11.06.2008
Balls to worker sport?
The first Worker Olympiad attracted 150,000 spectators, writes Lawrence Parker. But did such events really pose an alternative to the Olympic Games and capitalist sporting culture?
What follows is a consideration of some of the issues surrounding the practice of sport, particularly in relation to the worker sport movement of the inter-war years. But it is first necessary to spend some time discussing what has been a controversial issue on the Marxist left - competitive sport.
Competition
Back in 2005 Dave Isaacson wrote: “Class societies are inherently competitive and therefore unavoidably produce competitive sports. Many believe that competition is part and parcel of ‘human nature’. Communists, on the other hand, know that ‘human nature’ is not fixed or static, but is determined by social conditions and therefore a changing, developing phenomenon. As communists we look forward to a classless society in which there will be no competitive sports. In their place our leisure activities will include forms of physical play that we cannot conceive at present, which will be based on enjoyment of ourselves, each other and our environment - not competition”.1
Such reasoning seems coherent enough. However, this statement exhibits extreme confusion on a number of levels. A significant part of the accumulation of capital over the last century has been bound up with monopolies. The capitalist mantra of ‘competition’ often masks non-competition and state subsidy (as happened in Britain during the ‘free market’ Thatcher years). In theory, one could imagine either an ultra-competitive capitalism or an ultra-monopolistic capitalism that both turned labour into an alienating and oppressive object. Comrade Isaacson’s circular identity logic (capitalism = competition = competitive sport = bad) immediately starts off from a false assumption by elevating an inessential form of capital into some kind of theoretical master key to unlock sporting activity.
Comrade Isaacson says that human nature is not fixed or static, but then proceeds to fix the idea of competition into its capitalist past by denying its future. Leon Trotsky saw things differently: “The powerful force of competition which, in bourgeois society, has the character of market competition, will not disappear in a socialist society, but, to use the language of psychoanalysis, will be sublimated - that is, will assume a higher and more fertile form. There will be the struggle for one’s opinion, for one’s project, for one’s taste. In the measure in which political struggles will be eliminated - and in a society where there will be no classes, there will be no such struggles - the liberated passions will be channelled into technique, into construction …”2
So, although the social base of the sublimated competition of capitalist society has been liquidated, competition lives on - including, one hopes, in sport, which itself would become sublimated. One could argue that competition offers a superior route to what Trotsky called the “heightening of the objective quality and the subjective consciousness of individuality”, which he saw as “the most valuable contribution of the cultural advance”. Trotsky thought that a lack of “extreme individualism” was a problem: “The trouble is that the average proletarian is lacking in this very quality. In the mass, proletarian individuality has not been sufficiently formed and differentiated”.3
In other words, Trotsky is setting out a dialectic of the individual and the mass that needs to be mastered by communist society. How could ‘non-competitive sports’, which would almost inevitably mean holding back the prowess of certain groups and individuals, achieve anything else but the oppressive subordination of the part to the whole (under the guise, presumably, of an administered, ‘average’ standard)? Beneath the demand for non-competitive sport lies yet another version of ‘barracks communism’ and a cultural programme of decay and backwardness.
Chris Bambery of the Socialist Workers Party, writing in 1996, is another ‘Marxist’ writer who tells us confidently: “Socialism will not be a society where 22 men still play football (far less where another 30,000 people will pay to watch them) or men and women crash up and down a swimming pool competing against each other and the clock. Physical recreation and play are about the enjoyment of one’s body, human company and the environment. Sport is not. It is about competing, doing better than the next person, being the best. It is about obeying arbitrary rules - an ideal preparation for the capitalist productive process.”4 The same erroneous circular identity logic (capitalism = competition = competitive sport = bad) makes its grisly presence felt once more.
One gets the feeling when reading Bambery’s refuse heap of poorly expressed ideas that this is a person writing for people who (generally) hate sport as a ‘diversion’ from the class struggle. This is made clear by the following: “Naturally socialists understand why people take part in or watch sport. It is an escape from the harsh world in which we live. That is why we do not ignore sport. Rather socialists campaign, for instance, against racism on the terraces and seek the support of sportsmen and women for such campaigns. Neither would socialists dream of banning or prohibiting participation in sports.”
This semi-patronising conclusion is presented as a non-sectarian stance, whereas in fact it is a classic statement of instrumentalist logic. Bambery is essentially saying: ‘Sport is a waste of time because it diverts workers from their real interests in the workplace or as people who should be getting angry at cuts or wars [in other words, the image of the proletariat that Socialist Worker has invented for political consumption]. However, we do realise that being honest and telling workers all this would be problematic, so we’ll stand outside football grounds occasionally giving out anti-racist leaflets, buggering off at kick-off time.’
