False Jersey Ops (Part 1): Critical Beatdown

Basketball, Anti-Communism, and Conspiracy Theory

In a word, compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers, the social and political institutions born of the “triumph of reason” were bitterly disappointing caricatures. All that was wanting was the men to formulate this disappointment, and they came with the turn of the century[1].

Kyrie Irving has been behaving strangely of late. During an interview last month, Irving expressed his apparent frustration[2] with capitalism (“the fact that you have to pay to play in this world is ridiculous”), and even brought up the taboo subject of class (“there’s a separate class that they’ve put us in because of money”)! However, rather than suggest a viable alternative, much less one in which we can all participate, Irving simply offered some brief remarks about his nebulous, utopian vision of a self-sustaining eco commune within which he and his friends might live pleasant and equitable lives isolated from the outside world.

Well, it may not be perfect, but perhaps we shouldn’t be too critical of well-intentioned celebrities. Surely we should be content that Kyrie Irving is prepared to imagine alternative ways of arranging society, regardless of the petty details. Or should we?

Irving, a notorious troll who just a few months ago made headlines by pretending to believe that the earth is flat, may have an ulterior motive. His peddling of a facile utopian socialism at a time when such a great deal of money and effort is being spent on anti-communist propaganda campaigns warrants suspicion.

During the second half of the twentieth century, secret armies of fascist hooligans were organised and maintained throughout various NATO[3] countries, their purpose to commit acts of terror under the “flag” of communism as part of a strategy of tension. Of course, Irving is not murdering civilians and blaming it on the Communist Party USA (yet); he is merely pretending to be an idiot, and then pretending to be some sort of a socialist in order to encourage the public to associate these two modes of thinking: socialists are clearly imbeciles, and to believe that capitalism is destructive, that there is an exploiting class and an exploited class, is as ludicrous as believing that the earth is flat.

It’s not that I think literally everything is a psyop[4]. I am not being entirely serious here, but I am being sincere. Is Kyrie Irving really engaged in some sort of “false flag” operation? I don’t know. Probably not. It’s quite possible that Irving really is a sensitive fellow with dreams of creating a better society, and that he simply hasn’t had the chance to devote much thought to it yet. I hope that this is the case, and time will tell. Nevertheless, we can be confident that basketball is used for propaganda purposes, that governments throughout the world do indeed carry out psychological operations on social media, and that the US military is very interested in the influence that celebrities exert over their Twitter followers. This being the case, we should regard the political rhetoric of basketball players and other celebrities with a healthy degree of scepticism.

Chelsea Manning demonstrating the capacity of jokes to reveal the truth.

I started writing this before Chelsea Manning began talking trash about communists, but Manning’s case is actually very relevant here, so it’s just as well she invited the ire of principled Marxist-Leninists with an ill-conceived tweet equating communism and fascism. Unlike Irving, who first established himself as a buffoon and a bad teammate in the eyes of the public before uttering vague anti-capitalist and environmentally conscientious mumblings with the goal of discrediting such attitudes, Manning began by doing something brilliant, establishing her credibility as a dissident and earning the sympathy of a great many well-meaning people. It is since her release, following years of imprisonment and torture, that she has begun to behave very much like a propaganda asset, helpfully explaining to her many fans why Venezuelan socialism is unsustainable, joking about the bumbling and incompetent FBI, and assuring her audience over and over again that “we got this”—that is to say, mission accomplished; the system works; power has been successfully held to account.

For a story with such tremendous implications—beyond the famous collateral murder video and other war crimes committed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, Manning also leaked documents exposing a variety of additional crimes committed by the US ruling class all over the world—this is a bitterly disappointing conclusion, though a familiar one, as we shall see. Chelsea Manning the celebrity icon, along with (perfectly legitimate) concern over her imprisonment and her future, overshadowed the revelations themselves in media coverage, and the resolution of her personal struggle for some semblance of justice now appears to have drawn the whole saga to a convenient close. Thanks, Obama.

There are illuminating parallels, I think, between the Manning/WikiLeaks story and the Al Yamamah controversy (a recurring drama in the UK media concerning alleged bribes paid by weapons manufacturer BAe Systems to the Saudi royal family and others in order to secure an arms deal, and a subsequent cover-up). The latter culminated in an apparent resolution with the announcement of a handful of out-of-court penalties. BAe admitted to “corporate misdemeanours” in relation to a Serious Fraud Office inquiry, and to “obstructing investigation” by the US Department of Justice, but not to any bribery. Naturally, the news media and their official sources sought to amplify the penalties imposed on BAe as a means of avoiding accusations of a whitewash and deterring further scrutiny. Here, for example, are the headlines the BBC chose to print the day the settlements were announced:

This all sounds very serious, except that the incurred fines were worth just 1% of BAe’s annual turnover, and, as Justin Schlosberg explains, the framing of the settlements

demonstrated the apparent efficacy of due process and enabled a line to be drawn between BAe’s past and present. Crucially, it suggested the system en masse had worked: BAe had done wrong, the media had exposed it, the judicial system imposed an appropriate penalty, and the company had reformed its practices as a result.

Yet this is not the worst of it. The bribery allegations may have slipped out of the headlines, but that was never the most important aspect of this story. It is not true that the UK government, in order to profit from arms deals, cynically looks the other way while the naughty Saudi Arabian military destroys Yemen; on the contrary, it is the UK government that specifically wants to destroy Yemen, and that provides material aid to the Saudi Arabian military in order to achieve its genocidal goal. This is not about a few crooked people profiting from arms deals, it is about imperialism. The war is not “Saudi-led,” it is UK-led. It is this story which is obscured by headlines about fines and accountability, not the “corruption” of BAe. But all we can expect to hear from the obsequious pundits[5] of the “left” is that our government is in league with the terrorism-exporting Saudi establishment, and that “we” must stop “supporting” them.

