Everyday communism and the “spirit of Christmas”
In
these times of crisis, it is crucial to remember that the seeds of a
better society already lie embedded in the contradictions of the current
one.
In
the Western world, at least, Christmas is a profoundly schizophrenic
time of year. On the one hand, the holidays bring out some of the best
aspects of what it means to be human: people coming together to share
food and gifts in a communal spirit that temporarily breaks with the
alienation of everyday life. But, at the same time, the holidays shine a
light on some of the worst elements of consumerism and false pretense
that have come to pervade the social fabric: endless lines of zombified
humans stumbling mindlessly through pretentiously decorated shopping
malls in search of the latest useless gadget or gift card, confirming
once again that the only way to express value in late capitalist society
is through the accumulation of entirely useless commodities, even as
countless people to go sleep in the cold streets at night.
When Charles Dickens waxed poetic about death, greed and misery in his classic Christmas Carol,
he very much had in mind the societal dislocation wrought by early
industrial capitalism. Of course the Dickensian critique of capitalism
lacked a thorough political economic analysis and ultimately failed to
move beyond moral outrage at poverty and the decline of human virtue.
But, that said, even Karl Marx opined that Dickens in his lifetime
“issued to the world more political and social truths than have been
uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists
put together.” A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, just five years before The Communist Manifesto and the revolutionary wave of 1848. If we were to write A Christmas Carol for our time, would the story really look so different?
Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear
The
character of Scrooge still seems omnipresent — from wealthy Wall Street
investors who haven’t paid a penny for the financial mess they created
in the lead-up to the current crisis, to the power-hungry politicians
who literally surround themselves with gold
while announcing an Age of Austerity for everyone else. Misery and
death are rife once more as social safety nets are dismantled at the
altar of the marketplace, while millions toil just to make ends meet,
surviving off poorly paying, thoroughly meaningless and increasingly
precarious jobs, even while being burdened with ever higher debts and
taxes. And, especially in this time of year, it’s not just the material
deprivation that counts; the psychological trauma of persistent economic
insecurity and social atomization wreaks havoc on a scale we can barely
even fathom — a silent murderer taking thousands of lives we will never
even hear about.
I recently moved to
Athens, where the Dickensian depiction of naked capitalism is on full
display every single day: ordinary people sleeping in front of banks and
supermarkets like stray dogs; tens of thousands of “for rent” signs
covering apartment walls; immigrants hiding inside dilapidated
buildings, too afraid to come out for fear of being attacked by police
or racist scum. A layer of smog hangs over the city as people resort to
burning wood and plastic for calefaction. Landlords have shut down
central heating across the country, simply because tenants can’t afford
the petrol anymore. Just a few weeks ago, a 13-year-old girl died from
carbon monoxide inhalation after her mother tried to fight back the
freezing cold in their apartment. The electricity had been cut off
because she couldn’t pay the bills. These are not isolated incidents.
Third World-style poverty is making its way into the very heartland of
the “developed” West.
Hunger and inequality are on the rise across Europe and North America. A record 48 million Americans
— 22 millions of whom are children — rely on food stamps to survive.
Oxfam recently warned that Europe faces a “lost decade” of poverty and
marginalization, with the NGO’s head of advocacy lamenting
that “we were founded in 1942 because of the famine in Greece; no one
would have believed we would be here more than 70 years later, saying
Greece is in a terrible state.” And, again, Greece is not the exception —
the so-called cradle of democracy is merely the concrete universal of a
terrifying trend across the world, as nominally democratic regimes
resort to increasingly authoritarian and inhumane measures to enforce
their neoliberal dogma, which can be summarized in a simple formula:
privatize the gains, socialize the losses. Scrooge is all over us today,
wielding batons and teargas canisters.
It
is no coincidence, then, that the rioters who took to the streets of
Athens and cities throughout Greece in December 2008, following the police murder
of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, immediately attacked and torched
the huge Christmas tree that had been so ostentatiously erected at
Syntagma Square in front of Parliament. A few days later, the words of a
prophet appeared scribbled on a city wall: merry crisis and a happy new
fear!
Everyday Communism and the Crisis of our Times
But
this is not the full story. Just like Christmas, times of crisis tend
to be profoundly schizophrenic — producing both extreme dangers of
social disintegration and unprecedented opportunities for radical social
change, neither of which seemed possible in the previous state of
normalcy. Embedded in the very contradictions of capitalism lies the
latent potential for both its disintegration into monstrosity and its
dissolution and transcendence into something better. In ancient Greek,
the word crisis (κρίσις) referred to exactly this: a moment of
separation, decision or judgement — like a turning point in a disease
that determines the fate of the patient: a moment of life or death.
