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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Max Zirngast Returns to Austria

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

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

[CW: fuckin’]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And all you want to talk about is my penis?

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

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

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“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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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.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CrimethInc. Organises Dauvé Talk in Phnom Penh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s it. That’s the joke.

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Bigfoot Condemns Gramsci

As a cold front rolls in to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, that most awe-inspiring of all God’s anti-revisionist creatures, Maoist Bigfoot shakes some snow off of his fur, saddles up on his elk, and sets off towards the 43rd parallel.

He must travel many miles to attend the annual conference of the rarest and most powerful of the three ICMLPOs, the ICMLPO (Cryptid), hosted by a mountain Giant in Woodland Caribou National Park this year.

Whilst crossing the sparsely populated Canadian south, he wanders past a group of young revolutionaries training for gue-errrrr… practising their bushcraft skills in a wooded grove in southern Ontario. One of the cadre- which is to say, group, eagle-eyed as ever, spots Maoist Bigfoot hiding, mostly concealed by a dense thicket of trees, just outside of the range most cameras can effectively focus.

“Ah, Bigfoot,” exclaimed J. Moufawad-Paul said “My old ideological nemisis.”

“JMP,” replied Bigfoot, nodding.

“How are the Red Guards?’’ smirked JMP.

“We split over the issue of pig heads,” Bigfoot replied, calmly: “they wouldn’t give me the rest of the pig. Apparently ‘the butcher uses the rest of the pig’. Do they know how many calories it takes to sustain a creature of my size? Absolute bullshit.”

“Solidarity,” replied JMP, sympathetically.

“How have you been, JMP?” asked Bigfoot, dismounting from his elk. “What polemics have you been engaged with since we last met?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” said JMP. “I had to break into my own university during a strike to host a conference with Worker’s Spatula. We were going to continue it, but ever since we’ve been e-mailing back and forth, debating Gramsci.”

“Gramsci?” bristled Bigfoot, “I presume your debate centred on Gramsci’s flagrant idealism?”

“…no, I… we were debating whether Gramsci can be considered an orthodox Marxist-Leninist theorist. I suppose that in so far as Gramsci’s ideas from his Prison Notebooks weren’t connected to a concrete practice…”

“NOR SHOULD THEY HAVE BEEN!” thundered Bigfoot. “Gramsci’s theory substitutes an idealist war of culture in the place of engaging with the real roots of the decline in the emergence of the proletariat as a class for itself: that although the proletariat objectively increased in number since capitalism emerged, the development of imperialism has divided the proletariat, and neo-liberal restructuring has intensified this process of the practical fragmentation of the proletariat in social terms!”

“Absolutely the economic processes to which you refer are real,” replied JMP, “but you can’t possibly claim that there is no place for ideological struggle for unity of the revolutionary masses? After all, what was the Cultural Revolution if not an attempt to shore up the ideological hegemony of what was at the time referred to as ‘Mao Zedong Thought’?”

“Chairman Mao never advocated for an internationalisation of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which was a political struggle by the Chinese proletariat in practice after having already overcome the material obstacles to proletarian revolution in their own country!” proclaimed Bigfoot, pausing to blow a huge cloud of vape, under which he was entirely naked.

“So you’re suggesting that Gramsci’s theories were mistaken in terms of his understanding of what the role of ideological struggle was?” enquired JMP, attempting to find common ground with the Cryptid.

“Not at all,” insisted Bigfoot, “the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a practical political struggle in concrete material practice, just as People’s War is. Delaying People’s War in favour of achieving some idealist ‘ideological hegemony’ is nothing but the October Road, no matter how you choose to conceal this fact. There is no ‘War of Position’, there is only a strategic defensive phase of the protracted war that the people wage against imperialism and the comprador bourgeoisies,” concluded Bigfoot, placing his vaporiser back in the pouch on his elk.

Polemics continued for several hours, as is traditional among anti-revisionists, before talk turned to the shared commitment of the RCP-PCR and Bigfoot to Maoist People’s War against all the settler-colonial imperialist forces of North America, who oppress the victims of colonialism and exploit all the cryptids of the region for tourist money.

The group raised their Kalashnik-I mean their bushcraft firemaking tools and fired-that is to say… produced sparks up into the air in a display of anti-revisionist Maoist unity. A revisionist loon on a near-by lake was heard cawing in disdain in the distance, but even this could not dull the spirit of proletarian and internationalist solidarity.

As Bigfoot climbed back onto his trusty elk, his thoughts returned to the upcoming ICMLPO (Cryptid) conference ahead of him. Strange ethereal lights guided his way through the snow-covered landscape. What would the other creatures of lore have to say about the current struggles around the world? Was Dogman really a Hoxhaist? Would the Black-Eyed Children of the PSL turn up and ruin it for everyone? Would proceedings get interrupted again by a group of Satanic Guevarists trying to contact Fidel Castro by seance again like last year? Only time––and the dialectic of history––will tell.

To be continued…

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New 12-Step Programme AAAA Founded for those Addicted to Artisanal Anti-Revisionism

CW: Addiction, self-harm

A BASEMENT IN LOS ANGELES – A new twelve-step programme called “Artisanal Anti-Revisionism Addicts Anonymous” (AAAA) has been founded in Los Angeles (or by its full, original, Spanish name: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili), which is targeted at anti-revisionists too disattached from the social dogma even for Gonzaloism.

You know, the sort of people who read Abstrakt and write for Worker’s Spatula and have strong opinions about the TİKB splits.