Similarly, the story lost in the shuffle of the Chelsea Manning spectacle is not one of a few rogue soldiers caught murdering civilians and journalists in Baghdad on the 12th of July 2007 and subsequently avoiding punishment despite incontrovertible video evidence, as Cenk Uygur claims (though of course this is not unimportant). Rather, it is that the cables provide yet more proof (as though more were needed) of the true nature of the United States, and the fact that it cannot just be voted away. Its backing of the 2009 coup in Honduras and its engineering of the “Arab Spring” in order to overthrow yet more progressive governments are not isolated crimes; they are systemic, part of a deliberate strategy by which the ruling class uses whatever means are expedient to pursue its interests throughout the world. The big story is that, in spite of Manning’s leaks and the media coverage they received, nothing has changed. We haven’t “got this.”

In addition to emphasising certain aspects of a story over others, one of the ways in which inconvenient news is “contained” by the capitalist media is to deploy accusations of conspiracy theory. “This taboo,” writes Schlosberg, “which operates within journalist and academic circles alike, has some sound basis. It discriminates against conjecture often associated with tabloid sensationalism or internet subcultures that respond to secrecy or uncertainty with unfounded reasoning.” It also has a distinct tendency to discriminate against good investigative journalism and correct analysis.

Oh, you think entertainment media is used for propaganda purposes? You think there’s some kind of “ruling class”?

When I heard Nietzsche-obsessed Cambridge academic Hugo Drochon compare conspiracy theory with critical theory, I was a little excited. “Conspiracy theory,” Drochon says, “is kind of vulgarised critical theory, but you use many of the same tools, so it’s about debunking the kind of official line and seeing what’s behind it.” Critical theory without all of the impenetrable academic jargon sounds pretty good to me. After all, Gerhard Schweppenhäuser and Frigga Haug define critical theory in their Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism) as an “emancipatory social philosophy” that attempts to “unite in one movement of thought the analysis and critique of forms of practice as well as types of reason and rationality of bourgeois-capitalist societies since the middle of the 19th century until today.” Christian Fuchs makes critical theory sound quite wonderful in his Critical Theory of Communication:

Critical theory questions all thought and practices that justify or uphold domination and exploitation. Marx formulated the categorical imperative of critical theory: it is the ‘categoric imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being’ (Marx 1997, 257–258). Critical theory wants to show that a good life is possible for all and that domination and exploitation alienate humans from achieving such a society. For Marx, the ‘task of philosophy […] is to unmask human self-alienation’ (Marx 1997, 251). In deconstructing alienation, domination and exploitation, critical theory also makes demands for a self-determined, participatory and just democracy. Such a society is not only a grassroots political democracy, but also an economic democracy, in which the producers control the production process and the means and outcomes of production. Critical theory wants to make the world conscious of its own possibilities. The ‘world has long dreamed of something of which it only has to become conscious in order to possess it in actuality’ (Marx 1997, 214).

According to Drochon, it was Bruno Latour who initially made this comparison between critical theory and conspiracy theory, so I read Latour’s essay on the subject. Finally, conspiracy theory is receiving recognition and serious engagement from respected academics, I thought as I opened up the document.

But Latour was not elevating conspiracy theory by comparing it with the “serious” work of academics. Rather, according to Latour, critical theory resembles conspiracy theory to the extent that critical theory is a lot of self-indulgent nonsense: “entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on.”

stop it tankies chelsea is our woman and you will have NO PART in insulting her
the stasi were repressive as fuck jeeshh
tankies: UGHHH liberal psyops calling all statist communists tankies
also tankies: hey look at all these statists thats us right there lol

Latour, who takes the US government’s account of 9/11 for granted and is deeply disturbed that anybody might question this narrative, considers conspiracy theories “an absurd deformation of our [i.e. academics’] own arguments.” But those who go to university to study critical theory are apparently no better!

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn’t this fabulous? Isn’t it really worth going to graduate school to study critique? “Enter here, you poor folks. After arduous years of reading turgid prose, you will be always right, you will never be taken in any more; no one, no matter how powerful, will be able to accuse you of naïveté, that supreme sin, any longer? Better equipped than Zeus himself you rule alone, striking from above with the salvo of antifetishism in one hand and the solid causality of objectivity in the other.” The only loser is the naïve believer, the great unwashed, always caught off balance.

Here Latour employs a familiar tactic, ascribing to conspiracy theorists (and critical theorists) a psychological need that they supposedly fulfil through their delusional theorising. Whether it is the need to be right at all times, as Latour presumes, or a desire to project heroism in a time of cultural malaise, as Noam Chomsky suggests, these smears conveniently sidestep the need to engage with actual arguments and evidence. Yet as Michael Parenti points out, the legitimacy of conspiracy theories must be “decided by an investigation of evidence, not by a priori, unscientific, and patronising presumptions about the public mind.” Chomsky argues that analysis of US institutions and political culture, not of individuals or assassination plots, is the key to understanding history. But as Parenti says, “conspiracy is not something that’s in contradistinction to structural analysis. It is part of it.”

Conspiracies in which institutions, rather than individuals, are implicated make academics very uncomfortable. To return to Justin Schlosberg for a moment, his book attempts to answer the following question: why does the news media consistently fail to hold power to account? This question can be answered in a very straightforward way by reformulating it: why does the capitalist news media consistently fail to hold the ruling class to account? There’s your answer.

