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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Feel Old Yet? Billie Eilish Wasn’t Even Born at Publication of Die bewußte Anwendung der dialektischen Methode auf dem Niveau der Lehre von der Denkweise

BERLIN – With the release of US pop singer Billie Eilish’s new song (“No Time to Die”, the theme for the latest installment in the never-ending post-Cold War British intelligence services advert series), the young songsayer has been again courting controversy by not knowing things as she makes the rounds on the talk show circuits of European countries.

Having already alienated all the “Boomers” in the band’s native Netherlands due to her lack of familiarity with Van Halen, Eilish arrived in Germany this week only to find her knowledge of formal logic and philosophy under scrutiny in the homeland of Hegel:

“You haven’t read Die bewußte Anwendung der dialektischen Methode auf dem Niveau der Lehre von der Denkweise?” asked the incredulous Bremen-based late-night talk show host James Kümmel, in a clearly visible state of shock during Eilish’s appearance on the former’s Thursday night show.

“I’ve never even heard of it!” laughed the singer, to gasps from the audience.

“It’s a classic short work by the Maoist theoretician Stefan Engel, of the MLPD. How old are you?” asked Kümmel, checking his notes.

“I was born in 2001, I’m 18!” laughed Eilish. “The only Maoist I read is JMP!”

“Oh God, you’re younger than the text! I feel so old! Don’t you feel extremely old, folks?” asked Kümmel to the audience, who laughed uproariously, but in that German way, where you have to stop chuckling every few seconds to say “ja, natürlich”.

Other public appearances by Eilish were marked by a similar culture clash between the Land of No Theory and the Land of The Appropriate Amount of Theory. During a daytime performance on Friday, Eilish made a joking reference to the synthesiser on stage as being “constructed through the Hegelian dialectic by attaching an antithesiser to a thesiser”, provoking a heckler to begin shouting: “that’s Fichte! Stop attributing Fichtean logic to Hegel, Yanks!” over and over again until they were escorted from the premises by security.

Eilish’s young age and theoretical naïveté leave her particularly vulnerable to ontological bullying in a country where every secondary school student is required to write a philosophically grounded defence of the rational core of Christianity or similarly grounded criticism of one of the same to be allowed to graduate. Outside of a scheduled performance in Hamburg this weekend, a picket is to take place by an LGBT+ group  who condemn Eilish’s discography for “failure to meaningfully engage with Hocquenghem’s central claims”. In solidarity, local Worker’s Spatula cadres will be joining the picket and passing out literature condemning Leon Trotsky.

Eilish’s management company, The Darkroom, have released a statement attempting to calm German outrage at the singer:

To the German press and public opinion,

Although we understand that it is not the case in Germany, in most cultures, youth is a time of impetuousness and irreverence towards authority and tradition. Billie Eilish can hardly be blamed for her ignorance, an understandable consequence of coming from the most anti-intellectual country on Earth and being born into a generation where hope is a fast-dying flame which we ourselves are extinguishing by profiting off of the despairing alienation which her entire generation is slowly resigning itself to.

We wish to assure the German public that Billie Eilish means no offence by not having an opinion on Kant’s religiosity, or the causes of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, or what a “World War II” is. She is simply too young in our culture to know things, and frankly, if it is up to us and all other gatekeepers of socially normative “alternative” culture, no young people would ever know a single new thing not necessary for commodity production and exchange.

However, as sale of Billie Eilish’s music is especially important in our digital era, it is very important to us that Billie Eilish know harmless things which will allow German people to purchase the alienated product of her labour and the labour of all those involved in the production of her music in its objectified commodity form.

Accordingly, we promise that throughout 2020, she and her brother and musical partner Finneas will sit down together to read Slavoj Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, so that she can do rudimentary interviews for German television in the manner you people expect.

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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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Overcoming the Whitegeist

“Why Trump? Why now? Why not Bernie?”

Don’t worry, US readers: this will not be yet another thinkpiece about how Donald Trump reflects the latent white supremacy of the settler-colonial Yankee national identity. This will not be yet another thinkpiece about how many of Donald Trump’s supporters are bourgeois. This will not be yet another thinkpiece which repeats that the Trump presidency is the means by which the crisis punishes all of the US for the victory of Clintonite status quo-ism over even the most modest reformism of Sanders.

