09.08.2012

Our sport and theirs

Socialist Workers Party member Keith Flett contrasts todays corporate Olympics with the tradition of worker sport. This is an edited version of his speech to a CPGB London Communist Forum

The workers’ Olympiad is not a subject which has attracted a great deal of interest and I do not claim to be an expert on it. I am, amongst other things, a research historian who has no particular line to defend on the subject, but who merely has some thoughts to present. Frankly I would want to do a lot more research before putting forward some particular view. One thing this would involve, if anyone felt inspired enough, would be to look back over what the left press had to say about the 1908 and 1948 London Olympics.

In terms of where we are now, I am sure you will be aware of the huge fuss about all the gold medals won by Team GB. Labour politicians and so on have been pulled in and this atmosphere is not very good for the left. That being said, I was in a pub when Mo Farah won the 10,000 metres athletics final and everyone there stood up and clapped. It is interesting that ordinary people can celebrate the victory of this Somalian asylum-seeker, while the right did not celebrate it. The usual suspects on Twitter have bigged up this or that person who has “won a gold medal for Britain”, but they did not have much to say about Mo Farah.

There are people around on the left - I will not name them, but you can use Google to find them if you want - who clearly have the view that sport is some kind of conspiracy against working people to divert their attention from the revolutionary struggle. There definitely has been a trend, particularly after World War II, of the left keeping its distance, at the very least, from sport.

However, conversely, a lot of people on the left are very interested in sport; they play it, organise it and so on. And there is a third, more recent trend of the left being involved in what you could call the ‘spectator movements’, particularly in football and cricket, but there are others. The ‘Barmy Army’ in cricket is an interesting thing to touch on, which could take up a whole discussion by itself, because it appears to be a bunch of rightwing people, but I do not think that is necessarily the case at all: there certainly appears to be a left presence within it, which I found puzzling when I came across it.

Worker sport

The origins of the working class sport movement go back to the battle for the eight-hour day in the last quarter of the 19th century. Before that you will find, for example, the Chartists taking part in football matches, but overall there really was not much working class participation. And the reason is obvious, frankly: workers are unable to engage in leisure activities, because they do not have any leisure time of note.

The anti-sports line of organisations like the Social Democratic Federation arose from the connection made between sport, drink, gambling and the Tories - they all went together. Even today those in the pub watching sports with a pint in one hand and a gambling slip in the other will probably be Tories. That was something that the labour movement noted.

However, towards the end of the 19th century the movement begins to fight for sport as part of the campaign for the right of workers to enjoy their own pastimes - for example, cycling and walking (the latter developed into the mass trespasses of the 1930s). The emphasis was on the setting up of separate cultural and sports structures and in Germany this occurred on a much bigger scale.

In 1914, there were 350,000 members of the German workers’ sports organisations, and by 1928 the figure was two million. There were 60 sports papers with a readership of 800,000. These structures were organised by the Social Democratic Party of Germany. But by the early 1930s and the ‘third period’ turn, the Communist Party had separate bodies with 100,000 members. And behind such huge organisations there were things like the cooperative production of bicycles to supply the cycling clubs. In Austria in 1913 the workers’ swimming association organised 100,000 free swimming lessons. It is difficult to imagine today’s left being able to organise on such a scale.

It was the strength of the German movement which allowed the workers’ Olympiads to develop. But it was the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 that provided both the material ability and the political motivation for establishing some kind of framework for a workers’ Olympiad, boosted by the rise of organised labour and the development of revolutionary movements in other countries.

Figures from the 1924 Cooperative and Wholesale Society people’s yearbook show that, while Germany had 1.3 million affiliated members of the social democratic Socialist Workers Sports International, there were only 2,220 in Britain. But the total membership of the SWSI was just over 1.5 million members, mostly in Europe obviously, so Britain’s membership was by no means the smallest proportionally. By today’s standards this is an amazingly large organisation.

The first official event was, unsurprisingly, held in Germany in 1925, where 50,000 were said to have attended. Vienna in 1931 followed, with around 100,000 spectators and competitors from 26 countries. These games were organised by the SWSI - its wing in Britain being the British Workers Sports Federation.

During the ‘third period’ the communist parties set up their own rival Red Sports International, whose first festival was held in Moscow in 1928. This was followed by Berlin 1931, before the political line changed once again for the aborted Barcelona workers’ games in 1936, on the cusp of the Spanish civil war. This was to be a united effort between the social democracy and the communists in opposition to the Nazi Olympic Games in Berlin.

There is more material available about Barcelona than earlier games because of its proximity in time to the start of the Spanish civil war. The idea was to put on a popular sports festival which was not aiming at the breaking of records, but at promoting a ‘spirit of peace and cooperation between peoples and nations’. Which sounds worthy, but rather boring.

