No. 108 THE SOCIOLOGY
OF SPORT:
T. R. Young
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ARCHIVES
of the TRANSFORMING SOCIOLOGY SERIES of the RED FEATHER INSTITUTE for ADVANCED STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY
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(Winner of the 1987 PSA Award for Distinguished Scholarship).
THE SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT Structural and Cultural Approaches
Sport served a political function. Capitalism supports a division of sports into 'theirs' and 'ours.' Into workers sports and bourgeois sports. The Working class must use sports to bring back people from their lonely, tortured and shattered worlds to their rightful human dignity.
....from Arbeitsports by Fritz Wildung
Abstract
A Marxian theory of sport has two major dimensions: a political economy in which one weighs the degree to which sports serves the accumulation problems of advanced monopoly capital and a cultural-marxist dimension in which one examines the ways in which sports solves the problems of legitimacy and helps produce alienated consciousness in self and society. This paper provides insight in both uses to which commodity sports are put. In brief, advanced monopoly capitalism uses the advertising industry to colonize desire and myth in sports as an envelope in which to insert commercial messages. The human desire for good and enlivening social relations is transferred to the lifeless commodity. A better use of sports is to locate desire within community and interpersonal concerns rather than profit and a false solidarity. A radical research agenda is summarized in the last section.
The Sociology of Sport. The Sociology of Sport is increasingly disputed ideological territory in American social science. On the one hand is the uncritical descriptive statistical examination of sports activity created by an admiring journalism. In the same camp is the celebratory history of sports and sport figures which redeems its ugly aspects by enlarging the heroic efforts of individual players and teams. Joining with these extensive statistical presentations and their selected historical forays is a safe and bland sociology of sport which trivializes and depoliticizes sports in particular and leisure time pursuits generally.
Among the major introductory textbooks of the past 20 years, very little attention is paid to the sociology of sports. Babbie (1983) does not mention sports or leisure as an institutional form. Wilson (1971) treats leisure activities as a subsection or work containing no theory or analysis. McGee (1980) does not mention sports and treats leisure activities as a problem which may arise in the future as people work less. Again no analysis. Ritzer et al. (1982) has a very decent section on sports although it is primarily descriptive of organization and variety. It does have some mildly critical dimensions about sports as corporate business as well as the disturbing influence of mass media.
Opposed to this happy, marginalized view of sports is a new genre of Marxian work embodied in the works of Paul Hoch (1972), Jean Marie Brohm (1975), Richard Gruneau (1981), Jon Sewart (1981), Leon Chorbajian (1984), and Thomas Keil (1984). A marxian perspective when viewing sports has two major approaches: The first and more orthodox approach centers on the political economy of sports while the second focuses upon its ideological meaning for socialization as well as for the legitimacy within a strife ridden nation.
Structural Analysis. Central to the first approach are the concepts of profit, capital accumulation, concentration of wealth, extraction of surplus value, externalization of costs as well as the exploitation, objectification and commodification of athletes, games, leagues and seasons of play. This approach is concerned with the ways in which the mode of production of sports is organized to socialize the costs of production while the profits are privatized.
Economic benefits of commodity sports include profits, tax write off for losses, residuals, stock and real estate appreciation as well as copyrights and commercial spin-offs. Profits from financing, construction and auxiliary services to sports all redound to the private owner while the costs of production are transferred to the tax-payer, workers and fans through player training programs in school, college and community, public stadia building, low wages and benefits for nonathletes, ticket and television revenue.
Modern American society invests a great deal of resources in commodity sports. This political economy critique of sports shows how it accumulates and concentrates capital for ownership, how it manages player unrest, how it has developed to a labor aristocracy which joins with management to exploit other sectors of the working class and how it commodifies every element of sports from intermissions of play, to grand moments in play, to the very reputations and esteem of players.
There is also an economic analysis of mass sports made of the ways and means by which banks and monopolies have taken over the financial side of sports; the interconnections between ownership within and between differing sports; between sports and other economic activities such as publishing, cinema, advertising, as well as gambling and politics.
There is the mapping of the subsidiary businesses to sports; transport, food, hostelry, equipment manufacture, construction, sports medicine, development schemes as well as insurance and investment. There is a critical history of sports created as well. Brohm (1975) notes that world sport paralleled the rise of colonial imperialism. Sport is modeled upon capitalist modes of production; upon the accumulation ethic and is assimilated by the state in such a fashion as to socialize the costs of producing athletes, stadia, and injury while privatizing the profits of mass sports.
There are the forms of crime, forms of policing, forms of justice and forms of control to be studied -- a sort of micro-criminology. There are the frauds, tax evasion, black-listing, spurious bankruptcies, bribes, medical crime, illegal transfers and point-fixing to be analyzed. These analyses are made in the traditional structural analysis of the political economy.
