Capitalism, Sport and Resistance
Capitalism, Sport and Resistance
Adrian Budd
South Bank University
Introduction
In the late 1970s the non-racial sports movement in South Africa 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 honourary whites rather confirmed this view, as it did that of the contributors to The Politics of Sport (1986) who sought to demolish the 'myth of autonomy' of sport from wider social and political processes.1
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: the normality of the capitalist mode of production, with all its irrationalities, prejudices, oppressions and exploitation, produces a sport in its own image.2 This normality is not timeless or unchanging, and capitalism's unfolding contradictions are mirrored in changes in sport. Neither is sport an expression of some natural competitive spirit imputed to all of humanity by bourgeois ideology. Nor can we see sport as an extension of play without significant qualifications: sport is too heavily laden with competition, routine, success and failure to be equated with the playful pursuit of pleasure. Against the split, unintegrated, one-sided beings that the poet and historian Schiller encountered under early capitalism, he argued that play 'makes man complete'.3 This search for a more integrated self is suggestive of why sport can occasionally become a vehicle not only for the release of pent-up frustrations but also for popular resistance to dominant values and structures. But Schiller's romantic 'sentimental enthusiasm for unrealisable ideals' offers no guide to the recovery of play: reform
Adrian Budd
South Bank University
Introduction
In the late 1970s the non-racial sports movement in South Africa 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 honourary whites rather confirmed this view, as it did that of the contributors to The Politics of Sport (1986) who sought to demolish the 'myth of autonomy' of sport from wider social and political processes.1
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: the normality of the capitalist mode of production, with all its irrationalities, prejudices, oppressions and exploitation, produces a sport in its own image.2 This normality is not timeless or unchanging, and capitalism's unfolding contradictions are mirrored in changes in sport. Neither is sport an expression of some natural competitive spirit imputed to all of humanity by bourgeois ideology. Nor can we see sport as an extension of play without significant qualifications: sport is too heavily laden with competition, routine, success and failure to be equated with the playful pursuit of pleasure. Against the split, unintegrated, one-sided beings that the poet and historian Schiller encountered under early capitalism, he argued that play 'makes man complete'.3 This search for a more integrated self is suggestive of why sport can occasionally become a vehicle not only for the release of pent-up frustrations but also for popular resistance to dominant values and structures. But Schiller's romantic 'sentimental enthusiasm for unrealisable ideals' offers no guide to the recovery of play: reform