Instead, Schlosberg does everything he can to avoid a Marxist analysis by playing with words. “The powerful,” he suggests, “are not a ruling class but rather an elite core of decision-makers—a network that transcends party politics and operates at the nexus between government, industry and military” and which “operates largely informally and ‘off the record’” (i.e. a ruling class). Schlosberg argues that “an essential function of the media in liberal democracies is to legitimate power by holding it to account.” This is correct, provided you wink and make air-quote gestures while saying “holding it to account.” Latour, likewise, takes a dim view of such theories: “Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes—society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism—while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents.” Believing in a capitalist class who pursue their interests is basically like believing in a cabal of shadowy figures who are evil for the sake of it, according to these brilliant minds.

Conspiracy theories concerning Chelsea Manning are not far-fetched but proceed from pretty straightforward facts. Manning, still “on active duty in a special [unpaid] status,” was released from prison for no apparent reason and has since then promoted the anti-communist, fascist-abetting ACLU and relentlessly tweeted Barack Obama campaign slogans, focus-tested platitudes, and State Department propaganda. Maybe she’s just a liberal and all of this is perfectly spontaneous, sure. She doesn’t owe it to anybody to be a communist. But it is not at all unlikely that she is a propaganda asset, and it doesn’t make any sense not to be critical.

Before I go, there is one further way in which news stories are contained, and it is perhaps the most effective of all. That the United States backed the 2009 Honduran coup and orchestrated the “Arab Spring” did not escape the notice of influential publications like the Guardian and the New York Times when they were covering the diplomatic cables leak. But so what? As Parenti explains in Make-Believe Media,

Even when the truth is not totally suppressed and parts of it get out to the public in an occasionally dissident book or film, it no longer seems all that important to a public conditioned to mass-market glitz and glamor. Thus books and films that tell us something of the truth about our history and our social and political life pose only a marginal challenge to the dominant ideology, if even that. They are crowded to the edges of the communication universe by the crush of mainstream offerings. Rather than being completely interdicted, truth is submerged in a sea of irrelevance. Silly amusement, contrived distraction, and endless hype become the foremost means of social control. Preemption is the most effective form of social control. Rather than being politically repressed, people are made apolitical.

On that note, thanks for reading, and death to America.

[1] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

[2] He doesn’t want to pay for his clothes and is confused by free-range eggs.

[3] Today, NATO has an accredited international military organisation called the NATO Strategic Communication Center of Excellence. What does it do? In its own words, it is concerned with discovering “new challenges in [the] information environment in the context of robot trolling.”

[4] Well, actually…

[5] “[W]here,” enquires Owen Jones, “are the western demands for Qatar to stop funding international terrorism or being complicit in the rise of jihadi groups? Instead, Britain arms Qatar’s dictatorship, selling it millions of pounds worth of weaponry including “crowd-control ammunition” and missile parts.” Now, it is of course Jones’ job to be a credulous dimwit, but his readers must surely put two and two together eventually.

Court Fools

Basketball, Drawing-Room Life, and the Function of the Fool

Witty people are a very important part of modern life, and they are very popular. They replace truth, seriousness and profundity with a quip that makes people laugh. The idea of their spiritual life is the elegant drawing-room, its fatuous and brilliant conversation, its measured applause and the veiled smile of its habitués. They reduce all life to the clever mediocrity of drawing-room life: a lot of words, amiable scepticism, and a light sprinkle of melancholy sentimentalism. The wit has become even more important through the latest incarnation of drawing-room life, namely the offices of the bourgeois newspapers. Here the wit has enlarged the circle of his audience and has made everything a source of humour—politics, war, pain, life and death—thereby winning much applause and earning a pile of money[1].

The 2017 NBA All-Star Game was shit. I’m by no means the first person to make such an observation, but I nevertheless feel that a thorough investigation into the All-Star Game as an institution is warranted, and that its descent into self-parody can tell us something about the destructive potential of jokes.

As the above clip from the 1996 game in San Antonio demonstrates, defence was not always a faux pas at the All-Star Game. The annoyance with which Marv Albert declares Grant Hill’s dunk “too easy” is telling: such lapses were not the norm, and they were certainly not to be encouraged. Steve Jones is even able to joke that some sort of conspiracy exists between Hill and Shawn Kemp, a joke that can only work if the audience knows that these are in fact competitive players, that they are of course taking this game quite seriously. An earlier remark by Jones—“you’re seeing a team from the West not playing much defence, looking to score a lot of points”—likewise indicates that prioritising scoring over defence was simply one of a number of legitimate strategies that a team might adopt, not a prescribed play style.

Much has changed in the 21 intervening years. What was once a wink-wink, unwritten-but-slyly-acknowledged aspect of the All-Star Game has become its raison d’être. While the All-Star Game is still officially a real basketball game, the “you let me have one, and I’ll let you have one” arrangement has been formalised and is now taken for granted by all involved. That an actual basketball game might occur is recognised to be a slim hope by the television announcers (“a game will break out—a real game,” a despondent Marv Albert unconvincingly reassured his audience in 2013). The running gag that the All-Star Game is not really a game at all but simply an excuse to see a lot of cool dunks has been turned on its head; to suggest that the players might expend any effort at all on defence is to elicit laughter today. Thanks to the ceaseless chattering of Marv Albert and his accomplices, both participants and audience have stumbled into a sort of joke-induced hyperreality, unable to apprehend what the All-Star Game really is any more, let alone what it ought to be.

