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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Sandwich Theory

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

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

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

Is a hot dog a sandwich?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is an Onigiri a sandwich?

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

You’ve been called out, onigiri-haters.

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

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

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

Is a pie a sandwich?

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

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

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

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

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

It is, however, arguably very erotic.

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

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

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

A Pop-Tart is a sandwich.

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

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

A cheese and tomato sandwich.

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

Sandwich workers and oppressed
sandwiches of the world, unite!

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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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Humourless Marxist Reviews: lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to

Other than the fact that it’s music which you’re listening to right now, there’s another reason why Worker’s Spatula had to review “lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to”: the PKK are behind this channel.

Oh yes, the PKK. The Workers’ Party of Kurdistan, whose leader and chief theoretician is Abdullah Öcalan. That PKK.

Öcalan determined that the PKK needed to operate a lo-fi chill beats radio channel on YouTube years ago while smoking on some particularly potent ganja and thinking about how the patriarchy is the basis for stratification, exploitation, and oppression in human society. His vision was clear: a channel with some of the chillest beats for the oppressed woman who is struggling to bring down the capitalist man-state to relax to after a mission.

The channel was also designed to serve as a soundtrack for revolutionary women studying or producing theoretical works directed at undermining capitalist modernity, as depicted in the channel’s video pane in the format of an anime. While Worker’s Spatula continue to advocate a boycott of all animes produced in Japan, as the anime factories exploit the labour of Zainichi Koreans, the victims of Japanese imperialism, and profits from all animes fund the joint Japanese-Yankee occupation of Okinawa, we are assured by our Kurdish friends that the heroic young woman in this PKK propaganda channel’s video pane was drawn by guerrillas in Rojava.

Dank.

The beats themselves are very relaxing and good for controlling the anxiety which all of us experience, suffering as we do from the trauma of capitalism-imperialism, the undemocratic civilisation. Many of them have elements of traditional Japanese music over lo-fi beats, despite having been produced in Diyarbekir. Others contain samples of classic jazz and hip-hop, television clips, and the sounds of ululating Kurdish guerrilla women firing Kalashnikovs into the air as they defy the man-state in all its forms.

In addition to the anarchists who already listen to this channel when they’re high on marijuanas (as far as we understand, this is their usual state), we would also recommend this channel to the cadres of the THKP-C/MLSPB, who really need to chill the fuck out.

Best songs: “Sunday Vibes” by wünsche, “I fall in love too easily” by StackOne, “Tola Salan”

Worst song: “Piano Man” by Billy Joel

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Japanese Communist Party Entering its Avant-Garde Phase

OSAKA – Having long since abandoned any pretence of being a Leninist vanguard communist party, the Japanese Communist Party is now apparently experimenting with being an avant-garde communist party.

“work                            ers POLITICAL. political lacitilop L A B O U R ¿ J a           pan;;;;              elect      ion,” explained Kazuo Shii [No relation. –WS Editor in Chief] in the form of a poem recited in the place of a speech at a recent rally in Osaka, performed over a soundtrack of atonal guitar playing. “WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR!”

“Peace.” he concluded.

Michiro Endo, best known as vocalist for the seminal Japanese punk act ‘The Stalin’, hailed the change in presentation by the Eurocommunist party: “I’ve been saying for years that the party needs to rebrand itself in a bid to reach more people outside the traditional sites of industrial labour organising, and I’ve also for years endorsed the mentality reflected in their new slogan: ‘Humanity is naked with naughty bits a-floppin’, we are the communists, we won’t be stoppin’.”

Yasuko Onuki, of Melt-Banana fame, also expressed her hope that members of the Japanese punk scene would embrace the creative new direction of the JCP, and was enthusiastic about the idea of personally getting involved in helping to build the rejuvenated party: “I will play benefit concerts for them, just as long as I don’t have to shake hands with any of their friends from the CPUSA. There is not enough hand sanitiser in the world for me to do that.”

The Zainichi Korean community loyal to the Workers’ Party of Korea remains suspicious of the JCP. Although a recent protest was carried out “in support of the DPRK’s right to self defence”, our correspondent in Osaka found that most local Zainichi Koreans suspect this was done sarcastically, particularly after the protesters joined together in a song whose lyrics called on the DPRK to nuke Tokyo, Posadas style.

