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.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

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!

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

Humourless Marxist Reviews: Tiger King

Tiger King is that new Netflix series that everyone seems to be watching, inexplicably. Well, perhaps inexplicably is the wrong word. The explanations are well known: the series follows the true story of outrageous characters who lived already dangerous lives making even more dangerous decisions, and was released in suspiciously good timing for the COVID-19 outbreak. So, not inexplicably, but unfortunately it’s the series that everyone seems to be watching, and here’s your review, you content-hungry jackanapes!

The series follows Joe Exotic, one of these horrible people who professionally imprisons and enslaves animals, in this case tigers, as the series’s name implies. Joe Exotic is gay, but not in a cool way, like Worker’s Spatula writers are required to be, but in a douche-y way.

Indeed, if there’s one word that could describe Joe Exotic, the “Tiger King”, it would certainly be “douche-y”. We almost never use the word “douche” here at Worker’s Spatula, but the word so perfectly encapsulated the energy that Joe Exotic radiates that a special committee was convened to determine if necessity dictated that we publish a piece calling out Joe Exotic for the douchey douche he is.

As you might have gathered, the committee affirmed that you must all be forewarned that if you watch this series, you would be exposed to ours of this fucking douche.

Actually, almost all of the human characters in this series could be described as being at least somewhat douchey. As COVID-19 has practically imprisoned some of our readers in their homes, and even workers forced to go out to be exploited for their labour are deprived of as much time outdoors during their social reproduction time, we can say with great certainty that the most relatable characters will be the tigers. Also, like the imprisoned tigers, our loyal readership are some truly fierce binches.

That’s right, we’re publishing the word “binch” again. This is a pandemic and we had to watch Tiger King, we’re breaking out all the weird nouns we have to, and you’re just going to have to deal with it.

Almost every single human character is problematic, unlikeable, and/or suspect in some way. To be honest, we even believe Carole Baskin did feed her husband’s corpse to some big cats. That’s definitely the most believable thing about that video.

Would we recommend our readers actually watch this series? No, but we don’t recommend you consume a lot of media that we can’t stop you from consuming. None the less, if any of our readers want to consume some documentary media centered around a likeable main character?

We humbly recommend the works of Grover Furr.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

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.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

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.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

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.”

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

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!”

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

#BirdsArentReal in China, either

Here at Worker’s Spatula, if there’s one thing we take extremely seriously, it’s rebutting the lies of the bourgeoisie about actually existing socialism, from whether or not Stalin said all those things they said he said, to whether Enver Hoxha was a power bottom, to whether or not Lysenko was right (he was, he was one whole conference worth of right).

But we would be remiss if we failed to rebut one of the most obscene pieces of slander in the 20th century about China, one which even most explicitly Maoist sites fail to discuss sufficiently: namely the lies repeated by the bourgeoisie and their revisionist servants about the infamous Four Pests Campaign during the Great Leap Forward.

As always, we assume that most readers are genuine socialists and not crypto-fascists, and therefore there is no need to rebut the obvious lie that the Great Leap Forward was a campaign which (intentionally or otherwise) resulted in mass starvation, but rather was a normal, reasonable Stalin-style five-year plan which actually ended mass starvation which had previously been the norm in Chinese society. Criticism of the Four Pests Campaign by ostensible “socialists”, unfortunately, tends to accept that there is a kernel of truth to this slander, namely that Mao and his comrades ignorantly neglected the role sparrows played in the local food chain and ecosystem. Nothing could be further from the truth: coming from a peasant background himself, Chairman Mao and his comrades, who made extensive use of the Mass Line with the poor peasant class on whom they relied extensively for their glorious socialist construction in China, would never be so foolish as to advocate agricultural policy that did not dialectically reflect the peasants own material experience.

In short, it is dialectically impossible for there to be any truth to these claims of wanton and useless sparrowcide, and we must seek the truth of the matter in known materialist facts about the world: what are sparrows but the most obvious example of flying birds, and what are birds, but the flying avian equivalent of imperialist running dogs???

If Chairman Mao and his comrades advocated the extermination of these nefarious wrecker sparrows, it was because the Chinese party were the first group of revolutionaries to grasp the fact that birds are not real.