The result of all this is that the NBA’s modern stars are, in the words of Aram Goudsouzian, “boiled down to commercial symbols, icons of the global marketplace.” They do not play exciting basketball; they perform exciting basketball by rote (thereby stripping it of excitement).

Here we see the power of jokes at work. Jokes are not trivial at all; they are deeply serious. Jokes influence reality. They can disarm and make an audience receptive to otherwise unpalatable ideas[2]. Jokes also reveal intent:

A joke can also be an expression of power. There are those who would have us believe that maintaining a detached, sardonic demeanour and joking about very serious contemporary issues is a sophisticated and wise mode of engaging with the world. This sort of approach is often confused with good adversarial journalism. As Tom Mills observed of Jeremy Paxman, his “bumptious posturing” has a great deal more to do with the glib, self-congratulatory Oxbridge debating society culture of which he is a product than with any desire to speak truth to power.

This was a milieu with which Malcolm X became closely acquainted in December 1964. Invited to participate in a debate at the Oxford Union by its president Eric Anthony Abrahams, Malcolm, who took the debate[3] quite seriously,  was subjected to a barrage of smirking, sneering, and hectoring from his unbearably smug opponents (for whom nothing whatsoever was at stake). The event sounded more like a stand-up comedy gig than a serious debate, an audience of cretinous aristocrats-in-training erupting in hoots of laugher after every clever inside joke or humble-brag (a remark about the “great colonial experience” of a Tory peer elicited merry laughter from these contemptuous jackals).

By their serious remarks, the chief antagonists Humphrey Berkeley and Lord Stonham portrayed themselves as very reasonable and progressive people indeed who were of course opposed to any kind of racism or apartheid. It was their humorous remarks that betrayed their true character—their ridiculing Malcolm X for adopting a pseudonym and joking about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of British politics. During the open forum, a speaker whose identity isn’t clear delivered a sort of horseshoe manifesto, stressing the importance of “justice for the oppressed, and justice for the oppressor too[4]!”

But what is going to happen to the Black Muslims? […]. Will it not mean…that the, er, there would be, perhaps, a black Ku Klux Klan of extremists who, in alleged defence of their liberty, would repeat in reverse the vicious extremes o-o-of white oppressors? […]. Extremes…will not provide a solution, will not provide true liberty or freedom. […]. Moderation is not synonymous with cowardice!

Lebert Bethune, who had accompanied Malcolm to the debate, later remarked that the “flippant, drawing-room comedy manner” of the speakers had angered Malcolm. Are contemporary pundits and podcasters, in their ironic detachment and affected vulgarity, really any better? Who do they think they are, and what are they trying to accomplish? Let us consider the most idealised view of such people, the romantic myth of the court jester:

Later in this same talk, Alan Watts goes on to describe the fool as “an analogue of the Sage[5].” Is it possible that these comedians, from celebrity left clowns to edgy internet ironists, perceive themselves as wise and daring, dispensing enlightenment by bravely subverting social norms and cleverly behaving like credulous imbeciles?[6] Or is it possible that all such people are merely climbers, eagerly peddling ruling class propaganda under the guise of humour while earning a pile of money?

The prohibited impulse may be tolerated if there is no doubt that the final aim is its elimination—this is the case with jokes or fun, the miserable parody of fulfilment. As a despised and despising characteristic, the mimetic function is enjoyed craftily. Anyone who seeks out “bad” smells, in order to destroy them, may imitate sniffing to his heart’s content, taking unrationalised pleasure in the experience. The civilised man “disinfects” the forbidden impulse by his unconditional identification with the authority which has prohibited it; in this way the action is made acceptable. If he goes beyond the permitted bounds, laughter ensues[7].

It is not the case that all jokes are bad, or that political satire is inherently dangerous. As Lenin said of art and literature, “partisan literature and art will be truly free, because it will further the freedom of millions of people.” By the same token, jokes in the service of communism may further the freedom of millions of people, while jokes which promote imperialism will lead to the immiseration of millions.

Exciting basketball cannot be simulated. Exciting basketball is so precisely because it is spontaneous and unscripted. Any attempt to make a formal obligation of fun and exciting basketball will inevitably produce the sort of facile basketball exhibitionism we have become accustomed to seeing at the All-Star Game. Good basketball is produced through struggle between offensive players and defensive players. Likewise, good jokes are not the product of a practiced and reflexive cynicism; they are the fruit of struggle—class struggle.

 

[1] This is a Gramsci quote.

[2] According to Kierkegaard, when an audience does not want to hear a speaker’s message, the speaker needs to communicate in an indirect fashion, and the queen of indirectness is irony. The CIA is adept at utilising humour for its Hollywood propaganda, at using comedy as a Trojan Horse. Often it isn’t very subtle.

[3] The motion for the debate was a statement made by the US right-winger Barry Goldwater when he accepted the Republican nomination for the presidential election: “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Despite Malcolm X’s brilliant and persuasive speech, the motion was defeated 449 to 225. What a surprise!

[4] In other words, are there civil liberties for the fascists? As Stephen Gowans put it,

Moralist positions on human rights are not only beside the point; they’re nonsensical, inasmuch as they assume rights are absolute and that antagonisms between the rights of oppressor classes and nations and the classes and nations they oppress can be mediated. In the real world, it is not possible to build a socialist society if the capitalist class is allowed the freedom to organize to restore its power. It is not possible for a government of national liberation to achieve its country’s independence if it grants political and civil liberties to all, including agents of the oppressor nation who seek to restore that nation’s formerly privileged position.

