Stefan Engel Discovers Christmas

THÜRINGEN, GERMANY – Notable big shot ICOR guy and Maoist theoretician Stefan Engel has ordered all MLPD cadre to meet him in his beloved Thüringen to make “the biggest announcement in German history”.

Upon arrival at the press conference, MLPD cadre and local press (including Worker’s Spatula correspondents from across the German-speaking world) found that Stefan Engel was not alone at the podium, but was flanked by pop singer Mariah Carey:

“Christmas is magic. It’s so festive and joyous. Nothing else really matters,” explained Worker’s Spatula’s favourite German, giddy as a schoolboy, to the confused stares of all present.

“Ever since Stefan first heard my song, ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’, earlier this week, he’s been texting and e-mailing and demanding I come to Germany to meet with him and spread the good word. I don’t know too much about this Maoism stuff, but it seems pretty close to my politics, and I’m happy as long as my music is bringing happiness to people, especially if it’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is You,” explained Carey.

“From now on, I want the MLPD to cease all operations not related to Christmas, Mariah Carey, or Tetsurō Watsuji from December 24th until New Year’s Day, every year,” explained a suddenly dour-faced Engel.

Sources present at the conference agreed this was the biggest Christmas song-related event in communist news ever since the IMCWP commemorated the death of their fallen comrade, George Michael.

“We Germans don’t really know very much about Christmas, in spite of our strong opinions on Jesus, which in part may explain our reactionary national Spirit,” explained Engel to his followers, who were furiously scribbling notes to a background soundtrack of Mariah Carey’s hit song. “We don’t have any songs or traditions related to the birth of Jesus, who the German state informs us is our official Lord and Saviour, but who we only celebrate through the academic study of Luther, Bonhoeffer, or Hegel if we’re lucky enough to live in a Protestant area.

“In my own native Bavaria, on the other hand, I had never even heard of Christmas as a child. This, like most elements of Bavarian culture, is tantamount to child abuse, and I don’t want the next generation to grow up without knowing how wonderful Christmas is, and, oh wait, shut up, here it comes!” exclaimed Engel, jumping up and down, barely able to contain his joy as the bridge began:

Oh, all the lights are shining so brightly everywhere
And the sound of children’s laughter fills the air
And everyone is singing, I hear those sleigh bells ringing
Santa, won’t you bring me the one I really need?

Sources present at the conference could not confirm if the one who Engel “really need”s is in fact Joseph Stalin.

The IMT’s local German affiliate “der Funke” have released a press release following their “Marxmas” merchandising push noting that the IMT and all its affiliates had long been aware of the joy and magic of Christmas, and had been working hard to raise awareness of the holiday and its festive spirit among the Germans long before Stefan Engel’s announcement:

In fact, while we have not been partisans of Christmas for our entire history, having not had a clear pro-Christmas line upon our formation in 1992, Ted Grant and Alan Woods both met with Mariah Carey personally in 1994 to learn all about Christmas and the laughter of children while the Stalinists ignored Carey and indeed condemned her as a representative of US imperialism.

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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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Sparts Need Attention Again

LONDON – The Spartacist League of Britain, the Trotskyite sect that everybody loves to hate, feel that they haven’t united the entire global left in condemnation of them enough lately, and have decided to weigh in on what they call “the so-called ‘Coronavirus'”.

Claiming that COVID-19 “is obviously not real”, the purposefully provocative piece in Workers Hammer cast doubt on almost every single claim since the outbreak, laying out an elaborate conspiracy by which China have agreed to go along with the conspiracy in exchange for an increase in USAID, Korea being fooled by reports from China and the puppet regime in the occupied south of the country, and various sections of the US ruling classes, who of course are pulling all the strings, are variously lying or telling the truth about what they do or don’t know, and to make a long story short, Herman Cain was assassinated because he learned the truth.

No word on why the lone truth-tellers of Workers Hammer don’t fear being targeted for their usual bravery in being the only ones to say whatever nonsense pops into their deluded Trotskyite heads.

