I have been tempted but it would be a mistake, for any number of reasons, to translate our strategy for revolution—united front under proletarian leadership—into the following terms: rely firmly on basketball, win over (or neutralize) as much as possible of football (and baseball), and firmly oppose and defeat golf (to say nothing of polo).
What I am getting at is that different sports, like everything else in society, have different and particular social meaning—they have their specific social base and social role. Here some introductory remarks by Pete Axthelm in his book The City Game are surprisingly insightful:
"Basketball is the city game.
"Its battlegrounds are strips of asphalt between tattered wire fences and crumbling buildings; its rhythms grow from the uneven thumps of a ball against hard surfaces.... Basketball is the game for young athletes without cars or allowances—the game whose drama and action are intensified by its confined spaces and chaotic surroundings.
"Every American sport directs itself in a general way toward certain segments of American life. Baseball is basically a leisurely, pastoral experience, offering a tableau of athletes against a lush green background, providing moments of action amid longer periods allowed for contemplation of the spectacle.... Born in a rural age, it offers still the appeal of an untroubled island where, for a few hours, a pitcher tugging at his pants leg can seem to be the most important thing in a fan's life.
"Football's attraction is more contemporary. Its violence is in tune with the times, and its well-mapped strategic war games invite fans to become generals, plotting and second-guessing along with the warriors on the field. With its action compressed in a fairly small area and its formations and patterns relatively easy to interpret, football is the ideal television spectacle: it belongs mostly to that loyal Sunday-afternoon viewer.... And basketball belongs to the cities.
"Basketball is more than a sport or diversion in the cities. It is a part, often a major part, of the fabric of life. Kids in small towns—particularly in the Midwest—often become superb basketball players. But they do so by developing accurate shots and precise skills; in the cities, kids simply develop 'moves.' Other young athletes may learn basketball, but city kids live it" (pp. ix, x).
From Pete Axthelm's comments it is possible, by the way, to get a sense of why football, culminating in the Super Bowl of the professional National Football League, is of such great importance to the empire, especially now. It is not for nothing that television announcers and commentators frequently use such expressions as "they're getting a lot of productivity out of so-and-so" and "they gained a valuable piece of real estate with that play"; or that such terms as "blitz" and "the bomb" are used to describe plays; or that often an injured player standing on the sidelines, not suited up for the game, is described as being in "civilian" clothes! (An irony here, however: some among the strategic military planners for the U.S. imperialists, taking note of the fact that it will not be possible to simply rely on overwhelming power as in the past, are stressing the need for more mobility and flexibility. A New York Times Magazine article [Nov. 28, 1982] notes that "General Morelli likes to show a slide of a soccer match and one of a football game. The Army, he argues, should stop thinking of battle as a football game, in which players assume fixed positions, and start emulating soccer, in which play shifts rapidly from one part of the field to another and players decide independently what to do." What? Soccer instead of American football—is nothing sacred and secure anymore!)
It is also possible to see from all this what it was that was most significant about the 1982 National Football League players' strike—and most upsetting and damnable to those who have so much invested, not just economically but politically and ideologically, in football. It was not the economic demands of the players—although those, of course, were troublesome to the owners of the teams and their governing board—it was rather the fact that the players stepped out of their assigned role, and disrupted moreover the social role of football, that agitated the owners of the empire and their government. (It must be admitted that it also agitated a number of staunch fans who are going along with the program and readily accept, even eat up, the symbolism celebrating the ''American way of life" and the battle "in the trenches" and "in the air" to "keep America Number One.")
Basketball, however, "belongs to the cities." And, strategically, the cities above all belong to the revolutionary proletariat, particularly in a country like the U.S.
Of course, right now the cities and their playgrounds and the game of basketball still belong, in the main and essentially, to the bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie uses the playgrounds and the game of basketball to promote its own ends through a kind of social-Darwinism (a crude application of the principle of "survival of the fittest," taken from the process of adaptation and natural selection in nature and vulgarized to conform to the capitalist compulsion to beat out the competition). Literally millions of ghetto youth, from early on, hit the playgrounds not just for the game and to hang out with their partners but, in many, many cases at least, to strive—and, whether consciously or more "spontaneously," to compete—for that far away goal of the professional leagues (the National Basketball Association—the NBA). It is true that today the majority of players in the NBA are Black—and that there are Black players pulling down six- or seven-figure salaries a year—but we are talking about a few hundred players in the NBA and a few score making a million or more a year (for ten years or so). When these actual facts are put together with the fact that the NBA is one of the very few arenas that offers the masses in the ghetto a chance to "make it" under this system, the cold reality of what this system has to offer these masses stands out very starkly.
