Every year, Christmas brings a flurry of e-mail from theater publicists scrambling to find a fresh way to spin the same old holiday dinosaurs that have lumbered across their stages for decades—Black Nativity, Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, plus a pack of fringe, improv, drag, and burlesque riffs on the holidays.
So I groaned a little when Becky Lathrop, the publicist at ACT Theatre, sent me her pitch: "A Christmas Carol ::: Occupy Wall Street! It's the perfect dramatic and social response to the relevant times." Considering ACT has been doing A Christmas Carol for 36 years, it's hard to see it as a "response" to anything in the news.
But as winter—and Occupy and A Christmas Carol—drags on, the more interesting and more complicated the thought experiment gets. There's an obvious affinity between Dickens and Marx. Both were writing in the same city at the same time, and both were distressed about the economic and political inequality produced by the industrial revolution. Dickens published his polemical holiday myth about specters haunting a London miser in 1843, five years before Marx and Engels would announce that "a specter is haunting Europe" in The Communist Manifesto. Marx was a Dickens fan. But the two men had very different ideas about what should be done.
A similar difference of ideas exists within the Occupy movement, too—between the radicals and the more reform-minded liberals. You can see the tension in disagreements over tone and tactics (peacefulness or aggression, defiance or compliance) and whether the socioeconomic failures Occupy is trying to address are moral (which could be solved with a Scrooge-like epiphany) or structural (which could only be solved through revolution).
A speaker who would subscribe to the latter point of view shouted at an October 22 rally down at Westlake: "It's not a matter of some bad apples—we need to rip out the whole fucking orchard! We need to destroy the state, capitalism, and the police with it!" More moderate occupiers watched nervously from the sidelines. "We do not want to see this turn into WTO," one of them said. "That's for damn sure."
A Christmas Carol takes the position that the problem is "bad apples," Scrooges who need to learn their lesson—and if generosity could triumph over greed, industrial capitalism could have a human face. "It's important to remember that Scrooge never does anything wrong," said Allison Narver, director of this year's A Christmas Carol at ACT. "He pays his taxes; he doesn't break the law. But Dickens is saying that's not enough. You need to have a positive impact on your community—you need to do something."
Dickens may have thought we needed to "do" generosity, but structural revolution wasn't his thing. He wrote about the French Revolution with horror, and some critics read A Christmas Carol as a cautionary tale about how to avoid the social pain of revolution. As George Orwell wrote in a 1940 essay about Dickens:
If the wicked nobleman could somehow have turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge, there would have been no [French] Revolution, no jacquerie, no guillotine—and so much the better. This is the opposite of the "revolutionary" attitude... Revolution as he sees it is merely a monster that is begotten by tyranny and always ends by devouring its own instruments... That is the difference between being a moralist and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, "Behave decently," which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence.
"The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence"—this is something else Dickens has in common with Occupy, which keeps refusing to articulate a list of demands that could be met (or at least cleverly pretended to be met). And what Orwell says above might be a hint about the future of Occupy—that, while revolutionaries must be part of any major social upheaval, the "behave decently" reformist faction usually wins out. Or at least they never go away. Because even if the radicals get their revolution, there will always be room for some vague, humane, Dickensian discontent.
The production at ACT is good, by the way. Not electrifying, but totally serviceable. Ian Bell's comically put-upon Bob Cratchit and David Pichette's snarling Scrooge are especially entertaining. 
