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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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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Varoufakis Back on His Bullshit

Yanis Varoufakis, the most famous veteran of the Syriza debacle, has taken a break from his prolific career as a male model to smugly host the 2020 Summit of the Progressive International, taking place, as everything else does lately, over Zoom and broadcast on YouTube.

Varoufakis, who dominated far too much of the Summit’s time with his self-important bullshit, spoke at great length about the importance of reforming capitalism maximally on its own terms, at a time when those terms are about to plunge us all into a global climate crisis the likes of which have yet to be seen.

Not content merely to take up so much of the actual audio and video time, he made sure that his pitiful, washed-up and frankly no longer relevant self was centred in discussion of the Summit in other news sources, even including extensive quotes from his prepared speech under that which he was expected to say.

Due to the Spatula’s perpetual commitment to combatting even the ghost of Nikita Khrushchev, Varoufakis’s hair-twin, we would remiss if we did not note that in a flagrant revisionism of class struggle, Varoufakis called for the problem of exploitation of workers to be addressed by converting each capitalist enterprise into “a corporation of all classes”.

Varoufakis also informed us that he personally does not shop on Amazon, and buys lots of fair trade coffee, or something.

The absolute highlight of the dismal Varoufakis Show where most of his guests were likewise held back by Keynesian cowardice from saying a single fucking thing of substance, was the appearance of Nick Estes, who is absolutely killing it on Twitter lately. In addition to a greatly Marxist call for land back to the Indigenous and a [planned?] economy for people and other such dank nugs, Estes heroically caused the one moment of tension by using the dreaded “s-word” which Varoufakis had clearly forbidden all guests from using.

“The name of the system we need to construct is socialism.” said Nick Estes, leaning forward for emphasis and staring into the camera. “Socialism. Socialism. Socialism.”

Varoufakis scrambled to regain control of the situation, lest he have to lose any sponsors for this unacceptably Stalinist turn of events: “Just so everyone out there knows, Progressive International doesn’t believe in any of that ‘actually existing socialism’, stuff, we’re just… we want to be beyond capitalism and critical of capitalism and contra-capitalist and everything else but allow me to emphasise that Mr. Estes is quite alone in his Enver Hoxha-esque call for ‘socialist construction’. No fucking way. No thank you.”

Before Estes or anyone else could interject any clarifying question or comment in response to this rant, Varoufakis nervously scratched his scalp and continued rambling: “I mean, if this were the Soviet Union, which thank God it’s not, I mean, that would be a really dystopic vision for the future, let me tell you, especially because I personally would be sent to GULAG. I mean I would. Me. Yanis Varoufakis. Imagine we’re in the Soviet Union now. I’d be the centre of attention then too, and Stalin couldn’t stand me getting all the attention, and so I’d have to go to GULAG. Is that what you want, Nick Estes? This is a fun game too, right?”

At time of press, [REDACTED] at the Worker’s Spatula Twitter was tweeting fantasies about an entirely different kind of summit with Varoufakis, if you catch my meaning, wink wink, nudge nudge.

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Point/Counterpoint: Stalin was Non-Binary

What follows is a debate between two Worker’s Spatula cadre at a closed Spatula conference on gender politics which took place in an undisclosed location. As the comrade arguing the initial “Point” represented a Maoist tradition, and the comrade arguing the follow-up “Counterpoint” represented a “Hoxhaite” tradition, they will be identified as such for the purposes of publication:

Point: Stalin was non-binary because Jughashvili was a Georgian
by a queer Maoist

There is, as everyone knows, a prolific online discourse as to whether Joseph Stalin was trans or not. Naturally, as with all such discussions, we as anti-revisionists assume that the side which wishes to associate Stalin with conservativism and reaction are nothing more than agents of the cishet patriarchal capitalist-imperialist-fascist enemy, who wish to sow confusion and division in our movement.

However, as Chairman Mao famously said: “no googling, no right to tweet”.