So sportsmen and women, and spectators, are going to be mobilised, not in or for sport, but in the cause of something else. This merely recreates the fetishisation of sport that occurs in capitalism on another, ‘socialist’ plane. Instead of having sport stamped on by the exchange of money and the labour process, that activity has to be ploughed through another alienated circuit - this time one of political correctness.
Bambery goes on to give the example of a game played by a tribe of Amazonian Indians, where a player who scores automatically changes team. The winners are weakened and the losers are reinforced; thus the score equalises. This is presented as a premonition of our sporting future under socialism. Bambery complains about arbitrary rules in capitalist sport. This seems like another. The point of this game appears to be to reach a state of equilibrium or equality; which begs the question as to why one would go to the effort to score a goal. Also, posing it as some kind of example for the future misses completely the joy a supposedly weaker team has competing against supposedly stronger teams. There are plenty of examples of sportsmen and women being exhilarated by such tussles, even if they have lost the contest.
Under the Amazonian-Bambery rules, players might actually regard a sudden switch of a talented opponent to their own side as an arbitrary imposition. They may want to continue to improve and try to match the very best. This constant switch-around may even mean that the poorer players develop less quickly if the talented players take the burden of the game.
Such games pose an abstract equality between different sporting abilities. The point, however, is not to snuff out such differences in the cause of equalisation, but ensure that players have ample opportunity to express themselves and take part. Part of this opportunity could mean players of different abilities lining up against each other and competing. In other periods it could involve those with more talent and achievements providing assistance to those less fortunate.
Those who favour non-competitive sport could make an appeal to tradition, to the bad old ideas of the past. As James Riordan recounts, the founders of what came to be generically known as the worker sport movement in the late 19th and early 20th century by and large saw themselves, erroneously, as a reservoir of socialist cooperative values, as against ‘bourgeois competition’, and hence skewed their activities toward activity that was deemed to be less competitive: gymnastics, tumbling, acrobatics, pyramid-forming, hiking, swimming, cycling, etc.5 However, the movement started to shift away from non-competitive sports after World War I (for example, the New York Call, periodical of the American Socialist Party, started to sponsor a baseball league in this period). Riordan says this shift “was a response to popular pressure within the working class, particularly young people” and that it helped to “boost support for the worker sports movement”.6
The Red Sport International (RSI), formed in 1921 and affiliated to the Comintern, also swerved away from advocating non-competitive sports, although André Gounot’s analysis indicates pragmatism and a surface veneer of revolutionary politics as formative factors: “… the RSI … chose not to draw up a theory of ‘proletarian physical culture’ with a special communist essence and put it into practice. It attempted, rather, to appropriate the contents of the dominant bourgeois culture and endow it with new political meaning. Its discourses neatly severed competitive sport from its individualistic contents, relating it instead to the collective requirements of the class struggle. There is no evidence, however, to prove that worker sport contests were in actual fact carried out in a ‘different spirit’ from those organised by bourgeois sport clubs.”7
This is not being served up to suggest that because workers taking part in their various sport movements exhibited a preference for competitive sports then the case for non-competitive sports automatically falls. Rather, it is meant to illustrate that there is no unified ‘proletarian tradition’ in sport and that such preferences have been a site of disputation. After all, the proletariat and the movements that have organised it in sport are not some special repository of pure revolutionary consciousness, but the product of social antagonisms and, in most cases, corrupted ideas.
However, a tendency toward non-competitive sport was present in the communist worker sport movement in the inter-war period. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, for example, the hygienists strove to reject all competitive sports, putting the emphasis instead on healthy exercise and physical culture. Sports such as soccer, boxing and weightlifting were thought to be damaging to mental and physical health.8 The Proletkult movement, with its disdain for pre-existing ‘bourgeois’ culture, made a similar critique of competitive sports.
By the middle of the 1930s these experiments had been eradicated in favour of the ideology of competition, with sporting icons becoming entwined with the ‘labour heroes’ of the Stakhanovite movement and the practice of seeking records.9 Thus, in 1938, Andrei Starostin, captain of the Moscow Spartak football team, said: “We understand that the task before Soviet physical culture is to educate a healthy young generation and help it to raise its chest in defence of our homeland by equalling and surpassing western European, bourgeois records.”10
Soviet sport and its competitive nature thus fed off, at least in bureaucratic intention, the bewitchment of that society by partly unreal five-year plan targets (where ‘result’ or ‘record’ are everything and the activity itself is nothing; which in sporting terms amounts to a crude abstraction from the social practice of competition) and the debasement of sport to the status of an instrument that provides cannon fodder. The ‘message’ of Soviet sport became an elitist one to match the development of a more general stratification of Soviet society.
