Capitalism, Sport and Resistance: Reflections

Abstract

In the late 1970s South Africa’s non-racial sports movement adopted the slogan, coined by Hassan Howa of the South African Cricket Board, ‘no normal sport in an abnormal society’. It later became a standard defence of the sporting boycott of apartheid. That black cricketers like the West Indian Alvin Kallicharan could only compete as honorary whites confirmed both this view and that of the contributors to Lincoln Allison’s The Politics of Sport, who rejected the ‘myth of autonomy’ of sport from wider social and political processes. Sport and society are clearly connected, but the question of normal sport is not straightforward. What passes for social normality is constructed historically and within the context of dominant ideas, structures, institutions and behaviours: capitalist normality produces a sport in its own image, alienation, exploitation, oppression and all, albeit a sport whose forms change with the unfolding of capitalist contradictions. Sport is neither an expression of some natural competitive spirit imputed to all of humanity by bourgeois ideology nor a simple and unqualified extension of play: sport is too heavily laden with competition, routine, success and failure to be equated with the playful pursuit of pleasure. Against the unintegrated, one-sided beings that the poet and historian Schiller encountered under early capitalism, he argued that play ‘makes man complete’. If sport does not unite mind and body, conception and execution, in the way that play does, it nevertheless provides an opportunity for the expression of accumulated frustrations and, occasionally, popular resistance to dominant values and structures. But, what Engels called Schiller’s ‘sentimental enthusiasm for unrealisable ideals’ is no guide to the recovery of play: reform of capitalist sport is possible but the playful pursuit of pleasure can only be fully achieved under socialism.