These poor souls have had their chance at a normal life ruined by a crippling addiction to reading condemnations, analysis, and declarations from various anti-revisionist groups so obscure in the mainstream discourse and so furiously angry at the various frauds who masquerade as Marxists these days that they make the RIM look like social democrats. Using the traditional twelve-step format for other addictions, they hope to come together and become normal, healthy, functioning (but critical) members of popular fronts.

The inaugural meeting began with all attendees going round the circle and introducing themselves in turn, in the form: “my name is [FIRST NAME], and I’m addicted to obscure boutique anti-revisionist publications”.

“It started with reading old Stalinist Workers Group for Afro-American National Liberation and a New Communist International polemics against anyone and everyone. I thought it was no big deal, just a fun way to arm myself theoretically against the modern revisionists,” explained one young man, who was fired from his job for spending an entire workweek doing nothing but printing up hundreds of pages of opinions on precisely what went wrong in China.

“The next thing I know, I’m casually using terms like ‘modern revisionists’, and teaching myself Tamil so I can read NDMLP propaganda from Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka. That’s like extra bad island India, with extra annoying Trots. Our comrades in the NDMLP say that…” trailed off the young man before bursting into tears, horrified at what he had become.

The young woman seated to his right patted him on the back to comfort him before taking her turn: “I started talking to some of the APL people in some leftbook group. It seemed like there couldn’t be any harm in reading Enver Hoxha. Then I found out that in Turkey, Hoxhaism is so mainstream that there are multiple kinds of Hoxhaist who disagree with each other on how to criticise Hoxha, whether to do it like Hoxha or Stalin or Freire or Che or something. I hit bottom last week when I found myself snorting the ashes from a printed-up stack of Devrimci Proletarya tweets I had smoked while listening to Kutup Yıldızı and screaming ‘FACTIONALIST! SPLITTER! NEO-BERNSTEINITE!’ at the mirror.

“My mother came in just as I had punched the mirror, shattering it to pieces. When she tried to take my wounded hands in hers, I pulled away screaming ‘NO, COMRADE MOM, I NEED TO WRITE A SELF-CRITICISM IN MY OWN BLOOD!'”

A minor spat broke out between two members over which four-person Guevarist group hiding in the Andes whose faxed pamphlets they had read in the library was more correct in their critical engagement with the Bolivarian Revolution, causing the moderator to have to intervene and remind them: “Comrades, let’s not forget that we want to be the sort of people who can hear the word ‘Venezuela’ without launching into an hour-long sectarian tirade against sectarianism.”

All members of the group, regardless of tendency or number of screeds they have wheatpasted to the walls of their college campus, could agree on their higher power to which they would appeal as they worked their way through the steps: the dialectic of history.

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Hypocritical “Communist” Owns Smartphone, Doesn’t Use it to Read Marxist Theory and Spread Propaganda

MELBOURNE – Sources close to Tyler Cheng, a suburban anti-capitalist in Melbourne and proud owner of all the DVDs and weed you could want if you’re thinking to come by his place later, have confirmed that in spite of his flirting with the self-designation of “communist”, he hypocritically owns a smartphone which he neither uses to read Marxist theory nor to spread communist propaganda.

“Ugh, Tyler’s so annoying. He’s always talking about anything that annoys him in terms of it being ‘capitalist’, but he doesn’t even seem to grasp that his comfortable life is made possible by an internationalised mode of production held up by monopoly-controlled imperialist powers which produce the goods and services he takes for granted. So you can imagine I never see him organising accordingly,” explained friend and classmate Jaswinder Kaur.

“Yeah, for sure, I hate when I see his stupid hammer and sickle background photo on his smartphone. What a hypocrite. Does he realise that the capitalist mode of production is a material reality that can’t be fought by idealism and formalism, but only by materialist dialectics as the theoretical basis for revolutionary practice?” concurred fellow classmate and Jaswinder’s partner Peter Smith.

Tyler’s Sociology professor Nancy Gold had this to say about Tyler’s outbursts in class, which we’re told never go beyond class as he’s too busy getting high all the fucking time to interact with anyone who isn’t explicitly asking for engagement as she does: “Tyler always shouts out something about capitalist society being stupid and responsible for the terrible essays I ‘make’ him write, but capitalism is amazing when you think about it: it puts in the palm of his hand a device which allows him to read diverse critical theoretical texts written over a timespan of over a hundred years on sites like Marxists Internet Archive and communicate with people in diverse social conditions, and he passes all that up in favour of looking edgy and stupid all the fucking time. I’m going to fail him.”

Tyler’s girlfriend Sharon Wong confessed that she too has become tired of her boyfriend’s posturing: “He’s always writing these papers for class which claim to criticise all actually existing conditions, but he never publishes them outside class or does any other propaganda work. It’s like, you go to a good university, you wear nice clothes made in sweatshops, you own a smartphone made by exploited workers the world over, all of these things place you within a respected social context such that you could reach dozens of young people in your own environment for the purpose of organisation. And yet, you’d rather just intellectually masturbate when you could go join RaFFWU and start a reading group with the other organisers or something useful.

“Do you know what communists actually believe? They don’t believe in you spending all your time on Facebook. They believe in you spending a few hours a day of your time on Facebook explaining how the capitalist society which produced Facebook is itself a product of generations of social development within class society, a state of affairs which could be overturned, but not if people like you just uncritically accept your own social belonging and fail to organise against it.

“It’s like, you live in Australia, Tyler. You can’t be a communist. Not without grasping our society’s objective existence as a parasitic settler-colony atop the oppressed Aboriginal people and within a system of international exploitation which includes the countries from which our parents hailed and is the material reason for our existence here.”

Image expropriated from Kriffed.

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