A THEORY OF
WAGES and Super-Salaries:
How to Understand the Wealth of Michael Jordan
THE COLONIZATION OF DESIRE!!
01/31/00 08:11
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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
Michael Jordan is, in my view, the best athlete in the world... and deserves very high rewards for such talent and effort as he demonstrates year after year.
But is not the wages and rewards of Mr. Jordan about which I want to comment. It is about the current theory of wages and rewards offered as scientific truth in modern sociology. That truth comes from structural-functional theory in general and the Davis-Moore Article on Stratification theory in particular. Now one could use the super-salaries of CEO's as case in point to the bias in structural functional theory on behalf of the super-rich...however, conservative sociologists would argue that they 'deserve' every million dollars they get. The same case is hard to make for people who run with a ball, slam a ball through a small hoop or hole, hit a ball with a big bat or otherwise exhibit their alienated sexuality. Now the theory.
FUNCTIONALIST THEORY OF INCOME
In brief that theory says that society rewards the most important and socially useful positions with high status and high income. Davis and Moore use doctors, professors and presidents of major corporations as data. When they were writing in the 1940's, basketball players were getting $50 a game; football players were drawing down almost $5000 a season and baseball players began at nearly $2500 a year for their rare talent, skill and best effort. If they did well at crucial times, they might get $10,000 per year...if they hit a lot of home runs, as did the Great Babe Ruth, they might get more than the president of the USA as did Babe Ruth.
Today, athletes get paid more than anyone...even including C.E.O.'s of the biggest banks, industries and merchandizing stores. What has changed? Have ball players become more important to the overall functioning of society than doctors, professors and presidents of great companies???
The short answer is, Yes!
FOOTBALL: In the NFL, Quarterback Troy Aikmann gets $5,874, 200 yearly. Barry Sanders [my vote for best running back of all time but then I'm a Lions fan from way back] would have been paid $4,988,000 for running with a football for maybe 500 times the year. The grunts and beasts of burden in NFL games are the linemen; Eric Swann, of the Cardinals, a defensive line-man is not as functional to the success of a team as a quarterback or a runner; he will only earn $3,500,000 next year but is more important, more helpful than is the best paid offensive lineman, Paul Gruber...he gets a half-million dollars a year less than does Swann. Pleasing and playing to cheering fans, Linebackers are essential: Hardy Nickerson will earn $3,551,700 next year. Defensive Back Ray Buchanan will intercept enough passes and tackles enough runners like Barry Sanders to earn $4,000,000 and change. Kickers are not so important by half; the top paid kicker of punts and placements will earn only $1,086,200...pity poor Doug O'Brien...so useless to victory and to the game.
Kurt Warner, quarterback, was paid minimum wage for taking the St. Louis Rams to the SuperBowl...and winning it this year, 2000. This year, minimum wage for most workers is $5.25 an hour. Minimum wage for Mr. Warner was $250,000. Next year, Mr. Warner will sign a contract for several millions per year...and more millions for ad endorsements.
BASKETBALL. Michael Jordan who plays basketball and a bit of baseball is in a league of his own...his overall value to Chicago and to the economy is around $3 billion...or more! More than all the doctors combined; more than all the professors combined; more than all the presidents of all the countries of the world combined [with the possible exception of those taking money from drug cartels]. Mr. Jordan was paid about $17 million dollars his last year in basketball.
BASEBALL. In Baseball, salaries have increased from an average $25,000 in 1950 to $597,537 in 1990 and, in the last ten years, have exploded to$1, 398,831 dollars according to Tracy Ringoslby of Scripps News Service. One player, a shortstop for the New York Yankees, signed a $17 million dollar contract to play there for three years.
GOLF. In 1950, winners of the Phoenix open won $3000. This year, 2000, prizes awarded in the Phoenix Open total over $1.3 million for the first three finishers...about $800,000 for the winner.
How to understand all this.