Googling reveals a startling pattern: Russian sources consistently refer to Joseph Stalin with the masculine pronouns in use in the Russian language, and no Russian sources mention that Stalin was a trans man, or any other kind of AFAB individual. Could Joseph Stalin have been cis?

The problem, of course, with consulting Russian sources is that they’re in Russian and by Russians. How can this imperialist language with its patriarchal pronouns capture the fullness of Stalin’s personhood? To discover the answer, I became fluent in the Georgian language, memorising its complex verbal morphology and becoming a master Georgian calligrapher, so that I could blend in to the indigenous culture of Georgian Orthodoxy and understand how gender was expressed among the Georgian people before capitalism and Russian Tsarism penetrated their country and imposed the cishet patriarchy on these noble people.

While reading the diaries of Stalin’s seminary friends, I discovered something startling: the same pronoun was used for “Soso” as for the Virgin Mary. That’s right: Stalin used the Georgian equivalent of they/them pronouns, because the indigenous Georgian culture doesn’t have gender.

Anyone who claims Stalin was a “cis man” doesn’t only impose on Stalin a gender identity which Stalin never chose, but because they are imposing this identity which apparently doesn’t even exist in Georgia, anyone who claims Stalin was a “cis man” is actually a racist.

I rest my case. Stalin’s pronouns are “ის/მან”, Stalin and the entire Georgian people are non-binary.

Counterpoint: Stalin was non-binary because Stalin represented the multi-gendered masses
by a queer Hoxhaite

While it’s definitely true that we have to critically reexamine any Russian sources of the Soviet Union as unrepresentative of the reality of the minority nationalities, particularly after decades of revisionism and known national oppression, we need not resort to Cuğaşvili’s national origins to deny the slanderous revisionist lie that Stalin was a “cis man”.

Even if Cuğaşvili would fit into our understanding of what a “cis man” is, Cuğaşvili was not Stalin, and Stalin was not Cuğaşvili. Before Soviet power was lost, Stalin was the symbol of soviet power, and as such, Stalin was at least bigender.

Oh, that’s right: if you consider Stalin–a symbolic representative figure based on the real hero but none the less fully human person Cuğaşvili, a figure expressing the political consciousness and will of the revolutionary proletariat in its totality–could possibly have just been a “man”, then you are effectively excluding women from your understanding of the proletariat which is, in addition to being grossly sexist, revisionist as all fuckhell.

Both of these people are equally Stalin.

So, accepting that the Stalin figure to whom all anti-revisionists pray to intercede on their behalf to the Dialectic of History was effectively “bigender” in the Russian-dominated official Soviet system, we must further surmise that today, in an online discourse that encompasses gender expressions of diverse kinds from diverse cultural traditions, Stalin, who lives on in our struggle, is extremely genderfluid.

We can safely say that if Stalin were on Twitter, Stalin would post pronouns as “any pronouns”: whether she/her, he/him, they/them, ze/zir, xe/xem, etc.

Stalin’s pronouns are whatever your pronouns are, you beautiful Stalin you.

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Lesbian Separatist Socialist Republic Found in Colorado

COLORADO – On the outskirts of Denver, the Spatular pickup pulls on the border of the self-declared Violet Peoples’ Socialist Republic of Sapphia, an isolated lesbian commune formed by a secretive group of Marxist ideologues and cellists driven from the San Francisco Bay Area by the tech bro gentrification, a fitting and dialectical unity of the oppression of lesbians by bros and the enmity between Marxists and innovative representatives of ravenous capital.

“Welcome, sister!” exclaimed a Raiders snapback-wearing stout Maoist butch at the checkpoint, motioning to the truck with her rifle. “You’re going to have to leave the truck here, for security purposes.”

Boarding her new comrade’s beat-up old Saturn station wagon, our correspondent produced a bottle of Aquaphor and applied it to her latest tattoo, a drag king depiction of Joseph Stalin.

