On Sports and Class Society

(Letter to Young Spartacus)

Dear Editor,

“College Sports Plantation” (WV No. 1054, 17 October) argues, “In the U.S., the cult and business of spectator sports has become another ‘opium of the people’.”  Racism serves as the rock of the church upon which American capitalism is built.  We can also observe how sports in the United States sweats bigotry from every pore under such exploitation.  However, hasn’t the writer overstretched the boundaries for usage of the term “cult”?

In his 1923 essay “Vodka, the Church, and the Cinema,” Leon Trotsky observed the phenomenon of the cinema by stating, “This amazing spectacular innovation has cut into human life with a successful rapidity never experienced in the past. In the daily life of capitalist towns, the cinema has become just such an integral part of life as the bath, the beer-hall, the church, and other indispensable institutions, commendable and otherwise.” He continued:

“The fact that we have so far, i.e., in nearly six years, not taken possession of the cinema shows how slow and uneducated we are, not to say, frankly, stupid. This weapon, which cries out to be used, is the best instrument for propaganda, technical, educational, and industrial propaganda, propaganda against alcohol, propaganda for sanitation, political propaganda, any kind of propaganda you please, a propaganda which is accessible to everyone, which is attractive, which cuts into the memory and may be made a possible source of revenue.”

Trotsky was certainly aware of the reactionary usage of the cinema as a reactionary tool bent on perpetuating racist divisions in society and glorifying imperialist militarism.  However, he doesn’t appear to argue the usage of this tool under capitalism as comparable to religion’s role as “opium of the people.”  Furthermore, can not all of these examples of how a proletarian dictatorship would harness such an essential innovation as the cinema be applicable to the realm of sports?  Certainly the flag-waving nationalism put on display by athletic events is no more cult-like than the nauseating glorification of bloody American imperialism on the silver screen.  What distinguishes the two realms of entertainment?

Otherwise, I found the recent article to be essential, especially in the wake of the frequent racist scandalizing of college and professional athletes constantly taking place in the bourgeois media.  Cannon argued in 1953 that, “Socialism will undoubtedly bring about a revolutionary transformation of human activity and association in all fields previously conditioned by the division of society into classes—in work, in education, in sports and amusements, in manners and morals, and in incentives and rewards.”

Only a Leninist-Trotskyist party, serving as a bastion of all the oppressed, can make this reality sooner rather than later.

Comradely,
Corey A.

YSp replies:

Thank you for your thoughtful letter. We agree that sports, like cinema, will look very different in a classless society. What we point out in the section of our article from which you quote is that, in the hands of the capitalist overlords, sports can be wielded to channel the anger workers feel from the thousand daily abuses they suffer under capitalism into an outlet that poses no threat to the profit system. In addition, sports can be used to foster nationalism, militarism and obedience to authority—from the singing of the national anthem before the game, to the cutaways of imperialist troops watching the event live from the field. We used the term cult in the colloquial sense, just as one might speak of a “cult of personality.” We do not know exactly what form sports will take under socialism. However we can be sure that the racism, exploitation and barbaric indifference to the safety of athletes which is integral to capitalist sports will not exist in a society run in the interest of all humanity.