The Sparts none the less emphasise their “critical support” for the “fake virus” on the grounds that this particular hoax “has none the less exposed deep contradictions in the ruling classes and is plunging capital into ever greater depths of crisis”, out of which “the revolutionary vanguard represented by the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) can finally organise the working class for our long-planned first Trotskyist revolution”.

Trump’s “alleged” infection in particular is being held up as proof that the virus “cannot be genuine”, and therefore as a “warning to all of our many readers about the limitations in putting too much faith in fake bourgeois viruses to effect revolutionary change that only the working class can deliver”, on the grounds that “despite promises, this reformist ‘virus’ didn’t even kill the President of the United States”, a task which can only be completed “by a virus designed and spread by the class-conscious proletariat of the United States, organised and agitated under the leadership of our sister organisation and known virus experts, the Spartacist League of the US”.

As the entire world is rocked with the release of every single statement by any Trotskyite organisation, it comes as no surprise that responses were swift. Rivals in Trotskyism, the IMT, have released a statement of their own which the Sparts, for their part, have preemptively refused to read “as social distancing prevents us from using it as an excuse to show up and ruin one of their events”.

In said statement released on marxist.com and reprinted on all the other various similarly named IMT sources, it was emphasised that with over a million deaths worldwide COVID-19 need “do anything more to separate itself out from demonstrably false bourgeois propaganda, like Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, or ‘the Big Bang’.”

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Worker’s Spatula New Year’s Message and Self-Criticism

MUMBAI – The video message begins with a shot of the Antilia, which is suddenly consumed in a fiery explosion. As the smoke clears, a small gathering of masked figures approach the camera bearing spatulas, weapons, and sheets of paper with statements on them to be read, as is our New Year’s tradition. One of the comrades begins to read:

“Hear ye, o ye Workers and Oppressed of the World! Verily, ’tis us, the Worker’s Spatula! The Year of our LORD Two Thousand and Nineteen is at an End, and the Two Thousand and Twentieth bears upon us! Tremble, Revisionist and Reactionary alike!”

A second explosion rocks the background of the video, causing one of our number to drop their spatula and cry aloud: “God’s Wounds!”

“As can plainly be seen, we have ended this most atrocious of Years with some Fireworks of our own: we have destroyed the Antilia Building as an Act of Armed Propaganda against the reactionary Indian Bourgeoisie, and also because the Idea of castrating a bourgeois Phallus-Building with Fire seems so very much on Brand for us. A Pox and a Curse upon thee, Mukesh Ambani, thou Dog!”

A second spokesperson leans closer to the camera to interject:

“In case ye had not surmised, we have found our own Manner of Speech in 2019 altogether too accessible, now that all the Reds, and not just the Spatula–Vanguard of the Vanguard of the Vanguard of the World Revolution–are hailing their detested Foes with ‘Scoundrels’ and the Like. In Consequence, we have elected to affect even more archaic Forms of English going forward. Expect us to transform ourselves into communist Bēowulf by 2025.”

“Yeah motherfuckers!”, adds the Yank.

This latest Attack on the Class Enemy here in India is Naught but the Culmination of a Year of the most intensive practical Work: from Melbourne to Massachusetts, from Ankara to Edinburgh, from Brooklyn to Berlin, from Kerala to Caracas, our Forces have been thoroughgoing in all Efforts on Fronts both legal and illegal: we tire not, for we are on Cocaine.

Because we are so tireless and thoroughgoing and united and so forth, one might venture to ask, “Worker’s Spatula, have you no Self-Criticisms for us at the end of this Year?” That we have, o Comrades. That we most certainly fucking have.

Foremost in our Minds, we must Self-criticise for the flagrant Racism we have displayed towards the Italian People on Twitter dot com. This offensive Jesting and Japery is beneath such a serious Platform as Worker’s Spatula, who stand against all Manner of Chauvinism, particularly that towards the most oppressed of all Peoples: the Italians.