“Do you want some?” asked our correspondent to the driver, already knowing the answer.

“Oh yeah, for sure, dude.” said the driver, turning and not decelerating at all as she applied Aquaphor all over her considerable right bicep. “This one’s still pretty fresh. You don’t mind do you? I used a lot.”

“No problem,” smiled our correspondent, opening her bag and revealing dozens of Aquaphor bottles, “I brought a bunch as gifts. I didn’t come to a lesbian commune expecting to part with anything less than a battalion’s worth of Aquaphor.”

“Cute and smart,” smirked the driver, staring straight ahead, causing our correspondent to blush.

As our intrepid and sapphicly charged pair arrive at the checkpoint welcoming them to the settlement itself, a tall undercut-sporting woman smiles a greeting, thrusting an environmentally responsible bag towards our correspondent.

“A welcome bag,” she explains “we give them to all our visitors here. You might have considerable need for some of its contents.”

The driver stifled a knowing laugh.

Inside, our correspondent discovered to her anxious excitement, were a pair of nail clippers, dental dams, a slightly-above-average-sized strap-on, a wand, and a DVD box set of the series “the L Word”.

The two lesbians laughed uproariously as our correspondent rapidly turned bright red.

“Everyone in the Violet Peoples’ Socialist Republic of Sapphia is entitled to food, shelter, and theoretical education, as three basic necessities of life. Our Administrative Council also considers the contents of that bag to be life necessities particular to our culture,” explained the undercut comrade.

“Some of them, like the L Word DVDs, have to imported from Denver. In order to pay for the DVDs with imperialist Yankee money, we had to modify our economic production so to produce not only in excess of our needs with regard to nail clippers, but so that they can be sold as commodities in the US market,” explained Comrade Snapback Maoism.

“Naturally you realise that this brings us close to the Titoite model of self-management and undermines the goal of constructing communistic productive relations by subordinating your economy to the profit motive, especially dangerous given you are surrounded on all sides by the most powerful imperialist economy on Earth?” enquired our theoretically astute correspondent.

“Certainly,” replied Comrade Undercut, confidently, “but you would also have to concede that relative to the alternative, simply existing as normative wage slaves under capitalism, it is a step forward.”

“Well that entirely depends,” countered our correspondent, looking up the imposing undercut, “on what the objective role this commune plays in pushing forward revolutionary processes outside of its own borders.”

Comrade Snapback Maoism smirked a knowing smirk. “Well for starters, we’re growing all the time by drawing in new recruits. As our subjectivity grows, so will our objective influence on the Denver–Aurora–Lakewood, Colorado Metropolitan Statistical Area (ML). We could be the next Jackson, but you know, queer girls.

“Who knows, maybe after our tour, you’ll join us,” chimed in Comrade Undercut.

“Yeah,” winked Comrade Snapback Maoism, “you might be my new roommate. Let us show you the farming facilities.”

Touring the “Green and Purple Houses”, which as their name implies house both green and purple, our correspondent was told how the dryness of the climate meant they had to augment their water supplies, but rather than purchase water from the capitalists, they were trading with the still-worker-controlled Gordons Pickles and using pickle water to hydrate the crops.

“Do you use the pickle water for other purposes, like bathing and drinking?” asked our correspondent.

“We don’t bathe very often out here,” countered Comrade Undercut.

“Don’t you feel self-conscious about your body odour?” asked our correspondent, as non-judgmentally as she could.

Comrade Undercut turned sharply and pulled Comrade Snapback Maoism’s face close to the side of her chest and whispered loudly in her ear, so our correspondent could hear: “Why don’t you tell our friend? Do you like mommy’s body odour? Should mommy feel self-conscious?”

“Unnnnnnnnnnnnf” responded the ordinarily self-confident butch, melting into her “mommy”s embrace, drawing in deep of the smell.

“You’re gonna make mommy sweat even more later so you can get more of this smell, aren’t you, [REDACTED]?” asked Comrade Undercut, pulling off Comrade Snapback Maoism’s Maoist snapback and stroking her scalp lovingly.

