|
A spectre is haunting Professional Sports--the spectre of Athleticism! All the old powers of Pro Sports have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectre: Football and Basketball, Baseball and Hockey, Soccer and Rugby.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Athleticistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition has not hurled back the branding reproach of Athleticism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Athleticism is already acknowledged by all Professional Sports to be itself a Power.
II. It is high time that Athleticists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursury tale of the spectre of Athleticism with a Manifesto of the league itself.
To this end, Athleticists of various sports have assembled in the Hockey Hall of Fame, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published for Hockey, Football, Basketball, Baseball, Soccer, and all existing Professional team sports.
I Players and Owners
The history of all hitherto existing professional sports is the history of labour relations.
Master and slave, Employer and employee, Owner and Player, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a collective bargaining agreement of the sport at large, or in the folding of the league itself.
All over the field of sports, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of sports into various orders, a manifold gradation of management rank. Owner, President, Director of Operations, Manager, Coach, Trainer, and finally, Player; subordinate gradation.
The modern Owner society that has sprouted from the ruins of unorganized athletics in the nineteenth century has not done away with labour antagonisms. It has but established new titles, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the Owners, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the labour antagonisms. Professional sports as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Players and Owners.
From the capitalists of other industries sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest franchises. From these teams the first elements of the Owners were developed.
The discovery of merchandising, broadcasting revenue, opened up fresh ground for the rising Owners. The baseball cap and jersey markets, the expansion bids, the building of new stadiums and arenas, the increase in ticket sales and in souvenir sales generally, gave to commerce, to expansion, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering old sports leagues, a rapid development.
The old sports leagues, under which the teams were monopolized by closed, family-owned businesses, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The corporations took their place. The old owners were pushed aside by the profit-driven machines of the corporations; division of labour between different corporate sports franchises vanished in the face of division of labour in each single team.
Meantime the merchandising profits kept ever-growing, the demand ever rising. Even corporations no longer sufficed. Thereupon, advertising and endorsing revolutionized the industry. The place of ownership was taken by giant, economic oligarchies, the place of the corporate Owners, by corporate CEOs, the leaders of whole business empires, the modern Owners.
Modern sports has established the world market, for which the discovery of merchandising has paved the way. This market has given an immense development to profit, to expansion. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of sports; and in proportion as sports, profit, expansion, leagues expanded, in the same proportion the Owners developed, increased their profit, and pushed into the background every employee handed down from the old system.
We see, therefore, how the modern Owners are themselves the product of a long course of development, of a series of evolutions in the modes of profit and of commerce.
Each step in the development of the Owners was accompanied by a corresponding commercial advance. An oppressed group under the sway of the old Owners, the costless entertainment of community athletics; here independent urban communities (as in our various towns and cities), their funding coming from the government (as in Hockey), afterwards, in the period of the old owners, serving either the community or the government as a counterpoise against the capitalists, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great community sports in general, the Owners have at last, since the establishment of modern sports and of massive profits, conquered for itself, in our modern, monetary society, exclusive community influence.
The Owners, historically, have played a most revolutionary part.
The Owners, wherever they have got the upper hand, have put an end to all rival league competition. They have pitilessly torn asunder the motley rivalries that bound the sportsman to his "competitive superiors", and have left no other nexus between athletes than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of community wellbeing, of health and fitness, of playing for the love of the game, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by commercial and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The Owners have stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the trainer, the agent, the sports psychologist, the journalist, the coach, into its paid wage laborers.
The Owners have torn away from sports its sentimental veil, and has reduced sports into a mere money relation.
The Owners have disclosed how it has come to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Golden Age of sports, which old sportswriters so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Stanley Cups, Superbowl Rings, and Pennant races; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of sports and games.
The Owners cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of performance, and thereby the relations of performance, and with them the whole relations of professional sports. Conservation of the old modes of performance in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier athletic labor. Constant revolutionizing of performance, uninterrupted disturbance of all recreational conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the Owner epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the Owner over the entire surface of the globe. He must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The Owners have, through their exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to performance and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of old sports writers, they have drawn from under the feet of team loyalty the national ground on which it stood. All old-established traditional teams have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new superteams, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all professional sports, by teams that no longer work up through drafting and smart trading, but purchasing championships drawn from free agency; teams whose merchandise are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the performance of the local team, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the performance of distant lands and leagues. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of sports. And as in material, so also in intellectual performance. The intellectual creations of individual sports become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local media, there arises a world media.
The Owners, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of performance, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most amateur sports into professionalism. The cheap prices of new talent are the heavy artillery with which it forces the amateur’s intensely obstinate hatred of professionals to capitulate. It compels all sports, on pain of extinction, to adopt the Owner mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls professionalism into their midst, i.e., to become Owners themselves.
