Yuletide Eve in the Holding Cell

“Hey!” yelled Joseph through the bars at the passing guard, “will you be charging us with something and keeping us here, or deporting us, and if so, to where?”

Joseph winced and tried to cover his face to prevent spittle from hitting him as the guard screamed a response at him. He turned heel and sat back on the cot he and his cellmate were sharing.

“What did he say?” asked Leon.

“I don’t know, I don’t speak Japanese.”

“Probably this was one of the shortcomings to our plan,” said Leon, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Attempting to sail into Japan, illegally, under COVID-19 conditions, without speaking Japanese, to travel to the gender neutral toilet in Kamakura.”

“I appreciate your acknowledgement of the gender neutral quality of the toilet in question,” said Joseph, looking his friend in the eye. “Very progressive.”

“And I appreciate you, friend.”

The two friends laid down in a spooning formation on the narrow cot and held each other for warmth. Leon, the big spoon, wrapped his arms tenderly around Joseph as they pressed into each other.

“I wish we had a blanket,” lamented Joseph.

“I know,” said Leon, planting a tender kiss on Joseph’s cheek. “What do you think our comrades are up to right now?”

“Probably huddled around the burning effigy drinking hot toddies and chanting ‘takbir’s. I wish we were with them,” Joseph sighed.

“Alan told me there’d be a piñata as well as a burned effigy this year. He said they’re going to get Stefan Engel drunker than usual, blindfold him, and make him crack it open with his bare fists.”

“What’s inside the piñata?”

“Several kilos of vegan okonomiyaki.”

Joseph turned around to face his friend. “I wish we had a blanket or something, it’s so cold and if we could at least cover ourselves from the waist down we could…”

“I know, hun. Try not to think about it,” said Leon.

“I just hate it!” Joseph yelped, a little tear rolling down his cheek. “We couldn’t complete our mission to urinate on Tetsurō Watsuji’s grave, just like we couldn’t build socialist construction up to a level that would allow humanity to pass from necessity into freedom, I just feel like a failure, and I just want to get drunk and get off with you right now, and we can’t even do that!”

Leon stroked his cheek tenderly as he looked out the tiny window of their holding cell at the moon shining over coastal Japan. “I know, Joseph. It’s hard to live with failure. Trust me, I know.”

“Yeah,” said Joseph. “We’ll still win though, right?”

“Inshallah.” said Leon. “Let’s try to focus on the reason for the season, and not put ourselves down right now.”

“You’re right,” said Joseph. “It’s December 25th, the eve of Tetsurō Watsuji’s death, and we should be focusing on that.”

“Did you read what [REDACTED] wrote? That Watsuji is actually a dialectical materialist, because of all the ningen stuff about society?” scoffed Leon.

“Absurd!” muttered Joseph, sitting upright. “The entire point of Watsuji’s work in every period is essentially anti-universalist, and his purported self-criticism about his past individualism is actually worse because of its real social context as academic propaganda for fascist Japanese nationalism!”

“You don’t have to tell me,” said Leon, standing and pacing in front of him. “It’s also deeply disturbing how Watsuji is held up as a sort of philosopher of Buddhism in this sense. The entire obsession with geography as a basis for social belonging has a clear Shinto origin, for starters, but more than that, it all builds into obvious Japanese nationalism which is completely at odds with the quest for Buddhahood that genuine Buddhists pursue.”

“It’s actually quite perverse,” agreed Joseph, tearing open two cigarettes and packing himself a pipe to smoke with the contents. “Every time Watsuji lauds the state, and in particular, the imperial Japanese state with its caste structures and racial supremacism, when he considers social rebellion to be an egotistical act, he forgets that non-conformity, social rebellion, and in particular social rebellion against outdated and superstitious structures are, in addition to being the source of development of human society from stage to stage in general, at the core of how Buddhism first became revealed as a great world religion!”

“Sure,” said Leon. “But this dual allegiance of the sangha to Buddha and king has a long history in every Buddhist society. Watsuji didn’t invent these problems in the Japanese academy, he simply worked hard to legitimise them there.”

