While Kropotkin is the most tolerable anarchist, and it would be based if a bunch of people went around stealing toys from stores and giving them to children on Christmas, some of the silliness of anarchism really shines through in this piece.
For example:
“If you are one of us”, he continued, “you will realise that the magic of Christmas depends on Father Christmas’s system of production, not the stores’ attempts to seduce you to consume useless luxuries”. Kropotkin described the sprawling workshops at the North Pole, where elves worked all year, happily because they knew that they were producing for other peoples’ pleasure. Noting that these workshops were strictly not-for profit, craft-based and run on communal lines, Kropotkin treated them as prototypes for the factories of the future (outlined in Fields, Factories and Workshops).
Considering the north pole is just fucking ice, it’s a wonder that Father Christmas is able to meet even the basic needs of things like food, housing, and clothing for enough elves to run a system of “sprawling workshops”. This is without going into how they procure the manifold materials needed to make the toys, or even how they got the means of production needed to make them in the first place. Either world communism has been achieved allowing the elves of the north pole to cooperate with people in various other locals non-exploitatively, the elves get all their material from the world market and thus they are still held under its sway, or it’s fucking magic (I’m going with 3 because it’s Santa).
Later they say:
Similarly, the practice of giving was mistakenly thought to require the implementation of a centrally-directed plan, overseen by an omniscient administrator. This was quite wrong: Father Christmas came from the imagination of the people (just consider the range of local names that Nicholas had accrued – Sinterklaas, Tomte, de Kerstman). And the spreading of good cheer – through festivity – was organised from the bottom up.
Here I was thinking that central planning is an effective way of deciding production so as to minimize unnecessary labor and the waste of resources, but fuck, if a way of organizing production is good enough for Santa it’s good enough for real life /s.
It’s hard to get more mired in idealism than trying to implement the mode of production from a fairy tale.
Considering the north pole is just fucking ice, it’s a wonder that Father Christmas is able to meet even the basic needs of things like food, housing, and clothing for enough elves to run a system of “sprawling workshops”.
Anarchists theory and ignoring material conditions as always. I would rather expected Santa Claus to be like in this comic.
I think you were so ready to dunk on anarchists, that you missed the point entirely.
No, Kropotkin is not saying the North Pole has an industry. He was saying the elves work voluntarily, the shops are not after profit, and bringing joy to people is reward enough.
No, Kropotkin does not say we should base our production on a fairy tale. His point is that production should happen to satisfy needs and wants of people, with people deciding what those are, rather than a central, omniscient administrator (like the classic, capitalist Santa Claus). He points to the fact that Santa was created by people, and every people have their own, slightly different version. This speaks to the universality of the concept of giving without wanting anything in return.
Fair enough. I just saw “Father Christmas’s system of production” and got a bit carried away. 'Tis always the season to dunk on anarchists.