Such developments were a perversion of the communist ideal of sport, where sporting activity is an end in itself and not merely endured as the route to a suffocating other. The problem of Soviet sport was not competition per se, but the dubious and alienated ideological uses to which that activity was put to.
Worker sport
When discussing the organisation of sport by working class organisations in the inter-war years, it is worthwhile reflecting that it potentially put these organisations (which present-day ‘Marxists’ would cheekily refer to as ‘reformist’ or ‘Stalinist’) on a higher plane. If movements have the ambition to master sport and cultural pursuits in general, then they begin, in embryo, to challenge an economistic approach that abstractly equates ‘workers’ with ‘workplace’. So these movements will seem thoroughly alien to contemporary Trotskyists who refuse to see the proletariat through any other prism than wage-slavery. This embryo of a totalising challenge to capital’s rule was squandered in practice and, in fact, turned into its opposite.
The Lucerne Sport International (LSI - affiliated to the Second International) was the social democratic wing of the worker sport movement that flourished in the inter-war years. By 1931, membership of this body (which was officially renamed the Socialist Worker Sports International in 1928) stood at around 1.9 million people, although 1.2 million of these were in Germany.11 The German wing of the movement had, for example, a cycling movement with 320,000 members and its own cooperative cycling works.12
It was from this movement that came the initial Worker Olympiads. These were events that in terms of scope and participation easily exceeded the ‘bourgeois’ Olympics of the era. The first set of official Worker Olympics were held in 1925 in Frankfurt (summer games) and Schreiberhau (winter games). The summer games attracted more than 150,000 spectators with athletes from 19 countries.13 By 1931, the LSI had more than two million members, 350,000 of which were women. The Vienna Olympiad of that year had 80,000 worker athletes from 23 countries and it is estimated that 250,000 people came onto the streets to watch the opening parade.
Socialist and communist workers came together for the third Worker Olympics in Barcelona in July 1936 (organised in opposition to the ‘bourgeois’, ‘Nazi’ Olympics in 1936), although the event was abandoned after Franco’s putsch on the morning of the scheduled opening ceremony. The event was rescheduled for Antwerp, Belgium, in the following year and, although smaller in scope, 27,000 worker athletes from 17 countries took part and the associated pageant was attended by more than 200,000 spectators.14
The Worker Olympics were explicitly against the ‘amateurism’ ideology of the International Olympic Committee’s ‘bourgeois’ Olympics, which was seen as the mask for a class bias against proletarian athletes in favour of the privileged few. The Worker Olympics were against national chauvinism, sexism and racism and the games were generally open to all, regardless of ability (although competitive activities were important alongside mass pageants, artistic displays, dramatic performances and other events). In Vienna, the ‘national’ delegations each marched under a red flag into the stadium for the opening ceremony, while the Frankfurt games were organised under the slogan: “No more war!”15 Mass participation was emphasised over a ‘star’ system and records were not chased for their own sake (although records were broken - for example, in the women’s 100-metre relay in the Frankfurt games).
The Third International (or Comintern) had its own sporting organisation in the shape of the RSI (mentioned above). The Frankfurt Olympiad of 1925 was marked by disputes between the communists and socialists, and the LSI pursued a sectarian policy of excluding sport movements and athletes suspected of communist association.16 This division, aided by the Comintern’s adoption of ‘third period’ perspectives towards the end of the 1930s, filtered down into national movements.
Thus, for example, in Britain the Young Communist League was active in the British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF), which was affiliated to the LSI. From around 1927 a power struggle ensued and the BWSF leadership, aided and abetted by the TUC and social democratic figures, attempted to exclude communists from membership. This initially backfired as the YCL took control of the BWSF, having dual affiliation to the LSI and the RSI for a period. The TUC and the Labour Party eventually broke away to form the British Workers’ Sports Association (BWSA) in 1930.17
Increasingly, the RSI and the communist wing of the worker sport movement saw itself as a rival movement to the ‘bourgeois’ Olympics and the social democratic LSI. To that end the First Worker Spartakiad took place in Moscow in 1928. Six hundred worker athletes from 14 countries were thought to have taken part, with a programme of 21 sports alongside other activities such as pageants, carnivals and poetry readings. The winter counterpart also took place in Moscow in late 1928.18 The RSI attempted to organise a Second Spartakiad in Berlin in 1932, resulting in visa problems and the games being banned.19 The two worker sport internationals eventually came together again in 1936 during the era of the popular front and Soviet athletes attended the Antwerp Worker Olympics in 1937.