It is here, interestingly, that people like Axthelm run up against the limits of their bourgeois outlook and turn back on their own insights. In The City Game Axthelm tries to make a flying leap and somehow combine the world of ghetto playground basketball and that of the NBA. The ghetto playground and the NBA are related, but they are related as opposites of a contradiction. Axthelm himself not only acknowledges but emphasizes the fact that, for every inner city kid who makes it all the way to the professional big time, there are hundreds and thousands who are left behind to be swallowed alive by the streets. But he still echoes the same old lies, the same old upward-mobility mythology: you can make it if you try, and if you don't it's because you don't have what it takes. Axthelm admits that "in describing sports, a word like 'determination' is so overused that it becomes a cliché." But then he immediately goes on to conclude that "Determination is an integral part of the game on every level. It decides who makes it out of the ghetto and it often decides which of two almost equally skilled teams wins an important pro game" (The City Game, p. 159, my emphasis).
Determination decides who makes it out of the ghetto—now there is a tired old cliché, at its worst, on every level. This is separating the parts of the whole picture in such a way as to obscure its essence. It is like looking at millions of people being put through a meat-grinder and, instead of focusing on the fact that the great majority are chewed to pieces, concentrating instead on the few who slip through in one piece and fixing on some individual characteristic of theirs—their "determination"—as the decisive thing... and then, on top of it all, using this, straightforwardly or backhandedly, to say that "the meat-grinder works"!
Axthelm may express some appreciation for city playground basketball, but in the end he can only cast it as a dog-eat-dog testing ground that passes along the "fittest few" to the more controlled and comfortable arena of professional basketball. Axthelm cannot see beyond the confines of the capitalist system, and, in the terms of that system, city playground basketball—and the inner city itself—is after all alien, and dangerous. For us, it is just the opposite. We recognize our territory and our own in the inner cities and the millions who remain there, trapped, with no way out—except revolution. Yes, the cities belong, strategically, to the revolutionary proletariat.
This strategic question and its importance is recognized not only by the revolutionary forces but by the reactionary ones as well. The RCP has pointed to this not only in its overall strategic analysis (for example in the pamphlet Charting the Uncharted Course) but more recently in an article in the Revolutionary Worker, "Behind the Oroville Incident," where it is pointed out that the "vision of the future" of the head of the local Nazis
"is similar to plans being implemented by other organizations—the KKK and the Christian Patriot Party, for example. These plans for 'race war' and rallying patriotic, politically backward sections of the people against potentially revolutionary sections—immigrants from oppressed nations, the people in the ghettos and barrios of urban centers—are linked by these groups to a military strategy of building base areas in rural areas and some suburbs, to 'surround the cities' militarily at a time of deep social crisis and revolutionary possibilities. These efforts generally bear careful watching—especially to the degree they are more systematically linked to the related activities of the government and other arms of U.S. imperialism" (RW, No. 187, January 7, 1983).
If we not only carefully watch the plans and actions of the enemy, but reverse them as well, we can get an even clearer sense of the strategic possibilities for proletarian revolution, right in the U.S. itself, and of the strategic alliances and principles that will be all-important when the time comes.
It is a well-known device to warn "the people in the ghettos and barrios of urban centers" that they are "only a small minority" and that they are bound to be hopelessly overwhelmed if they ever attempt a real revolutionary rising. But, despite the relatively privileged position of many white workers and middle class strata, there is a fundamental class division in the U.S. as a whole between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (including millions of whites as well as oppressed peoples concentrated in the ghettos and barrios), and there is a growing trend toward polarization in U.S. society as a whole. We have already seen how, in the cultural but also in the political sphere, those who most have nothing to lose can exert a powerful influence far beyond their own numbers. In the period ahead, with alienation and upheaval increasing in society and among broader numbers of people of different strata, with all this possibly coming to a head, who can say that, when it is for real not a game, the city, especially with the conscious revolutionary proletariat at its head, cannot exert a powerful enough force and sweep enough along with it to win?