You know these things already. The fact is, everyone knows these things. Everything under the sun is old and burnt.

Rather, let us dispense momentarily with a simple meditation, in lieu of a hot take. At this point, all but the most out-of-touch critic would agree that Bernie would, in fact, have won. But given that the objective conditions are such that Bernie did not in fact win, let us not forget how much of the blame lies precisely with political subjects such as Sanders and the Sandernistas for failing to see beyond the Whitegeist.

The Zeitgeist, as all of our readers know, is the spirit (Geist) of the age (Zeit). We are most concerned with the level of development of the masses, their collective consciousness and spirit. It does not suffice to consider oneself a meaningful political subject and not consider the objective reality of the development of the revolutionary masses. But who are the revolutionary masses In the United States? Quite simply, everyone except white people.

At this point, their biases against us confirmed, all the white leftists in the United States have stopped reading. But seriously, folks, nobody is actually preaching that there is no revolutionary potential in the struggles of “white” proletarians. And if such people do appear to exist, they’re just Worker’s Spatula psyops.

In fact, just to be safe, assume that everyone on left Twitter discussing such matters is either a Spatula writer or a sockpuppet which is part of a Spatula psyop, depending on whether or not we unironically share the views they espouse or not.

Can we all stop talking about the problem of imaginary leftists condemning labour strikes because of the skin colour of white workers? How often has this actually obstructed your practice, if you’re reading this and actually have any practice (since most of the internet left has neither theory nor practice)?

However, many white leftists in the United States, particularly the Sandernistas and large sections of the DSA, but also some anarchists and Marxist-Leninists, seem to think that chauvinism is found only in explicit statements of condemnation for oppressed nations and identities or movements addressing said oppression. Strasserite chauvinism finds its reflection in an obsession by more honest socialists with saving the soul of white workers, no matter how chauvinist those workers might be.

“Oh so you’re saying all white workers are chauvinists?” Hell yes we are, every single one of them is chauvinist trash, no different to the KKK, and all non-white workers are pure vessels for the revolution, whose only flaw is not kicking white workers out of their unions screaming “beat it, whitey!”

But seriously, the editing process for this piece was inordinately held back by debating how many times we should insert a joke about how we hate all white people* or there are no white workers or whatever. The hyper-sensitivity on this point by white communists (particularly in the US) is so obnoxious and we wonder when they will stop it. We assure you: we have considered the class implications.

We all know Trump voters are not disproportionately the disenfranchised in the US. We all also agree that there should be a unity of struggle between the white proletariat and the oppressed nationalities. The problem is, to build a sincere solidarity after literally centuries of harsh national oppression, which is not merely a scar on historical memory but which creates a real hierarchy in economic reality, we must do so on the terms of the more oppressed and impoverished oppressed nationalities.

Occupy Wall Street began in 2011. Afro-Americans have been struggling for their most basic democratic rights since before there was a United States. It is not unreasonable to expect that in uniting the two struggles, the one should show due deference to the other.

But what is the response of the white left? To scold others for bringing up the national question, to speak of “One United American Working Class™”, to compare George Washington to Robespierre, and other such thinly-veiled patriotic nonsense, right as the US Empire is weakening for the first time since the end of the Cold War!

It is not only the DSA, who speak of the US as a “nation”, who do this, but even many ostensible Marxist-Leninists! While the Whitegeist in the US may be one step ahead of Occupy Wall Street, the Zeitgeist of the oppressed nations in the US is one step ahead of Black Lives Matter, is in Cooperation Jackson, is speaking about “decolonisation”. We struggle to unite these struggles of course, but the Whitegeist must be brought up to the level of the heroic oppressed peoples in the US, the struggle of these oppressed peoples cannot be buried because the Whitegeist of the white working class (or intellectuals’ idealist conception thereof) is frightened of it!

Our hypocritical white US leftists insist that they support Black Lives Matter, that they “like” Malcolm X, that they name-drop Assata Shakur. Like anarchists, they use their individual lifestyle to cover up the essence of a more general theoretical critique; like social democrats, they assure us that Black America is on their mind, but we can’t divide the working class [vote?] by distracting precious white workers from their own precious white problems with anyone else’s “identitarian” non-white problems; like the liberals who worship Barack Obama, they want Black “allies” who validate their position as good white people and do not make them uncomfortable.

