The Class Struggle in the North Pole

By Jacobin

24 December 18

What's behind Santa's bloody rise? Three leading elven labor activists offer a class analysis of the North Pole 'gift economy.'

he North Pole Labor Study Group was constituted by a group of Christmas elves in fall 2008. Santa Claus’s workshops had been reeling from the global economic recession. The sense of discontent among our ranks was palpable. Since then we have been meeting biweekly to develop a concrete analysis of our conditions as workers, as well as debate strategies for resistance.

The following is a document we are submitting to the group in the spirit of deepening our analysis.

The Arab Spring and the Occupy movement radicalized many elves. But it is clear that there remains uncertainty about what it will take to challenge the system of exploitation we live under. We believe that the confusion around political strategy is at least in part a product of a mistaken analysis of the class structure and dynamics of our economic system.

What is the true nature of the relationships among elves, Santa Claus and his reindeer? How were these relations first constituted and how are they reproduced?

In order to answer these questions, we first need to grapple with the dynamics of our supposed “gift economy.” While it is true that the gifts we produce are not sold, they are governed by more than social norms and custom. Warm cookies can sustain Santa’s waistline, but a manufacturer cannot survive on sugar and flour alone (unless, of course, he’s selling cookies). He still needs money to expand his workshop and to purchase new equipment or maintain ones of an older vintage.

Another issue is that our workshops depend on resources not immediately available to us in the North Pole. For a long time Santa could simply exploit our natural reserves of wood and fossil-based fuels. But as new product lines have been introduced additional materials need to be purchased on a global market.

In place of wooden toys we have increasingly had to adopt plastics in order to effectively compete in the Christmas market. This has as much to do with consumer demand as it does unit labor costs. While Santa might want to think he lives in a gift bubble, a growing share of annual Christmas presents has been privatized since the onset of the neoliberal era, made possible by increased price competition with thriving Chinese industry.

But competition has not led Santa to necessarily increase the productivity of each worker. Instead he has been able to drive down unit costs of production by more aggressively sweating the labor he already employs, or by simply adding more workers to reduce the time the workshop is left idle. As long he has surplus elf labor to draw on, as he certainly still does, we cannot expect him to be much concerned with the health and safety grievances we have filed with management.

Furthermore, gratitude only gets a businessman so far. Santa, as sole proprietor, is able to keep his finances secret. But those who have had the misfortune to work in his office have reported that letters from the Vatican and Washington have regularly arrived days before Santa announces quarterly plans for production. We can surmise that financial support from these sources, along with their yearly estimates of “nice” children, are what actually sustains our economy. It is through these external funds that Santa is able to provide the candy and shelter for which we must exchange our labor power.

But how did he come to hold such power over us? Was it through greater ingenuity or was it something more sinister?

The Rise of Santa Claus

We must remember that Santa started his life as a petty commodity producer of wooden toys. He had been a master craftsman of wood, trained by some of the best elves in the North Pole. Yet, while others had been content to exchange their wooden commodities in local markets, Santa began selling his in nearby towns.

As luck would have it, the clergy in the some industrial towns he visited saw in these scarce commodities the means to engender moral discipline in the increasing numbers of children that flooded their streets from the lower classes.

The clergy raised funds from rich patrons, as well as the middling classes, to generously compensate Santa for delivering his wooden toys as gifts to a select group of children.

As urban populations expanded and the problems facing the ruling class worsened, Santa became overwhelmed by the increased demand for his handmade toys. He initially sought to expand production by exploiting his own family, but he soon had to look for surplus labor elsewhere. But try as he might with stories of serving the greater good and helping the impoverished in distant lands, he could not compel the necessary numbers among us to labor in his workshop.

Finally, after a failed experiment with a putting-out system, Santa resorted to violence as the only means by which he could coerce us into his employ. This would not have been possible without the support of the clergy and rising bourgeoisie in the towns. With their help, Claus organized an underclass of reindeer, who have historically had tense relations with elves, by promising them economic security and social status.

