Political Philosophy: Part Two

 The second in my continuing series of posts explaining my worldview. It covers many of the same themes of the first post, and is intended to reinforce the argument of its conclusion, but will focus specifically on the history of sport.

Part Two: The People’s Olympiad, Ultras, and hooligans: the elite capture of sport

In July 1936, just as General Franco’s fascist troops were preparing to launch their coup d’état, Barcelona was getting ready to host the People’s Olympiad. Earlier that year, the ‘official’ Summer Olympic Games had been held in Berlin. The story of those games, of their use as a propaganda tool by the Nazi regime and the symbolic rebuke to their ideology of white supremacy that was Jesse Owens’ four gold medals, has been told many times over. The People’s Olympiad is not well-known, and neither is the culture of self-managed working class sport of which it formed part.

The People’s Olympiad grew out of a movement calling for a boycott of the Berlin Olympics, which was ultimately unsuccessful in persuading most countries not to send athletes to an event which they knew would be used for fascist propaganda. The Popular Front government elected in Spain in early 1936 organised the games, and attracted six thousand competitors from twenty-two countries, including regional teams representing Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, and Alsace, a team of Jewish athletes, teams from French and Spanish colonies in North Africa, and teams of German and Italian exiles. After the cancellation of the games, some took up arms for the Republican cause in the Civil War. The organisations which sent athletes to Barcelona instead of Berlin in 1936 were those socialist and non-communist sporting bodies affiliated with the Socialist Workers’ Sport International. These groups opposed both the conservative Olympic movement and the Soviet-organised Spartakiads.

Organised sport has its roots in the extension of leisure time to workers – historians often cite the various Factory Acts passed by the British Parliament in the mid-nineteenth century, giving workers Saturdays off, as being key to its development. While most early sporting bodies were funded and managed by elites, working class people played important roles as players and paying spectators. Oppositional politics have played an important role in the development of certain sporting bodies: the best-known example which still exists is the link between Irish nationalism and the Gaelic Athletic Association. Even where sporting bodies were not explicitly organised on political or class lines, their activities were attacked by elites on those grounds. For example, when the Victorian Football League continued playing during the First World War, conservative elements portrayed players as unpatriotic for refusing to enlist in the military. When the league was reduced to four teams in 1916, it was no coincidence that the four in question were from suburbs of Melbourne with large Irish-Australian communities (Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, and Richmond). And, of course, the strict yet selectively applied rules enforcing amateurism in the Olympic movement (prior to 1980) and in rugby union (prior to 1995) were aimed at preventing working class players from earning a living from sport.

At Italian soccer matches, one can often see banners reading ‘contro il calcio moderno’ (‘against modern football’). The phrase is the slogan of a loose set of ideas among fans, who oppose the commercialisation of soccer and the policing of their activities. The groups of fans which are most vocal in support of these ideas are Ultras, a word often mistranslated by English-language media as ‘hooligan’. The Ultra culture emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of political, cultural, and economic upheaval in Italy, and shares many features of ‘autonomist’ Marxist groups which were common at the time. Some have a distinct political orientation – usually far-left, but with quite a few exceptions. Ultras groups act as autonomous institutions which at times have a hostile, oppositional attitude to club and league authorities. When rivalries get more heated than usual, those authorities are quick to assert their authority, and the organs of elite opinion are quick to denounce the entire Ultras scene – as The Guardian did in 2001 with the headline: ‘Racist. Violent. Corrupt. Welcome to Serie A’.

Although Ultras survive in Italy, as well as in other European and South American countries, the terraces of many other countries have been deprived of an autonomous non-elite fan culture. The policing of the Ultras witnessed in Italy, and the methods and language employed by elites to justify it, finds its parallel in Britain, and in the crackdowns on hooliganism. Using the disruption caused to public order by a minority of apolitical trouble-makers as a pretext, successive governments, most notably that of Margaret Thatcher, have largely succeeded in de-proletarianising the country’s soccer stadiums. In 1989, the government commissioned the Taylor Report, which was charged with proposing solutions to the hooligan problem, which had reached its height in the mid-to-late 1980s. One of its most influential results was the diktat that all professional clubs eradicate terraces from their grounds and establish all-seater stadiums. Just as with the palatial cinemas mentioned in my first post, the need to recoup the cost of construction led to escalating ticket prices. By the year 2000, it was possible for the captain of Manchester United, Roy Keane, to deride his own club’s fans as the “prawn sandwich brigade.” From the perspective of the desirability of autonomous working class institutions, this was a regrettable development.

Today, there is no self-managed sport. Everything is under the control of state-sanctioned national governing bodies, affiliated to IOC-sanctioned international governing bodies. The dependence of sporting bodies on public funding and favourable legislation ensures that it is virtually impossible to operate outside the state sphere. The idea of sport as a venue for political struggle has become alien – the accusation of ‘politicising sport’ has been levelled at those campaigning for sporting boycotts of South Africa during apartheid, and at those who dared question Beijing’s human rights record in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics. The idea that sport and politics don’t mix would be anathema to the organisers and competitors of the People’s Olympiad, or to the Italian workers and students who formed Ultras groups in between strikes and protests.

Just as with the workers’ schools and co-operatives in nineteenth century Britain, the ateneus of fin-de-siècle Barcelona, the Wobblies, and the oppositional culture of early cinema, sport has been subject to the same attacks and attempts at co-option by the elites. This strategy was successful in destroying the independent working class sporting bodies most prominent in the 1920s and 1930s, and the autonomist terrace cultures such as Italy’s Ultras which emerged in the second half of the century.