Not only is this Racism counter to our Ideology, it has impaired our heroic Practice: has even one Italian joined our heroic Guerrilla front in the Alpine Peaks against that most reactionary State Entity of Liechtenstein? We answer, nay! We have undermined the Sisterhood of the Peoples! Alienated the Italians from our midst with our Racism most foul! In Order that this Slight might be forgotten by the noble Italian Folk, we ask that our Readers refrain from any Repartee based upon our Joke that the Marxist-Leninist Theoretician Gramsci was an Italian. Let this humorous Lie ne’er yet be repeated, lest the Italians take Offence!

At this juncture, the Yank produces a banner which reads “Prisencólinensináinciúsol!” and waves it around.

Having brought up Liechtenstein, we pray that our Work in 2020 might result in more fruitful Struggle in the Microstates of the World: though Liechtenstein yet stands strong against our Assault, we will open up a new front of Guerrilla Struggle alongside the Italians we expect to flock to our Ranks against San Marino, and the Vatican, now an ally of Chinese Imperialism, has for too long escaped our Wrath!

Not content with stretching our Alpine Forces so thin, we are amassing Forces for yet more Microstate-based Fronts:

• to bring down the Stormont Regime in the Isle of Man, and finally liberate the Island such that Women may walk freely upon its long-forbidden Soil!
• to unite with the Cape Cod Faction of the PKK to establish a new Canton for Rojava in Massachusetts!
• and at long last to bring down the bourgeois Conch Republic to usher in a red Dawn on the People’s Republic of the Conch!

Let our Struggle in these shitty wee Lands inspire all of our Readers near and far to Action in their own social Contexts, or to join us in these Battles in the Flesh!

At this juncture, a South Asian Comrade raises a banner with the unmistakeable visage of Chairman Mao, causing one of the Turks to grimace and reluctantly take hold of one of the sheets of paper and begin reading:

I’m not doing the weird dialect stuff. So our Central Committee used to all be pro-Enver Hoxha against the Maoists, right? Well the Maoists talked their way in. Our Central Committee now consists both of partisans of Enver Hoxha and Maoist elements who reject the revisionist Theory of the Three Worlds and generally otherwise hold to similar positions as the old Central Committee. We’ve always been against excessive criticism of the Maoists in spite of our disagreements, so… this is the logical continuation of that, I suppose.

Our Central Committee, as you can see, represents diverse oppressed identities and is now a clear minority of men. This will be hopefully reflected in even more militancy on gender, sexuality, and disabled issues.

A comrade in a wheelchair unfurls a banner reading “cripples of the world, rejoice!”, before the Turkish Hoxhaite continues reading.

Now that we have so deeply penetrated the South Asian communist left, we expect to be read regularly by as much as 0.1% of the communist population of the subcontinent, which is to say, 30,000 people, almost all Hill Country Tamils and irony-poisoned Malayalams. In other words, more South Asians read Worker’s Spatula than read all Trotskyite publications from the subcontinent combined since the IMT lost Pakistan.

Whoops, we hurt the IMT’s feelings before 2020 even started. Our bad.

We’re going to have more of the Bad Leftist Poetry too, that seems like it has some promise, as a bit.

Anyway, other than that, it’s all pretty much what you’d expect. We’re going to keep being the best and most sincere Marxist-Leninist platform on social media while also being the worst and most irony-poisoned, because #Dialectics.

As the sound of sirens grows in the distance, the masked figures raise their fists as Stalinistly as humanly possible and scream in unison: “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!” before scattering into the crowded Mumbai streets.

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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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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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Frente de Izquierda Caught Buying Argentine Trotskyism

BUENOS AIRES – Following news that Jacobin have been buying followers for their publication through online identity theft, related sections of the international Marxist left are being exposed for these same duplicitous dealings.

“Everyone knows that we in El Militante have the finest of Trotskyisms, with the most brutal analysis and the best international connections,” explained Dario Romano, a local representative of the IMT affiliate in Buenos Aires. “How could anyone pass by our top quality Marxist publication and settle for the petty bourgeois opportunism of el Frente de Izquierda, much less in the apparently large numbers which they are? Only one possible explanation exists: Jacobin are buying them followers.”