“Yes mommy,” moaned Comrade Snapback Maoism, sliding her hands down Comrade “Mommy” Undercut’s back towards her buttocks, at which point our correspondent coughed loudly causing everyone to snap back to reality.

“So what else do you do around here for fun?” asked our correspondent, hoping to save all the “mommy” stuff for after dinner.

Comrade Snapback Maoism replaced her hat and caught her breath before responding. “You seen the chelistas? Is it almost that time?”

Comrade Undercut nodded and smiled, leading them back to the car.

At the far edge of the settlement sat a wooden stage with a red and purple curtain drawn in front of it. A considerably sized crowd of diverse kinds of lesbian socialists were already assembled in the audience as our heroes pulled up.

Taking their place in the audience, the curtain drew back to reveal the Transbian Cellists Union. Trans ladies dressed in their best punk rock finery gave a stirring performance which would’ve been at home in any Scandinavian metal festival, except that obviously their presence was anti-racist and anti-fascist in character.

The wonderful performance began, unfolding new delights at every turn—ensemble and individual, partisan songs and modern pop, classic and folk music of amazing originality. Could it be possible that a few years before in 2007—in 2015—these women had been living under the patriarchy—their cultural expression forbidden, their rich heritage almost lost under transphobic oppression’s heel?

Comrade Snapback Maoism looked over at our correspondent as she scribbled her notes.

“Are you quoting Paul Robeson, dude?”

“Well sure!” exclaimed our correspondent. “Worker’s Spatula are the Paul Robeson of the internet left, and Colorado is the Central Asia of 21st century anti-revisionism, and don’t people always say that transbians are the Uzbeks of lesbianism?”

“Absolutely,” replied Comrade Undercut, staring forward at the performance and smiling. “I always say exactly that in exactly those words.”

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Humourless Marxist Reviews: the Notebook (2004)

“The Notebook” (2004) is a romantic melodrama starring master Hegelian dialectician and known smexy binch Ryan Gosling as Noah, alongside significantly less sexy but equally Hegelian philosopher Rachel McAdams as Allie. The two leads characters are young lovers in 1940s South Carolina, that tells the story of how they came to be together, in the form of an older Noah reading the story to a dementia-stricken Allie.

It is a sweet, sentimental, sad movie, mostly sad because of the constant background of the national oppression of Afro-America.

You thought that we would review some sappy film starring white northerners which takes place in the US south and *not* use it as an excuse to talk about the Achilles’ Heel of US imperialism? Fuck that. Don’t you know Worker’s Spatula?

We’re talking about freeing that land.

First things first, it’s South Carolina. The Black Belt. In the 1940s. What else can this possibly call to mind other than the great tragedy of the abandonment of sharecroppers union organisation by the Browderite revisionists? As if to underscore the importance of this historical betrayal and its contemporary relevance, Afro-American labour is omnipresent in the background of a privileged white romance:

• • • In the modern day, the nursing home where Noah and Allie live is entirely staffed by Afro-American nurses and orderlies, while those living there (for whom the former toil) are mostly white.
    • When Noah visits Allie’s family at their estate, the servants are all Afro-American.
    • Allie’s fiancé, Lon, proposes to her while an all-Afro-American jazz band provides entertainment to a white audience playing music created by Afro-Americans and looked down upon and disparaged by white society until they literally commodified it as something they could own.
    • Allie’s fiancé is the wealthy heir to Hamilton cotton, cotton grown and picked and baled by Afro-American peasantry working in the Black Belt.
    • Noah builds Allie’s dream house on an old plantation where Afro-American slaves lived and died, producing obscene profits for which they were not even paid wages, sacrificing unthinkable amounts of their blood, sweat, and tears. It’s all in Capital, Vol. I.