Cultural Marxism: The second major approach in Marxian analysis is a cultural Marxist analysis. It involves the concepts of legitimation, ideological culture, alienation, false consciousness, solidarity, massification, character, structure, surplus production and the realization problem. Cultural Marxism studies how commodity sports creates a false solidarity between and among workers and owners, Blacks and Anglos, rich and poor, East and West, North and South as well as between nations within the world capitalist system and between the socialist bloc and the non-socialist bloc. In Brazil and Argentina, revolutionary groups stop the revolution for the World Soccer Finals.
Commodity sports colonizes the beauty, elegance, joy and despair of physical performance. Thus it bends eros to the accumulation and legitimation needs of capitalism in crisis (as well as bureaucratic socialism, feudal relations in the Mid-East or fascist relations in the poor capitalist countries). Eros is colonized in order to transfer desire from essential social and community needs to privatized consumer goods. In advanced monopoly capitalism, the entire sports ensemble becomes a product sold to major corporations which need to dispose of surplus production in order to realize profit.
Commodity sports legitimates the false separation of social life into the world of work which is said to be necessarily alienating on the one hand and the world of play in which one finds delight and joy on the other hand; in which the forces of life may be expressed in exhilarating play and thus redeem the bitter imperfection of alienated relations at work, in school, in family or in church. The possibility that eros, conceived as the forces of life, could be expressed at work, school, in family or in religious practice is falsely excluded from the consciousness of the worker, the student, the husband or the somnolent church-goer.
These two approaches together, use of sports for the capital accumulation and the use of sports for the mystification of conflict relations in class, racist, sexist or national chauvinistic societies combines to provide the emancipatory knowledge basic to the transformation of society in general and sports in particular to more human and humane purpose. The critical project is always to advance the radical anthropological project of Marx in which the individual constitutes himself or herself as species being, i.e., as human, by the appropriation of nature including one's own athletic abilities in building a just, harmonious and egalitarian social life world in concert with others. It is to that end that this paper is written.
Before I develop both approaches a bit, I would like to set forth the contemporary but depoliticized ways in which athletes and fans falsely understand the meaning of sports. One must remember that there is some truth value in each approach. It is not that these other approaches are false but rather that, in their limited truth, they provide a false consciousness of sports in capitalist societies which deflect the authentic self knowledge of sports and society and thus defuse and deflect political control over the very institution so many give so much of the body and loyalty.
The False Self-Understanding of Sports: Health and Character building.
The officially given uses to which sports and other athletic activity are put center around physical health and character building. The vast resources laid on for physical education in high school, college and city league programs are justified by appeal to the presumed increase in quality of life or in moral character for participants. There are several features of modern sport activity which bespeak this rationale. The incidence of injuries to professional ball teams subvert the claim of better physical condition as a result of participation.
The use of drugs to train and repair players as well as for controlling pain so one can play while injured also calls such a rationale into question. The kind of muscles used and the development of them may have no real lasting effect on quality of health. And the physical deterioration of players after they cease playing suggests that this philosophy of sports is much more a gloss than substance.
And as far as the moral character, in commercial sports in particular and competitive sports in general, one must wonder whether that particular character is, indeed, an ideal to be adopted. The widespread cheating by coaches and players, the envy, disappointment, cynicism and hypocrisy entailed in commercialized competitive sports, as well as the abusive and profane behavior of the fans, leave one in doubt about the psychological benefits accruing from and calling for such social investments.
Finally, the minuscule differences in performance of runners, throwers, catchers, batters, and jumpers need critical analysis. With electronic timing and measurement, the differences between "winners" and "losers" in races, series, and games may be magnified far beyond any sensible proportion. If two runners finish within a tenth of a second in a four minute mile, how is one declared a winner and the other a loser when both are superior examples of athletic excellence. If two teams are tied in the last minute of play after a long season and the "winner" depends upon the last basket in the last second -- or the last pass on the last down or the last kick in overtime, all this is exhilarating drama but rests more comfortably in an analysis which places sports in a dramatic framework about endurance, persistence, or national superiority than in one centered on superiority or merit.
It is the view taken here that these physical activities are central to the human project if organized adequately; that these aesthetically pleasing capabilities are and should be expressed in the world of work, family life, politics and, indeed, sports, theatre, dance, and the plastic arts.
Solidarity. Perhaps the most visible and most pervasive understanding of sports activity is a solidarity use. High schools, small towns, large cities, entire nations, friendship groups, male associations, father-son relationships, as well as whole economic systems make use of the aesthetic, dramatic, mysterious and strategic responses in sports, games and play to define, to celebrate, to expand and to reaffirm a special solidarity status for those assembled to participate or to observe.
As a solidarity device in conjunction with a variety of other solidarity supplies; food, alcohol, violence, risk, song, sexual display, chants, special clothing and physical ecstasy, such sports as football, basketball, soccer, hockey, and baseball bind people together.
