Welcome to Socialism World, where everything is paid for. ‘Yeah, nah’, as we say here in the People’s Republic of ScoMo. It’s our personal proletarian Aloha for pasty humanities graduates who can’t tan. As Mao once said, take a pamphlet, lie back, relax and watch the safety demonstration.

All socialism is a spectrum. It’s non-binary. Everyone is a socialist even if you’re not. Confused? Don’t be. Whether you are some minimum wage useful idiot whining about your NBN connection and how you miss Kevin 07, or a bitter merchant banking vanguard-of-the-proletariat former PM. It’s the vibe of the thing. Here, feel free to borrow a copy of my 3,000-page autobiography, A Bigger Paycheck and valuable collection of rare twentieth century Bill Henson erotica while I tell you why I’m not PM.

Marx says religion is the opiate of the masses or was it the other way round? Marx was a pisshead and socialist theory can be confusing – but please view my interpretative dance. It’s the workers that are screwed due to their false consciousness but are they really? Like any abusive relationship, false consciousness is a tricky thing. Which brings us back to collectivism and the many ways it is building a better world especially if you are a Pacific island nation needing a new airport runway and flu pandemic. Let me lend you a shit load of money from my belt and road initiative so you can buy a flat in Collingwood and complain to rich Trotskyites about your mortgage.

As Fidel Castro noted while installing a puppet regime in Angola, not all socialisms are equal, but some Toorak real estate portfolios are more equal than others. It says it right here in the users manual. As Nicolae Ceaușescu told his chauffeur before shooting him, to each according to his needs.

So what sort of socialist are you? Are you young? Attractive? A recently redundant Nine journalist looking for a job at The Guardian? An IPA-hating radio announcer at the ABC who happens to know where the Savage Club is? Is your name Virginia? Maybe you’re a bored doctor’s wife in South Yarra wanting someone to push around now that you have to self-isolate from the help and do your own dishes. Or perhaps you run a rapidly tanking airline that likes shouting at people about Israel Foulau while they’re still playing pay-for-view homosexual executions at Middle Eastern Airports because that’s different but the same? Yeah, nah as we say.

Please take time to chat with our personal stylist to see which socialism suits your star sign. From Stalinism where we will kill you through to Greta-ism where we bore you to death, we’ve got all options covered and autumnal shades are particularly popular this season especially in military jackets.

We have Bolshevism, Maoism and Scandanavia-ism that combines grainy 1970’s soft porn highlights with BDSM fluoro safety vests and an excessive use of the Safe Word, ‘mackerel’. There’s Pol Potism where they only shoot you if you look clever and wear spectacles. A kind of Bolshevik Spec Savers where every second corpse is free.

If you’re trying to cut back, we have our mentholated socialism range: Triangulation, the Third Way, Dan Andrewism, the union organiser who will beat the shit out of you if you don’t all chant in unison. They’re all on the socialist spectrum; organizing society likes it’s their personal sock drawer.

Please make your selection now, or hit the red button for assistance. The inflatable Peter FitzSimons will be with you shortly with your complimentary champagne and copy of Tim Minchin’s new song about how he hates #scottyfrommarketing even more, now that the market in clichéd anti-George Pell doggerel has collapsed.

Meanwhile, We The People are grieving about the passing of Marxist Dear Leader Bernie Sanders. Oprah will be with us shortly to assist. But really, Bernie will never be gone. Let’s face it was he ever really here? If he had lived in Soviet Russia they would have given him that disappointed look every Socialist apparatchik knows before being sent to the gulag to give TED talks.

As your personal celebrity chef and boxercise therapist Leon Trotsky said while wearing an ice pick in his head, ‘there are so many other ways to cook boiled cabbage.’ But it’s hard to get excited about boiled cabbage or standing in a queue outside JB HiFi when it’s only three people at a time.

As Lenin tweeted while watching HD Netflix show trial reruns, socialism is just an ideology about standing in queues, making soup from horse glue and learning the correct way to use a mounted Gatling gun in a paddock before rolling people into a mass grave. Try fitting all that onto one grungy, tightly fitting South Yarra boutique t-shirt.

But these are exciting times for exciting media people who like spending the government’s money. Jacqueline Maley keeps hyperventilating that we have become collectivists like she has won a bet with Friedrich Engels and Lisa Wilkinson. And Nicholas Reece is celebrating the revolution by transitioning from dressing like a David Jones department store dummy to wearing Armani and channelling Herbert Marcuse so his students can dismantle their own university degree while sporting a smart casual blazer.

He says we are all socialists now while waving his silk red pocket handkerchief on Sky-After-Dark at a perplexed Michael Kroger who responds by telling Nicholas he is at best a Number 11 batsman which just makes ‘Kroges’ look like an elitist prick. After all, cricket is a sport for rich bastards except for Marxist-bogan Dave Warner who did a double-masters in sandpaper management and third-wave feminism at Monash.

As Dave Xiaoping said to critics of his poor footwork when playing the hook on green English wickets, it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice and goes for 6 over square but if you stand in front of one of our friendly and highly amusing tanks in Tiananmen Square or maybe choose the romantic Wuhan Airbnb getaway from our government monitored online catalogue you will quickly become a scorebook statistic. Have a nice day and let me send you a cargo container full of face masks that were actually yours in the first place.

‘Yeah, nah’, as we say.

Michael Scammell is a useful idiot. He writes at https://mdswords.wordpress.com.

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