Radical Reprint: The Christmas spectacle

A curmudgeonly anarchist Christmas rejoinder is in some ways truer now than it was forty-five years ago

~ punkacademic ~

The 8 December 1980 edition of Freedom led with a bold call to action—BOYCOTT CHRISTMAS! A wonderfully curmudgeonly rant at ‘Capitalist Christmas’ penned by one of our predecessors, the piece veers between all-out assault on the hypocrisies of Christmas celebrations under capitalism and more poignant reflections on loneliness and mental health.

At its core is a concern with Christmas as a capitalist spectacle, though it doesn’t use that term. Celebrations and forced fun are a must at Christmas to legitimise the misery in which we live. These invented rituals, which generate untold waste and whose contradictions are visible to children, have to be seen to be done. This aspect is never more true than now, with the advent (pun intended) of social media and the digital production of the self ensuring that we are all making a ‘spectacle’ of ourselves one way or another.

Your present author is what academics call ‘highly situated” which translates to ‘has skin in the game’ as he is currently in Cologne making the most of sentiment, hypocrisy, and Glühwein. I feel suitably admonished by my more illustrious predecessors here, but whilst very much failing to take my past comrade’s advice on a boycott, it’s profoundly the case that the hypocrisies of Christmas are more alive and well than they were even in 1980.

For our author reproduced below, the bribery of children with presents stands in lieu of the briberies we all face to forestall the social revolution. But it is arguably worse than that today. Whereas the rant below seeks to convince an audience that Christmas is a capitalist institution that masks the reality of economic dispossession, few would need convincing today whether an anarchist or no.

Klarna-ing your gifts on ‘Black Friday’, most know only too well the fraudulent nature of the Christmas spectacle under capitalism. The truth is more prosaic—they feel powerless to do anything about it in a world of oligarch billionaires. The alienation of which the author speaks is now encapsulated by the Instagramming of our lives, which prizes not even the event itself, but its representation.

I’ll end the same way as my predecessor, as I stumble back to the Glühwein, which is to say merry…er…wossname..thingy.

—–

Boycott Christmas!

CHRISTMAS is coming and the goose isn’t all that’s getting fat! It’s that time of year again. Crass commercialism has its once a year orgy of selling kitsch revolting commodities using even kitschier more revolting advertising.

Everyone will go out and buy useless presents they don’t like and that fall to bits overnight, for people they don’t like, using money they haven’t got. There will be loads and loads of exciting spectacular events all designed to lead up to the wonderfully exciting event itself when everyone will go to endless boring events with even more endless boring relatives. Everyone will go off getting drunk, stoned, ripped and bloated for several days and then wake up hungover, down and sick and either boast about how drunk, stoned, ripped, bloated etcetera they were (oh you should have seen me on Christmas day – three turkeys, forty-eight bottles of vodka, three pounds of hash….) or else vow never never never again – till next year.

In the meantime the kids are wondering what the adults are playing at – they are always the best leveller there is because they see right through the artificial game playing and are only kept from ruining the whole affair by being given brightly coloured plastic bribes. A bit like family reformism. The right concessions at the right time keep the social fabric from revolution.

And then everyone goes back to work poorer but none the wiser to work harder than ever to have an even more miserable Christmas next year.

Of course crass commercialism will get the blame but there’s more to it than that. For instance the suicide rate amongst single people leaps…dramatically during December. And the death rate amongst old single people is much higher just after Christmas as well as after their birthdays.

Which brings us to the most important point about the whole pathetic affair. Existence has been reduced to such miserable organised boredom that without organised excuses to pretend to be happy there is no happiness and no community in this society.

Not that Christmas is the only offender, there are birthdays, weddings, rock festivals…the list goes on. And Capitalist Christmas is merely a usurper on Christian Christmas which itself usurped the traditional European festivals such as the Saxon Yule.

But Capitalistmas has taken alienation to a particularly advanced state of the art and anyone who had anything approaching a decent life on this muckball wouldn’t be fooled by such a pathetic, degraded and degrading imitation of life. Life – real life – as always, consists in the positive conscious creation of our own environments for ourselves, by ourselves, outside of and against all alienation, all constraints, all limitations.

Anyway, have a….you know…thingummy…..er….wosoname..and…er a whatsit…er….you know….

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