The Owners have subjected the leagues to the rule of the superteams. It has created enormous disparity between rich and poor, has greatly increased ticket prices as compared with the small market teams, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the public from the idiocy of taking their family to see a game. Just as it has made the league dependent on the superteams, so it has made amateur and semi-pro leagues dependent on the civilized ones, sports of players on sports of Owners, the East on the West.
The Owners keep more and more doing away with the scattered state of the player’s contract, of the means of performance, and of ownership. They have agglomerated contracts, centralized the means of performance, and have concentrated ownership in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent, or but loosely connected leagues, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of play, became lumped together into one league, with one governing body, one code of laws, one national competition, and one collective bargaining agreement.
The Owners, during their rule of scarce one hundred years, have created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding sports entertainment together.
We see then: the means of performance and of payment, on whose foundation the Owners built themselves up, were generated in the old days. At a certain stage in the development of these means of performance and of payment, the conditions under which the old leagues performed and paid out, in one word, the old relations of ownership became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free agency, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the Owner class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern Owner-driven professional sports, with its relations of performance, of payment and of ownership, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past, the history of franchises and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern performance-based forces against modern conditions of performance, against the ownership relations that are the conditions for the existence of the Owners and of their rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire Owner-driven sports on trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of existing performance, but also of the previously created performance forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of super profit. Professional sports suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary amateurism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the creativity and entertainment imbued in modern sports; team loyalties seem to be manufactured and purchased rather than earned. And why? Because there is too much sports media, too much merchandising, too many teams, too much revenue. The productive forces at the disposal of professional sports no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of Owner profits; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of Owner-driven professional sports, endanger the existence of the game. The goals of Owner-driven professional sports are too narrow to comprise the ambition created by them. And how does the Owner get over these crises? On the one hand, by mass marketing and engineering public opinion in what he’s doing; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the Owner felled the old leagues to the ground are now turned against the Owner himself.
But not only has the Owner forged the weapons that bring death to himself; he has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons -- the modern working athlete -- the Players.
In proportion as the Owner is developed, in the same proportion is the Player, the modern working athlete, developed – an athletic class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases revenue. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the Players has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the working athlete. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of performance of a working athlete is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his team’s success. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of performance. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. What is more, in proportion as division of labor and specialization of positions increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the training hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased level of fitness, etc.
Modern teams have converted the little office of the family-owned business into the cold, sterile environment of the sports entertainment corporation. Masses of athletes, crowded into the arena, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the sports army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of coaches and team presidents. Not only are they slaves of the Owners, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
No sooner is the exploitation of the athlete by the company, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in salary, than he is set upon by the other portion of the Owners, the shareholders, etc.
The lower strata of management -- the small trainers, physicians, coaches and retired former players generally -- all these sink gradually into the Players, partly because their diminutive worth does not suffice for the scale on which Modern sports is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large corporate teams, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus, the Players are recruited from all classes of the population.
At this stage, athletes still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active association, but of the union of the Owners, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole Players in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the Players do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of small businesses, the general managers, the team presidents. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the Owners; every victory so obtained is a victory for the Owners.
But with the development of big-money sports, the Player not only increases in number; he becomes concentrated in greater masses, his strength grows, and he feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the Players are more and more equalized, in proportion as public smear campaigns and lockouts obliterate all value in the Players’ labor, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the Owners make the wages of the athletes ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of skills, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious. Thereupon, the athletes begin to form combinations (Players Associations) against the Owners; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into work stoppages.
Now and then the players are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the players. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern sports, and that place the athletes of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between sports. But every struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the players of a generations, with their miserable highways, required decades, the modern Player, thanks to telecommunications, achieve in a few days.
This organization of the Players into a class, and, consequently, into a political league, is continually being upset again by the competition between the players themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the players, by taking advantage of the divisions among the Owners themselves.
Altogether, collisions between the classes in the old days further in many ways the course of development of the Players. The Owners find themselves involved in a constant battle. At first with the traditionalists; later on, with those portions of the Owners themselves, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of sports; at all time with the Owners of foreign leagues. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the Players, to ask for help, and thus to drag them into the political arena. The Owners themselves, therefore, supply the Players with their own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the Players with weapons for fighting the Owners.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ownership, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the players, normally retired players unmistakably exalted as greatness, cuts itself adrift, and joins the Owner class. So now a portion of the Players goes over to the Owners, and in particular, a portion of these new Owners raise themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the athletic classes that stand face to face with the Owners today, the professional team player alone is a genuinely revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern sports; the Player is its special and essential product.
The individual athletes, the track runner, the swimmer, the golfer, the tennis player, all these fight against the Owners, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the athletic class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the players; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the players.