The solidarity function is central to a sociological understanding of sports, games and play. We do act, feel and think as one as we cheer, chant, despair, and rejoice together at the turns of events in the game. There can be no greater solidarity than dozens, thousands, millions thinking, doing and feeling the same things in the same place at the same moment. These are the precious, rare moments of perfect harmony and collective exuberance in a world all too short on such moments.
But it is this a narrow solidarity limited in time and place and confined to the world of make-believe and not-for-real. When the game is over, the enthusiasm dies, the solidarity runs short and disharmony in other relations reassert themselves. Much as one hour a week cannot answer to the religious impulse, one game a week cannot answer to the solidarity needs of a racist, sexist or elitist society. In this respect more radical structural solutions are preferred.
In a conflict-ridden society where each is the natural enemy of similarly-situated competitors for jobs, for land and resources, for sexual access, and for other scarce items, where there are class antagonists and ethnic opponents, where ever more people are impoverished, such solidarity activity is important to the masking of these antagonisms. When the home team beats the putative enemy with skill, genius, heroic acts, with deceit or trickery and guile, great delight, joy and enthusiasm emerges and can be shared with those-present-on-our-side. Class antagonisms, ethnic hatred, as well as gender and national hostilities with real conflicting interests can be assimilated to the harmless competitive in sports. The structures of privilege, inequality and oppression are left intact by such use of solidarity moments in sports.
Alienated Sexuality. Perhaps the most simple-minded view of the current way sports is organized centers around sex and violence. This view reduces the analysis of sports to some universal psychological drive/anxiety about sexual and violent behavior.
The depth analyses made in this kind of understanding is that the equipment and events in football, basketball, baseball, golf and other sports events lend themselves to sexual interpretation.
The pitcher throwing the ball to the catcher to deceive the hitter readily lends itself to this interpretation if we regard the bat as a phallic symbol, the ball as a sperm, the catcher and the mitt as earth-mother and her genital organ, the pitcher as the castrating father and the home run as the symbolic murder of the primitive father.
In like fashion, football action may be so reconstructed as to evoke the primal scene. If the goal line is the hymen and the ballcarrier the phallus while the ball itself is a primitive womb to be delivered in triumph to earthmother, then a touchdown is a symbolic rape uniting sex and violence in a series of downs in which the underdog team (the symbolic son) pushes away the defenses of the favored team (the primitive father) to penetrate the sacred opening of that mother.
Golf also takes on sexual meaning if we convert the golf club into a phallus, the white ball into sperm and the drive itself into an ejaculatory orgasm aimed at a hole-in one. Basketball with its inaccessible hoop, its oversized balls and its slam-dunk could create an image of the primal scene in the violence of rape. And so on. In these analyses a horse is a phallic symbol as is a car, motorbike, bicycle, rifle or running back. In sports, one side represents father, one side the adolescent son reaching for incestuous control of the primitive mother embodied in the win, the bucket, the touchdown, the hole in one, the home run.
In this perspective, sports is seen as a form of sublimated sexuality which makes the world safer for decent women.
A variation on this theme is that sports and the deep involvement of Americans and people everywhere with them is an expressive outlet for undesirable and/or unusable emotional drives or psychological imperatives. Rage, anger, antic genius, violence, sexuality, fantasy, foolishness, and humor (eros generally) are said to be "safely" channeled into harmless pursuits through sports, games, reading novels, watching plays and dreaming. It is not that these are central to all forms of human activity but that they have a very limited place in "real" life and must be rendered neutral by expressing them in non-serious endeavor. Sports is, here as before, a safety valve to discharge "naturally" occurring and "dangerous" emotion.
Divertissment Another well received view of sports is as a diversion from serious matters.
In this analysis, ordinary work, politics and family are adult matters. One who seeks escape into trivial, non-serious activity is immature. More generally, the social world is split into two components: seriously intended social reality on the one hand and make-believe, just-pretend and just-for-fun on the other. It may be all right for children and students to engage in such frivolity but the sober citizen works hard and remains joyless.
In this view, eros is not to be linked with work still less is it to be colonized to encourage consumerism--eros is to be denied. This view sees life as necessarily involving suffering--joy is unnatural. In a marginally efficient mode of production the Protestant ethic of hard work and self-denial has a certain social utility. In an affluent society, this approach makes sense only to those whose relationship to the means of production is so precarious that the least indulgence would be a serious matter.
A great many people including some Marxists hold a differing view. They accept that life is alienating and that people inappropriately escape that alienation by fleeing the family, onerous work, dull/mean-spirited religion as well as massified educational forms to the lively world of play and sports. Alienated workers escape the boredom, drudgery and humiliation of work in the ever expanding weekend of commercial sports, drinking, bowling, jogging, hunting or swinging sex. People give up on local, state and national politics, surrender elitist control over politics to the politicians in exchange for the private freedoms of sports, games, and play.