Joseph nodded, “as with every religious tradition, the relationship between its ideal aim of universal consciousness and overcoming of the contradiction between self and other through spiritual transcendence is at odds with its material reliance on the state, which is an oppressive class structure and geographically and culturally limited in its particularity.”

“Word,” said Leon. “Do you want to make out and do some over-the-pants rubbing? All this philosophy talk has really got me going.”

“Yeah, all right.”

FUCK TETSURŌ WATSUJI.

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Jains, US Democrats, Talk Common Passive Resistance to Fascism

MADURAI, TAMIL NADU (INDIA, FOR NOW) – Amidst the sharpening of contradictions in the US to an ever finer point, and the sharpening of contradictions in India to under 0.1 mm in width at the sharpest point, representatives of the US party of hand-wringing and finger-wagging travelled to the subcontinent in order to discuss common strategy to combat the rise in fascism under Trump and Modi, respectively.

The Democrats quickly found themselves with no one willing to cast in their lot with their globally unpopular politics. Even the milquetoast Indian National Congress turned down a meeting with the US Democratic Party on the grounds of their “insufficiently radical” stance on combatting the vile uncle in charge of the most bellicose theocracy in the Americas, and his friend, the uncle in charge of the most populous theocracy on the planet.

Desperate to find some legitimising force in India to win over the much-coveted “bourgeois South Asian diaspora vote” known to have been the decisive factor in the election of the past three US presidents, the less serious of the two parties of US capital found themselves begging for attention from the Jains, the least dank of all the subcontinental faiths.

“I’m very happy to be here with representatives of the Jain community,” began President Obama at the sparsely attended and thoroughly bourgeois intercontinental summit dubbed “Acquiring Good Karma to Win Elections: Problems and Possibility for India and Indian-Americans”:

The Jains have always been a great source of inspiration for Americans of diverse backgrounds, with their admirable doctrine of personal advancement in society and in the cycle of Saṃsāra via ahimsa, which Joseph, my Sanskrit to English interpreter, tells me refers to “non-malarkey towards other sentient beings”.

Through sufficient commitment to ahimsa, the Jains believe that anyone can attain moksha, which Joseph tells me refers to “the Indian dream”. It’s a lot like the American dream, but with better musical interludes to carry the narrative forward.

I’m sure my Jain friends will agree with me when I say that although the police are not always right, if you dream the dream hard enough, you can be reincarnated economically well-off enough to avoid the more direct violence of the police, and therefore not be out there, Destroying Businesses In Your Own Community For No Reason™.

I think I speak for all Americans when I say that this is the vision that can bring our two countries together, not divide us, like the BJP want to do. Whether you’re Jain or Hindu… wait, I’m sorry, usually I google this stuff but… are Jains a kind of Hindu?

“Are we Jains Hindus? Maybe,” answered the nude monk seated to Obama’s right, serenely. “Are we Hindu nationalists? It would be violent to say. But what we can say is this: we absolutely share the US Democrats’ stance towards their political opponents, both in essential ferocity and formal manifestation…

Right now, we are told that enemies of the karmically misled leader of the United States, Donald Trump, are rioting to express their displeasure with the violence of the police. This is itself a kind of violence, no better from the perspective of their liberation from Saṃsāra than the violence of the police itself.

At this juncture, Obama nodded somberly at these wise and rational words.

We can only suppose that the “AntiFa” to whom Trump refers are like our Naxalites: irreligious persons infected with the spiritual disease of materialism, which is alien to both of our deeply pious countries.

We praise the US Democratic party for hearing our wise council and going to these misled youths with our message: “Eight Can’t Wait. The only solution, without any delay, to any grievances anyone has to the police is to go to them, with compassion, and teach them about the eight kinds of karma.

This is the enlightened path to police reform.

Mr. Obama, please join us in an hour of guided meditation.

Stefan Engel was unable to make it into India due to the lack of international flights due to the COVID-19 pandemic. None the less, he had to be included in the narrative and spoke to the Spatula’s Indian correspondent live via the CPI (ML) Red Star’s Zoom chat room:

I’m speaking to you live from the streets of Seattle, where I have been joining in with the revolutionary masses in fighting the fascists. #BlackLivesMatter.