In short, these labour aristocratic settler-colonialist white leftists, who have yet to face their own history and social position, substitute their own consciousness for that of the revolutionary proletariat. They may be well-intentioned, but their good intentions are only an indication of of how far we can travel with them as individuals. They are no indication of the correctness of their analysis, which entirely substitutes their idealist and subjective conception of the working class for a critical dialectical process of material struggle of all workers and all oppressed.

There is a general tendency in the United States to characterise polemics such as this one, without using precisely this terminology, as “reverse racist”, or “anti-white”. The code-word used is “Third Worldist”. You would think, therefore, that those who demand that liberation of the oppressed be centred in the rhetoric of revolutionaries in the US are either idealists who don’t understand the material conditions of their own country, or foreign leftists who don’t understand that the objective conditions of struggle in the US are so undeveloped as to not be ready for this sort of revolutionary rhetoric.

And indeed, one of the writers who pushed this piece in committee did come from a country with wildly different economic conditions, political history, and culture.

Australia.

Yes, whatever you want to say about Socialist Alliance, and no Worker’s Spatula writer can pass up the chance to point out that Green Left Weekly, while a fine news source, simply has NOTHING TO SAY ABOUT HEGEL, but from the vantage point (Ollman lol) of Melbourne, it’s frankly startling to see how little the liberation of oppressed peoples means to white leftists in the US. It’s not as if we committed less genocide against the indigenous than the Yanks. If Yanks are under that impression, it’s simply because their settler-colonial society’s population has been bolstered by more immigration than ours.

And while it’s true that in Australia, Aboriginals are a greater portion of the population than the Indigenous nations in the United States, it’s equally true that the Afro-American people, who are subject to similar national oppression, are a much greater percentage of the overall population of the United States than the Aboriginals in Australia. Thus we can see that it is not that the white left are ignoring the oppressed peoples within “their own” borders based on irrelevance, but out of a chauvinism that even other settler-colonial peoples, such as the arch-racist white Australian society, are capable of overcoming on the radical left.

Compare the CPA to the CPUSA and despair.

This is a clear example of the role subjectivity plays in shaping objectivity. If the white left in the US insists on tailing the Whitegeist, then they will see no objective need to embrace the liberation struggles of the oppressed peoples. If the white left in Australia overcome the Whitegeist, suddenly it becomes completely objectively obvious to them that there is a pressing need to embrace the struggle of the Aboriginals.

In fact, whether or not we had written this screed, things are in motion in the white left, and the Whitegeist itself is developing. Different elements of the white working class in the US will be driven towards fascism whether we intervene or those with a less full analysis intervene with a more vulgar class politics. But to intervene most correctly we hope all interested comrades will grasp the limitations into which they were socialised, struggle to overcome them, and take on the struggle of the oppressed peoples as their own, and by doing so, become themselves a living connection.

Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!

Recommended further reading: How to be Class Conscious

*Although, you know, fuck white people.

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Point/Counterpoint: Theory or Practice?

Point: Your theory is bourgeois idealism, stop confusing the proletariat (me)
by Toilers’ Party for Global Freedom representative

Worker’s Spatula, shut the fuck up! Nobody gives a fucking shit about dianetics, nobody fucking knows who Steven Engels is, and for sure nobody fucking cares which part of the social-fascist deMOCKratic “$ociali$t$” of ameriKKKa (d$a) is better than which other part. You need to stop using so many big words to cover up for what you’re doing: spreading social-democratic and reformist views that serve imperialism and pave the way for fascism.

Fuck your propaganda for the Zionist psyop “Rojava” and the social-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn, fuck your stupid reading list which just confuses the proletariat (me), and especially fuck your claim to being anti-revisionist Stalinists when you don’t even uphold the immortal thought of Comrade President Xi. You’re nothing but fucking Trots, with your “movement building” and your “quantitative change” and your “blocking me from your Facebook page”. But what do you have to show for it? Pages and pages of bullshit nobody wants to read because it doesn’t relate to materialism.

