Christmas and the Nature of Capitalism

An extended ramble about A Charlie Brown Christmas

Christmas is, in ways rarely understood by its practitioners, an incredibly bizarre holiday. Nominally the celebration of the birth of the Christian messiah (literally Christ’s Mass) but held not on his actual birthday but on the day of an ancient Pagan festive, Christmas is riven by contradictory tendencies that pull it in 3 different directions at once. The tension between these three directions: Christmas as religious holiday, Christmas as gift giving, and Christmas as consumer spectacle, forms the core of most Christmas media. Take for example the 1965 classic A Charlie Brown Christmas. The story opens with Charlie Brown, depressed at yet another holiday season, encountering a series of manifestations of Christmas’ commercialization. Lucy’s quip about never getting real estate for Christmas is the capitalist corruption of interpersonal gift giving, Snoopy’s decorations represent the injection of vanity and competition (read as symptoms of capitalist modernity) into the holiday, and Sally’s demand for cash from Santa sees the intrusion of commercialization into the mythological form of gift giving represented by Santa. The Christmas play, an attempt to reassert the supremacy of the religious aspect of the holiday, is threatened by the emergence of Lucy as the seemingly secular Christmas queen, causing Charlie Brown to retreat into the symbolism and tradition of the Christmas tree as a way to find the “true meaning of Christmas”. But the realm of tradition has likewise become corrupted and the only Christmas tree left is a sad and immediately mocked tiny real pine tree, which leads to the climax of the movie where an exasperated Charlie Brown shouts “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Linus presents a solution to the commercialization problem: a “return” to Christmas’ theocratic roots, wrapped in a revamping of modern tradition that likewise presents itself as a return to true tradition (the real organic Christmas tree displaces the metal artificial tree as the symbol of Christmas). He recites the Biblical annunciation to the shepherds and leaves Charlie Brown to finish the synthesis by decorating the tiny Christmas tree. The movie ends with the whole gang standing around the tree singing all time great Christmas banger Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, about the most religious Christmas song you can possibly imagine, as the camera rises into the sky.

So what have we actually learned here? On the surface the three contradictory poles of Christmas seem irreconcilable, locked in an endless battle for supremacy over the contested field of tradition. Capitalism and Christianity’s shotgun wedding seems to be coming apart at the seams as as pure commercialization threatens to convert Christmas into a pure sales event, bringing with it the malaise that so afflicts Charlie Brown at the beginning of the movie and ultimately threats capitalism and Christianity alike by transforming the holiday they both rely on into a day of pure depression hostile to spending and religious devotion alike. Gift giving likewise threatens theocracy by encouraging a form of vulgar materialism that while at the opposite end of the political spectrum from commercialization represents a similar threat of secularization to the Christian theocrat. But the more immediate danger is the wholesale consumption of gift giving by the logic of capitalism, reducing it to the transfer of money and real estate demanded by Sally and Lucy, the purposely feminine embodiments of consumer culture (it’s no coincidence that the project theocratic project that overcomes them is carried out by two men, theocracy always is ultimately a patriarchal project). The solution offered by Linus, as we’ve discussed, is a return to the religious foundation of Christmas to resolve the contradictions. But is that really all that’s going on? After all, A Charlie Brown Christmas (now streaming on Amazon Prime) is itself a commercial product, the goal of which is to sell you the experience of a “true” Christmas represented by the overcoming of commercialization by religion. So did capitalism win out in the end anyways? Has all that’s solid finally melted into air, all that’s sacred been profaned, leaving us like Charlie Brown at the beginning of the movie facing with sober senses how much our lives suck?

