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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Max Zirngast Returns to Austria

VIENNA, GOD HELP US ALL – Max Zirngast, the stoic and persecuted leader of the Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab revolutions, the Karl Marx of our time, the German-speaking socialist with the greatest amassed personal wealth since Friedrich Engels, the Lenin in the streets, Stalin in the sheets of the Alps, has made good on his threat to return to his trash homeland to discuss pressing issues related to the international revolutionary movement.

But Worker’s Spatula have helpfully intervened and revealed lurid details of his sex life to the Austrian bourgeois press, so that’s all anyone’s asking him about.

[CW: fuckin’]

Oh yeah, baby. You knew you could count on Worker’s Spatula to subvert a potentially helpful discussion about the connection between EU imperialism’s decay and the slide to fascism and the manifold contradictions in Foşik TC––a discussion about refugee policy (such as the “guest” policy of the AKP-MHP regime which allows the state to change policy towards the Syrians on a whim and its connection to the EU’s internal “open borders” and fierce external borders; which naturally connects to the spectre of Islamism raised by EU regimes who themselves support the most retrograde and violent Islamists through the Turkish state’s regional policies); a discussion about the ongoing global economic crisis (and the connections between austerity in EU states and the ongoing semi-colonial super-exploitation in Turkey and Kurdistan in particular); a discussion about militarism and imperialist warmongering––with lurid sex talk.

Sorry Max, we respect you a great deal as an internationalist, as a socialist, as a theorist, but the people want to know about your sex life.

Having leaked juicy details of freaky late night Ankara orgies to the Austrian press, Max Zirngast was swamped at the airport by a veritable detachment of reporters eager to know if the rumours of his considerable size and stamina were true, if he “swings both ways” and if he’s “into bears”, and if he indeed had experience arranging multiple considerate and capable man lovers for socialist women for a night of critical passion, and if so, if he charged for such services if the women in question were Austrian reporters with no particular political commitments.

“You know, I talked to a lot of Syrian refugee children in Ankara, and basically, these kids are not even being sent to school. This should be of particular interest to people here in the EU, given Erdoğan’s use of the refugees as a negotiating chip with the EU. If you would just…” Zirngast attempted to articulate, before being cut off by a woman who had spent all night downing shots with two Spatula correspondents and giggling about Zirngast’s performance in the bedroom:

“Do Turkish women care about the fact that you’re not circumcised, Max?” ejaculated the reporter, still visibly drunk, pointing the microphone towards the ground.

“Max, can you teach me your ways?” asked a young Austrian man interning for a bourgeois press outlet who asked that we not print their name.

“If you mean, can I teach you about Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Absolutely. Basically the idea is that, as capitalism develops, it penetrates different markets…”

“I BET IT DOES!” shouted another reporter, causing the entire assembled press corps to fill the airport arrival hall with laughter so loud that it drowned out a bomb threat warning.

“Really?” asked a confounded Zirngast. “This is your best and brightest, Austria? This is your journalistic integrity?

I had more intellectually serious discussions in Turkish prison, and I was at one point trapped in a cell with an ISIS militant. People are dying. The environment is rapidly being destroyed to a point where we might not be able to inhabit it. Turkish people are fighting for their most basic democratic rights while they’re being torn from our hands step by step in Europe. This system is not sustainable, and its consequences are quite serious for each and every one of us.

I’m not trying to overstate my importance here, but I’m coming to you with an insider’s perspective on a society you’ve all been concerned with, even if for selfish reasons, for decades. I’m here to explain to you what stands in the way of these people’s liberation, and what we can learn from it about our own common future.

I’m trying to offer a different, frankly optimistic, perspective in what appears at first glance to be hopeless times. This has value both in terms of journalism and in terms of its policy implications, and if you look at all of this philosophically, it has implications for the direction of human history.

And all you want to talk about is my penis?

Silence fell over the crowd for a full thirty seconds. The assembled press workers turned red and stared at their nervously shuffling feet, until one young Austrian woman of Turkish background looked up, eyes bright with realisation:

“He’s right, lift up your shirt so we can see those prison abs!”

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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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Humourless Marxist Reviews: If Beale Street Could Talk

“If Beale Street Could Talk” is the latest film from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s straight accomplice from “Moonlight”, Barry Jenkins. The film is based on a novel of the same name by James Baldwin, continuing Barry Jenkins’s artistic love affair with gay men.

What is the film about, you ask? Quite simply, it’s about the same thing that everything is essentially about: structural violence against the oppressed.

Whether it’s the patriarchal behaviour of even the most apparently well-intentioned men in the film, or the constantly simmering racist dynamics which define the relationship between the Black characters and the dominating white society which oppresses them, this film contains many examples of what every film contains many examples of: reminders that the world is harshly––indeed, violently––oppressive in a manner that can only be explained by the fundamental structures through which it is defined.

