Opium of the People Revisited

Here's Terry Eagleton, never a man afraid to recycle old clichés:

If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse. It reminds us of what is still likely to hold back such change long after the coalition is dead. If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football. No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead....

In a social order denuded of ceremony and symbolism, football steps in to enrich the aesthetic lives of people for whom Rimbaud is a cinematic strongman....

[f]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished.

Better surely, in the spirit of Brecht, to abolish the ignorant and gullible working class, who have over the last hundred or so years shown such a discreditable lack of enthusiasm for the radical ideas of their intellectual betters: people like Terry here, for whom Rambo is a 19th Century French poet.

Comments

[Richard]

'has to be abolished'? How you gonna do that then, mate?

Eagleton is a wanker. He thinks that Macbeth is really about the three witches and feminist power!!

[John C]

Um, wasn't Eric Cantona a Rimbaud fan?

But Eagleton's obviously right. Football stadiums should be used for mass callisthenic exercises to show the People's devotion to Socialism. Ask Kim Jong Il for details.

[DShand]

I'm no expert on this, but, wasn't football still pretty popular throughout the Soviet Union? Or did everyone take to playing chess in order to distract themselves from, er, things. But that wasn't perfected socialism, I suppose. "...the game has to be abolished." Ah, I can see the black leather jacketed police now, in the brave new socialist state, breaking up those insidious underground football matches so that the workers can be sent back to their ballet and poetry and, er, well,...their proper ceremonies and symbols, whatever they may be...

[ji xiang]

the Soviet Union was not proper socialism, everyone agrees on that now I think.

Anyway the guy has a point. Football has become the new opium of the people. The amount of attention some people give the game is just ridicolous, and it does distract people from their real problems. I wouldn't suggest abolishing it though, just maybe abolishing the professional leagues.

[John C]

"I wouldn't suggest abolishing it though, just maybe abolishing the professional leagues."

That's very generous of you. Nice to see that "proper socialists" have got rid of their totalitarian tendencies. Plus I'm sure the USSR's biggest mistake was not banning professional football. Personally, I've always blamed the Ukrainian famine on Dynamo Kiev's shocking performance in the 1931-32 season.

[TDK]

I really don't see a problem.

Let's ban anything and everything that makes life pleasurable until we reach the perfect society, and only then lift the restrictions. If the miserable buggers still won't revolt then we must start beating them until they finally rise up and bring about utopia.

Of course Eagleton's problem is that the wicked bloody Capitalist won't play along by making people miserable. Perhaps the solution is to create "not proper socialism"/degenerated workers' state/State Capitalism snigger and create the miserable conditions necessary for a true socialist revolution.

Clearly that must be the plan in North Korea. Hurrah!

[sackcloth and ashes]

I think Eagleton is proof that possession of a PhD and an academic post doesn't necessarily mean you're actually intelligent.

[Luis Enrique]

well he's right that abolishing football would shake people out of the opiate haze and get people thinking about politics. Specifically, how to get rid of the buggers that just abolished football.