Nevertheless the political impact was huge. Avery Brundage - the US representative on the International Olympic Committee, who thought Hitler was a great bloke and was determined the Berlin games should go ahead - referred to Barcelona as “the communist games”. There were 10,000 athletes from 20 countries. The United Kingdom had a small team of mostly Labour Party members playing tennis, chess and so on - the chess player was AR Northcott from the Acton Labour Party sports section. The team also included Welsh 100 yards champion EG Cupid and was even recognised by the Amateur Athletics Association.

But, as the games were due to start, Franco launched his assault on Barcelona, making it impossible for them to go ahead. Many in the British team were shipped out by the Royal Navy, but I believe some participants did stay on and may have become part of the British battalion of the International Brigades - they certainly inspired some of that activity. The games were held instead in Antwerp the following year.

There was also a sort of counter-Olympics organised in 1932 by the Communist Party of the United States of America in Chicago. The CPUSA attitude was that sport was the opium of the masses and they saw the event as a way of promoting particular agendas of opposition around the whole issue of capitalism and sport. It must have been quite difficult to organise a counter-Olympics, whilst at the same time saying that sport is something you shouldn’t be doing. It was not a huge success and indeed the American Athletics Association declared that any athlete competing in the counter-Olympics would be banned for life.

However, this led to a very interesting debate on the American left. The Daily Worker, despite the ‘opium of the masses’ line, ran a sports page - the more this was allowed to reflect the views of actual workers, the more it was realised that organised workers were really quite interested in sport and some of them watched and even took part in it. Eventually the Daily Worker abandoned its former line and went on to lead a very successful and high-profile campaign against segregation in baseball. The CPUSA reputation amongst black Americans was boosted as a result.

The British Workers Sports Association is the organisation which split off from the social democratic British Workers Sports Federation during the ‘third period’. The BWSA was, of course, organised by the Communist Party. The interesting thing about this (and one that raises a lot of questions in my mind anyway) is that during World War II the BWSA became the centre of an attempt to re-establish international workers’ sports, which had been utterly destroyed by the rise of fascism and the war itself. It tried to get the USSR, which had not participated in the official Olympics since the Bolshevik revolution, and American working class bodies to back the formation of the International Workers Sports Committee in 1947.

But the fact that this would include communists caused problems, leading the Labour Party and TUC to withdraw. Further splits occurred and there were no more workers’ Olympiads. In other words, the attempt to start the thing up again after World War II foundered upon the cold war, the rise of McCarthyism and so on. There was an attempt in the 1950s to set up some sort of structure that excluded communists, but that did not work. So in 1954 the BWSA re-affiliated to the ‘official communist’ international sports organisation, and was finally closed down in 1960.

Anti-sport

There remains a strand of thought on the left which sees sport as purely a distraction - and does so far more than the CPUSA. This trend, which gathered influence after World War II and especially in the 1960s, goes beyond condemning sport as the opium of the masses, to expressing hatred of sport and ignoring it altogether. The reason for this, I think, is quite interesting. It is tied to the rise of a different kind of popular culture: the music industry, very different ways of spending leisure time, and so on.

From the late 19th century through to World War II, sport was one of the major outlets for workers’ leisure time. However, once you move on to the rock’n’roll era from the mid-50s onwards, there are clearly other outlets competing with sport that were just not there in any real way previously. Some of these were associated with some kind of political rebellion which appealed to the left in a way in which sport perhaps did not.

The other factor here is the rise of a ‘spectator culture’ (as with the ‘Barmy Army’ I mentioned at the beginning). It is particularly prominent in football, of course, where there are traditions in fan groups going back decades, based around a dislike of the rich and powerful owners of the football clubs. Usually they are strongly anti-racist, and generally pro-fan above all else.

The best known example is the Wimbledon football club, currently somewhere in the lower reaches of the Football League. Wimbledon FC rose from nowhere to win the FA Cup. But then it was taken over, moved to Milton Keynes and renamed MK Dons. This caused a big fan revolt and AFC Wimbledon was formed as a result. Despite a lot of moaning and groaning from the authorities, the new club actually succeeded in getting off the ground and getting back into the league, which is an interesting achievement. It was without question a fan-based movement against what was seen as the power of business to move sport around at a whim.

This was not an isolated case - the spectator movement has grown in strength. However, I do not think it is possible to say that all this is organised by or associated with the political left, but it is something coming from below and there are strong, potentially leftwing currents within it. This stems from the experiences of spectators, who feel they are paying money to somebody ‘up there’ who does not understand the game and has no real passion for the club itself.

This is connected to the phenomenon of corporate sport, which has been obvious around the London Olympics. There is no question that sports fan bases are now more middle class in composition because of the level of income required. Being a spectator is not a cheap activity these days. You cannot watch an international cricket match for less that £70 or £80 and football charges a similar kind of price. Not something within your reach if you are on Job Seekers Allowance.

This is true of the Olympics. There is no need for tickets to be so astronomical - they could be £5. But there has been a deliberate pricing structure to attract a certain kind of people. That is just for the ticket, mind you. If they want a disgusting fizzy lager that will cost them £7 or £8 a pint!