…

The battlefield of human rights isn’t one in which the object of Left forces should be the securing of absolute rights for all (for there is no such thing as liberty and democracy for all) but the securing of the rights of oppressed classes and nations at the expense of those of their enemies. The right of the sheep to be free from predation comes at the expense of the wolf’s right to eat the sheep. The question is never whether you’re for human rights or not. The question is always whose rights are you for?

[5] That this myth of the jester as wise and subversive gadfly probably isn’t true doesn’t really matter. Wise fools may not have existed, but the idea that there existed wise fools does exist, and it is pervasive.

[6] I know a stand-up comedian personally, and he is absolutely insufferable. This is definitely how he sees himself.

[7] This one’s Adorno and Horkheimer.

Hercules and the Hydra

Basketball, Myth, and the Symbionese Liberation Army

From the beginning of English colonial expansion in the early seventeenth century through the metropolitan industrialisation of the early nineteenth, rulers referred to the Hercules-hydra myth to describe the difficulty of imposing order on increasingly global systems of labour. They variously designated dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, pirates, urban labourers, soldiers, sailors, and African slaves as the numerous, ever-changing heads of the monster. But the heads, though originally brought into productive combination by their Herculean rulers, soon developed among themselves new forms of cooperation against those rulers, from mutinies and strikes to riots and insurrections and revolution.

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt have noticed the image of the seven-headed snake that sits at the top of the page [edit: I’ve since replaced it with something nicer]. It is of course the logo of the SLA, an apparently revolutionary organisation which was briefly active in the Bay Area during the 1970s, and which has since been the subject of a great deal of controversy. I first became aware of the SLA after listening to Third Sight’s Symbionese Liberation Album, and, after tracking down their audio dispatches and hearing of their audacious attempts to distribute free food to the poor and hungry people of California by extorting media baron and raving fascist Randolph Hearst[1], I decided I rather liked them.

It wasn’t until several years later that I stumbled upon rumours and allegations that Donald DeFreeze (the group’s leader) was an informant for the Los Angeles Police Department, and that the SLA was essentially a CIA-orchestrated false flag operation. I find this perfectly plausible, though I will leave it to readers to conduct their own research into the SLA if they’re interested (it’s not really within the scope of this blog post, though it is all quite fascinating). What I intend to focus on below is the question of whether or not the fact that the SLA was almost certainly a fake left-wing revolutionary group whose purpose was to discredit the so-called “New Left” really matters, and, naturally, the implications this may have for the 2017 NBA Finals.

After kidnapping Patty Hearst (Randolph’s daughter, then a student at UC Berkeley) from her apartment on 4 February 1974, the SLA released a series of communiques to local media (issued between 12 February and 2 April), which they stipulated were to be broadcast in full, no editing. In hindsight, these tapes may well have been cynical attempts to caricature the kind of language used by the stereotypical white bourgeois “radicals” that UC Berkeley is famous for, and thus were intended to sound ludicrous and off-putting to ordinary, sensible Americans[2].

Yet some of Donald DeFreeze’s speeches were actually surprisingly good. Patty Hearst frequently spoke of “fascist America,” with its “concentration camps” and “fascist pig media.” This is perfectly reasonable language which accurately describes the society in which she lived (and which remains accurate to this day). If these were attempts to make a mockery of idealistic young revolutionaries, they were not successful. In fact, the SLA’s message inspired me to read about (real) revolutionary movements around the world and throughout history, and ultimately to join a communist party.

The logo of the SLA is reminiscent of the mythical hydra of Lerna, a many-headed monster that Hercules was apparently obliged to kill in exchange for immortality. This is significant because rulers and exploiters have throughout history used this myth to represent the struggle between themselves and the people they seek to oppress. Naturally, the ruling class identified with Hercules, the powerful and heroic individual who overcomes challenges and is rewarded handsomely for his efforts. The role of the hydra was reserved for the exploited, the working class, whom the rulers feared and despised. The hydra, write Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, was regarded as “an antithetical symbol of disorder and resistance, a powerful threat to the building of state, empire, and capitalism.”

Implicit in the hydra myth is the fundamental truth that the working class vastly outnumber the craven capitalist dogs who struggle to contain them, and therefore pose a permanent threat to the capitalist system. When Hercules lopped off one of the hydra’s heads, two new ones grew in its place. Likewise, cut down one revolutionary and you only create more. As Hearst explained in her eulogy to her fallen comrades after they were brutally massacred by the LAPD on live television,

I know that the pigs are proud of themselves; they’ve killed another black leader. […]. But no matter how many leaders are killed, the pig can’t kill their ideals. […]. They live on in the hearts and minds of millions of people in fascist America. […]. The SLA terrifies the pigs, because it calls all oppressed people in this country to arms, to fight in a united front to overthrow this fascist dictatorship. The pigs think that they can deal with a handful of revolutionaries, but they know they can’t defeat the incredible power which the people, once united, represent.

Is it possible that ideological projects which were intended for one thing may be requisitioned, rehabilitated, and redeployed for something entirely different, to take on a life of their own?[3] Consider the example presented by Richard King in Orientalism and Religion of the faux Vedic text which, when originally forged by French Jesuits, was intended to lampoon Indian culture, but, when later read by Voltaire, impressed him with its sophistication! Discourses, concluded King, “cannot be controlled once they have entered the public arena and become subject to contestation, appropriation, and inversion by others.” Of course, this is by no means a new idea. As Roland Barthes[4] wrote,

We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

We may well be able to dismiss the author of a text, but can we dismiss the authors of events, of whole systems of ideas? Consider the particular brand of Zen Buddhism that was famously popular in the Bay Area a few years before the SLA emerged. The Zen of the Beat Generation was largely the product of Japanese ultranationalists and bore little resemblance to Zen as it was practiced in Japan. Rather than dismiss it as corrupted and inauthentic, however, I think it is more useful to understand Beat Zen as Californian Buddhism. Religions do change; they are adapted to suit different cultures and periods, and this can happen in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. As far as I’m concerned, Californian Buddhism functions as a religion and is therefore legitimate (though of course it is important to understand it in context).

