Mon 9 Jul 2018, 10:28 AM | Posted by editor

Letter from Jack Fawbert, North-West Suffolk Labour Party member and UCU member.

In his letter to Left Horizons (Friday, 6 July 2018) Mark Langabeer, echoing Ted Grant’s assertion from 20 years earlier, suggested that since Marx’s day football had taken over from religion as ‘opium’ for the masses and that should England win the World Cup, nothing will have fundamentally changed. Whilst I accept what Mark says that should England succeed the initial euphoria will not immediately change the reality of life for the many in neo-liberal Britain, I think that football’s role in society and in the consciousness of the working-class is more complicated and ambiguous than that presented by those who dismiss it merely as a drug to pacify the masses.

Firstly, as Mark is probably aware, Marx’s aphorism about religion is rarely quoted in full, sometimes deliberately, giving a rather misleading impression of his attitude to its role in capitalist societies. Leaving that issue aside, subsequent neo-Marxist writers have suggested that the issue is far more complicated, first with regard to religion, and more latterly with regard to football usurping religion’s role in capitalist societies.

It’s certainly true that many Marxists, when talking about the common people and their love of football tend to echo the Roman satirist Juvenal when he said that ‘he longs for only two things: bread and circuses’. One could also reasonably present a vulgar economic determinist argument that elements of the superstructure of institutions and forms of social consciousness such as football fandom are merely a reflection of capitalist interests; that the economic base of capitalism conditions or determines the content and form of culture and that the culture of football fandom is merely a reflection of the interests of capital.

This was certainly the view adopted by many of the so-called Frankfurt school of neo-Marxists who argued that modern, capitalist societies were characterised by a commercialised ‘culture industry’ designed to maintain the social authority of capitalism and that an ‘atomised mass’ simply consume commodities like football that are provided for the masses. In this view football is part of a culture, as Mark’s use of the word ‘euphoria’ suggests, designed to stimulate the emotions rather than the intellect, to reproduce bourgeois meanings designed to depoliticise the working-class and to limit their horizons to social, economic and political goals that are realizable within the oppressive framework of bourgeois society. In short, it is fodder for the masses that indoctrinates, manipulates, pacifies and produces a false consciousness.

The bourgeoisie, thus, control not only production but also the reproduction of consciousness or common sense of cultural discourses. This view was evident in attitudes to football fandom some 35 years ago when the sociologist Gary Whannel, referring to football fans who stood on the ‘Kop’ at Liverpool, said:

The spectacle of 20,000 people behind the goal at a football match chanting ‘come on you reds’ is both intriguing and frustrating. All that energy wasted on 22 men and a bag of wind. What might 20,000 Liverpool workers achieve if they travelled up and down the country for socialism instead of football?

However, there is an alternative ‘Gramscian’ view that the cultural configuration in any capitalist society is the result of cultural struggles and not solely a result of the economic interests of the ruling class. Such ‘struggles’ take place over the meaning, form and function of culture between the forces of incorporation and the forces of resistance. The forces of incorporation may have much more power, but often they have to make compromises with the forces of resistance. Hegemony is, thus, always fluid, containing shifting alliances of groups, values, beliefs and practices that result in the common sense of the age.

When applied to support for the national game, it should be clear that football fans are not merely passive dupes or dopes, but rather possess the power to resist controls and to mobilise meanings in their own interests. Football fans are perfectly aware of attempts to manipulate them by commercial interests, but often, though admittedly not frequently enough, they engage in what Gramsci described as a ‘war of position’. Since football was appropriated from the Victorian ‘gentlemen’ who midwifed the game the terraces have been a terrain of struggle; reminiscent of the ‘epic theatre’ of a Bertholt Brecht play. Football is an expressive theatricalization of the social relations in any given society.

The Kop ‘sucked the ball into the net’

For example, Bill Shankly, the former manager of Liverpool FC, once said that the Kop, the famous ‘end’ at the club’s ground, ‘suck the ball into the net’. The ‘pushing’ and ‘pulling’ of the game from the ends is very instructive about how the volume of support can affect (political?) outcomes. More generally, he also opined that ‘the socialism I believe in, is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That’s how I see football, that’s how I see life’. Indeed, not for nothing is James Walvin’s seminal history of football entitled ‘The People’s Game’.

