Rudolf the Red-Nosed Traitor to His Species, Class, and Proletarians Everywhere

Steve, Steve, Steve. How sad that your eyes have been so clouded that you’ve missed the true import of this allegedly “innocent” Christmas canticle. Allow me to remove the scales from your eyes.

Rudolph is not a victim. On the contrary. His name should properly be Judas, apostate, arch-traitor. Your analysis of Rudolph’s story falls woefully short of completeness. Rather than directionless speculation about the social structure of the “reindeer class,” the true meaning of this song only becomes clear if we can consider in total Rudolf’s relations to the social and productive forces in which he is implicated.

The truly unspoken presence in all of this mess is that of the elves – voiceless, powerless slaves, chained like true animals to the gears of the bourgeois capitalist machine that is the North Pole. Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer may not be about the struggle of the elves to overcome their overlord and de-alienate their own labor. Yet the entire superstructure of social relations that lock the elves into their endless slavery is evoked directly by the “resolution” of the problematic posed by the song in the first place.

Rudolf’s original state may seem miserable, exiled from his so-called brothers, the other reindeer, whose sole existence is comprised of endless games (like Monopoly) broken only by a single night of actual labor. Yet what is that one night of labor? In a single evening, the reindeer slaves of the capitalist bourgeoisie distribute the seeds of pacification to the masses of young people whose development into the revolutionary vanguard of the future is retarded, perhaps even aborted by their premature exposure to the opiate of capitalist appropriation.

Even worse, on what does the production of these “toys” depend? Without the total alienation of the elf from his labor, this mountain of toys would never exist. These are the very mountains for which the elves have slaved, and will continue to slave until the socialist elf revolution sweeps away the bourgeoisie and its shills - whether those shills be human, elf, or animal.

To praise Rudolph for his "fitness" and Santa for choosing him on that fateful Christmas eve is merely to put a Social Darwinist fig leaf over the unmentionable bits of this tale. For while the reindeer (including Rudolph) are all agog over Rudolph's unique abilities they are blind to their own privileged position in the edifice of oppression - blind (willfully?) to the oppression and exploitation that make their existence as a class-cum-species possible.

Perhaps we ought not to praise Santa, but to abhor Rudolf, whose tranquil assent in the name of “fitting in” allowed the machine of bourgeois oppression and appropriation to grind on toward the future, rather than striking at it with both hooves at the point of its greatest vulnerability, Christmas Eve. Given the opportunity to inaugurate a socialist revolution to restore the dignity of the better part of mankind, Rudolph’s cowardice has instead denied the elves (and by extension, all of us) their best shot at the collectivist utopia that is elfkind’s (and mankind’s) ultimate destiny, if only they would recognize it.