The difficulties with this analysis are many including the unjustified assumptions that work and sexual life within institutional marriage forms or institutional politics necessarily are alienating. It simply does not follow that since these are alienated in this social formation that they must be alienated everywhere, eternally for all people. There is the prior question about the relationship between reality and make-believe.
Sports, games, theatre, fiction, rehearsal, are, have been and must be integrally linked to the human project (Young, 1983). As we shall see a bit later, the realm of make believe and magic can be alienated from the human project--the salient political question is how to forestall alienation. The short answer lies in the democratic modes of production for make believe and just-pretend including sports.
The Political Economy of Sports There are several structural characteristics of a political economy approach upon which I touched earlier and would like to develop a bit here. The first and most general point I want to emphasize is that the character of sports varies with the mode of production of the society in which it appears. The history of sports parallels the history of human society.
In each of the five great modes of organization for social production, sports and the world of serious activity has been mutually inter-dependent. In primitive communal societies, in slave, feudal, capitalist or socialist society, sports has been shaped by the dominant mode of production.
Contemporary sports: Football, basketball, soccer, track and field events have their origins in inter-tribal, inter-feudal and inter- capitalist warfare.
Football probably started out as a predator village kicked the heads of conquered neighbors around. Baseball is little else but the skilled use of the bludgeon. Field events: shot put, javelin, hammer throw and archery all come out of the weaponry of feudal warfare.
Such events as the marathon, the hurdles, the obstacle course, the dash and the relay recapitulate the structure of field communication in the various military encounters between low tech armies from the wars between city-states in ancient Greece to the crusades through the feudal conquests of France, Britain, Scandinavia and the African nations.
The modern assimilation of sports to military goals came in 1811 when the Germans were occupied by the armies of Napoleon. The mass calisthenics which later came to be associated with the Jugendschaften of the Hitler era, were encouraged as prelude to the overthrow of the French oppressors by German patriots.
In our times, sports is shaped more by the commercial needs of advanced monopoly capital. There are several points at which its needs shape the structure and development of sports. The most significant structural change in modern sports is the gradual and continuing commodification of sports. This means that the social, psychological, physical and cultural uses of sports are assimilated to the commercial needs of advanced monopoly capital.
The Realization 'Problem'
A major use to which sports are put by commodity capitalists is in the solution to the "realization problem." Given the profit motive, capitalist firms produce more than their workers can buy. This happens for two reasons. First, workers collectively do not get paid 100% of the price set by the market. For any given firm labor costs are about 25-35% of the price set. Across all workers who share in the division of the profits, the wages are less than 100 percent of the price available with which to purchase the goods they produce.
In low profit lines, workers may have 95% of the value produced; in high profit lines of production, they may have less than 50% of the value of the wealth they produce. Whatever the case they can't buy it all. In such a case, the economy tends to slow down to recession or depression levels. There are several ways to renew demand each with other problems-
warfare destroys wealth and renews demand. A prolonged recession renews demand. Price wars dispose of surplus production but benefit big competitors. Crime requires replacement of items stolen. The welfare state redistributes wealth. Credit and deficit spending can keep the system going a while longer. Capitalists compete for foreign markets and try to capture surplus value from foreign economies with which to renew demand
However, a major way to dispose of "surplus" goods and realize profit is to transfer desire from the world of cultural events; sports, theatre, religion or patriotism to the world of commodity production via advertising.
The inability of a capitalist firm to dispose of "surplus" production leads corporations to purchase sports programming as a commodity to generate demand by using the beauty and elegance of athletics as an envelope in which to insert a commercial message.
Extracting Surplus Income. A second structural feature of advanced monopoly capitalism which besets the accumulation process is the great inequality of income distribution among those who do work for wage labor.
The Yuppie portion of the population has discretionary income as do most elements of the capital class, but in the capitalist system today a few million people get around 40 percent of that wealth and hundreds of millions share less than 50 percent of the wealth. In America, the bottom 20 percent of the population share only five percent of the gross national product. A lot of money to be sure but far less than is required to purchase all the cars, beer, refrigerators, cigarettes, and other items produced.
The few million who do have surplus income and could purchase the surplus production don't need the fourth car, the fifth television set or the tenth toaster. This distortion in income means, again, that capitalists can't realize profit. A third reason that there is a surplus of goods is the tendency in capitalist systems to disemploy workers by the use of new technology or by increased productivity from each worker.
These disemployed workers join the surplus population. Their material needs may be met by the state in its welfare system, by family members, by private charity or by friends. Again many turn to crime as a way to reunite production and distribution. So, in order to dispose of the surplus production on profitable terms, capitalist firms turn to advertising to create an ever expanding layer of false needs and wants among those who may have discretionary income. Or try to expand markets overseas to the disadvantage of capitalists in other countries who also have the same realization problem.