On the surface, and despite the sectarian wrangles, this seems an inspiring history, and workers taking part in such events were no doubt inspired by their experiences. But one can draw comparisons between where we are now (an atomised, defeated left, hidebound by its narrow orientation to invented ideas of what ‘workers’ are and should do) and almost any point in the history of workers’ movement, and conclude that the past is the more wholesome arena. This, although understandable, is a gross error and breeds an atmosphere of sentimentality. The alternative is to advance a critique of the worker sport movement.
Marx and Engels state: “The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounces on itself by producing wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property.”20
So, the goal of communist politics is the abolition of the proletariat. If the goal of communist and socialist politics becomes the realisation of ‘proletarian’ politics and culture (ie, the politics and culture of a slave class), then it stops becoming the opposite of capital and instead works back toward conciliation (which, in political terms, is reformism). In Trotsky’s devastating words: “The formless talk about proletarian culture, in antithesis to bourgeois culture, feeds on the extremely uncritical identification of the historic destinies of the proletariat with those of the bourgeoisie.”21
There is then a huge political and theoretical problem with the whole idea and rhetoric of ‘worker sport’. (But, also following Trotsky, this does not mean that elements of our ‘proletarian’ past will not be sublimated in any future order, precisely through the act of being transcended.)
This gives us a different vantage point from which to view the worker sport movement. Bambery short-sightedly argues: “… socialists should follow the example of the Bolsheviks in pulling out of all sports competitions based on nationalism, such as the Olympics.”22
It is true that the bourgeois Olympic movement and its ethos of amateurism was a class movement against proletarian participation and that many worker sport groups grew up precisely because of the exclusion of workers from sports clubs on class grounds. It is also true that events such as the Worker Olympiads were a genuine, popular rival to the ‘bourgeois’ Olympic Games in terms of audiences and participation in the inter-war years. But a future communist sports movement should not be arguing for boycotts of ‘mainstream’ sporting events in bourgeois society. Rather communist athletes should, where possible, be consciously entering such events alongside organising their own mass participation events.
This is the difference between sealing oneself in a ‘proletarian’ bunker (one could argue that this was the politically neutered outcome of the worker sport movement in the inter-war years) and fighting to realise sport as an activity for itself for the whole of society (which is a task of human, rather than proletarian, culture), thus beginning the task of abolishing the proletariat.
Riordan argues of the LSI wing of the movement: “… the socialists were not trying to make their sports movement into an active revolutionary force; instead, it was to be a strong, independent movement within capitalist society ready, come the revolution, to implement a fully developed system of physical culture”.23 This passive culture was fully dependent on capitalist society and actively worked against “the revolution”. All such cultures ultimately achieve is the mere constitution of the proletariat and its opposite, capital, which, in the guise of these types of organisation, become opposites only in the most formalised sense.
Not that the activity of the Comintern and the RSI achieved anything qualitatively different in the capitalist west during the inter-war period. Ernst Grube, chairman of the Kampfgemeinschaft für rote Sportenheit and member of the central committee of the Communist Party of Germany, said: “… worker sport has nothing in common with the petty bourgeoisie’s craving for freedom; it is Marxist class war on all fronts of sport and physical exercise.”24
The reality of the RSI, in the light of Gounot’s analysis, was something of a marriage of convenience between a politically inclined (in the narrower sense) bureaucracy and a membership on the ground relatively uninterested in anything else but pursuing its sporting and social activities. The RSI itself noted in 1931 that it was essentially a cross-party organisation that incorporated many members who had no formal political affiliation. Political distinctions, even in the more highly charged German movement, had little purchase in sporting activities.
In any case, sporting factors had the whip hand in the adherence of worker sport groups to the RSI (the LSI was no different in this regard). For example, after the split in the Arbeiter-Turn-und-Sportbund in 1928-29 (mirroring the international split in the worker sport movement), the soccer clubs of the communist-dominated Berlin-Brandenburg federation joined the RSI-affiliated movement without exception, presumably to keep their league together. Gounot says of the RSI’s rank and file: “Practising sport, entering competitions and taking part in the club’s social activities in a predominantly proletarian environment were the major factors which bound members together despite all the ideological divisions between the parties. Just as in other worker clubs, independent social mechanisms, which deviated more or less markedly from the parties’ goals, were able to assert themselves.”25
The reality of the RSI’s sporting activity, taken as a whole, was thus not markedly superior to that of the ‘reformist’ LSI (whatever the RSI’s functionaries might have said of it); in both cases, proletarian activity merely constituted the proletariat as the proletariat. By doing so, such activity actually becomes functional to the continued existence of capital, like all attempts to realise proletarian politics or pose the proletariat as the subject-object of history (in its more radical Lukácsian reading). Such activities are the practical death of the communist project.