Crucially, the word implies conflict: two possible outcomes lie before us; our actions today will determine the world for decades to come.
Upon
moving to Athens, I quickly discovered why the patient has managed to
survive its crisis so far. It obviously has nothing to do with budget
cuts or EU-IMF bailouts. It’s all about mutual aid and communal
solidarity. Without ordinary people simply helping each other get by,
Greek society would have been a lot worse off. If it weren’t for parents
taking their unemployed twenty-somethings back in, soup kitchens
providing food to the hungry, autonomous clinics providing free medical
assistance to the uninsured, and social centers distributing free
clothes to those who need them, it is difficult to imagine how people
would have coped at all. This leads us to an ironic conclusion: if it
weren’t for the sense of community and mutual aid — both of which defy
the Smithian and Hayekian logic of self-interest — capitalism as such
would probably not be able to survive. Indeed, no society can function
without a healthy dose of altruism. The trick, then, is how to wield
this altruism not as a means of sustaining capitalism, but as a weapon
with which to kill it.
David Graeber refers to this social bedrock of communal solidarity as “everyday communism.” Building
on the work of the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, Graeber
distinguishes between three different kinds of social relations:
hierarchical relations based on precedent, formally equal relations
based on exchange, and genuinely equal relations based on sharing — or
the old communist principle “from each according to their ability, to
each according to their needs.” These different types of social
relations are never monolithic and should therefore not be totalized: no
society is based only on precedent, exchange or sharing. Instead, the
three coexist to different degrees in different types of societies.
Feudal societies may be marked by a predominance of hierarchy,
capitalist societies by a predominance of exchange, and genuinely
communistic societies by sharing. But even in the latter type of
society, hierarchy and exchange will never fully disappear; they will
just be subordinated to a different cultural and systemic logic — the
logic of sharing will come to take precedence as social priorities are
radically rearranged.
Of course things are not that
simple. But at this time of year, and in this time of crisis, Mauss and
Graeber direct our attention towards something very important: even in
capitalist society, “communistic” relations (of altruism and sharing)
continue to exist. Indeed, in many ways, “we are already communists”
— especially towards family and friends, and especially on a day like
this. It would be utterly inconceivable for any of us to present our
parents, siblings or children with a bill for the Christmas dinner we
just cooked for them; just as it would be utterly absurd for mothers to
charge their children for nurturing and breastfeeding. In the same way,
it is totally absurd that today’s Scrooges — presented with a “crisis”
of their own making — now seek to socialize their losses by forcing
austerity down everyone else’s throat and slapping a price tag on common
goods like water and knowledge. If pursued to its logical extreme, this
Randian logic of naked self-interest would simply lead to total social
disintegration; and that’s precisely where neoliberalism is pushing the
world today.
The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come
We
are living through a moment of judgement in which the fate of humanity
is to be decided. In these dark days, when all hope seems lost and even
the most communistic of social rituals are succumbing to the spectacle
of shallow-minded consumerism, it is crucial to remind ourselves that
the seeds for a better world already lie sown in the scorched earth of
the present one; and that our challenge as “radicals” or
“revolutionaries” is not necessarily the creation of a whole new society
from scratch, but rather the liberation and actualization of the hidden
potentialities for altruism and communal living that are currently
being repressed at the barrel of a gun. This should give hope for the
struggle: we do not necessarily have to innovate the new so much as we have to crush the past and intensify the already-existing.
In A Christmas Carol,
Scrooge was ultimately transformed into a better man, embracing the
Spirit of Christmas and the sense of joy and community it represented —
but not before being visited by three phantoms: the Ghost of Christmas
Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet To
Come. The first showed him his own past self, the child within who had
relished in the spirit of sharing; the second confronted him with the
thoroughly despicable man he had become, clinging to his money as if
there were no tomorrow; and the latter presented him with a terrifying
image of what lay ahead if he persisted in his cold-hearted and
tight-fisted ways:
The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery. It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand. … It thrilled him with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the dusky shroud there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black.
Let
us be this gloomy spirit; the cloaked phantom of the future tormenting
the miser before bedtime. Let us be the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come —
the specter of already-existing communism haunting the capitalist
present from the firm grounding of a future yet to come. Let us be the
Spirit of Revolution reincarnated, striking down upon the Scrooges of
our time right as darkness seems to envelop the world. Merry Christmas
everyone. May 2014 mark the year of our ghostly reappearance.
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