The accusation, as shocking as it seemed, was not spurious. The IMT representative produced pages of transcripts of interviews with non-Marxist Argentines who couldn’t even identify which kind of Marxist was angry about which international and why:

“I woke up this morning and found all these posts by el FIT in my Facebook timeline,” explained one bank teller from Córdoba in the transcript our local correspondent read: “I couldn’t figure out why at all. I don’t particularly care about politics, and I don’t come from an especially left-wing family. It looks like I got added by an algorithm because of a post I wrote complaining about banking bureaucracy at my job. You can’t complain about that without mentioning ‘banks’ and ‘bureaucrats’ about a dozen times each, and apparently those are words that Trotskyites use a lot?”

Even quite explicitly right-wing individuals were found to have been remotely linked into el FIT’s social media presence due to their own peripherally related activity:

“I liked a page named ‘Venezuela is a Fascist State’, and next thing I know I’m getting updates and e-mails from el FIT,” complained one reactionary from Neuquén: “Trotkyites, Maoists, Chavists, I don’t care what kind of Castroist you are, just go back to Bolivia where you came from.”

“You see what I mean?” explained Romano to our local correspondent, “There’s simply no way these traitors to the Fourth International deserve their apparent popularity. People should love El Militante. We are like a fine Malbec of Trotskyism that even a Stalinist like yourself can appreciate once in a while, whereas el FIT are some cheap box wine that Macri is trying to get people liquored up on, I’m not sure, it’s not a perfect analogy, but this is some bullshit.”

“No question,” agreed our correspondent, “We’ll be sure to report to the outside world that el FIT is not as popular as people think, and that the real tribune of the Argentine masses is el Partido del Trabajo y del Pueblo.”

“Whatever, as long as Jacobin is exposed,” sighed Romano. “Would you like to buy a copy of El Militante?”

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News in Brief: July 15th 2017

THE INTERNET – Some years after Tumblr stopped being even a vague cultural influence on left-wing politics and well into the division of its former users into those who are engaged in quite broad front practical politics and those who have retreated from politics entirely, Marxist-Leninists on the internet remain convinced of the importance of fighting “SJWs” who are supposedly to be seen at every protest telling white male workers to “check their privilege”.

“Identity politics is dividing the working class,” explained a white man in an imperialist country to his internet audience of other white men in imperialist countries. “How does anyone expect to win over the working class when they talk about gay people and racism all the time?” referring to the all-white, all-male class which he has been extremely successful in winning over, unlike those horrific SJWs.

ST. PETERSBURG – Russian communists are trying to piece together what exactly the US government is accused of doing with the Russian state.

“So… the ‘resistance’ in the US refers to those people who feel the US state is not fighting hard enough for global hegemony?” asked local Враг Капитала reader Vladimir Semyonovich.

“I’m for revolutionary defeatism without exception,” protested Russian Maoist Party member Anna Mikhailovna, “so I don’t want Russian capital interests defended in Washington DC. But is there no one in the US who feel that the interests of capital in Washington DC should not be judged based on their Russianness?”

NEW YORK – ROL infiltration of the DSA is reportedly well underway, with the DSA already embracing national liberation for Afro-Americans and sending off martyrs to die in ICOR-approved armed struggle. Boston-based analysts expect the DSA to be a complete ROL front by 2019, right around the time the Democratic Party officially embraces the Three Worlds Theory as its lone “concession” to “the left”.

ANKARA – Worker’s Spatula correspondents are nervously considering whether or not to publish a story about Erdoğan condemning the French for celebrating Bastille Day, as he might do.

“Like, the joke is about how the Marxist tradition appropriates the French Revolution, and how Erdoğan is an arch-reactionary, and that,” explained [REDACTED 1] to her comrade during a Worker’s Spatula meeting.

“Right, but, even making a joke these days in Turkey makes you wonder,” replied [REDACTED 2]. “Erdoğan could easily say that the storming of the Bastille inspired the July 15th Coup Attempt, and…”

“Yeah…”

“Yeah…”