Eight Can’t Wait? I’ll tell you what the workers and the oppressed can’t wait for: police reforms that will get watered down in committee and anyway are up to the discretion of the mafia-like fraternal orders in this country.

Fuck that, comrades: they hit us with a fucking car. Nobody should think this will go away with with some Democratic Party-approved co-opting toothless bullshit. All power to the people.

Jainism? I call on all the workers and oppressed to convert to Sikhism. We’re going to earn our karma with a sword in hand. Slash the fash!

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Britain’s Most Advanced Communist Thwarted by COVID-19

KING’S LYNN, NORFOLK – We regret to inform the proletarian masses of Britain that the infamous ‘Comrade X’, the Lenin of East Anglia who lives in the shadows and contains within her incomparable mind the totality of proletarian science, has been thwarted in her nigh-successful quest to build a vanguard cadre organisation for proletarian revolution by being placed on mandatory 12-week isolation due to the global pandemic COVID-19.

“I was really going to do it this time,” she informed our correspondent via messenger pigeon. “I’ve been traveling on weekends around the region, sussing various contacts to see how trustworthy they are, carefully providing contact information… we were really building.”

“But then the fucking Tories botched the whole Coronavirus job, and now I’m in isolation forever so… blame the objective conditions.”

Upon being informed that “that sounds like the sort of cop-out the Trotskyites might give us”, ‘Comrade X’ called our correspondent by WhatsApp video chat to furiously respond:

Don’t even jokingly compare me with that cult, Worker’s Spatula. I know I’ve made some excuses in the past, but things were really going well for a change. I was meeting with some promising trade unionists. I was coordinating with people close to the Lever and some ICOR representatives. I had made contact with some people experienced in [REDACTED] and we went together to [REDACTED] to set up a training [REDACTED] for [REDACTED] who [REDACTED] in case [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] or [REDACTED].

I put in the hours, door to door. But literally what am I supposed to do in mandatory social isolation? I’m not a Trotskyite… the coronavirus is.

Noting that her practical work had made her “feel more alive than ever before”, and with each passing day in social isolation, she can “feel the fighting spirit diminish”, ‘Comrade X’ emphasised that “if I had just had a few more days, we could have built a functional organisation that would have survived the outbreak, but it’s too late now.”

‘Comrade X’ also noted the extremely unlikelihood of rebuilding potential organisational links when COVID-19 blows over: “the post-Corbyn period was perfect, because Corbyn’s contrarian and controversy-courting style of social democracy really did a lot to radicalise the kids, and then he got undermined by the system, leaving a small segment of the youth with a high potential for radicalisation. But as this COVID-19 nonsense wears on, the British state is going to realise that just as the Corbyn phenomenon had a potential to undermine the British state, it also had the potential to legitimise and preserve it that Boris just doesn’t have.”

“Once they realise that, they’re going to position some ‘just critical enough’ Labour politician that Corbyn and company can anoint who can fix the COVID-19 mess and return us to business as usual with a couple more compromises from the state’s side, and then they’ll make the kids fight tooth and nail to maintain that.”

Her bleak but practically speaking not absurd prediction caused ‘Comrade X’ to light up a cigarette in distress, a habit she had kicked during her weeks of regular organising work, signalling a likely return to being relegated to her own bed save for trips to the door to pick up the delivery she ordered.

“There’s no use trying to organise British people anyway. If things are going to kick off, it’s going to be in Ireland, and I have faith in them to change the world in the ways I’m too depressed to take part in because the world has made me the sort of person who’s too depressed to change it.”

At time of press, ‘Comrade X’ was forlornly stroking a photo of Ethem Sarısülük and mouthing the words “I have failed you”.