The amateur athletes may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a Player revolution; their conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting sports at large to their conditions of appropriation. The Players cannot become masters of the productive forces of sports, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, corporate ownership.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The Player movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The Player, the lowest stratum of professional sports, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of all sports being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the Players with the Owners is at first a national struggle. The Players of each league must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own Owners.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the Players, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the Owners lays the foundation for the sway of the Players.
And here it becomes evident that the Owners are unfit any longer to be the ruling class in sports, and to impose their conditions of existence upon sports as an overriding law. Sports can no longer exist under the Owners, in other words, their existence is no longer compatible with sports.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the Owner is the formation and augmentation of money interests; the condition for profit is an entertaining product. Such a product rests exclusively on competition between the players. The advance of media, whose involuntary promoter are the Owners, replaces the necessity of performance of the athletes, due to an inflated sense of importance in the team’s fortunes. The development of professional sports, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the Owners produce and appropriate the product. What the Owners therefore produce, above all, are their own grave-diggers. Their fall and the victory of the Players are equally inevitable.
II Players and Athleticists
In what relation do the Athleticists stand to the Players as a whole? Athleticists do not form a separate league opposed to the other athletic leagues.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the Players as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the Player movement.
Athleticists are distinguished from other professional athletes by this only:
(1) In the national struggles of the Players of the different leagues, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of all Players, independently of all sports.
(2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working athlete against the Owners has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
Athleticists, therefore, are on the one hand practically the most advanced and resolute section of the athletic leagues of every sport, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the Players the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the Player movement.
The immediate aim of the Athleticists is the same as that of all other Player associations: Formation of the Players into a class, overthrow of the Owner supremacy, conquest of athletic political power by the Players.
The theoretical conclusions of the Athleticists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing labor struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing ownerships is not at all a distinctive feature of Athleticism.
All ownerships in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.
The distinguishing feature of Athleticism is not the abolition of ownership generally, but the abolition of current corporate Owner ownership. But modern Owner property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating money that is based on antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Athleticists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of franchise ownership.
We Athleticists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring ownership as the nexus of sports business, which ownership is alleged to be the groundwork of all sports success, activity and wealth.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned ownership! Do you mean the ownership of petty teams and of the local minor association league, a form of ownership that preceded the Owner form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of sports has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern corporate ownership of professional sports?
But does playing sports create any ownership for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates entertainment value for the Owners, the kind of ownership that exploits playing sports, and which cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of athletes for fresh exploitation. Ownership, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of money and entertainment. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be in sports business is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in ownership. Revenue is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of the league, can it be set in motion.
Revenue is therefore not only personal; it is a social power.
When, therefore, revenue is converted into common ownership, into the ownership of all members of professional sports, personal ownership is not thereby transformed into social ownership. It is only the social character of the ownership that is changed. It loses its class character.
Let us now take player salaries.
The standard player salary is determined by the collective bargaining contract, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to maintain the player’s standard as a player and provider of entertainment. What, therefore, the player appropriates by means of his playing merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of playing, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the playing of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the player lives merely to increase revenue, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling ownership requires it.
In Owner society, sports are but a means to increase accumulated profit. In Athleticist society, accumulated athletics is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the athlete.
In Owner society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Athleticist society, the present dominates the past. In Owner society, profit is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the Owner, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of Owner individuality, Owner independence, and Owner freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.
By freedom is meant, under the present Owner conditions of production, free agency, free selling and buying.
You are horrified at our intending to do away with all ownership. But in your existing sports, owning a team is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of ownership, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any ownership for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your ownership. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when sports entertainment can no longer be converted into money or a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual ownership can no longer be transformed into Owner property, into profit, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the Owner. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.
Athleticism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the profit of sports; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriations.
It has been objected that upon the abolition of ownership, all sports will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, Owner society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: There can no longer be any collective bargaining agreement when there is no longer any profit.
All objections urged against the Athleticistic mode of producing and appropriating sports entertainment, have, in the same way, been urged against the Athleticistic mode of producing and appropriating all business.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace greedy parents with community values in sports.
The Owner claptrap about family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and children, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of minor youth leagues, all the family ties among the Players are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.
The Athleticists are further reproached with desiring to abolish all current professional leagues and franchises.
The players have no team. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the Players must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of all sports, must constitute themselves the league, it is, so far, itself international, though not in the Owner sense of the word.
National differences and antagonism between leagues are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the Owners, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of performance and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the Players will cause them to vanish still faster. United action of the leading professional sports at least is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the Players.
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one league by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the league vanishes, the hostility of one league to another will come to an end.
The charges against Athleticism made from a commercial, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that the athlete's ideas, views, and conception, in one word, the athlete’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his sporting life?
What else does the history of sports prove, than that exhortative revenue changes their character in proportion as delivery of entertainment is changed?
