Britain’s Most Advanced Communist Thwarted by COVID-19

KING’S LYNN, NORFOLK – We regret to inform the proletarian masses of Britain that the infamous ‘Comrade X’, the Lenin of East Anglia who lives in the shadows and contains within her incomparable mind the totality of proletarian science, has been thwarted in her nigh-successful quest to build a vanguard cadre organisation for proletarian revolution by being placed on mandatory 12-week isolation due to the global pandemic COVID-19.

“I was really going to do it this time,” she informed our correspondent via messenger pigeon. “I’ve been traveling on weekends around the region, sussing various contacts to see how trustworthy they are, carefully providing contact information… we were really building.”

“But then the fucking Tories botched the whole Coronavirus job, and now I’m in isolation forever so… blame the objective conditions.”

Upon being informed that “that sounds like the sort of cop-out the Trotskyites might give us”, ‘Comrade X’ called our correspondent by WhatsApp video chat to furiously respond:

Don’t even jokingly compare me with that cult, Worker’s Spatula. I know I’ve made some excuses in the past, but things were really going well for a change. I was meeting with some promising trade unionists. I was coordinating with people close to the Lever and some ICOR representatives. I had made contact with some people experienced in [REDACTED] and we went together to [REDACTED] to set up a training [REDACTED] for [REDACTED] who [REDACTED] in case [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] or [REDACTED].

I put in the hours, door to door. But literally what am I supposed to do in mandatory social isolation? I’m not a Trotskyite… the coronavirus is.

Noting that her practical work had made her “feel more alive than ever before”, and with each passing day in social isolation, she can “feel the fighting spirit diminish”, ‘Comrade X’ emphasised that “if I had just had a few more days, we could have built a functional organisation that would have survived the outbreak, but it’s too late now.”

‘Comrade X’ also noted the extremely unlikelihood of rebuilding potential organisational links when COVID-19 blows over: “the post-Corbyn period was perfect, because Corbyn’s contrarian and controversy-courting style of social democracy really did a lot to radicalise the kids, and then he got undermined by the system, leaving a small segment of the youth with a high potential for radicalisation. But as this COVID-19 nonsense wears on, the British state is going to realise that just as the Corbyn phenomenon had a potential to undermine the British state, it also had the potential to legitimise and preserve it that Boris just doesn’t have.”

“Once they realise that, they’re going to position some ‘just critical enough’ Labour politician that Corbyn and company can anoint who can fix the COVID-19 mess and return us to business as usual with a couple more compromises from the state’s side, and then they’ll make the kids fight tooth and nail to maintain that.”

Her bleak but practically speaking not absurd prediction caused ‘Comrade X’ to light up a cigarette in distress, a habit she had kicked during her weeks of regular organising work, signalling a likely return to being relegated to her own bed save for trips to the door to pick up the delivery she ordered.

“There’s no use trying to organise British people anyway. If things are going to kick off, it’s going to be in Ireland, and I have faith in them to change the world in the ways I’m too depressed to take part in because the world has made me the sort of person who’s too depressed to change it.”

At time of press, ‘Comrade X’ was forlornly stroking a photo of Ethem Sarısülük and mouthing the words “I have failed you”.

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“Maoists Too Jargony” Says Fan of Man Who Referred to Uses as “Gebrauchseigenschaften”

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA – Student socialist and activist Jason Kwong has left local Maoist theory group “Little Red Reading Club” over a disenchantment with the Maoists’ supposedly arcane and insular language. Kwong, who feels that the Maoists’ “alienated” him from the reading group by making him read texts that don’t just “get to the point”, is a self-identified fan of the theories of Karl Marx, a man who once expressed the idea that money can be used to buy different things by referring to it as “the reflection of the relationships of all other commodities”.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, or as the Maoists put it: “the change in quantity which effected a change in quality”, was the assignment of Mao’s “On Contradiction”. According to Kwong, who claims to idolise the Young Hegelian and radical materialist dialectician Karl Marx, complained that Section II, “the Universality of Contradiction”, was “jargony and obscure”, and “tried to advance a theory of everything in the world in terms of some abstract binary”.

Witnesses from within the “Little Red Reading Club”, however, insisted that Kwong’s distaste for their rhetorical proclivities predated the encounter with Mao’s more explicitly philosophical work: “We’re not sure if he has done anything more than skim any Marxist texts, but he objected pretty much any time any of us said anything with more theoretical depth than to object to capitalism as ‘exploitative’.”

Seemingly confirming the Maoist summary of Kwong’s distaste for “Maoist jargon”, the sociology major and “convinced Marxist” complained to a Spatula correspondent that the Maoists’ reference to “the people’s democratic dictatorship” in an early meeting was “jarring” and “violent”, in contrast––one assumes––to the peaceful and anti-“dictatorial” rhetoric of his dead German hero.

“It’s also weird that they’re so obtuse and intellectual when they’re all such third-worldists,” continued Kwong, the future vanguard of the toiling classes: “I mean, obviously the proletariat doesn’t have time for any academic jargon, but can you imagine Marx talking about the dangers of ‘capitalist roaders’ and whether or not one divides into two and basing his politics around people in the sort of undeveloped countries they’re obsessed with? What could these first world communists with their weird academic interests have in common politically with people in these underdeveloped countries?”