How many Allies and Noahs lived on that plantation, with their lives and loves shattered by the cruelties of slavery? How many Afro-American Allies and Noahs have existed throughout history, only to have their dreams shattered by US imperialism and national oppression? Why can’t Nicholas Sparks sell their stories?!

Racism, that’s why. If this isn’t what you were thinking about when you watched this movie, other than Ryan Gosling’s doubtless impressive phallus, you’re probably a racist yourself.

This isn’t satire, by the way. Think about what is implied by the art you consume. Break out of your own myopic lives for a split second and think about how the entire world is a complex historical network of exploitation and oppression in which we are all implicitly complicit every single day, or you don’t deserve romantic melodramas, much less ones starring Ryan Gosling.

God, he’s really very attractive.

Oh and when Allie leaves to go to college at Sarah Lawrence? Yeah that’s representative of the alliance between Yankee capital and the Bourbon planters to carry out the imperialist exploitation and oppression of New Afrika. Obviously.

Read your goddamn Harry Haywood, you ingrates.

The only thing greater than Allie and Noah’s love is the love the Afro-American people have for their homeland and their people. It is that revolutionary love that will be the spark that sets the prairie fire, a fire that will burn the US empire down and leave a free and liberated life in a free homeland, an independent and socialist New Afrika, rising from the ashes.

FREE THE LAND!

LAND AND STATE POWER IN THE BLACK BELT SOUTH!
INDEPENDENCE AND SOCIALISM FOR THE OPPRESSED AFRO-AMERICAN NATION!

As for the film’s value for “Netflix and chill”: if you and your date still want to get busy after thinking about and discussing this stuff, well, then you earned it. Go nuts, kids.

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Pope Francis to Recognise Chinese Catholic Church

HONG KONG – Pope Francis, known Marxist socialist communist and Red Catholic and so on and so forth, continues his long march towards uniting all the anti-imperialist and revolutionary socialist forces of the world this week with a special meeting in Hong Kong overseen by the local Roman Catholic diocese with Chairman Xi of the Chinese Communist Party, with the goal of recognising the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association as the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church, an autonomous church in full communion with Rome.

The two great socialist leaders have come to agreement on a number of matters pertinent to their shared commitment to Marxist-Leninist theory, including but not limited to:

• “the social purpose of all forms of private property”
• the importance of “cherishing harmony”
• condemnation of the “hypocrisy” of “the Anglo-Protestant countries”

The bishops of the now-kosher-with-Francis Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church are to enjoy the same status among Catholic bishops as those of other autonomous particular churches in communion with Rome. The new political and theological unity between the Vatican is expected to open up many business opportunities for the 2,000-year-old spiritual fad of Catholicism, in which even Worker’s Spatula are known to have dabbled. Sources close to the Holy Father report that upon leaving Hong Kong, he high-fived a cardinal and stated that he “can’t wait to rub this in the Dalai Lama’s fucking face”.

From the Chinese side, the move to reconcile with Pope Francis is rumoured to have followed the collapse of negotiations with the Eastern Orthodox Church which, it was hoped, would lead to the establishment of the Chinese Patriotic Orthodox Church as an autocephalous church in communion with Constantinople. The collapse in negotiations is rumoured to have been the result of a three-way dispute over a real estate and development deal between the AKP, the CPC, and Bartholomew I in Istanbul, the most important city in the world, and don’t you fucking forget it, gâvurlar.

Prior to Pope Francis’s reassurances that the newly granted sui iuris status would afford the Chinese Church sufficient protections from loyalty to a foreign power (“and at any rate, our Lord Jesus Christ is a stranger to no land” –Pope Francis), another historical reason for opposition to reunification with the Holy See by the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association was the infamous one-child policy [editor’s note: presently a two-child policy] of the Chinese communist party and the Roman Catholic Church’s known fanatical adherence to a literal interpretation of Genesis 1:28 and almost no other verse of the Tanakh.

