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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Charles Mingus is the Rosa Luxemburg of Jazz

As all of our neighbours in Vienna are aware by now, we at Worker’s Spatula headquarters have replaced the traditional Turkish method of waking our comrades for sahur with a davulcu [drummer] with the more innovative method of waking our comrades and half the neighbourhood with loud 20th century Afro-American music.

No, you shut the fuck up, Laurenz. It’s Ramadan. We need to get our sahur in before a busy day of communism with nothing to eat or drink.

Some of the songs have been purely inspirational, such as “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” by Nina Simone, who famously defecated on a microphone. Others, such as Public Enemy’s “Can’t Truss It”, have focused on burning questions such as the veracity of bourgeois imperialist propaganda, or “fake news”, as settler-colonial White AmeriKKKa refers to it.

We are, however, moving into a more theoretical phase of Ramadan as we draw ever closer to Laylat al-Qadr, and thus this morning we woke up to the rousing sound of Charles Mingus’s “Moanin'”.

Some of you may wonder what Charles Mingus’s swinging sound has to do with Marxist theory. To that we say: Rosa Luxemburg.

Yes, Mingus intended his career as a composer of great jazz as an allegorical polemic against both spontaneist and commandist deviations in Marxist political practice. We all know how Mingus was eager to take part in the movement to develop jazz composition to a higher level, and took active part in workshops geared towards this goal. However, being a Ryan Gosling-level dialectician, Mingus was quickly disenchanted with the formalist errors of his fellow jazz composers, who rejected any allowance for improvisation in their sheet music. Mingus, on the other hand, understood perfectly well that the dialectic between performer and composer is as central to jazz as it is to the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism.

Among Mingus’s most famous outbursts, scarcely less famous than “Itzhak Perlman doesn’t have to put up with this type of shit!”, is the time he stormed out of a workshop and berated his “Trotskyite” colleagues for “imposing vulgar commandism on the revolutionary jazz masses”.

Ever since then, pieces like “Moanin'” haven proven through their numerous recordings and performances by diverse artists Mingus’s ability to compose great jazz of a complex and universal nature, allowing for the dynamic subjectivity of diverse performers in their particular material contexts, without deviating into the Kautskyite spontaneism which characterises that most revisionist of all jazz styles, free jazz.

We hope all comrades have enjoyed this brief lecture on the theoretical importance of Charles Mingus. For our comrades in Vienna, tomorrow’s sahur music and lecture will also centre on the dynamics of the social movement, as expressed in “Stand Up” by Ludacris.

Image source: FablesOfFabus on imgur, captioning Mingus on getting evicted, full quote: “I hope that uh… the communists blow you people up, man. You dig? That’s where I am. Red China.”

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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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