A MARXIST THEORY OF INCOME IN ADVANCED MONOPOLY CAPITALISM
The long answer is no...sports is not essential to society generally; it is not essential to business in particular. The reason that that sport figures including women golfers get paid so much money is because they help realize profit in a market economies.
If one were to claim that market economies were more valuable to societies in general, still one could not infer from that [putative] fact that one sports figure is more important to society than all the workers at Ford or General Motors...and twenty times more important than Presidents Carter, Bush and Clinton combined. It is possible to have market societies in which profits are based upon quality, price and urgency of need for customers.
The reason that our particular market economy in 1990's pay so much to so few is because demand and desire are manufactured using the admiration, awe and esteem innocent consumers hold for Michael Jordan, Barry Sanders and, once upon a time, Babe Ruth.
COLONIZATION OF--DESIRE!!
The reason desire can be manufactured is that a $200 billion dollar industry exists which uses dramaturgy to create the semblance, the image, the impression of value. Dramaturgy is used to connect, falsely, human need and human desire. A dramaturgy alienated from its emancipatory and praxical potentials is created by hundreds of thousands of actors, writers, musicians, sound and visual experts and put to work using wondrous athletic gifts as a key with which to unlock the psyche of sports fans and to insert desire into human volition.
Michael Jordan is case in point...a good, gentle, amiable man on his own terms, his rare skill, grace, determination and true grit is used by an alienated dramaturgical industry to manufacture desire for tennis shoes, for tee-shirts, for jackets, for soft drinks and almost any other capital-intensive good or high profit service one might sign him on to endorse.
Endorsements are not the same as functionality to the whole society...therein lays the categorical error made by structural-functionalists who connect wages and rewards with social necessity. An endorsement is used in an advertisement in mass media with which desire [not need] is enhanced in a mass audience. Indeed, our theory of wages is a sub-theory of advertizing and the manufacturing by skilled writers, artists, camera and sound technicians who are well paid to help realize profit.
In all this, it is very helpful to note that desire could be vested in religious rather than sports grace; desire could be vested in knowledge and wisdom rather than in cars or beer; desire could be vested in fellowship, helping and mutual aid rather than in shoes, jackets and Pepsi Cola.
Desire could be vested in more socially important psycho-biological drives; more important to the functioning of a good and decent society than the goods produced by multi-billion dollar corporations.
Dramaturgy could be used for more socially beneficial activities than the manufacture of desire for material goods; for consumer goods. Dramaturgy could be and is in fact used to sanctify lovers to each other; to warn us away from crime and evil; to move us to be better human beings than perhaps we think we could be. Dramaturgy can be and is being used for purpose better than increasing profit margins in high tech goods and services.
In all this, it is important to note that social theory is not value-free. This structural-functionalism sets as the highest form of society, one in which wealth and power are used to institute a dramaturgy capable of generating layer after layer of desire in the human psyche. In all this, it is important to note that this analysis, a cultural marxist analysis, is not value free either. This analysis too, has a political and economic agenda; this analysis too tries to open up the human psyche and to re-construct it. The operative question is not who has the correct theory of wages and rewards; the operative question is just which kind of desire is to be inserted into the human consciousness and just who is to be the architect and engineer of that most fundamental industry.
For most of human history, it has been the family, the church and the state which has engineered human consciousness and which have shaped the human psyche. In a globalized capitalist economy, it is the transnational corporation with advertizing budgets large enough to buy time and place on the media, to buy the endorsement and enchantment from those gifted enough to have such.
Quarterbacks and Wide-receivers are not functional to the structures of society; they are functional to the profit margins of giant corporations. The story is this: most products are not much different from each other; Pepsi Cola is not much different from Coca Cola; Budwieser is not much different from Old Milwaukee; Buick is not much different from Toyota. In order to make a difference and to sell to a few more people, the elegance and impossibilities of baseball, soccer, football and basketball are use to create the dramaturgical facsimile of difference. Michael Jordan is most valuable to that purpose; more so than all the presidents of all the countries in all the world.
Written for the Socgrad Network as part of the
Graduate Student Lectures Series by,
TR Young,