Ultimately, the Red Pope was satisfied with a compromise on this matter to the effect that the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church will teach that both contraception and violation of Chinese procreation policy constitute sins. Thus, all non-clergy within the Chinese Church must abstain from sex until marriage, avoid contraception after marriage, and then practice abstinence after they have fulfilled their patriotic and Christian duty to produce an appropriate number of children.

Abortion’s status as a sin or sacrament will depend on the party-approved parental status of the Chinese believer in question.

In the name of the Three Represents:
the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
Amen.

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

 

PAN-ALPINE GUERRILLA FRONT PATROL ROUTE, SOMEWHERE IN THE SWISS ALPS – Seated in plastic chairs in a snow-flecked mountain landscape under the blue Swiss sky, the video displays the heroic Central Committee of Worker’s Spatula, guns and spatulas raised in their clenched anti-fascist fists.

Cacophonously, the anthems of several rival Turkish anti-revisionist organisations begin playing simultaneously over shitty cell phone speakers which are clearly nowhere near the microphone. All of the assembled Worker’s Spatula Central Committee members attempt to sing along, off-key, for a few seconds before the video cuts forward to a speech by a representative of the group, already mid-speech:

“…an especially happy New Year to the now-free Max Zirngast, who is about as free as any of our friends trapped in the Republic of Reaction can be. Free them all!

We would like to begin this year’s New Year’s message, which usually would only contain our self-criticism, with a criticism of all of you. We would like to criticise all of our followers who were fooled by our 2018 April Fool’s joke. Shame on you for ever thinking the Spatula team would abandon you without the death, imprisonment, or otherwise neutralisation of our Central Committee.

Obviously, we would be shirking our duties if we did not add here that we must self-criticise for making light of the idea of the end of Worker’s Spatula, the vanguard of the vanguard of the vanguard of the world revolution. Such things are not to be joked about. Indeed, fuck “jokes”. Basically, everything we write is real. Raw dialectical materialism without the horse shit. No, we will NOT revise Marxism-Leninism. Worker’s Spatula. We live for this.”

At this juncture, the Yank is overcome with excitement and begins firing a Mosin into the air, after which the video cuts forward again, the Yank now disarmed and holding two spatulas instead of the rifle. The spokesperson continues:

“Continuing with our self-criticisms. 2018 was in many ways a year of setbacks. We suffered a split in our ranks on April 1st, and while unity has been achieved again, we are still rebuilding the structures which were lost in these difficult inter-Spatular conflicts. In particular, our Melbourne base of Hungry Jack’s workers has lost a fair number of good cadre, weakening the southern hemisphere work we had initially hoped to emphasise in 2018.”

Another cut, and the floor has been surrendered to two Welsh comrades, one of them speaking in Welsh, and the other providing simultaneous translation, providing a brief report on southern hemisphere work, including this self-critical section:

“Australia was meant to be our red base, it was, for the liberation of Papua and Argentina and all the rest of them mad winter-is-summer places, like. Well we cached that one up right proper, we won’t lie to you. And not being funny or nothing, like, but we’ll tell you for why: there’s no Marxist-Leninist discipline down there. No tradition of it, is there?

Well from now on, all of our Australian comrades are going straight to Turkish boot camp, reading Stalin and Hoxha and studying the culture, like. It’s no more of that mad upside-down rygbi or VB for them, only Turkish football and tea. Iechyd da, cymrodyr.”

The main representative concludes the self-criticism with a reference to the second Three-Year Plan announced in August of 2018:

“One last point of self-criticism before we get to our plans for 2019: as we already mentioned in the announcement of our second Three-Year Plan, we underestimated the strength of Swiss imperialism in the capitalist world-system. Liechtenstein have made us look like fools, and now they’re probably going to get to celebrate the 300th anniversary of their Nazi shithole homeland on the 23rd of January before we can even overthrow their parasitic regime. Fuck Liechtenstein.