At this juncture, Kwong paused to update his Twitter, a website on which his personal logo is a photo of the 19th century German intellectual who was writing treatises on mathematics near the end of his revolutionary life in which he declared the Irish liberation struggle was to be “the lever” for an English proletarian revolution.

Finishing his tweeting under the Twitter handle @MarxReborn, Kwong looked up at our correspondent, sighed, and said: “I should’ve known when the first meeting I went to they were talking about ‘combatting liberalism’. What sort of leftist attacks liberalism? I guess beneath all the rebel rhetoric and fancy words, they’re nothing but conservatives.”

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Point/Counterpoint: English Republicanism

Point: We must build an anti-Westminster movement in England
by Anthony Jones, writer at The Lever

As the economic crisis deepens, Europe is particularly gripped by contradictions between various imperialist powers. This is most saliently felt in the “Brexit” regime which has pitted sections of the British ruling classes against their French and German counterparts. However, we in Britain are still living through the contradictions of capitalism-imperialism headed by Westminster, and in particular, the national contradictions within Britain which have the potential to splinter the UK as the EU is being splintered.

Naturally, I am referring to the potential of rising Scottish and Welsh nationalism to weaken Westminster imperialism and the English bourgeoisie, but it is very important that we understand how the English bourgeoisie is actually ruling Britain under the guise of not doing so. Through cultural soft power and economic and military hard power, the English ruling classes whose seat of power is Westminster attempt to convince all the peoples of this island of a shared political identity as “British”. This lie must be exposed not only by the Welsh and Scottish proletariats who can carry the struggle against imperialism beyond the weak positions offered by our “own” bourgeoisies, but also by the English themselves.

It is not enough for the English working class to not identify with British imperialism: they must show how British imperialism is seeking to dominate the market through national oppression, even “at home”. To do this, a line of demarcation must be drawn and an English movement against Westminster must be born, roughly based on the weak historical trend of English republicanism, now potentially strengthened by economic crisis and sharpened by the knowledge of national contradictions in these islands.

This is no appeal to a bourgeois English patriotism of the sort of the original English republicans, which itself sowed the seeds of capitalist-imperialist domination of Wales and Ireland. Rather the English revolutionaries must preemptively work to give up land dominated not only by the UK state as such, but even legally defined as England. As I have argued before, it is up to the English revolutionaries to begin this struggle against their ruling classes by continuing to question the borders of England itself. But whatever remains of England and Englishness after this investigation, must be realised as a particular site of struggle, and the “local” class struggle in England identified with the multinational proletariat imprisoned in and by England and Britain, in a united revolutionary struggle against the bourgeois dictatorship in Westminster.

Workers and oppressed peoples of the world – unite!

Counterpoint: Chas and Dave were English
by RCG representative

The position put forth by Anthony Jones would at first glance appear to take a creative and original anti-imperialist stance against the English ruling classes, dividing English workers from their “own” ruling classes by uniting them with the anti-imperialist movements of various oppressed peoples in these islands and around the world.

But “Comrade” Anthony Jones is forgetting one crucial fact: Chas and Dave were English.

 

How can the revolutionary multi-national proletariat around the world put any faith in any of the classes which belong to a nation so reactionary that it produced such “art” as Chas and Dave? They certainly cannot.

So as to prevent a continuation of this “debate” with opportunists such as Anthony Jones, we want to head off potential responses to what we consider is already the end of the discussion: Anthony Jones might offer that many English people also agree that Chas and Dave are bad and reactionary shit. This is certainly true: we know many individual English people who never listen to Chas and Dave, or indeed, any English “musicians”. But breaking on an individual level with Chas and Dave cannot be mistaken for a decisive break by English workers with the labour aristocracy ideology best exemplified by Chas and Dave and their rubbish “music”.

Since Chas Hodges passed away (tragically altogether too late) earlier this year, Anthony Jones might offer that Chas and Dave represent a historical threat to proletarian internationalism, but not a contemporary one. However, the continued life of Dave Peacock… really? His surname is Peacock? Disgusting. Right, the fact that Dave is still alive represents a concrete obstacle that we are confident no victim of British imperialism could look beyond.

Imagine you are in Belfast, engaged in solidarity work with the 32 County Sovereignty Movement or the Irish Republican Socialist Party. On this nearest front line against British Imperialism, if you were in a pub, and Dave Peacock came on television, speaking in that horrendous accent of his, what Irish republican would not be justified in taking out their rage on any English person in sight?

Under such conditions, no meaningful international solidarity can be built on the basis of anti-imperialism between the victims of British imperialism and the English, the nightmare nation which incubated the “cultural” abomination known as Chas and Dave. Not even the most apparently revolutionary elements of the English working class will be able to overcome the contradiction of Chas and Dave and Chas and Dave-ism at least until some hero ends the life of Dave. Until then, we must maintain a national liberation strategy of the entire legitimate territory of Wales and Scotland from English oppression “at home” and strict anti-imperialist struggle against Britain abroad.

KNEES UP MOTHER BROWN.

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