Gangs of reindeer were sent out to elf villages to tear up farmland, which they were well-suited for given their antlers. The constant disruptions to food production left many of our people with no choice but to go work for Santa.

All the while, the ruling class in the towns had fabricated a story to counter the reports of violence in the hinterland that made their way to the cities. Pointing to the gifts he bestowed on the children of the town, they likened Santa to Bishop Nicholas of Smyrna — a rich man who was known to be generous with children — and depicted the reindeer as noble creatures.

But Santa is no saint and the reindeer are no friends to us. Santa violently reconstructed the old class structure in his narrow interests. He separated us from our primary means of subsistence through the coercive threat of antlers, a strategy he has had to maintain to this day in order to protect his class position.

Understanding the different class interests in our society is essential if we are going to develop an effective strategy of resisting our exploitation. Armed with such an analysis we can explain to our brothers and sisters why recent statements about a few “bad apples” among the reindeer ring hollow. They remain “Our Enemies in Antlers” as long as they serve as a bulwark of power in our society.

A class analysis also counters the dominant narrative we are fed about why Christmas elves are so willing to work for meager compensation. We did not enter his workshop because we have innate dispositions that better fit the production of toys. Nor did we leave our farms because we preferred candy to tubers.

This is a crucial point. The popular lore about us is that we gladly work for candy. But that was not by choice. Before the reindeer devastated our family plots we cultivated a diverse range of vegetables well-suited to the surrounding land. We were even recognized worldwide as experts at storing harvests in the warmer months for consumption year-round. All that has now been lost.

Our dependence on imported sugar is the result of social conditions beyond our control. And in this sense we have much more in common with the worker in the cane field than we do with the oversized exploiter who benefits off our blood, sweat, and toil.

Some have concluded that the old slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” is far too outdated for the new post-industrial reality. They have said that the working class is no longer the agent of social transformation. But this conclusion, we believe, ignores the conditions that continue to prevail in Santa’s workshops and beyond.

We hope that the above clarified some of what we see as crucial for a correct analysis of classes in the North Pole. Let the “war on Christmas” recommence on a more scientific basis.

Last Minute Gifts? All I Want for Christmas Is No Plastic, Please

By Jemima Kiss, Guardian UK

24 December 18

For the next few months, Jemima Kiss explores how we can all move towards a life without plastic, starting with Christmas

e all know the physical and emotional toll Christmas can take, particularly on women; it is hard bloody work. But I also enjoy making the magic happen because I love the ritual, and the nostalgia, and the gratitude. I loved it when I was a kid, when Father Christmas left sooty boot prints across our lounge carpet, crumbs of mince pies and dribbles of whisky on the floor. I loved the map he left me that Christmas morning in 1984 that led to a real bunny rabbit waiting for me downstairs. I loved my Mum’s Christmas pudding. I loved hand-making my cards. I loved giving presents. Thirtysomething years later I still love all of this, and now I unironically have Michael Bublé’s Christmas album, too.

But Christmas is also an environmental nightmare. The US produces 25% more waste between Christmas and New Year, an estimated 1m tons each holiday week that includes 33m trees, 2.65bn Christmas cards, and the packaging debris from our intensifying love affair with home delivery that will see UPS alone deliver 800m seasonal packages this year; cardboard can be recycled but not packing peanuts, air pillows or wrapping film. The $720bn consumer leviathan that is Christmas in America seems to require us to buy more, eat more, to suck up more resources than ever. It’s even noticeable from space, where Nasa’s satellite monitoring shows that US cities shine 20-50% brighter between Thanksgiving and New Year thanks to holiday lights.

A few months ago, I challenged myself to go plastic-free for a week – not buying anything made of or wrapped in petrochemicals. The experience led me to create this column, a personal look at our global plastic addiction and its effects. For the next few months, I’ll be considering how we can all move towards a life without plastic, examining everything from the synthetic fibers in our clothes to whether we can – or should – recycle our dog poop bags.