Look at the evidence: birds have been proven to be totally fake, nothing more than drones employed by the CIA to spy on everyone. Anyone who pretends that birds are real is an objective CIA agent, and who would the CIA want to spy on more than China in the middle of the 20th century?

Which brings us to the second piece of evidence, according to the peer-reviewed subreddit on the subject, the birds-drone replacement experiments began in the late ’50s and early ’60s, “coincidentally” the period in which China was bravely taking a stance against Khrushchev’s “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism headed by Yankee imperialism. Said “peaceful coexistence” doubtless included the “peaceful” sharing of state-of-the-art bird technology between Moscow and Washington for use against their common foes.

So, the Chinese communists saw through the joint US-Soviet (and likely Yugoslav) plot and launched the Four Pests Campaign to combine this counter-espionage operation with a routine crop defence activity. When the campaign was too successful at destroying the primitive CIA sparrow-drones, the CIA engineered a famine which their agent (and likely famine-doer), Zheng Zuoxin, blamed on the anti-sparrow campaign.

With all these facts at hand, which sincere socialist can look at the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and come to any other conclusion other than that its failure was practically pre-determined by the wrecking behaviour of the legions of imperialist sparrows who had tragically been allowed to escape the cleansing fire of revolution a decade prior???

The success of the sparrow-drones proven, the forces of imperialism and revisionism doubtless conspired to utilise sparrows or some other manner of Trotskyite bird to undermine Albanian socialism in the late 1980s following the death of known sparrow-hater, general bird skeptic, and prolific imperialism-condemner Enver Halil Hoxha.

Worker’s Spatula will be dedicating all of our resources in the coming months to ensuring that top Albanian ornithologists can be contacted and employed to research this crucial question.

Birds are an imperialist psyop.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

 

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.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!

Illegal Turkish Organisation Claims Responsibility for Criticism

İSTANBUL – With thousands in jail for criticising Erdoğan and his ruling clique in Turkey, and the body count across Kurdistan rising every day, every political act is risky business in the region, as all of our readers know.

But, and we cannot stress this strongly enough, nothing is quite as risky as a truly ruthless concrete criticism of all that exists. And the clandestine and illegal Bolşevik Parti (Kuzey Kürdistan-Türkiye) is well-known as the most ruthlessly critical voice of all the not-very-well-known ruthlessly critical voices in Kurdistan and Turkey.

So it came as little surprise this morning when our İstanbul correspondents awoke to text messages confirming that the Bolşevik Parti had claimed responsibility for a devastating string of criticisms delivered by e-mail from a no-longer-functioning e-mail address over the past week to targets ranging from HDP co-chair Sezai Temelli to Boğaziçi University Rector Mehmed Özkan.

Some targets, such as Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım, were shocked to discover their personal e-mail addresses (previously thought hidden from the public) were attacked by the high-level dialectical materialist theory of the rarest and most powerful school of İboculuk. Yıldırım, not accustomed to being made to read complete sentences, let alone Marxist theory, is reportedly in critical condition following the criticism of his conditions.

One target, Celal Şengör, was reportedly criticised so harshly that his head exploded from the realisation of how wrong he had been about Marxist epistemology, a subject about which Şengör had publicly pontificated repeatedly, incorrectly, and worst of all, uncritically in the past. Worker’s Spatula have dispatched a crack team to the morgue in an attempt to intercept Şengör’s organs before it is too late.

Other victims of the string of criticisms included Marxist groups, including fellow İbocu Pınar Aydınlar, whom they described as “a Menshevik songsmith”, Alp Altınörs of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP), for “opportunism” and possession of “an inferior moustache”, fellow obscure publication producers and frenemies KöZ for being “the castle of sectarianism”, the Turkish Labour Party (EMEP), for “dogmatism”, and TÖP, for “not being easy enough for us to criticise”.

No one has been formally charged with any crime in response to the criticisms, but anti-terror police are reported to have swept through Gazi Mahallesi, where they took every man over forty with a Stalin moustache into custody.

At time of press, the count of uncles named “Ali” who had been asked very specific Stefan Engel-related questions in police custody is rumoured to have exceeded 170.

Did you enjoy this piece, or anything else on Worker’s Spatula? Then consider donating as little as one imperialist Yankee dollar a month to supporting our work!