Since sports events generate large audiences and participants (for any or all of the reasons mentioned earlier: the alienated solidarity, the alienated sexuality or the alienated aesthetics of play), advertising firms buy the audiences and sell them to capitalist firms which are large enough to have national markets and wealthy enough to pay the costs of the audience, the commercials, the media time and the teams involved. Apart from the fact that this solution to the problem of capitalist production greatly inflates costs of distribution and apart from the fact that small firms tend to fail, the real problem of this growing alliance between sports and capitalism is the linkage between mythic concerns of a society and profit concerns of private capital.
Cultural Marxist Analysis of Sports.
In brief the argument in Cultural Marxism is that sports has absorbed some of the religious needs of a secular society for solidarity and for a metaphysic.
The analysis of sports presented here is that it embodies elements of four great founding myths of society -- especially that of a morality metaphysic which instructs players and fans alike about how to approach the problematics of interpersonal interaction; how to relate oneself to the social unit, and how to confront the imponderables of nature and other groups.
It seems to me that it is this morality metaphysic which so intrigues and so engrosses fans in the actions and outcomes of a sports event. It is this morality metaphysic which can be used as an envelop in which to insert advertisements. To understand the rise of commodity sports in America, we need to connect the political economy of capitalism to alienated social life.
Every society has four general myths which help reproduce it across generations. The first great myth is, of course, the creation myth. The second myth and the one used here is the morality myth -- one which instructs us on how we are to deal with the ordinary contingencies of life, how we are to relate to others inside and outside our group.
Morality myths instruct us about the forms of evil, the sources of evil, the agents of evil and the solutions for evil.
A third great myth form is one which tells us how to understand and survive the inevitable tragedies which is the common lot of all people -- what to do about death, about love gone wrong, about children gone wrong and about the imponderables of life.
The fourth great mythic form speaks to the future and to the failings of the past in that social formation itself. This fourth mythic form usually says that times were good before, they turn bad through no fault of the system and they will be good again if one has faith.
A myth is a line of symbolic activity -- activity in music, in activity, in mime or in words -- which grasps the basic concerns of a society and resolves the conflict and contradictions inherent in social life in its chronology and in the logic of its action (Silverstone, 1983:138).
The simplicity of the sports event is especially amenable to mythic use. In the play, the protagonist must overcome adversity in society and in nature. Each play and player must, to be successful as a mythic element, transcend everyday activity. The game is trans-parent in its play and unlike written or narrated myths has no foregone conclusion. Every fan has the same standing as do all others. In those crucial moments of play, a satisfactory event is anticipated and recognized by all present. One does not need a priestly functionary to interpret the mysteries as in religious myths. In that respect, sports may be experienced directly for its aesthetic and mythic meanings.
The structure of sports as a mythic form is about socialization under conditions of conflict. In feudal society; in competitive capitalist societies with class as well as ethnic conflict; in the world capitalist system with its nationalistic antagonisms, the mythic structure of modern adversary sports resonates with the lived experiences of workers, Blacks, third world patriots as well as partisans of geographical animosity. All stress the need for the individual to accept and to work within the existing structure of social conflict and "friendly" competition.
Commodity capital, with its internal crises and contradictions has assimilated the mythic form to its own needs for survival, for profit, for socialization to competitive, aggressive, privatized character as well as for legitimacy with workers, consumers and citizens who are its natural antagonists. I raise the question about whether American sports in its commodity form -- however excellent and appealing -- should be harnessed to the ideological needs of a given class or elite in any society. The view advanced here is that sports, indeed all cultural activities, might better be oriented to the general social interest in authentic solidarity and prosocial cooperation rather than the special character and consumer morality of monopoly capital.
Every social group needs to use the awe and mystery of myth, magic, pretend, rehearsal, play and the world of imagination and make- believe to the reproduction of cultural forms.
All sports activities are mythic endeavors in which the forces of life are pitted against the forces of nature. In the case of football, basketball, baseball and, more intensely tennis, the effort to control a ball pushes the player to the limits of psychobiological capacity and endurance. The catch takes on added drama if it occurs in a strategic moment of play. Still more dramatic impact arises should the moment of play be located in a strategic game or even in a moment of note in the entire history of a league or nation.
The means by which conflict is to be resolved is by excellent individual performance within the logics of team goals. In a recent (18 July 1983) Monday Night Baseball game, the shortstop of the Toronto Blue Jays made four such plays in that single game. Few persons on earth could have made the moves as swiftly, as gracefully or as accurately and with the panache displayed. The grace, beauty and art possible from the human body shown forth clearly in that game.
In like fashion, the extension of the physical capacity of the human body in making spectacular catches in football is even more remarkable taking place as they do in the face of expert defensive play by the opposing team. Most of those who watch football know and appreciate those catches, the moves for which match in grace and timing the finest of ballet. By themselves, this physical excellence is only of passing interest -- observed only for the purest of aesthetic reasons as indeed one may appreciate ballet. But unlike most ballet today, sports games are located in significant social frames within which they take on mythic force.