But we are still here in the Swiss Alps. In December, we made a lot of progress in organising a Krampus union together with the Marxist-Leninist Group of Switzerland, and our guerrilla movement across the Alps grows stronger and more determined to fight for a new, Liechtenstein-less tomorrow each day. Death to Liechtenstein, whose fascist security forces are responsible for the martyrdom of Subcomandante Spatule on the 4th of April, 2018. Death to Swiss imperialism which protects the existence of Liechtenstein, as it has for 300 years.”

At this juncture, the flags of Liechtenstein and Switzerland are taken out, smeared with what appears to be faeces, and set on fire to cheers and applause from the assembled Central Committee. The representative continues:

“We are here in Switzerland, just as our invisible army of workers and intellectuals is to be found everywhere around the globe. We are in the Toblerone factories, the Toblerone mines, and the Toblerone fields, making Toblerone halal to troll the Christians, and making Toblerone Hegelian to troll the AKP.

In 2019 we hope to engage in more polemics with non-Marxist pages, as we finished off 2018 by doing to the revisionists at AboutIslam. You know we had to do it to them.

While joining the rest of you in dealing with the absolute shitshow that will be the beginning of the 2020 US Presidential Election campaigns which will start this coming year, we also plan to swing an election somewhere. Maybe a student election, maybe a municipal election, but we swear by Allah (SWT) that we will find some election with a candidate we support, make propaganda for them as the Spatula, and then take credit for the ensuing victory.

We will also continue building RaFFWU in Australia, as our deepest connections with the working class remain those with the fast food workers in Australia, who anyway are the single most revolutionary section of the international proletariat that exists.

We will of course continue posting pithy jokes to Twitter, memes to Facebook, and giving you the deep content you crave on this WordPress page. If the bastards at Facebook attempt to ban us again, we can just keep changing our URL. Top mathematicians in our ranks theorise that we can just keep adding one to the current number in the URL and achieve a larger whole number, perhaps infinitely.

We may also actually write an original joke, instead of repeating the same jokes over and over again in different combinations as a thin veneer for Marxist theory and criticism. But don’t hold your breath.

Regardless, we will continue to transform the internet left generation into serious Marxist-Leninist cadre with real praxis and build sincere revolutionary movements around the world.

No one can stop us: we are right, we will win.”

And with that, the Central Committee disappear over a mountain pass, the Alpine landscape disappears from the screen, and the video message concludes by displaying the text “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!”

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CrimethInc. Organises Dauvé Talk in Phnom Penh

PHNOM PENH – CrimethInc., the most popular of all post-left anarchist “Ex-Workers Ex-Collective[s]” recently organised a talk on “the failures of Leninism” by Gilles Dauvé, their favourite “Marxist” thinker, delivered in the capital city of the country where his ideas on socialism were first put into practice all those years ago. The talk was attended by correspondents of Worker’s Spatula, the most popular of all “internationalist and anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist platform[s] for irreverent Marxist discourse”.

Owing to the scarcity of Dauvé’s public appearances, his readers from around the world have flocked to “the Pearl of Asia” to hear the premiere Communization theorist speak on his insightful criticisms of Leninist theory and practice, as well as the history of practical alternatives and the theoreticians associated therewith:

The failure of 20th century “Marxist” projects was that their programme of the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” was–in its essence–the programme of dictatorship over capital, which effectively constrained the real movement within the confines of the management of a particular mode of production: capitalist production in essence.

The real essence of communism – which is an eternally dynamic real-historic movement towards the wholesale abolition of the current state of things–fundamentally irreconcilable with the management of production–was thus lost.

The talk proceeded that way for some time, with Dauvé going on about abolishing value production as a prerequisite for the Communization process–something that is definitely compatible with capitalism’s continued existence as an international mode of production–and the “revisionism” of communism displayed in those who speak of a socialist transition called the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, since “only he is a communist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the immediate building of communist society as such”, as emphasized by the great Communization theorist Saloth Sâr.