For well over a century football has served as a vital emblem of the interests of working-class communities. For much of this time powerful hegemonic forces may have attempted to shape football as ‘only a game’, but the working-class always saw in it much more than this. For working-class communities under the yoke of industrial capitalism it sometimes meant damn near everything. Such collectivism is the enemy of bourgeois individualism.

And in a sideswipe to those who dismiss it as merely ‘opium for the masses’, Arthur Hopcraft, in his wonderful book ‘The Football Man’ published back in 1966, said:

It has not been ‘only a game’ for eighty years; not since the working classes saw in it an escape route out of drudgery and claimed it as their own. It has not been a sideshow of this century. What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters, but as poetry does to some people… The people own this art… they cannot be fooled in it as they can with other things.

He followed up this telling last line with the assertion that football became ‘… not so much an opiate of the people as a flag run up against the gaffer bolting his gates and the landlord armed with his bailiffs’. The terraces, thus, became a site of resistance to bourgeois culture. As E. P. Thompson argues in the classic Marxist historical text ‘The Making of the English Working Class’, the working-class continually ‘make’ and ‘remake’ themselves through a culture of resistance. In other words, there is a permanent dialogue going on between imposed values and self-generating ones.

In recent decades there have undoubtedly been attempts to ‘remake’ the working-class in general and in particular to replace terrace culture with the dominant standards of bourgeois society. Whilst partially successful, through strategic acts of selective articulation the working-class have frequently subverted these attempts. Football fandom is active, not passive, consumption. Rather than being seen as cultural dopes, football fans should be regarded not only as critical saboteurs but also as cultural producers. The extreme partisanship, the profanities, the chants, the abuse of referees and the disdain for any constituted authority are examples of a culture of opposition and difference to bourgeois norms. In winning cultural space, just like in those folk and mob games of earlier times, there is a productive and offensive pleasure, or jouissance if you like, of a terrace culture that upsets bourgeois hegemony.

So, we need to recognise that there is a semiotic guerrilla war going on in which football acts as a metaphor and symbolises the dramas of everyday life for the working-class. And in an international tournament such as the World Cup we have seen an unprecedented spirit of internationalism between fans that has eschewed the petty nationalisms that normally serve global capitalism’s attempts to divide the working-class. The site of unsegregated terraces and fans from numerous countries playing football on the streets of Moscow together has been heart-warming and a lesson of how international cooperation could be in a future cooperative commonwealth of nations.

Okay, it may not be the equivalent of storming the Winter Palace i.e. it may not actually challenge the social order, but it certainly upsets it. Rather than dismiss this culture as an opiate, we should be trying to channel it into more socially useful avenues. Many of us have been trying to do that on the terraces for years (nearly 60 years in my case!). If we don’t and we just dismiss it as a tool of working-class oppression, reactionary forces will fill this cultural space as the National Front did in the 1970s and as the Football Lads Alliance are trying to do today.

Fascist propaganda at the doctor’s surgery

Mon 9 Jul 2018, 09:51 AM | Posted by editor

Letter from Mark Langabeer, Newton Abbot, CLP

I recently attended a GP surgery for a routine blood test and found a leaflet in the pages of a magazine that was on a table. On one side was a quote from Erdogan, the Turkish President, followed by a question that read, “Will Islam be the death of Britannia?”

On the other side of the material, it had pictures of a place of worship and Muslim women with veils. Chillingly, the final sentence of the so-called Patriotic Movement’s statement, said that they would not stand back and watch Britain drift into an Islamic Republic.

At the bottom of the leaflet was a Britain First logo. The propaganda is clearly fascist in character and I also saw a UKIP logo appearing alongside. It appears that they have aligned themselves with the Patriotic Movement.

This material was not just against Islamic fundamentalism, but a direct threat towards Muslims in general. At the present time, they have little support electorally. However, as the economic decline increases, it is inevitable that the fascists will gain a greater audience.

The Labour Movement must energetically campaign against these neo-nazis and organise counter demonstrations when they attempt to organise activities in our towns and cities.

Ultimately, only a Labour Government, implementing socialist measures that benefit the great majority, will the menace of fascism be finally eradicated.