The classically educated architects of the Atlantic economy found in Hercules—the mythical hero of the ancients who achieved immortality by performing twelve labours—a symbol of power and order. For inspiration they looked to the Greeks, for whom Hercules was a unifier of the centralised territorial state, and to the Romans, for whom he signified vast imperial ambition. The labours of Hercules symbolised economic development: the clearing of land, the draining of swamps, and the development of agriculture, as well as the domestication of livestock, the establishment of commerce, and the introduction of technology. Rulers placed the image of Hercules on money and seals, in pictures, sculptures and palaces, and on arches of triumph. Among English royalty, William III, George I, and George II’s brother, the “Butcher of Culloden,” all fancied themselves Hercules. John Adams, for his part, proposed in 1776 that “The Judgement of Hercules” be the seal for the new United States of America. The hero represented progress: Giambattista Vico, the philosopher of Naples, used Hercules to develop the stadial theory of history, while Francis Bacon, philosopher and politician, cited him to advance modern science and to suggest that capitalism was very nearly divine.

By arranging for the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers to face one another in the NBA Finals for the third year in a row, Adam Silver was clearly attempting to revive and re-present the Hercules-hydra myth for a contemporary basketball audience. This time around, the hydra was permitted to overpower Hercules. Were LeBron James to have cut down one Finals MVP, another would simply have risen from the bench to take his place! The team of perfect unity and cooperation won against the outmoded brute force of capitalist domination. The Cavaliers could not overcome their own internal contradictions.

Or so the NBA would have us believe!

By signing Kevin Durant in 2016, the Golden State Warriors became the best basketball team that has ever existed. They are incredibly fun to watch, and, I think, even quite likable. As a basketball enjoyer, I love watching teams that rely on isolations get crushed by teams that move the ball, and the 2017 NBA Finals would have entertained me ten years ago.

However, things are not as they are made to appear. In fact, the Warriors are not a hydra but a team of Herculean individuals. The signing of Durant not only represented the further concentration of unimaginable wealth in the hands of the already filthy rich (the Warriors won a record 73 games last season before Durant arrived), but Durant himself did not join the team due to any high-minded basketball ideals. He does not play in a beautifully planned and executed offence because he wants to liberate the NBA from the tyranny of isolation ball. Rather, Durant was bedazzled by the promise of Silicon Valley riches offered to him by his venture capitalist teammates.

Like the SLA, the Golden State Warriors are presented to us as a revolutionary organisation. But just as the SLA were in fact puppets of the CIA, so the Warriors actually represent the ideology of another terrorist organisation—the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley (who “saw the 3-point line as a market inefficiency”). The SLA was indeed revolutionary—their gruesome end, broadcast live on national television, resulted in a revolution in US policing, in the militarisation of American cops. As they watched the murders unfold, fascist police across America were beguiled by the Kevlar vests and incendiary grenades of the SWAT team that had been called in to murder the entire SLA, and subsequently set about arming themselves in a similar vein. By the same token, the revolution the Warriors are ushering in is one of mass surveillance and the tyranny of technology.

So where does all of this leave us? Is it advisable to enjoy watching the Golden State Warriors, or is their very existence a duplicitous scheme to foster within us sympathy for Silicon Valley and its evil plots? Critics of the secularisation thesis, from Émile Durkheim to Rachel Wagener, have pointed out that truth claims by religious authorities and sacred texts in fact mean relatively little to most religious people[5]—what matters is community, tradition, ritual, identity, and so on. Perhaps, then, the truth that Donald DeFreeze and Kevin Durant are agents provocateurs does not matter very much after all so long as alternative ideas, inspirations, and significances can be drawn from their escapades. Viewed this way, they become as much a myth as the Hercules-hydra drama they echo. As Nancy Isenberg writes, the Patty Hearst saga resists one single meaning:

This surfeit of information generated by the SLA, and the overproduction of meaning by the media, suggests why Patty Hearst is perhaps the best of all postmodern subjects. Her story at once registers and resists the desire to find a single meaning. Despite all attempts by journalists, psychiatrists, and jurists to explain her persona through either the tragic story of a female captive/brainwashed victim or the dark comedy of the spoiled rich girl/pseudo revolutionary, her gendered identity cannot be fixed. […]. The Patty Hearst case obliges us to reassess the meaning of identity through a postmodern lens. In a profound way, Hearst’s trial problematizes the meaning of human agency, volition, and the “truthful” representation of facts—cultural categories central to the law and a postmodern critique of bourgeois individualism and “reality.”

The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author.

In both instances, the battle between Hercules and the hydra turns out to be an illusion, a theatrical production. Both the Warriors and the Cavaliers are owned by vile plutocrats whose only goal is capital accumulation at the expense of you and I. As for the SLA, it was created by the CIA and destroyed by the LAPD; the SLA saga was essentially a puppet show between two arms of the fascist American state (two heads of the fascist American hydra?). Yet, as Stuart Hall argued, audiences are not passive and stupid, and though a certain message may be encoded within a text, this message can be contested, subverted, rejected.