In a world series, with the bases loaded and two out, and with the score tied in the ninth, a long fly ball is immediately anticipated as a dramatic event. As the center fielder races back, gauges the flight, lifts off the ground in every effort, whether the catch is made or whether the ball clears the 430 foot marker, the partisan crowd is on its feet as one, explodes in a cheer of delight as one and appreciates that all others present share the grand moment. The soaring grace of the fielder's catch or the perfect timing and power of the batsman testify to the possibility of human success in everyday life. That is what the myth -- and the game -- is all about.
As noted, the sports event teaches us four things: it tells us what the sources of evil are, it tells us who the agent of evil is (often conceived as the enemy), it instructs us in the forms of evil, and it instructs us in the means by which evil is to be overcome.
In the case of baseball, the source of travail is to be found in the physical forces of nature; time, space, gravity, weather and light. The sources of evil are found as well in the individual imperfections of the players: the lazy player, the inept player, the foolish player, the cheating player, the selfish player, and the indifferent player. Evil is to betray one's teammates to sloth, greed, envy, pride, anger and hate.
If not the unproductive team member, the agent of evil is the outsider. For most major sports, it is the visiting team. High school and college sports set as enemy the opposing team much more than do the professional teams although in baseball, everyone hates the Yankees; in football for years it was the Chicago Bears and in basketball the Boston Celtics who embodied adversity.
The particular forms of evil embodied these teams entailed unfair tactics, dirty play, illegal recruiting, purchasing of pennants and players as well as architectural innovations of the field of play which gave unfair advantage to the other team.
When combined, the forms and agents of evil as embodied in the mythic structure of sports teaches a lesson. It says the tribe is the paramount unit of social order, the enemy is other neighboring tribes; they cheat and thus are less than human. This default renders the home tribe the embodiment of the human being in its highest, most principled form -- however, since the opposing team violates the rules of social life found in the sports event, it excludes itself from the normal courtesies of social conduct. Such self exclusion in turn justifies less-than-social treatment of the enemy. By this practical logic, the home tribe at once justifies noncompliance with social rules and in the same moment preserves the home tribe myth of superior moral standing.
If the Yankees buy up all the best players, they default on the rules and may be subjected to tactics otherwise inconceivable. Since the Chicago Bears hit, gouge, kick and pile on, they disqualify themselves as equals and may be hit, gouged, and kicked without culpable wrong imputed to the home team. Since the Celtics use picks, fast breaks, double-teaming, presses, and platoon substitution tactics; since they grab the super stars from college ranks and use the home court advantage in extremis, they also are the embodiment of evil for all other home teams -- and the Celtics, Bears, and Yankees view the Philadelphia Warriors, the Green Bay Packers, and the Dodgers as less than human.
In the Marxian analysis presented here, sports have been commodified and massified in response to some of the structural problems of advanced monopoly capitalism. A separate but parallel analysis is possible for bureaucratic socialist economies or the semi-feudalities in the Mid-East and Far-East.
In brief, sports solves the problems of accumulation and legitimacy in the ways mentioned above. Sports in its present form presents us with a modern metaphysic for daily life. It redeems, in a false and trivial manner, alienated conditions of work. It provides alienated solidarity in a conflict ridden society. Its super-masculine model of play offers to redeem an alienated sexuality. And its aesthetics and metaphysics provide an envelope into which to insert a message vesting desire into possession of material goods rather than in primary social relations. In a final section, I would like to add to this cultural analysis of sports, a structural analysis of advertising since the advertising industry is the enterprise which uses the metaphysics and aesthetics of sports to colonize social desire in the interest of private profit.
This analysis is part of a larger analysis of the use of dramaturgy in society to manage the political and economic problems of class cleavages, racial conflict, gender preference and bureaucratic authority in mass society.
The major thesis of this work is that the technologies of electronics, theatre, and the social sciences; sociology, as well as psychology, are used conjointly to mystify consciousness and subvert democratic and collective political possibilities in the interests of class elites as well as other elites within the world capitalist system (and in bureaucratic socialist societies).
This technology provides a slick, smooth, scientific way to preserve privilege in a putatively democratic society. The crude and disruptive politics of fascism are replaced by an $80 billion industry of dramaturgical practitioners in the advertising industry whose only productive labor is to serve elites in the extraction of surplus value and creation of false consciousness. Commodity sports is but one expression of the alienation of the lively arts to the managerial needs of capitalism. Commodity politics, theatric commercials, electronic religion as well as the spectacles of space and war all converge to use dramaturgy in the sociology of fraud to serve power, privilege and the great wealth of multinational corporations.