It is also useful to dwell on Adorno’s idea that free time is in fact the very opposite of ‘free’, entwined as it is with the oppressive experience of dead time: ie, time spent at work.26 It would be idealistic in the extreme to imagine that one could carve out a space in capitalist society that could avoid this, but this is exactly what our old friend, Nick Long (now of Rushey Green Rangers [youth] FC - presumably Nick is centre-forward), imagines is the case: “Four million children play football in organised leagues every week, supported by 200,000 active parents - helping to develop an awareness of the importance of organisation, collective struggle, solidarity and cooperation. A live and active space challenging capitalism exists within football,” he breathlessly gabbles.27
The root of this is simplistic politics that imagines that activity can exist in an unmediated form, skirting the deep-seated whiles of capitalist ideology and thus threatening capitalism itself. This is nonsense. Capital is a totalising social form, whatever localised resistance it encounters (and recuperates). One can imagine, for example, “200,000 active parents” shelling out for the latest football merchandise. How, pray, does drowning in commodities challenge capitalism?
So a communist programme for sport needs to move beyond ‘leisure’ and into an incursion into dead time, a refusal of work. The problem with sport in our contemporary world is the manner in which it can never be an activity that is experienced for itself and that is owned by the participants. The alienation experienced in other arenas of our life spills over into our unfree ‘free time’ activities, often in ugly forms, precisely because people get the feeling they are being cheated out of their ‘leisure’ (ie, football hooliganism).
Consider the manner in which all-seater British premiership football grounds have been constructed to impede the involvement of the crowd in the game itself. Sometimes this is unsuccessful (supporters of the visiting side inevitably stand up as one) but these arenas have been designed for passive consumption and stewards persecute people who stand up. So it is not just a matter of ‘money ruining football’ (although this is important), but the manner in which the lived experience of the football ground is that of being out of the control of the spectators, just as commodities in general appear to be out of the control of creators and consumers.
Football can be just as frustrating for the players. From my own experience, it is easy to play with the feeling that a game is slipping out of control and easy also for a team to fall in with a reified ‘role’ relating to its status and ability. Eamon Dunphy’s Only a game? The diary of a professional footballer (London, 1976), an account of the 1973-74 season at Millwall (a Second Division club at the time), shows this happening at the professional level.
Dunphy, by all accounts a skilled midfielder, talks about how his game has been reduced to the more dour virtues of hard work, to functions rather than expression, even though he thinks this shift is correct in the circumstances. He recounts games (in which Millwall are actually winning) from which he feels personally alienated and, at times, finds it inexplicable that his team has lost games that he thought were being controlled with a level of comfort (Dunphy’s alienation is compacted, as he is dropped from the team and eventually transferred).
This anxiety on behalf of the footballer and his inability to see his own reflection in events around him (in which he is an important ‘actor’) is not merely a personal foible, but rather an index of an irrational society, in which a seemingly slippery world is hard to comprehend and grasp.
This, of course, is just as much about the relations that permeate our work and our home as it is about our sport.
Notes
1. D Isaacson, ‘Reclaim the beautiful game’ Weekly Worker May 26 2005.
2. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/art/tia23.htm
3. Ibid.
4. pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj73/bambery.htm
5. See ‘The worker sports movement’ in J Riordan and A Krüger The international politics of sport in the 20th century London 1995, p106.
6. Ibid p107.
7. A Gounot, ‘Sport or political organisation? Structures and characteristics of the Red Sport International’, 1921-37’ Journal of Sport History spring 2001, p33.
8. R Edelman Serious fun: a history of spectator sport in the USSR Oxford 1993, p33.h:
9. Ibid pp35-36.
10. Cited in ibid p35.
11. A Gounot op cit p24.
12. J Riordan op cit p107.
13. Ibid p110.
14. Ibid pp111-113.
15. Ibid p109.
16. Ibid pp110-111.
17. See www.tssa.org.uk/about/single-or-return/chapter18.htm
18. J Riordan op cit p111.
19. Ibid p112.
20. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm
21. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/art/tia23c.htm
22. C Bambery op cit.
23. J Riordan op cit p108.
24. A Gounot op cit, p35.
25. Ibid p29.
26. See T Adorno ‘Free time’ in The culture industry London 2007, pp187-97.
27. Letters Weekly Worker March 20.
