The opiate of the people? - Eduardo Galeano

The late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano on some intellectuals and their views on football.

Submitted by wojtek on July 24, 2019

How is soccer like God? Each inspires devotion among followers and distrust in intellectuals.

In 1902 in London, Rudyard Kipling made fun of soccer and those who contented their souls with 'the muddied oafs at the goals.' Three-quarters of a century later in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges was more subtle; he gave a lecture on the subject of immortality on the same day and at the same hour that Argentina was playing its first match in the 1978 World Cup.

The scorn of many conservative intellectuals comes from their conviction that soccer worship is precisely the superstition people deserve. Possessed by the ball, working stiffs think with their feet, which is entirely appropriate, and fulfill their dreams in primitive ecstasy. Animal instinct overtakes human reason, ignorance crushes culture, and the riffraff gets what they want.

In contrast, many leftist intellectuals denigrate soccer because it castrates the masses and derails their revolutionary ardor. Bread and circus, circus without the bread: hypnotized by the ball, which exercises a perverse fascination, workers forget who they are and let themselves be led about like sheep by their class enemies.

In the River Plate, once the English and the rich lost possession of the sport, the first popular clubs were organized in railroad workshops and shipyards. Several anarchist and socialist leaders denounced the clubs as a maneuver by the bourgeoisie to forestall strikes and disguise class divisions. The spread of soccer across the world was an imperialist trick to keep oppressed peoples trapped in an eternal childhood.

But the club Argentinos Juniors was born calling itself the Chicago Martyrs, in homage to those anarchist workers, and May 1 was the day chosen to launch the club Chacarita at a Buenos Aires anarchist library. In those first years of the twentieth century, plenty of left-leaning intellectuals celebrated soccer instead of repudiating it as a sedative of consciousness. Among them was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who praised 'this open-air kingdom of human loyalty'.

Comments

jaycee

4 years 8 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jaycee on July 24, 2019

I have always and still do love football but it is also clearly ONE of the opiates/religions of the modern world. Everything in this world becomes coopted and turned against its creators; music, art, culture, religion, sex, love etc this doesn't mean any of these things are inherently 'bad' it's just a fact of life in capitalism.

Having said that capitalism does progressively become more and more totalitarian in its control/manipulation of these human expressions and football has in lots of ways been increasingly 'ruined' by this tendency (as everything does). Also it can be useful/interesting to analyse how this process takes place and how capitalist ideology is expressed in things like football. K would say the lack ocbindivifuslity and creativity in the modern game is an example of this for example