While you were spreading your idealism, my party, the Toilers’ Party for Global Freedom, was engaged in real fucking revolutionary practice. We confronted your imperialist Sandersbot friends at some Fight for $15 bullshit, chanting “BERNIE KILLED ROSA” while waving the flag of the ONLY Korea, the North one, and the flag of the only Syrians, the SSNP. We’re fighting fascism in its most dangerous form, as the ANTISOFA front against social-fascism, while you’re all in the library or Melbourne or wherever the fuck you are.

While I can’t organise any workers because of that book Settlers, the one good thing your dumb site has recommended I read, I can say I’m personally doing more for proletarian revolution here in the so-called “United” States than any of you are doing in any country in the world, even if you are organising workers: I’m at the firing range every week, getting ready for the fucking people’s war against UnKKKle $am. I bet that pisses you off, doesn’t it?

More like “Imperialist’s Spatula”.

And stop over-complicating Leninism with your stupid quotes, you revisionists. You may be able to quote a lot of bullshit, but if Lenin were alive today, he’d answer you just as he answered the revisionists in his day with his 11th Thesis: OPPOSE BOOK WORSHIP.

Counterpoint: Stalinist practice is the result of Stalinist theory.
by the only Marxist on the internet

That was a marvelous display of ignorance, typical of Stalinists like the ones who run this sorry excuse for a website which has agreed to host my rebuttal.

I am sure no actual Marxists are even reading this, just the same sort of Stalinists who run this page, but I was promised a case of some truly choice pinot noir in exchange for a counterpoint in defence of Marxist theory, so here we are:

The claims of “revolutionary practice” by Stalinists mirror their claims of defending “actually existing socialism”. This faux-materialism is nothing more than a constellation of vulgar “left”-nationalisms which are bourgeois in the first and final instance, all attempts to dress them up otherwise notwithstanding.

Could you pop open one of those pinot noirs for me? No, no need for a glass, just uncork it and set it down there.

I’m sure Worker’s Spatula were hoping I was simply planning on rebutting the pithy pseudo-revolutionism displayed in the outbursts of this child from the so-called “Toilers’ Party for Global Freedom”. I suspect Worker’s Spatula editors forget all those times they called me a “leftcom waste of oxygen” and “wrecker neo-Trotskyite filth”. Then use me as a hired gun who can be bought off with a few bottles of pinot to gainsay your ideological enemies within the Stalinist movement???

Don’t take that away, I’m still drinking that!

Well, I haven’t forgotten. I haven’t forgotten anything. It’s always you Stalinists who forget things. You forget how many of your heroes wouldn’t be up to your own standards of Marxist theoretical rigour, you’ve forgotten how many un-self-criticised zig-zags and re-un-self-criticised re-zig-re-zags you’ve been responsible for throughout your confused 20th century aborted attempt at marrying assorted “anti-imperialist” bourgeois nationalisms with Marxism predicated on a few out-of-context Marx quotes, and now you’re doing it all over again with 21st century identity politics and whatever unsettled nationalist scores you can still muster in 2018! You fucking hacks! You expect me to treat you any differently from these first day communist kids because you can hobble together some Hegelese? You think I’ll view you as equals because you could hold your own in a debate with Žižek? Anyone with enough coke in their system who’s taken more than one semester of philosophy can pull that off! How long will your fraud go unexposed?

Your future will be the same as all of those who have gone before you, and picking on stupid kids who can’t tell the difference between the Bolshevik Party and Phalangists won’t change that. One day your opportunism will overpower your intellectualism and you’ll be right there next to them, you won’t be joking when you claim Trump is pushing history forward because of some ill-defined “contradictions”, your US comrades will be low-level functionaries in some washed-up post-DSA “popular front”, your German comrades will be little Horst Mahlers, your British comrades will be in the Green Party, your Australian comrades will still be in the Green Party, and any of your Turkish and Kurdish comrades who aren’t dead will be Doğu Perinçek and the PUK, respectively.

I can see the future through my superior understanding of the dialectic of class struggle, “comrades”, and I can tell you in the end everyone will see what frauds and fake Marxists you were, like all the Stalinists before you. One day, history will look back and see that I was the only real Marxist on the internet.

And then maybe, just maybe, someone will read my blog.