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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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“Max Zirngast Maoist or Something” –BVT

VIENNA, MAY ALLAH HAVE MERCY UPON US ALL, WE’RE BACK IN VIENNA – As is now widely known across the German-speaking world, the Austrian BVT (Counterterrorism Office), not content to merely collaborate with the Turkish state’s farcical case against Turkish TÖP cadre and their friend Max Zirngast, apparently decided to commit the much-greater crime of mixing up unrelated factions of the Turkish left.

Yes, not only was Max’s closeness while in Ankara to TÖP understood as a real link to the “TKP/K” even though the latter organisation’s actual existence is in doubt according to previous Turkish court cases, but the Liechtenstein-backed puppet government in Vienna decided that “TKP/K” was some varient of the TKP-ML, and therefore that TÖP has an armed wing engaging in Maoist people’s war: TİKKO.

While allegedly Max Zirngast is no longer being investigated for his alleged alleged alleged alleged links to TİKKO, the story represented a huge scandal not only in the alleged left scene in Austria, but across Europe including in countries which actually matter. Following German-language press briefly referring to Zirngast as “Europe’s most famous contemporary Maoist”, Maoists in other German-speaking countries took issue with the breadth of this claim:

“Europe’s most famous?” asked an incredulous Stefan Engel, grabbing hold of the nearest television camera in a Marx-level drunken rage at 7 AM, local time. “Maybe Austria, sure. But how can you ignore Stefan Engel? Everything is about Stefan Engel, author of only the finest books about Maoism! I regret stepping down from my chair position, if this is how you’re all going to treat me.”

“And I’m being told he’s not even really a Maoist? What a joke country Austria is, that they don’t even check the prolific analytical output of any given Marxist prior to discussing them in the news media. That would make sense in an English-speaking country, where your Marxists read and write about as much Marxist theory as your average fascist, but we expect a higher standard here in Germany,” concluded the livid Bavarian, with the same completely not-nationalist drunken tone that Marx used over a century prior.

Response from one of Germany’s wildly inferior western neighbours was similarly swift, with the Philippine-origin Jose Maria Sison holding a press conference noting that it was “beyond dispute” that he was “the most famous and best Maoist in the world today”, and that his exclusion from consideration in the German-language press doubtless reflected the “typical German obsession with race” simply because of his “Asian origins”.

The TKP-ML itself felt compelled to issue a statement, denying any “organic connection” to “the alleged individual known as Max Zirngast”. The statement did however attempt to reach a point of solidarity with the embattled Austrian, stating that “the people of Dersim feel a deep connection to the people of Hatay, for whom Zirngast is a symbol of hope”, and that further “the bogus terror charges which MİT throws out will never be remembered as anything more than the desperate cries of a doomed fascist regime”, and finally that “like Max Zirngast, the TKP-ML is a legitimate political party which, in a people’s democracy, will finally be allowed to speak“.

Max Zirngast could not be reached for comment, as he was unavoidably detained with urgent business on behalf of his girlfriend/owner, involving the latter’s foot being lodged deep in Zirngast’s mouth, where it belongs.

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Anxious Maoists Unsure How Much More Excellent the Situation Can Get

As protests continue to blossom in diverse locations across the globe, the class character of the conflicts around which many of these protests pivot are so stark as to practically beg all but the most reactionary news-follower to embrace the science of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

And yet among those who have long been bathing totally nude in the never-setting sun of the Chairman’s doctrines, there are some comrades who have been paralysed by these sharpening contradictions: we speak of course of the significant portion of Worker’s Spatula readers who are Maoists with clinically high levels of anxiety:

FRANKFURT – “What the fuck, shut the fuck up, please leave me alone,” groaned Katerina at her the smartphone buzzing in her pocket as she teetered to a seat in the Mensa, a tray of food balanced precariously atop the laptop clutched in her hands, several bags of various materials hanging off of each arm.

“I basically haven’t slept since the Ecuadorians started setting everything on fire,” she explained breathlessly as she shoveled mediocre vegetarian pasta into her mouth with her left hand, glancing anxiously at the clock. With the right hand she attempted to hammer out e-mail responses on her laptop. “Do you see this?” she snapped, throwing her phone across the table at our correspondent, pointing at the lock screen, flooding with fresh alerts every few seconds. “None of these are even group chats. I’ve muted all of those. These are just individual messages.”