Well no. And this is what’s actually interesting about Christmas. Contra early Marx’s prediction that capitalist social relations would consume the relations of all prior eras, capitalism has instead fused with religious fundamentalists everywhere as a means of ideological and even material reproduction. This accounts for two of the poles of Christmas. Capitalism relies on pre-existing traditions and social relations to function. This is as true of capitalism’s reliance on slave labor as it is of capitalism’s dependence on Christianity and ultimately Christmas. In the US capitalism’s shock troopers (and this is no euphemism, the Evangelical fanatics who sat next to me in orchestra class are even now busy busting down doors in Iraq) are Christian fundamentalists who fight ferociously to protect their particular fusion of capitalism and Christianity. Christianity gets a similar bonus out of the deal. Pure theocracy alone is ultimately too weak a tradition to reproduce itself. Christmas as a church service with children reenacting the birth of Christ and the whole congregation singing Christmas hymns, while the best service of the year by a country mile, is ultimately less entertaining than the average game of football. Capitalism gives Christianity the hooks it needs to reproduce itself, whether that’s in the form of producing material scarcity that Christian charity can exploit to its advantage, the ability for Christianity to present itself as an alternative to the monotony and drudgery of capitalist existence, or just by making Christmas more fun through increasingly expensive toys. This is where gift giving comes back into the equation. Christianity relies on the mythological gift giving tradition to perpetuate itself and to draw people who would otherwise drift away into the theology itself. Now to some extent this mythological gift giving tradition was the invention of Coca-Cola from its series of North Pole ads that popularized the modern version of Santa. But Saint Nick has his roots in both Christian theology (or at least Catholic theology, which was good enough for repurposing) and gift giving itself emerged originally as a popular tradition developed and practiced essentially spontaneously by the masses.

The introduction of gift giving to Christmas, while convenient for Christianity and capitalism alike, gives rise to some immediate contradictions. Capitalism to a large extent now literally relies on gift giving to function. The largest commercial day of the year in the US is Black Friday, originally a sales day for Christmas, so named because it’s the day retailers “go into the black” and actually start making money for the year. Yet gift giving represents the negation of the logic of capitalist society itself by obliterating the concept of exchange (and therefor value) altogether. Extended throughout a society it becomes mutual aid and threatens to consume capitalism altogether and become a form of communism. Anarchists like Kropotkin saw the revolutionary potential of Christmas and used it as a propaganda tool to the point of Kropotkin dressing up as old Saint Nick himself. Later Danish anarchists, seizing on the potential of gift giving to subvert capitalist logics, continued the tradition by infiltrating a department store and emerging dressed in Santa costumes, immediately declaring that everything was free and giving people newly liberated gifts left and right. These protests were inevitably repressed but capitalism’s reliance on its own negation should be enough to give us pause. Halloween too functions on similar a logic: suspending the normal function of capitalist society to give out gifts (which is what candy really is) in an attempt to sell more goods. It’s as if capitalism demands the negation of its own values to get people to spend more, that the exploitation of our natural desire to aid and comfort each other becomes the basis of the system that causes so much suffering.

Gift giving’s tension with Christianity on the other hand functions somewhat differently. On the one hand gift giving and the Santa mythology, as we’ve previously discussed, represent the secularization of the holiday. But the problem is more complicated than just secularization or materialism. Gift giving represents an autonomous logic outside of the control of the church. This wouldn’t really be a problem normally, in fact Christian doctrine originally demanded its disciples live in a form of religious communism, sharing property in a way not altogether dissimilar from the gift giving logic. But that theology was abandoned thousands of years ago as Christianity began to take political power. The rise of Christianity’s material wealth consumed its communistic doctrine and led to the modern absurdity of the Vatican and the modern televangelist who take the wealth of their flock to live in enormous castles much closer to the Romans than their god. Now theoretically this is just a theological issue, one that could if necessary be solved by reverting to an older form of Christianity. But practically embracing the gift giving ethic would mean the destruction of modern Christianity. For long before Christianity became wedded to capitalism it fused with the state and embraced its practices of wealth accumulation and violence as a means of political and social control, both of which are incompatible with prior Christian doctrines and gift giving itself as anything more than a subset of Christian charity.

Here at last we see the true nature of the mystery of Christmas: each pole of the holiday relies on the other to function even as they contradict each other. The conflict between the three poles constantly structure each other and the holiday itself. But the final triumph of any one pole over the other two would lead to collective ruin of all parties (with the possible exception of gift giving, though generalized gift giving alone would render the holiday unnecessary). This is, in some sense, a microcosm of how capitalism works. Capitalism is built on a constantly shifting series of contradictions. But those contradictions, and even the crises they generate, don’t necessarily mean that capitalism will actually collapse. It’s much more likely that a crisis will simply rearrange the balance of power between contradictory tendencies until the contradictions of that tendency reassert themselves, causing yet another shift in power. The end of capitalism then is not an inevitable product of it inner dynamics. It is a deliberate political and social project that must be fought for and built by our hands. But its principles are not wholly alien to us. We live them every day, though some days more so than others. After all what is Christmas but an elaborate dress rehearsal for the day when the bourgeoisie’s power collapses and the fruits of our labor our once again ours to give to each other for no other reason than to put a smile on the faces of those we love?