Things in the film which are examples of structural violence against the oppressed include: religion, marriage, gender, sexuality, capitalism, jobs, and of course: the state. All of these things strongly resemble prisons, which incidentally are also depicted in the film. Several of these structurally oppressive things are depicted in a particular concrete act of violence, which can only serve to remind us of the abstract universality of violence under the oppressive structures which are our collective lived experience.

The structural violence which victimises the characters played by Stephen James (who strips down for the camera) and Brian Tyree Henry (who tragically does not strip down for the camera, even though he looks like a real snack as always) also plunges them into a dynamic in which they indirectly enact violence against each other, reinforcing their mutual oppression seemingly inescapably, because the violence is structural.

Also at several points in the film characters explicitly mention that they are oppressed by violent structures in the manner alluded to above. KiKi Layne, who does a stellar job in portraying the hero, Trish, is stellar partially because she is the actor who narrated the film and therefore gets to do this the most often.

If you were to ask us which film this most reminded our team of reviewers of, we would have to say “any other film about structural violence”, which is to say, all of the films.

We would like to congratulate the entire cast and crew, but especially director Barry Jenkins, for reminding us all of the structural violence against the oppressed which everything else that exists reminds us of, either because it is a concrete instance of structural violence, or because it is another artistic depiction of structural violence, or because artistic depictions are themselves an act of structural violence.

The world is a carnival of pain and oppression.

Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite.

Honestly the film was good and you should see it, as well as read the literary works of James Baldwin, an artistic treasure of the heroic Afro-American people, who still hope and fight for freedom to this day, as they did in Baldwin’s day.

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Sources Confirm: Australia Still the Fucking Worst

MELBOURNE – The Australian federal election, as is now known, was a moderate success for the Australian Labor Party [sic], who were able to win a fair number of seats from the Liberal–National Coalition, whose politics Labor [sic] assure us are quite different to theirs.

Days on, however, the votes continue to be counted, mostly due to the laziness of the Australian vote counters, who are all of course white Australians, unlike the industrious non-white immigrants who could’ve counted all the votes within an hour and still had the energy to take on a pack of white Australian fascists in a street fight.

It seems likely, however, that Turnbull and his Coalition will maintain power, in spite of the loss of seats. They will simply need to enter into a coalition with those stupid “parties” that Australians like that consist of only a single seat occupied by the person whose name is even part of the bloody party name.

Additionally, it is worth noting that the Australian Greens achieved the monumental victory of maintaining all of their seats.

Many sources say that regardless of how a government is formed, the election confirms longtime suspicions that Australia is “the worst” and “full of fucking knobs”. An e-mail to Malcolm Turnbull requesting confirmation or denial of these allegations was responded to thus:

Dear Worker’s Spatula,

While the Honourable Malcolm Turnbull regrets that he cannot personally respond to every enquiry which is sent in to the office, it is the general view of those of us who work in his office that his election in the first place does signal a particularly high level of knobishness on the part of the Australian electorate, and indeed may serve as evidence that Australia is just the fucking worst.

Best regards,
The office of Malcolm Bligh Turnbull

PS: Yes, his middle name is fucking Bligh. More like “blight” if you ask us.

Unfortunately, on the ground information from our Australia correspondent was scarce as just before the election she was deported from Southeast Asia’s least favourite island. A stamp on her passport reading “fuck off, we’re full” has made her legal re-entry an impossibility, and therefore our brave correspondent spent much of the past few days attempting to sneak into the country. She was, however, able to provide us with the following responses of local Marxist-Leninists to the election:

The Communist Party of Australia assures us that the Australian masses are now aware of the dead end represented both by Labor [sic] and the Coalition, and that they plan to stand in the next elections, where they will undoubtedly be very successful.

The Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), for its part, has condemned the revisionist CPA for this strategy, which fails to take into account Australia’s status as a semi-colony of US imperialism, a unique analysis which has won the CPA(ML) many supporters among the Australian masses, who are preparing for people’s war even as you read this, drinking something other than VB, like some sort of fancy English cunt. You think you’re too good for us, eh?

As of press time, our correspondent had snuck back into Australia using her cleverly chosen light skin, and had begun grilling a celebratory bream on the barbie.

FRSO Unites with Socialist Alternative

CHICAGO – In a monumental blow to the sectarianism which plagues the left in general and the US left in particular, the FRSO (the Belgian one, not the hipster one) and Socialist Alternative have announced the conclusion of their unity talks. As of now, the two organisations have united under the common banner of the Permanent Revolution Front (Marxist-Leninist).

The new organisation intends to participate both in the International Communist Seminar and the Committee for a Workers’ International, as a symbol of uniting the international communist movement against Stalinist degeneracy, and also in defence of actually existing socialism, if only socialism had ever actually existed.

The new organisation’s points of unity include:

-Support for the social democrat Bernie Sanders against his own degenerate line of support for Clinton and the Democratic Party

-Critical support of Afro-Americans getting angry at the police

-Approval of the colour red

The new organisation could not agree whether to end the statement with “workers of the world, unite” or “workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite”, and thus compromised with “peoples of the work, unite”.

The organisation is expected to split a few hours after press time.