorities Resolutions result. Bread and Roses won in an electoral sense, the only thing that matters to the heartless Clintonite monsters of the Bread and Roses clique headed by the reactionary agent Jeremy Gong. But it was a victory for us in a very real sense. It was a victory that we got two good revolutionaries on the Steering Committee. It was a victory that 67 brave souls showed up, in person, to vote against this garbage Priorities Resolution and the defeatist, pro-oppressor “socialism” it represents. You 67, you were in that room. Go find the other 66 people. Hug them. Exchange phone numbers. Befriend them. Learn about their struggles. Become a network of genuine human solidarity. 67 is not a small number of people to consciously challenge imperialist “social democracy” together in one place.
These 67 are the heroes, the very front line of the rebel youth, the heroic masses, the future. They should all work and learn and build together.
We would like to thank @NireBryce, one of the real heroes of the day, for tweeting the most of the proceedings of anyone, almost all the way to the end. That is exhausting work, not only having to type so much, but keep track of what people are saying, often rapidly, while you type. Let’s all thank them for their heroic work!
Regarding the Steering Committee, one of the Working-Class Unity and Power candidates who is now a Steering Committee member is the one that we as Worker’s Spatula endorsed: Hasan. Dear sweet Hasan, the solitary link between the East Bay DSA and the struggles of the downtrodden Turkish people who have lived under CIA-backed fascist dictatorship for decades, and the unspeakably oppressed Kurdish people who suffer under the most horrific colonial subjugation and violence, whose anti-colonial struggle in Rojava has been raised up to an international struggle of all suffering humanity, which drew Californian DSA member Michael Israel to fight in its defence, where he fell as a martyr. Hasan not only supports this link, Hasan lives it and speaks it every day by being Hasan, the living truth of the experience of the gurbetçis, all immigrants, all LGBT, all resisters. Hasan is the Anatolian angel of unity, the beautiful face of victory.
As our Turkish comrades always say, “bu daha başlangıç, mücadeleye devam”: “this is just the beginning, the struggle continues”. The scoundrels of the Bread and Roses clique may continue to hold back the democratisation of the chapter and the flow of information within and around it, but we can build our own channels, and we call on all our friends and comrades to speak with us about this work. We will continue to work together with all progressive forces to bring down these enemies of the people, and they know that we can succeed.
Already we have done a lot. Jeremy Gong is now known across the US as a condescending, sectarian, petty little man who thinks anyone to his left has mental health issues, insulting both to those of us who suffer from mental health issues and to the values of democracy and socialism he upholds in word only. Such a “leader” cannot last long if they are exposed.
We will succeed, because we are right. The truth is on our side in this fight. Always tell the truth. And the truth is this: Jeremy Gong is Adolf Hitler.
Fuck Jeremy Gong.
–Worker’s Spatula Bay Area Detachment of Militant Correspondents and Fast Food Workers (MORE COMMUNICATIONS TO FOLLOW)
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