And I’m kicking it off with Christmas. This year, many of my female friends will be unwrapping beautifully made reusable cloth pads on Christmas Day. I’ve never given anyone a panty pad for Christmas before, and I’m sure it will be a first for them, too. But I included a label that explained these are made by a small women-owned business in Wisconsin called Party in My Pants that makes leakproof pads from lovely fabrics, complete with instructions to “put the nice bit against your nice bits”. Fabrics include, obviously, the periodic table, a soft fleecy starscape or unicorns. Whatever tickles your fancy.

Discovering Party in My Pants is just the latest moment of mini joy to bubble up from my personal project to cut down the amount of plastic waste our family produces. It started in June, when I wondered if we could go a week without buying any single-use plastic or plastic packaging, and quickly spiralled into Plastic Free July, and then the whole summer, and then interest and encouragement from friends and the discovery of thousands of people and small businesses all trying to work towards a goal of cutting out plastic and reducing waste. The revelation for me has been that in this age of overwhelming chaos and impending environmental disaster, it feels hugely empowering to take charge of something and make a difference in our own small way.

Early on in this project I developed the habit of questioning whether I really needed to buy something, and whether there was a plastic-free alternative. Another rule is that we reuse plastic we already have until it just falls apart, and only then put it in recycling. We refuse plastic, and reuse it, before we have to recycle it. Christmas is hard not just because there is a huge amount of plastic involved with consumerism generally, but there’s also an emotional pressure to do it right – to get the right gift, the right food, create the right experience.

I asked Robert Reed at San Francisco’s progressive, employee-owned recycling firm Recology what would encourage people to make better decisions about what they buy, and what they throw away. “I think people just need to be brave,” he said. “The fear about making a change is worse than doing it. But really it doesn’t take much courage to give up buying Christmas wrapping. You make your life simpler and get more respect from your children.”

Reed told me that the materials that cause problems are plastic-based glitter on cards and wrapping that can’t be recycled, food containers that aren’t empty or rinsed out, and those thin plastics used in delivery packaging that can’t be easily recycled and that become entangled in sorting machinery.

So, good mother elf that I am, I started my Christmas spreadsheet in October. I found out that plastic Christmas trees take 20 years to cancel out the damage caused by making them, so rather than buying a new real tree we put up our plastic Ikea tree, circa 2001. On went the tinsel and tree decorations that we shall reuse every year until they disintegrate and then replace with a non-plastic alternative.

We’re using energy efficient LED lights rather than incandescents (27w, $10 over 40 days). Homemade crackers with non-plastic, personalized gifts inside. Homemade Christmas pudding. I might even try making a panettone if I’m feeling brave.

We once had something delivered that had 12ft of brown paper around it, so I kept it and used it as my Christmas wrapping this year; part of this project necessitates a sort of Mad Maxian hoarding of potentially useful materials. I used paper string and washi tape I already had. I handmade cards using paper from a big box of scraps and spares, sewed them together and posted them to friends and family in dozens of old mismatched envelopes I’ve had for years. I know, ideally, that I’d call or email instead, but our artist family has a long-held tradition of hand-making Christmas cards that we send at year end as a small token that we are thinking of people, however busy and far away they might be.

For big presents for my closest family back home I’ve ordered tickets to great things. Mum’s going to London’s most glamorous and outrageous Christmas panto at the London Palladium, my brother’s going to see his favourite stand-up in Brighton, his girlfriend will be doing a craft course and their kids are going to a puppet show. It feels both simple and triumphantly non-material.

I asked family and friends to consider handmade or non-plastic gifts, and to email one of their favourite recipes so that we can collect them and make them throughout the year. And I spent a few evenings sewing (with no significant level of skill) dozens of mini-pillowcases from pretty leftover fabric with labels that explain these are to be taken to the supermarket and used instead of plastic bags for fruit and vegetables. I’ve already had one friend say she’s been inspired to sew a few of her own and hand these out to her friends in Bristol.

I also remembered to add a note to my son’s letter to Father Christmas, asking him very nicely if he would avoid plastic packaging on any gifts this year. Given the enormous list of Lego requests, let’s see how she does with that.