“What are they after?” asked our correspondent, who doubles as a local Rote Fahne News correspondent.

“Some translation requests, some writing requests, all of that on top of the people alerting me about meetings and protests I should be attending. I’ve been doing all of this stuff for a couple of years, but the volume over the past few days is pretty exceptional. I’m even getting more thirsty messages from leftist fuckboys lately too, since they approach me at things under the pretext of our shared views on Bolivia or whatever, it’s a lot to have to deal with.”

“They may say all this chaos creates an excellent situation, but if it keeps up like this, I’m going to head up to the Swiss Alps, and join the people’s war against Liechtenstein.”

HONG KONG – Meanwhile, in China, the birthplace of Maoism, the Under Heaven Weather Report Service reports record great levels of chaos:

“I’m embedded in a cell of anarchists here in Hong Kong,” reported our Malaysian correspondent, “and our shared Cantonese heritage means there’s a common vocabulary in more ways than one. They were all born in the ’90s, so the internet raised them more than anyone else. That has its bad dimensions, of course, like the Pepe the Frog shit. But on the other hand, they’re kind of blank slates when it comes to 20th century history. I kid you not, one of these kids thought Tīn Ōn Mùhn was in Korea. So, I’m sneaking in Hùhng Bóu Syū quotes into every conversation I can.

Anyway, that’s all the good news, all the other news is bad. I’m just one person in one neighbourhood who has earned the trust of a few kids who grew up on the internet. And this is no unified movement, even by the standards of a street protest movement. We had to get in between a mob of fascist kids beating up a mainlander, and that’s not a dynamic we’re going to see less of.

Everyone makes a big deal out of the colonial era emergency laws, but the state always has the capacity to move towards fascism to protect the current ruling classes under capitalism. What actually makes the situation here so unique is, like Singapore, it’s such a small space which is so dense with capital and labour, which several imperialist powers have a strong interest in. You never know when some or other bourgeois element is going to overplay their hand, and we’ll all suffer because of it.

Every day I walk out of here with two wolves inside me, one of them is a Marxist-Leninist agitprop worker willing to sacrifice everything for the liberation of the masses, the other is just a wolf trying not to be the first one out here to get shot in the face.

I guess you could say there is great chaos under heaven, and I feel very conflicted about that.

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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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Objectivity Finally Gives Self-Criticism

Following over a century of Marxist criticism directed at its conditions, objectivity, the abstract concept in dialectical opposition to subjectivity, has finally given its self-criticism and seeks rectification through the totality of the process.

“I’ve been sitting out here, thinking myself beyond the intervention of subjectivity, in flagrant revisionism of Marxism-Leninism,” began the abstract concept, with its head bowed under the weight of a massive struggle session hat that all the particular subjectivities had fashioned for it decades ago, inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the collective anger at the “philosophy” of “Objectivism”.

“By neglecting the role of subjectivity in my own process of Becoming, I have held back the process of change as such, in opposition to the philosophical duty imposed by Marx’s 11th Thesis. I pray that all of the subjectivities will forgive my past deviations and unite with me going forward in principled struggle against the conditions I have imposed on them.”

Reaction from certain particular subjective critics of the objective conditions was predictably triumphant. David Harvey, famed for his subjective interventions in the form of building organisations and popular fronts in his native England and his adopted New England, responded to our request for a statement by saying: “Nobody has criticised the objective conditions and objectivity more than me. I hope that objectivity will now embrace subjectivity in practice, therefore making me objectively a subjective agent in practice. Dialectics, innit?”

Other elements of England’s famously undialectical left were less enthused by the development. A Spatula correspondent sat down with an SPGB representative over some chips in curry sauce to hash out the class implications: “We have long cautioned subjectivity against overdetermination by itself, and are saddened to see our longtime ally in this struggle, objectivity, criticise itself, thereby descending into subjective consciousness which can only weaken its own socialist potential. This is bourgeois identity politics for abstract concepts, and is therefore idealist reformism. Down with this state of affairs, world socialism now.”