Advertising and Commodity Sports
I have suggested that commodity sports a metaphysic about how to do life. Located within the problems of commodity capitalism, sports lends itself as a particularly effective tool for advertising.
If the morality myth embedded in sports resonates with the lived experience of fans, advertising resonates with the structural features of advanced monopoly capital.
In an automated, productive economic system the main problem of the capitalist is to realize profit. The shift is from the exploration of the working class to the extraction of surplus value from the consumer. To do this it is necessary to use science and guile rather than coercion and discipline. The modern corporation cannot force the consumer as readily as it can coerce the employee. It turns to depth psychology and social science to generate demand. Monopoly capital uses advertising to solve the problem of accumulation and of legitimacy.
Advertising uses the drama and mythic power of sports to generate demand and to realize profit for advanced monopoly capital.
There is also the shift from price and quality to generate demand. It is not possible to use pricing to generate demand in a stable monopoly system (Baran and Sweezy, 1976:115). Were one of the ten or so giants which dominate a product line to resort to price as a demand mechanism, it would destabilize the entire industry with devastating results for many. Quality cannot be used to generate demand for several reasons. There are the additional costs of quality; there is industrial espionage which quickly ends any advantage a new improvement might bring. There is the profitable parts and repair industry and most of all there is the advantage of built-in obsolescence for future demand -- all of which militates against quality -- and for advertising. The products advertised nationally are products from the monopoly sector. Products from the competitive sector of the state sector are seldom advertised on mass media.
A third thesis on advertising relates more directly to the realization problem.
A capitalist economy can only realize profit if all products are sold. But since workers do not have 100% of the price of a product paid to them directly or indirectly, capitalist economies tend to have surpluses which are not readily absorbed by workers taken collectively -- and the tiny handful of capitalists could not use all the gas, beer, autos, chain saws and sanitary napkins produced -- so they must create a neurotic need for such surplus purchasing. They must generate layer upon layer of desire and they use the elegance of professional baseball, football, basketball and soccer to do so.
Commodity sports with its morality lessons provides an envelop in which to hide the compulsion to consume apart from need, apart from merit, apart from other needs, apart from thought and words. Advertising, of course, cannot increase demand for all commodities but can shift demand from commodity A to commodity B. Fourthly, advertising is the cheapest way to reach millions of people. Commission sales only works in very special circumstances. In cons or swindles, in real estate and other super high profit, high growth lines, face to face sales can be used but not in mass sales with low profit margins.
So in the U.S., it is the structural needs of advanced monopoly capital in general by which one can best understand the growth in broadcast sports. And it is the morality myth embedded in sports which connects compulsive needs of the consumer with the compulsive needs for profit. Other myths may be also used to create demand -- on day-time television, oriented to the alienated house-wife, a differing myth is used to envelop demand -- that of the competent woman, still attractive and able to cope with the many failings of husband, children and neighbors. Such women use the household budget (about 60% of family income) to marshal the supplies to sustain her social skills.
Advertising capital furnished by monopoly industries at once encourages the production of cherished cultural supplies such as sports and transforms these in the same moment into their alienated form. A whole host of unproductive labor is used to reunite production and distribution on profitable terms for the monopoly capitalist beset by increasing costs of production, increasing legal restraints on dangerous practices, increasing foreign competition, decreasing markets in the unfree world, and decreasing freedom to control third-world supplies. Advertising is a necessity in this time of crisis for monopoly capital. Sports is a happy cultural activity upon which capitalism may parasitize -- for a while.
Conclusion. There are many ways to understand the huge investment a society allocates to sports and to other athletic activity. At any given level of analyses there are significant and important validities upon which to focus depending upon the interests and concerns of the critical scholar. In the previous section of this paper, the focus has been the mythic character of the rules and lines of play in contemporary American sports culture. In the earlier section, the focus was upon the political economy in which sports are located.
A political-economy approach to sports examines how and why it has been commodified. The Marxian view is that commodity sports is used by advertising to generate demand in an economic system in which demand is restricted by profit considerations, by monopoly practices, and by a continuing discrepancy between aggregate wage and aggregate price across all capitalist lines of production. The need for profit in advanced monopoly capitalism results in every possible good or service be commodified. Sports is commodified and sold to the largest corporations in order to add dimensions of desire and false need to products without intrinsic value to those with discretionary income.
That so many people invest so much time, emotion and money in these pursuits instructs us that something important is happening. It is the view advanced here that sports has gradually absorbed the religious impulse of a secular society, commodified it in capitalist societies and is in the process of assimilating that impulse to the economic and legitimacy needs of capitalism. Perhaps there are better ways to understand sports but I know no better for the present organization of American sports.
The analysis here presents a given sports event as an instance of one or more of the four great myths found in a society with which to instruct its young people in the metaphysics of human life as it is constructed in that culture. The four myths are: the Creation Myth, the Morality Myth, the Tragic Myth, and the Destiny Myth. All interesting novels, plays, poems and sports events incorporate the structures of one or more of these myths into its story line.