The question and answer period of the talk was dominated by critical “questions” delivered in the form of screamed Marx quotes by an unlikely alliance of Hoxhaites and Bordigaists, who waved crumpled pamphlets and pounded on the covers of ancient Italian and Balkan hardcovers, as is their tradition.

Dauvé–who, if it is not yet obvious, we are comparing to Pol Pot; and who has written a “theoretical” defence of paedophilia–responded to these criticisms by referring to the assembled Marxist-Leninists and Marx-literate leftcoms as “edgelords” and “power fetishists” whose commitment to abolishing capitalism is “suspect at best”.

That’s it. That’s the joke.

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Intolerable Prick Ascribes Lack of Popularity to Anti-Stalin Bias

CW: Abuse

ADELAIDE – Ex-CPA member and local piece of shit Mick Anderson has resurfaced in the activist scene after months of conspicuous absence following allegations of physical abuse of his then-girlfriend, [REDACTED].

Local CPA cadre were quick to distance themselves from Anderson, who, in further proof of the ubiquity of contradiction, has apparently distanced himself from the CPA on grounds of their “revisionism”.

Following Worker’s Spatula’s own suspicion of any organisation whose main international connections are the IMCWP as having deviated from an essential Marxist analytical method, we sought to gain impressions from locals in Adelaide to determine the dynamics of theoretical discourse in which this abuser seeks to position himself.

“Yeah he says China is capitalist now, but he never said anything like that even during his last days with us,” explained local CPA representative Jack Vogt, “he definitely didn’t split with us over theory, even if that’s what he says. The last time we saw him was the night of the incident, when [REDACTED] called [REDACTED] over to help protect her. Now he pops up talking like CPA(ML) or something, maybe he’s with them now? They call us ‘revisionists’ constantly.”

CPA(ML) representative Chelsea Greene denied Anderson’s affiliation with their organisation: “we were in brief contact, but he’s not interested in Mao Zedong Thought or our criticisms of economic development in China at all. He mostly just complains about Chinese immigrants to Australia.”

“Yeah,” concurred Adelaide anarchist John Balendra. “He really hates immigrants. He’s really REALLY strongly opposed to migrant solidarity work. Says it’s ‘a plot by the bourgeoisie’.”

“It would help if he read Engels on immigrant labour in Manchester a century ago, or anything at all,” interjected Greene. “But when I said that to him, he said ‘you Maoists are all just anarchists anyway, you need to tank down in Tank Town’. We’ve got a committee working on decoding that one.”

“Yeah he keeps saying LGBT people and Rojava and feminism and everything else is ‘post-modern’ or ‘crypto-anarchism’. Really good at reminding me why I’m an anarchist, I suppose”, concluded Balendra.

Deciding we had to confront Anderson himself, we found him in a local drinking establishment, half-pissed and barely past lunch. Our correspondent launched into a series of rapidly delivered critical questions about Anderson’s past behaviour and present isolation within the Australian socialist movement:

“It’s all LIES, SLANDER, LIBEL, what they say about me. I’ll tell you what, why they don’t, what they don’t like about me!” exclaimed Anderson, whose surly voice seemed to fill the entire pub, itself otherwise empty. “They’ve all been fooled by the post-modernists and the Trots and the anarchists, with their BULLSHIT theories! Me? I’m a real Stalinist, I’m all about the FACTS of working class, who I’m organising! I’m in a bloody union! What do you do?”

“RaFFWU? Real cute, sweetheart. Do you know how much I have to lift every day? Look at me muscles! I’M THE BLOODY WORKING CLASS! BLOODY… BLOODY, SWEATY, TEARSY! MARXISM-LENINISM! MARXISM-LENINISM! MARXISM-LENINISM! MARXISM-LENINISM!” he bellowed loudly enough for passers-by to hear from outside the pub.

“You’re a fucking labour aristocracy, is what you are!” he screamed, throwing his beer to the floor and lunging for our correspondent, who made a quick move for the door.

To be continued…

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