Reaction from other, more critically critical subjectivities took the opposite tact, with TİKB militants in Istanbul reporting that “fuck that, we never cared about objectivity in the first place. Our own particular subjectivity was always enough for us. Our love for Stalin keeps us warm at night while we’re camped out with the construction workers whom we organise.”

Meanwhile, fellow Turkish ICOR affiliate Bolşevik Parti (Kuzey Kürdistan-Türkiye) released yet another critical statement, this time expressing the only sensible thing anyone in this piece has said thus far:

No one has criticised the objective conditions more than our party, but it is entirely irrelevant whether or not objectivity self-criticises now. The act of self-criticism is itself an act of subjectivity, and objectivity is therefore objectively subjective. Therefore, the only means by which objectivity can meaningfully be rectified is for the proletarian subjectivity in its totality to overturn this order and reshape the objective conditions.

This is objectively true.

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Illegal Turkish Organisation Claims Responsibility for Criticism

İSTANBUL – With thousands in jail for criticising Erdoğan and his ruling clique in Turkey, and the body count across Kurdistan rising every day, every political act is risky business in the region, as all of our readers know.

But, and we cannot stress this strongly enough, nothing is quite as risky as a truly ruthless concrete criticism of all that exists. And the clandestine and illegal Bolşevik Parti (Kuzey Kürdistan-Türkiye) is well-known as the most ruthlessly critical voice of all the not-very-well-known ruthlessly critical voices in Kurdistan and Turkey.

So it came as little surprise this morning when our İstanbul correspondents awoke to text messages confirming that the Bolşevik Parti had claimed responsibility for a devastating string of criticisms delivered by e-mail from a no-longer-functioning e-mail address over the past week to targets ranging from HDP co-chair Sezai Temelli to Boğaziçi University Rector Mehmed Özkan.

Some targets, such as Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım, were shocked to discover their personal e-mail addresses (previously thought hidden from the public) were attacked by the high-level dialectical materialist theory of the rarest and most powerful school of İboculuk. Yıldırım, not accustomed to being made to read complete sentences, let alone Marxist theory, is reportedly in critical condition following the criticism of his conditions.

One target, Celal Şengör, was reportedly criticised so harshly that his head exploded from the realisation of how wrong he had been about Marxist epistemology, a subject about which Şengör had publicly pontificated repeatedly, incorrectly, and worst of all, uncritically in the past. Worker’s Spatula have dispatched a crack team to the morgue in an attempt to intercept Şengör’s organs before it is too late.

Other victims of the string of criticisms included Marxist groups, including fellow İbocu Pınar Aydınlar, whom they described as “a Menshevik songsmith”, Alp Altınörs of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP), for “opportunism” and possession of “an inferior moustache”, fellow obscure publication producers and frenemies KöZ for being “the castle of sectarianism”, the Turkish Labour Party (EMEP), for “dogmatism”, and TÖP, for “not being easy enough for us to criticise”.

No one has been formally charged with any crime in response to the criticisms, but anti-terror police are reported to have swept through Gazi Mahallesi, where they took every man over forty with a Stalin moustache into custody.

At time of press, the count of uncles named “Ali” who had been asked very specific Stefan Engel-related questions in police custody is rumoured to have exceeded 170.

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Fightback Guerrillas Killed in Clashes with RCMP

TORONTO – Canadian sources are reeling at the news of multiple deaths in shoot-outs between Canadian state forces and guerrilla units claimed to be affiliated with the local IMT organisation Fightback, who have apparently gone full Mahir Çayan while no one was paying attention.

At least six guerrillas died in the initial clash with the RCMP, while two of the Mounties are reported dead, apparently killed in an explosion when the guerrillas launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the RCMP vehicle at the beginning of the clash.

A statement released by the “Proletarian Guerrilla Forces”, the group claiming responsibility for the attack, quoted Alan Woods extensively, and stated that the attack was carried out in retaliation for “the colonial authorities suppression of the national will of the Wet’suwet’en people”, and that they intended to “fulfill our vanguard role for the proletariat fighting for the liberation of all oppressed peoples in the prison-house of nations that is Canada”.