According to Brad Screiber (an author who investigated the SLA fairly thoroughly), “neither Hearst nor the white radicals who followed DeFreeze realized that he was molded by a CIA officer and allowed to escape, thanks to collusion with the California Department of Corrections.” Screiber claims that Patty Hearst was a “closet radical,” and that most of the SLA’s members were unaware that they were being manipulated and led to their deaths. It is possible that some members of the Golden State Warriors are trapped in a similar predicament, believing naïvely that they are simply members of a basketball team when really their job is to crush any and all resistance to capitalist expansion. I think perhaps we owe it to the idealistic young souls who died in that tragic shootout with the LAPD to rescue what we can from the wreckage of the SLA, just as we owe it to innocent and idealistic basketball players to sometimes simply enjoy a basketball game. I enjoyed watching the Warriors beat the Cavs, and I think Patty Hearst was right about her parents.

The SLA’s rhetoric was imaginative and invigorating, and the principles that they outlined—of racial harmony, of men and women working side by side in a united front against fascist America—are laudable. I like the image and the idea of the hydra, even though the hydra myth was selected by the ruling class because they felt as though it cohered with their worldview, and, moreover, despite the fact that Hercules defeats the hydra in the original myth. I don’t believe in myths. In reality, the hydra (the workers of the world, united) would win every time.

In conclusion, I think I have established beyond any reasonable doubt that the purpose of the 2017 NBA Finals was ultimately to trick the public into thinking that the Warriors’ (i.e. Silicon Valley’s) “disruptive” and “innovative” style represents something different, something in opposition to LeBron James’ (i.e. the real estate mogul’s) more “traditional” Herculean approach to crushing their opponent (i.e. you and I), and as such to foster within us a false sense of security and a trust in the methods, products, and institutions of Silicon Valley.

Regardless of what we each think about the SLA and the Golden State Warriors, there is one thing that I’m confident we can all agree upon:

[1] Incidentally, Hearst Communications Inc., the “fascist media empire” (DeFreeze’s words) established by William Randolph Hearst (Patty’s grandfather), owns 20% of ESPN, and we would be wise not to discount the possibility that they are working to insert fascist messages into their basketball broadcasts right now.

[2] Brad Screiber, who wrote a book about the SLA, believes that these communiques were probably written by Nancy Ling Perry, rather than DeFreeze or Colston Westbrook (the alleged CIA contractor and mastermind behind the SLA), and, moreover, that she was probably quite unaware that the SLA was not what it seemed to be. They may therefore have been written in earnest, making them “authentic.”

[3] Similarly, can one enjoy a Radiohead song knowing that Thom Yorke doesn’t give a shit about Palestinians and appeals to the authority or J. K. Rowling in order to excuse his apathy towards the disgusting violence of Israeli settlers?

[4] The CIA was, incidentally, quite fond of Barthes, promoting his work in the belief that it would lead well-meaning academics into a dead end. They weren’t necessarily right, however. Is it possible that, just as a discarded weapon, which may have been a tool of state repression, can be picked up by a revolutionary and used to murder the agents of capitalism, images, symbols, myths, rhetoric, and theoretical concepts can also be turned against their creators? To be clear, I am not asserting that they can, but it is an interesting and important question to consider.

[5] The secularisation thesis was perhaps most famously advocated by Max Weber, who declared that scientific advances would result in the “disenchantment” of the world. However, in spite of the rise of science and the increasing scrutiny under which religious truth claims are placed, the demise of religion predicted by proponents of the secularisation thesis has yet to occur. Émile Durkheim was more prescient, in my opinion, arguing that although it “seems natural…that religion should progressively fade as science becomes more adept at completing its task,” “insofar as religion is action, insofar as it is a human way of living, science could not possibly take its place.” Religion, according to Durkheim, has ceded one of its original functions to science: that is, its speculative function, its “right to be dogmatic about the nature of things.” Durkheim recognised that “religion clearly cannot play the same role in the future that it has in the past,” but had the foresight to recognise that “it seems called upon to transform itself rather than to disappear.”

Breaking the Press (Part 2): Everything in this Universe is a PSYOP

Basketball, Fascism, and the Limits of Permissible Punditry

Perhaps you know the story of the investigator who watched the dunk contest for this purpose, and equipped himself with pencil and paper to record, at the moment of awakening, whatever revelation might have been given to him. Fortunately, the expected experience took place, and, for a brief period, the investigator had the vivid conviction of complete comprehension of this universe, of life and death. He regained waking consciousness with the tail-end of the sensation still upon him, grabbed the pencil, and swiftly recorded the essential content of the experience just before it faded. After several minutes, during which his mind returned to its normal state, he looked at what he had written, and there upon the paper was the following immensely profound observation: everything in this universe is a PSYOP.

I’ve been meaning to write about the 2012 dunk contest for a while now. It remains, five years on, one of the most ludicrous and unsettling spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. It is so thoroughly saturated with signs and messages, along with the obligatory US State Department propaganda, that to do it justice would require a book-length write-up (a project I fully intend to pursue). In the meantime, with the UK general election nearing its conclusion, I would like to begin my formal investigation of the 2012 dunk contest by considering what it can tell us about parliamentary democracy.

The 2012 dunk contest was the first to completely dispense with judges (representatives) and implement a kind of direct dunkmocracy in which the audience voted (via text or Twitter) for their favourite performer. Phrases like “America votes” and “America, you decide” were repeated throughout the broadcast (evidently NBA basketball was not yet a #GlobalGame), but was this really a democratic process?