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Rive Gauche Impressions: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Latest En Vogue Postmodernist Philosopher

PARIS – Worker’s Spatula spoke with some hip students and intellectuals in Rive Gauche cafés about the recent events in Turkey, including several bomb attacks and the assassination of the Russian ambassador, which followed over a year of extraordinary events that have by now become ordinary including, yet again, several bombing attacks, war in Kurdistan, a coup attempt, martial law, and so on and so on.

*sniffs*

Among the jeunesse d’or of France there is a widespread admiration for the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, particularly in poststructuralist and deconstructionist circles. François, philosophy student at Paris VIII told us: «Ever since the death of Derrida we have been thinking about how to develop his theory. I mean, what does it mean to develop a theory? Is there progress? Is there progress in theory? What about practice? I am very impressed by Erdoğan, he is a legitimate successor to Derrida. Even Derrida has only rejected the notion of the possibility of stability. He deciphered stability as an illusion on a conceptual level. But Erdoğan has deconstructed the notion of stability in practice, by proclaiming the unstable situation in Turkey as the manifestation of his stabilising effect. A deconstructive genius, using the material to tear apart the abstraction.»

Sophie appears to be a student somewhere, although she preferred to play coy when asked her precise academic affiliations, replying that she was «a student of life». She largely agreed with François’s assessment: «We always used to say that reality does not exist and everything is language and so on… but, let’s be honest, we say that because it is the cool thing to say. But with him, with my dear Recep, he actually lives the idea that reality does not exist. We could say, following Judith Butler, that there is a performativity involved, a performative negation of the notion of reality and illusion, dissolved into an infinite series of differences in his speeches. C’est fantastique!»

Mourad, a sociology student and a close observer of the Middle East, expressed his fascination with the fluidity not only of political discourse in Turkey, but of the ideology of the ruling party itself: «Also,» he added, «if their constant attacks on the intelligentsia aren’t postmodernist, they’re at least Maoist, so either way, a refreshing new approach to politics in the region.»

Local KCK enthusiast and weirdo Joseph pointed out to us that Abdullah Öcalan was the first one to assess Erdoğan’s thought in this fashion, and the former only fails to be recognised for his theoretical contributions due to the anti-Kurdish sentiments prevalent among the Rive Gauche élite.

«They’re all ironic Kemalists as well, you see.»

“I Have Read Adorno,” Announces Sam Kriss

LONDON – In a recent thinkpiece for VICE, freelance writer and vanguard of the thinkpiece-active hipster left Sam Kriss announced that he has indeed read at least one book by Adorno, and, in fact, he intends to read more.

“I have read Adorno,” the piece began, “and I think it is important that all of you know this. I have read Adorno, and I daresay that I enjoyed doing so. I hope this doesn’t put any of you off.”

Kriss went on to elaborate that, as one of the most important left public intellectuals, it is his responsibility to apply his intimate knowledge of the famed Frankfurt School theorist to pressing questions of the day, such as what Slavoj Žižek’s testicles probably look like, whether Star Wars is Maoist, or whether playing video games in your spare time is revolutionary or counter-revolutionary.

The shocking revelation has so captured the attention of Marxists around the world that Kriss was immediately approached for an interview by Jacobin to detail the implications of this revelation.

“Freud. Hegel,” he continued, when pressed for details on the development of his theoretical approach, “Lukács. With the accent mark.”

As of press time, Kriss was in the midst of a long and vigorous affirmation of the fact that, yes, he has indeed read quite a bit of Lacan.

Worker’s Spatula Announces “Pivot to Asia”

MELBOURNE – Despite loss of communication with the bulk of Worker’s Spatula’s correspondents in the UK since our English comrades went “full Mahir Çayan” in defence of Corbyn against the Blairite scum, and our Welsh comrades decided that now was the time to join Yr Aflonddwch Mawr’s glorious people’s war in the Welsh hills, new Worker’s Spatula recruits have inflated our ranks to the point where we feel confident to directly confront US imperialism on the world stage.

In response to the hated Obama regime’s “pivot to Asia”, Worker’s Spatula is hereby announcing its own “pivot to Asia”, recruiting comrades from Southeast Asian countries to a new two-pronged strategy:

From the north, Worker’s Spatula will continue supporting our comrades in the Philippines in their fight against the Philippine state (backed by US imperialism) and the Trotskyists (backed by Hong Kong imperialism).

