Discursively speaking, hashtag gamers with christian crosses in their profiles and marxists that don't even follow antifa accounts are not really people. They don't matter, they're not part of any discussion I care about. But a brief Joke Explainer re christmas & gift economies:

Because the concept of 'the commune' has obvious issues, many anarchists moved in recent decades to endorsing 'gift economies', but this got framed in a way disconnected from anthropological usage, more a hazy sketch of decentralized relations built on the "pure" gift.

Basically modern communist anarchists had a notion that we'd just share and help one another, but in a decentralized person-to-person way, and they conflated this as a "gift economy" to draw legitimacy from the fact that many societies did and do practice gift economies.

The most infamous rhetoric applied was to describe gift economies "as if every day was Christmas." I've continued to beat up on this for years and years.

1) xmas a poor representation of Actually Existing Gift Economies

2) it ALSO demonstrates many of their failings

In actual gift economies gifting is about tradition, power, status, debt, etc, so in eg Potlatch societies (some of which had slaves) you'll see "Big Men" competitively giving away goods as part of a complicated dance that maintains their hierarchical power.

Those anarchists with timid aspirations can argue that this is *better* than our current economy, that at least this is a path to providing some checks on authority, but obviously no one seriously committed to abolishing power is gonna tolerate such minor reformist progress.

Which is why, historically in the discourse, most egoists and mutualists have seen eye-to-eye on this.

I've repeatedly laughed about how gifting usually reifies a hierarchical relationship, imposing debt and obligations, etc. There've been whole meme ecosystems about this.

This is not at all what many communist anarchists -- including the activist that converted me to anarcho-transhumanism a decade and a half ago -- *mean*.

They're thinking in terms of the "pure" gift, perhaps facilitated by cybernetic app ecosystems on people's phones...

I have myriad criticisms of the limits of what is possible without the revealed preference dynamics of *trade* and what tech can economically coordinate (prior to like brain-to-brain tech) but it's a valid position *provided you don't claim such gift economies have been tried.*

Christmas, despite *ostensibly* being about the "pure" gift & framed by capital, actually provides great and intuitive examples to most people of the wastefulness of gifting (given subjective limits to knowledge) and the pressures and hierarchies that frequently rapidly emerge.

I also love citing the literature on gift economies, Mauss correctly characterized them as "markets" (he was right, they're just deprived of revealed preference), which Sahlins didn't even really counter, and Graeber turned to pointing out downsides and hierarchies.

But in any case, in the last half decade I've helped stomp out prior positive appeals to Christmas by communists by emphasizing the degrees to which xmas *does* replicate actually existing gift economy dynamics, not unrealized communist dreams. It's a fun recurring bit.

Appealing to Christmas was always a kind of tacky and awkward populism for anarchists, especially considering the overwhelmingly majority are virulent anti-christians, and the movement has long been more about setting christmas shit on fire for laughs.

But one of the weirder things about gaining more followers is you can't take a joking around tone ("onward!" etc) much less interweave self-aware winks with serious arguments like actual human beings do, because opportunists can always intentionally strip context.

(This intersects with the blunt populism and political rather than ethical focus of the piles of recent "leftist" converts who look with disdain on the concerns and audacious norms of existing radical discourses, "how does this get us medicare for all???")

This makes for the occasionally amusing blowup, because my follower count and insistence on not surrendering longrunning anarchist discourse means I'm often the point of contact between disconnected "left" normies and relatively standard anarchist discourse (youth lib, etc).

Part of the problem to platforms like twitter and local news comments sections is they're "open to anyone" which drives lowest common denominator dynamics. To resist that we turn more hostile to showily police the bounds of who's invited to certain discussions.

So it goes. Self-effacing humor (that isn't showboating genocidal hardness) like "come anticommunist comrades let's destroy christmas!" or personal vulnerability like Molly's introspection are ruthlessly exploited in silly tweet storms. But I think we should *keep doing them.*