“This is Japan, you know?” explained Ms. Kim, head of a local youth organisation for Zainichi Koreans, “Even the communists talk about ‘Japanese sovereignty’ and refuse to acknowledge that Japan is still an imperialist country. We’re not hopeful that they’ll come to their senses.”

On the other end of the national question spectrum, there are the Ryukyu republicans, who have historically been warm to the JCP’s stance on the US military presence in Okinawa. However, the turn to the surreal has cost the party dearly, as an earnest march against the military presence was interrupted by local JCP cadres throwing noodles in every direction and screaming “LENIN WAS TAIWANESE! LENIN WAS TAIWANESE!” in the faces of the protestors, in what the JCP later described as “a biting satire about colonialism in the Asia-Pacific region”.

In response to this shocking turn of events, various Trotskyist groups around the world have released statements by their sister organisations in Japan who are literally better known in English language Trotskyist publications than they are in Japan itself. The Japanese people remain blissfully ignorant of the continued existence of Trotskyism.

Humourless Marxist Reviews: Pokémon Go

Pokémon, the popular Japanese game about monsters fighting each other is now coming to the iPhone, which is just a collection of words that make me, as one of the geriatric members of the central committee of the CPUSA, extremely uncomfortable. “Popular”? “Japanese”? “Fighting”? “iPhone”? Count me out!

Back in my day, when we wanted entertainment, we went outside and played in the sun, like real proletarians, but now all kids want to do is sit inside and play videogames. As long as things like Pokémon Go are around, our young people will never have the energy for the sort of revolutionary work demanded by the CPUSA!

The only Japanese thing that young people should be getting into is our sister party in Japan, the Japanese Communist Party. They’ve run lots of successful electoral campaigns and maintain a firm line against the TPP. That’s what young people should be excited about. That’s what’s really kawaii.

But no, young people want to spend their hard-earned money on the goddamned Pokémon. Don’t they realise they’re just making giant multinational corporations rich? Don’t they see they’re wasting their precious lives when they could be joining in with me and making revolution? Well, this is what happens when the social programmes get slashed, I guess.

The other day I heard my granddaughter talking about her Charmimello and its “evolutions”. What about “revolutions”, huh, Julie? Huh?

Remember when you used to hang out with Grandpa, and we’d go fishing together, and I explained to you about dialectical materialism? How come Grandpa’s not a priority now that you’ve got your fucking Japanese toys?

Young people need to put down the Pokémon Go and start thinking seriously about the future of our world. Corporations like the ones that make your precious Pokémon are destroying the world for their profits, and then where are you gonna live?

It’s the world we must defend.

Workers’ Party of Korea Regret Not Corresponding with Bookchin

PYONGYANG – Behind-the-scenes sources from the 7th congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea report that the party is far more interested in sub-state developments in anti-imperialist trends than previously thought. It seems that many members of the party have been feverishly discussing for days the popularity of the Kurdish liberation movement led by Abdullah Öcalan in light of their stunning victories in Rojava.

“Why didn’t we correspond with Bookchin? Then North Korea could have actual defenders in fashionable left circles around the world, instead of just the CPGB-ML,” said Hwang Pyong-so.

“Oh, and the RCPB-ML. HOW COULD WE POSSIBLY FORGET THEM?”

“These solidarity missions to Rojava really upset us, why can’t ICOR try and ‘break the siege’ on North Korea? We’re only up against the fucking UN!” seethed Kim Yo-jong as she paced back and forth before a Worker’s Spatula correspondent as he furiously scribbled notes.

“But it’s our fault, we cut ourselves off from developments on the ground in imperialist countries, and now we’re losing out. Other than that, we’re pretty much the same as the PYD: We both abandoned historical materialism and the Marxist method in favour of a basically anti-imperialist vague socialist model, we both have our catchy name for it: Juche and Democratic Confederalism.

“We tried sending a delegation to Qamişlo to get advice. The Kurds promised to introduce us to their people in Berlin in exchange for mountains of aid. Again, being embargoed by the UN here.”

Sources report that Kim Jong-un is still optimistic. “It’s not too late. We have a lot of people in Japan. We can turn Tokyo into our Berlin,” he is reported to have told a close confidant.

“Oh, who am I kidding? It’s back to waiting for the economic crisis in the south to deepen.”