However, at the same time, we will attack US imperialism from the south by moving comrades from various countries to Australia and New Zealand. We believe these countries are ripe for anti-imperialist struggle for the following reasons:

-The CPA(ML) upholds the correct line of establishing “New Democracy” in Australia following a war of liberation against the occupying US forces. Together with the massive MLM community built by our comrades at “Communism Will Win in Australia“, we are certain that our increase in Worker’s Spatula comrades on the ground in Australia (that is, one has become two) will hasten a patriotic anti-colonial war which will shake US imperialism to its very foundations.

-New Zealand has the proud and very effectual tradition of the Communist Party of New Zealand, which sided with China in the Sino-Soviet Split, Albania in the Sino-Albanian split, and embraced Trotskyism after the fall of socialist Albania. Unfortunately, the CPNZ and all successor organisations have disbanded*, but we are certain that we can regroup the remnants and unite them with anti-imperialist Māori youth around the correct line of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Hoxhaism-Liquidationism and establish socialism in New Zealand very soon.

It is our hope that if victory may be achieved in these countries, the CPA(ML) will be able to direct resources to Cambodia to allow for the reformation and return to power of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, while a socialist New Zealand will be a great victory for the various theoretical trends involved in its construction.

*Just to be clear, we did not in any way exaggerate or fabricate our description of the history of the CPNZ.

Marxist-Leninist who Fails to Uphold Harry Haywood on Black Belt Nation Not a Racist or Anything

BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA – “Ian”, a white Marxist-Leninist who, to his credit, is out in the streets against the increasingly militarised police force in the US which is used to disproportionately attack the Black and Latino proletariats, informed our local correspondent in Louisiana that the red, black, and green flags were “false consciousness” and at the end of the day, the workers just need to unite.

“Just because they have a territory, a flag, a common and acknowledged history of struggle, a common language, a national anthem, a national bourgeoisie, and countless attempts at building national consciousness which were destroyed by state violence doesn’t make African Americans a nation,” he explained.

Asked about Lenin, Stalin, and Harry Haywood’s theoretical views on the matter, they were brushed aside as “errors which were rectified by Marxist-Leninists at the time,” meaning the Browderites.

“Besides, Harry Haywood was a revisionist. Maybe I can familiarise you with the works of Harpal Brar, who teaches us that even Scotland is not a nation.”

At press time, we were informed that English Canadians are a separate nation to the Yanks, on account of maple syrup and the maple leaf flag and maple maple maple maple.

But “Ian”s not a racist or anything, where would you get that idea?

United Federation of Planets under Fire for “Social Imperialism”

WHEREVER STAR TREK TAKES PLACE, SPACE OR WHATEVER, YOU GODDAMN NERDS – Despite claims made by the Federation to have abolished money, several former RIM affiliates have condemned the United Federation of Planets for operating in accordance with “capitalist logic” and having succumbed to the pressures of “space revisionism (the final revisionist frontier)”.

“The use of credits shows that contrary to the Federation’s claims of having advanced beyond socialism into full space communism, there is still some capacity for a descent into revisionism,” said a spokesman for the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan.

“Indeed,” concurred Yr Aflonyddwch Mawr’s spokesman. “It is our contention that old capitalist habits and relations have been sublated in the newly socialist Federation, but that lack of attention to this fact has allowed capitalist logic to reassert itself through the corrupt Federation bureaucracy. Combined with the Federation’s impressive military force, we are unfortunately beginning to see increasing violations of the Prime Directive, one of the first signs of social imperialism.”

When asked what they proposed as a solution for the dire picture they painted, the spokeswoman for the Communist Party of India (Maoist) prescribed “cultural revolution, by the bucketful. Just keep smashing old things until everything becomes new and good,” causing the other spokespeople to nod their heads in somber agreement.

While the intergalactic Trotskyist movement universally agreed that “degeneracy” was “inevitable” without Trotsky at the head of the Federation Council, they were divided on whether to critically support the Federation as a “degenerated workers’ space-althing” (per the Spartacist League) or whether to claim the Federation, like all practical efforts by anti-capitalists, was “worse than capitalism, which we wouldn’t want to be too hard on” (per Solidarity).

At press time, anarchists were still diving in dumpsters, even though we have fucking replicators now.