Sport Under Capitalism: a Diet of Escapism

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Governments pay brainwashed workers in uniform to go through ritual Saturday battles Boxing: TV reduces bone-crunching blows to the level of fake cinema fights As a social phenomenon that occupies a large proportion of the 'free' time of all social classes, organised Marxists.

Atyeo's book is certainly not written from anything remotely resembling a class perspective, yet it does challenge many of the prevailing bourgeois ideas and assumptions that condition our attitude to sport.

In addition, by focusing on the question of violence in sport, he inadvertently demonstrates many of the complex links between capitalist exploitation of sport and imperialism, racism and sexism.

Key role

By concentrating on 'contact sports like hunting, boxing, wrestling, rugby, soccer, American football, ice hockey and animal baiting, Atyeo shows the key role played by violent games in every classbased social system as far back as records exist. There is little to suggest that sport is either more or less violent under capitalism than in pre-capitalist society.

What is clear is that capitalism has led to a shift of emphasis from the participant to the spectator. Profit from the ticket-buying fans and from the media is now the prime motive factor.

In particular the working class provides an ideal market for a steady diet of escapism from deteriorating social conditions.

For the price of a ticket or a TV licence millions of people can be ushered into a world whose heroes and villains compete against each other with direct physical violence of the kind that would earn instant arrest if used outside the neat pitch markings or roped squares.

Fobbed off

Workers who are alienated every day at the point of production can be easily fobbed off with the pressures to identify with their local team, with their national team and with individuals of the same class background who have "made it' to the status of media celebrity.

At the same time, the relentless social forces that seek to maintain the existence of a whole exploited class have ensured that sport became a focal point of tension. This is especially true for working class youth. The "problem" of soccer hooliganism is the most naked example of capitalism's promotion of the spectator at the expense of the participant.

• The rise of football crowd violence over the last fifteen years also shows how capital uses sport-centred barbarism to direct social discontent along relatively safe channels.

Sport therefore plays an essential role in preventing thousands of youth mobilising to directly attack the bourgeois state which keeps them underpaid, unemployed and underprivileged.

All governments then need to do is pay the most backward and brainwashed workers sufficiently well to make them put on blue uniforms and go through ritual battles every Saturday afternoon to keep the violence within 'acceptable' limits.

Exactly the same process took place at the start of the capitalist stage when the bourgeoisie fostered bare-knuckle boxing to help redirect the smouldering discontent of the new urban proletariat. Much safer to allow thousands of people an orgy of crowd violence whilst two men bludgeoned and gouged each other for a few hours than to allow them to mobilise against their exploiters!

This, however, l is not to accept the popular idea of sport as "emotional catharsis" . fi.e. the notion that violent sport acts as a safety-valve for society).

Atyeo clearly demonstrates that these theories, which derive from Freud's view of men as having inherent aggressive tendencies, are almost totally discredited.

Most recent research by psychologists and anthropologists, and studies of sport in the deformed workers' states, indicate that aggression is learned and is closely linked with training to be competitive.

There is no evidence to suggest that individuals or groups are made any less inclined to violence by watching violent sport. On the contrary, (Rome, Britain, the USA, etc.)

'reflect' society like a single mirror image, any more than the media 'reflects' society. Sport is governed and ruled by capitalism in order to determine bourgeois ideology as well as reflect it.

The use of sport for its commercial possibilities under capitalism has completely changed many games which had existed in one form or another for centuries.

Boxing, the most blatant contact sport, is the best example of this. Modern boxing grew out of an amalgamation of duelling and wrestling and spread rapidly from the end of the eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth.

It was fostered by lavish aristocratic patronage and fed by the tensions of the urban poor.

From the beginning it was recognised that the hungry fighter is the best fighter'. The first social layer to achieve success in the ring was that comprising the most exploited manual labourers, often men so brutalised by their conditions that they could absorb and mete out unbelievable extremes of prysica punisment.

Death was not at all uncommon, either during or weeks after bouts that sometimes went on for five or six hours.

Racial oppression

Gradually distinct patterns of racial oppression began to be reflected in the social composition of the best known boxers. Irish-Americans and Jews from the urban ghettos of the US displaced British workers at the top of the slugging order.

By the first decade of this century blacks were also beginning to fight their way to the notice of the businessmen who controlled the sport. In 1908 Jack Johnson won the world heavyweight title, the most lucrative enterprise in sport, and the phase 'White Hope" was born as he thrashed his way past a series of white challengers.

Full scale race riots with many dead and injured erupted after Johnson hammered Jim Jeffries, a former champion dragged out of retirement to deal with the "uppity nigger"

After Johnson's éventual demise blacks were consciously excluded from competing at the highest level. But in the 1930s the most exploited layer burst through irrevocably with champions like Joe Louis ("the Brown Bomber") and Henry "Homicide" Armstrong. Even then the racial tensions could be used to highly profitable effect.

The publicity for fights between black or Jewish boxers and Max Schmeling of Germany and Primo Carnera (Mussolini's protege) was all centred around the rise of fascism.

Since the war boxing has been almost totally dominated by blacks and most recently there has been a perceptible shift to the most oppressed sections of the Far East and Latin America.

of the manipulation of contact sport, that is in the role of the blows on the same level as fake Cheria nyno, sit nicula vuu!r has also transformed sport from a profitable enterprise to one of the most thriving sectors of the captialist economy.

Atyeo also shows the centrality of sexism to contact sport.

'Machismo' may be an increasingly absurd social pose in some respects, but in contact sport it still reigns supreme. The exaggerated armour of the American footballer, the beerswilling hearties of a rugby team and the cultivated sex symbol of top sportsmen are just the more blatant examples.

Omission

It is worth recalling that when Emile Griffith pulverised Benny Paret into an early grave in a world championship boxing match in 1963 Griffith's ferocity was excused by boxing writers on the grounds that Paret had called him a homosexual in the pre-fight build-up.

One of the biggest omissions from Atyeo's book is any evaluation of the effect of the nationalisation of property relations in Russia, China, Eastern Europe and Cuba. Despite the bureaucratic degeneration of the 1917 Revolution under Stalinism it is true to say that many social and cultural patterns accepted as inevitable under capitalism have been substantially broken down in the workers' states. Violent contact sport does still exist, but the absence of profit motivation has ensured that the kind of calculated viciousness encouraged in professional sport is almost unknown.

• It still rears its head in international encounters howeverRussian ice hockey matches with Czechoslovakia for example are amongst the most brutal in sport.

Moralistic

The Olympic Games has also become a kind of international prestige battle between capitalism and Stalinism.

The Stalinists are way ahead at the moment, though the bourgeois press gets an occasional titbit to gloat Hke the incient or une caeat Red Army officer in the fencing at the last Olympics.

Another flaw in an otherwise challenging and carefully researched book is Atyeo's moralistic stance on the whole question. He writes basically from the point of view that too much violence is morally bad.

He pays lip service to the effects of socio-economic forces but pulls back from a thorough analysis of his own conclusions.

The killing, maiming and brutalising of people that is carried on in the name of professional contact sport is intricately bound up with the development of class society.

It will continue for as long as capitalism, the most advanced form of class society, lurches from crisis to crisis. And only internationalism can undermine the disgusting patriotism and chauvinism that passes for 'the sporting ideal'

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