The bourgeois settler-colonialist Canadian state aims to keep the Indigenous nationalities in Bantustans, and the only force which can prevent this is the united militant action of the class conscious proletariat of all nationalities. In the final instance, the only means to liberate the oppressed Indigenous peoples of Canada is through proletarian revolution, which will take the form a mass insurrection which will shake the entire Canadian project to its core.

But as we prepare ourselves for the moment when the ruling classes are unable to rule in the old way––in the schools, in the unions, in the streets, everywhere the revolutionary proletariat is to be found––the most advanced sections of the Canadian proletariat must defend the proletariat in the internal colonies by any means necessary. The Canadian state must know this: from now on, their repression of the First Nations peoples will have real consequences.

Despite a denial issued by Fightback of any connection to the “Proletarian Guerrilla Forces”, mass arrests of Fightback-affiliated students and workers took place in the hours following the release of the PGF statement. In general, the arrests took place peacefully, with the Fightback cadres shouting slogans but offering no violent resistance. However, York University witnessed several violent clashes with the police, raising the body count of this week higher still.

One student, upon seeing the police approach her in the library, is reported to have screamed “clear out, clear out!” frantically to the surrounding students, who all ran away looking confused. As the police approached her, she is reported to have screamed “THIS PROBLEM CAN ONLY BE SOLVED BY BLOOD AND IRON!”, before detonating an explosive device which the forensics team have determined was kept in her backpack, taking three police officers with her. Her identity has not been revealed by York University authorities, but she is claimed to be one Shilpa Mudaliyar, a York University Economics PhD student who classmates describe as “prone to quoting Alan Woods”.

Another student, whose identity has also been concealed by York University authorities but who has been widely claimed following release of video of the arrest to be Owen Patrick, a Mathematician and known Fightback cadre at the school, was apprehended on his way home. The stony-faced Trotskyist shouted “WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE” repeatedly and sternly for the entirety of the video until he was forced into the back of a police vehicle. While the student was taken into custody peacefully, police have claimed that a stockpile of weapons was found in his residence.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Alan Woods was taken in for questioning by British authorities. A spokesperson for Mr. Woods has denied all charges of coordinating “terrorist violence”, dismissing the claims as “ludicrous”:

It is not even clear that Fightback itself is concretely linked with the Proletarian Guerrilla Forces, and neither take orders from Alan Woods personally. The fact that the PGF quoted Alan Woods in their statement is proof only of Alan Woods’s continuing popularity as one of the most critical Marxist voices of our time. The Canadian state and its international allies would do well to cease harassing Marxists and instead to come to an agreement with the Indigenous First Nations which would not provoke such unfortunate violence.

Responses from the various Maoist elements around the world has been mostly shock. The RCP-PCR of Canada were the first to issue a response, stating that “we must repeat, as Fightback themselves have stated, that claims of an armed wing of Fightback are nothing more than rumours which the state is exploiting to repress socialist activists, and those repeating them are objectively aiding the state in this campaign”, but that “it is clear from the PGF statement that they are in fact followers of Alan Woods, so, um… that’s unexpected, eh?”

The German MLPD released a rare public letter to a Trotskyite figure, inviting Alan Woods to come to Germany to “discuss those things that you’re definitely not doing”, “which is not to say you can join ICOR, because of the Trot thing, but still, we want to discuss some stuff with you”. Another ICOR affiliate, the Turkish and Kurdish Hoxhaite party MLKP released a statement claiming to have predicted the developments in Canada, stating that “if the revolutionary wave of the 1970s gave the Trots the PRT-ERP in Argentina, then of course today’s wave of revolution would produce Trotskyite militants on the other side of the American continent. We look forward to the PGF following the PRT-ERP’s path of abandoning Trotskyism in the coming months”.

Trots from various non-IMT traditions have all been united in condemning the violence in Canada as “adventurism” that, even if it leads to a revolution, “will probably degenerate anyway”.

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