When people speak of the ideas that revolutionize sports, they do but express that fact that within the old leagues the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old leagues keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of the game.
The Athleticist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the Owner objections to Athleticism.
We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the athletes is to raise the Players to the position of ruling class to win the battle of professional sports.
The Players will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all revenue from the Owners, to centralize all instruments of organization in the hands of the League, i.e., of the Players organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
These measures will, of course, be different in different sports.
Nevertheless, in the most profitable sports, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of all ownerships in all sporting franchises and application of all venues to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated salary tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of selling franchises on public markets.
4. Confiscation of the profit of all owners and their financiers.
5. Centralization of every franchise’s dealings and decisions in the League, by means of a national headquarters with League revenue and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of all sports media and communication in the hands of the League.
7. Extension of venues, maintenance and upkeep owned by the League; the bringing into cultivation of failed sport markets, and the improvement of fan support generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to play. Establishment of national programs, especially for international play.
9. Combination of amateur and professional facilities; gradual abolition of all the distinction between minor and major athletics by a more equable distribution of the athletes over the world.
10. Free training, equipment, coaching and instruction for all children. Abolition of youth leagues in their present form. Combination of education with athletic achievement, etc.
When, in the course of development, inequality has disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole League, the power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the Players during their contest with the Owners are compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize themselves as a class; if, by means of a revolution, they make themselves the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of sports business, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of labor antagonisms and of labor generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old Owner society, with its labor divisions and labor antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
III Recreationist And Athleticist Literature
1. OWNER-DRIVEN RECREATIONISM
A part of the Owners is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of Owner control of all sports, amateur and professional.
To this section belong marketers, business owners, bankers, money-lenders, investors, corporate CEOs, and people of wealth and power. This form of recreationism has, moreover, been worked out into a complete system.
The recreationistic Owners want all the successes of owning a sporting franchise without the risk necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of sports, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a Owner without a player. The Owners naturally conceive the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and Owner-driven recreationism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the Players to carry out such a system, they but require in reality that the Players should remain within the bounds of existing sports, but should cast away all their hateful ideas concerning the Owners.
A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this recreationism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of all athletes by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of recreationism, however, by no means understands abolition of the Owner relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between revenue and performance, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work of Owner control.
Owner-driven recreationism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.
It is summed up in the phrase: the Owners are Owners -- for the benefit of the players.
2. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN RECREATIONSIM AND ATHLETICISM
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the Players.
The first direct attempts of the Players to attain their own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when the old ownerships were being overthrown with the creation of the players associations, necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the Players, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for their emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending corporate Owner epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the Players had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.
The founders of these systems see, indeed, the labor antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of professional spots. But the Players, as yet in their infancy, offered to them the spectacle of a workforce without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.
Since the development of labors antagonism keeps even pace with the commercialization of sports, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the Players. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous labor organization of the Players to an organization of sports especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of all amateur athletes, as being the most suffering profession. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering profession do the Players exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the labor struggles, as well as their own surroundings, causes Recreationists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all labor antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member involved in sports, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to sports at large, without the distinction of profession; nay, by preference, to the professional athletes. For how can people when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of sports?
Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new sports gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future sports, painted at a time when the Players are still in a very undeveloped state and have but a fantastic conception of their own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that profession for a general reconstruction of sports.
But these recreationist and athleticist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing sports. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of athletes. The practical measures proposed in them -- such as the abolition of the distinction between team and league, of the carrying on of commercial interests for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the function of the league into a more superintendence of performance -- all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of labor antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognized in their earliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely utopian character.
The significance of critical-utopian recreationism and Athleticism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern labor struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justifications. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the Players. They, therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the labor struggle and to reconcile the labor antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their athletic utopias, of buying and running their own teams, and to realize all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the Owners. By degrees, they sink into the category of the old sportswriter conservative recreationists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of athletes; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new gospel.
IV Position of the Athleticists in Relation to the Various Opposition Leagues
Section II has made clear the relations of the Athleticists to the existing athletic leagues.
The Athleticists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of athletes; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into athletes the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between Owners and Players, in order that the athletes may straightway use, as so many weapons against the Owners, the social and political conditions that the Owners must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in hockey, the fight against the Owners themselves may immediately begin.
The Athleticists turn their attention chiefly to hockey, because that sport is on the eve of an Owner revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of collective bargaining and with much more developed Players than that of the NBA, and MLB, and because the Owner revolution in hockey will be but the prelude to an immediately following Player revolution.
In short, the Athleticists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of professional sports.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the ownership question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the player’s associations of all leagues.
The Athleticists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing corporate sports conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at an Athleticist revolution. The Players have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Players of all sports, unite!
|
|
|
3 comments - join this discussion...
|
|
|
|
|
|