The Morality myth of advanced capitalist society suffuses the structure and chronology of the contemporary sports events in the United States. Competition, the resultant system of individual stars and individual viewers, the emphasis upon playing within the rules set by a small non-playing elite, the constant push by coaches and managers for greater productivity, for personal excellence and for uncritical acceptance of the authority system all resonate with the problematics of capitalist production in shop, office, school and factory: competition, discipline, creativity, teamwork, victory, and alienated joy.
As an embodiment of a mythic form which instructs all persons concerned, fans and players alike, on how to live out one's life in a laudable and praiseworthy style, sports supplements, complements and in some instances, displaces the sacred writings of the Bible and the Church Fathers. In a secular society, the drama of sports events absorb and bend the quest for the sacred to the profit concerns; to the control needs of the rich and the powerful.
It is this concern with the morality myth which so intrigues and so captures the fan and the player. We all need a metaphysic for the shaping of our everyday behavior. Professional football, baseball, basketball, volleyball and soccer, each in its differing format, provides us with such a morality.
I suggest there is a basic incompatibility with commercial sports and the longer historical interests of a society. I propose that a society which permits its mythic forms in sports to be purchased as a commodity, mortgages its future to the rich and the powerful. In this case, it is the private capitalist firm which has absorbed sports to its ideological, political and economic needs.
Such commodification of sports ceases to serve the general social interest in morality, in solidarity, and in excellence of individual effort when these interests are confined within the special interests of the capitalist firm for profit, for legitimacy, for growth and for control of markets, material and for a complacent labor force.
The argument presented here is that there is much of social value found in sports and in other mythic carriers. Given the social utility of morality myths and the great investment of time, talent and concern with sports in America, the significant question to raise is whether a society should so organize that talent and time of athletes, artists and actors to serve interests of private profit. Corollary to that question is whether other forms of sports, other modalities of morality, other structures of myths might not better serve the social interest or the human project.
In this respect, the sociology of sport fits within a larger framework of the political economy in which it is found. The usual approach to the study of sports sociology surgically isolates sports from the society in which it is found and from the content and outcomes of the cultural activities. One should keep in mind that it is the cultural activities -- ranging from family life to religious life and embracing art, music, science, games, leisure time activities as well as politics and parties -- which give life its distinctly human character. Work, food, shelter, health care and survival skills are basic to life but the creation of culture in all its forms is basic to human life.
The propensity is to trivialize the sociology of music, theatre, sports, folk arts and their economic and political meaning of these. A Marxian theory reclaims these cultural activities and locates them in a research endeavor which emancipates them once again to celebrate distinctly social and collective endeavors.
A Radical Research Agenda
These concerns constitute a radical research agenda for a critical sociology of sports. It seems to me that the ideological hegemony of capitalism and of bureaucratic socialism are particularly vulnerable to such research in sports, as well as in crime, in sexual repression and in the politics of torture and terror.
Crime, sports, religion and sexuality are enduring and intriguing concerns of Americans and of other nationalities around the world. The very use of these domains by the powerful and privileged open up possibilities for critical understanding and for progressive politics. If people are able to see the repressive uses of sports, sex and essential social goods, they may, in the same moment, see emancipatory uses. The task for the critical theorist is to challenge the celebratory, statistical approach to sports sociology with a more historical and constructive critique.
Opposed to a happy view of sports is the sociology of sports created by critical theorists. As noted, this work is concerned with the role which sports in its present format plays in reproducing the structure of class privilege and the concentration of wealth and class relations. Some of this new work concentrates upon the social sources of human consciousness and tries to show how sports legitimates national and ethnic loyalties by competitive striving. The Olympic Games serve as a rich source of material for this sort of critical analysis.
Also opposed to a depoliticized sociology is a series of analyses on how sports socializes young people to a special, historically grounded structure of self, personality and psychological mappings. Challenging a view of human nature as necessarily racist, necessarily violent, necessarily masculine, necessarily competitive or necessarily privatized, these analysts assert the possibility of a different psychology, a different structure of self, a different sport not oriented to the violent, destructive forms of behavior found in football, boxing, or hockey.
In history and in theory, cooperative, communitarian and creative forms of play, game and sport are found. Since these do not help create competitive workers, ambitious professionals, authoritarian functionaries or compulsive consumers, these forms of games, sports and play are selected out of sports history while more competitive games and sports are selected into the social experience of the child, the adult and the senior citizen by a complex institution of sports board members, owners, sponsors, coaches, fans, and editors.
There is much to be done; it will be interesting.
Dance is the unity of force, time and space, bound and unbound by inner rhythm. Dancing can be done by anyone who has desire and love.
...Mary Wingman in her Philosophy of the Dance
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