Every winter brings a flurry of email from p.r. folks at Seattle theaters who try to spin their old productions—the Nutcracker, Black Nativity, A Christmas Carol—in new ways, hoping to get some coverage. It's a holiday tradition.

So I groaned a little when I got the pitch from ACT to write about A Christmas Carol through the lens of Occupy. Though Occupy itself isn't getting old, using it as an attenuated news peg for all kinds of unrelated (or barely related) crap sure is. 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 also 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 by a Scrooge-like epiphany for our plutocrats and politicians) or structural (which could only be solved through revolution).

More about Dickens, Marx, Occupy, and what Orwell's got to do with it over here.