Even setting aside the obvious fact that its opaque electronic voting system was open to abuse, the democracy of the 2012 dunk contest, like the representative democracies of the United States and those of its allies, is illusory. Fans were permitted to vote for whichever dunker they preferred, but could select only from a field of four (horrible, insulting) candidates that they had played no part in nominating. There exists no mechanism which allows the public to select candidates for the dunk contest, to determine how many there will be, or to alter the format of the contest itself (which changes arbitrarily every year).

Thus, in 2012, television viewers watched four obscure and unexciting nobodies stumble about before an almost silent audience as the arena hype man screamed at them that what was taking place was entertaining. The public is well aware that there are other, better dunkers in the NBA than Derrick Williams, but such individuals are almost never invited to participate. On the rare occasions that a superior dunker is permitted to enter the dunk contest, we quickly find that they are curiously unable to perform the very dunks that made them popular in the first place. These populist dunkers invariably find that, in the face of the bright lights and insipid pageantry of the dunk contest, their dunking principles either desert them or are downplayed by the pundits on the sidelines.

This is no coincidence, nor is it the result of nerves; the current dunk contest system, by its very structure, prohibits original dunks. As with conventional parliamentary democracy, participants who are dedicated to progressive dunking are refused entry, and those few that do succeed in gaining admittance do so at the expense of whatever radical dunking ideology they may once have possessed.

Consider Jeremy Corbyn, an ostensibly principled politician who has, throughout his long career, condemned the criminal organisations of NATO and the EU, voted against one imperialist war after another, and campaigned for the UK’s nuclear disarmament. After two years of unrelenting pressure from the Blairite ghouls that dominate the parliamentary Labour Party as well as the craven stenographers of the capitalist press, his party’s manifesto ultimately turned out to be a pro-business, pro-war pile of shit (though, predictably, the usual suspects in the “progressive media” ate it up). Now that Corbyn’s election campaign is underway, Labour is “committed to NATO,” will ensure UK membership of the Single Market (i.e. membership of the capitalist EU in all but name), will continue funding Trident, and will put an extra 10,000 cops on the streets[1].

The challenge for organisers and administrators—whether of dunk contests or elections—is to keep the audience engaged in spite of the necessarily unpopular and uninteresting candidates from which they are expected to choose. This is achieved in two main ways. The first involves the inclusion of candidates so wildly inappropriate that the other contestants seem appealing by comparison: just as the 2012 dunk contest included Chase Buddinger, so elections in the US and Europe increasingly feature openly fascist candidates. How, for example, were French voters recently convinced to elect an investment banker as president? Simply by having him run against a repellent fascist[2].

It is in this way that liberalism and fascism exist in symbiosis: whether voters opt to thwart “the rising tide of right wing extremism” or to reject the liberal values of the bourgeois media, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen both ultimately exist to serve the interests of capital and of empire. No matter who wins, our class enemies always remain in power, yet the election of Macron—a former finance minister who referred to himself as a political “outsider” (a claim unquestioningly accepted by journalists and, as we shall see, even “critical voices” like Noam Chomsky)—was hailed as a victory for “progressive” values.

Which brings us to the second method by which interest and faith in these spectacles is maintained: the pundits. The 2012 dunk contest was narrated by the usual gang (Kevin Harlan, Kenny Smith, Charles Barkley, Reggie Miller, and Shaquille O’Neal). Through catchphrases and feigned excitement, their job is to infuse the contest with energy and legitimacy. The fact that it takes a team of five to fill the horrified silence in the arena and give the television audience a sense that something is happening when in fact nothing of interest is taking place says a lot about how boring and irrelevant these contests are to ordinary people.

Likewise, political elections in the United States and Europe would not be complete without an assortment of familiar and trusted journalists and academics whose job it is to mediate these processes for us. The role of these pundits is not to inform, however; it is to lend an air of legitimacy to proceedings, justifying the obviously undemocratic nature of capitalist society, and to help police the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Two of the most famous and highly regarded of these intellectuals-for-hire gave their pronouncements on the UK election earlier this month.

The problems, the men agreed, fell into three categories. First was the question of ‘communist sympathisers’ and ‘communist agents’ working at the BBC. Second was the possibility that ‘communist inspired speakers’ might be able to put their views across via programmes. The third problem the men discussed was, they agreed, the most difficult. This was the possibility that the BBC itself might become the location of industrial conflict and that the management of the Corporation might in a moment of ‘national crisis’ find itself vulnerable to ‘sabotage’ by BBC engineers.

Up first, Noam Chomsky was interviewed for the BBC’s flagship programme Newsnight by Evan Davis, an animatronic puppet with a PPE degree from Oxford who has published books on such edifying subjects as why the privatisation of public services is actually really good and why you should definitely trust the BBC. To his credit, Chomsky managed—to the visible discomfort of Davis—to slip in a couple of salient remarks about class (there exist “divides on all sorts of things, but a fundamental divide is the class divide”). Yet the bulk of the 22 minute interview was spent parroting Tory Party talking points (he agrees with Davis’ assessment that “there’s a sense of a lack of clarity about quite what [Jeremy Corbyn] stands for,” and claims that Corbyn is “evidently not inspiring the population,” despite all available evidence contradicting such a claim) and slowly muttering other insipid and barely audible clichés (Chomsky does not “go along with those who say that we have incipient fascism[3],” and apparently believes that Emmanuel Macron “came from the outside[4]”).

He is invited to repeat his claim that the Republican Party is “the most dangerous organisation in human history,” but very conveniently elides the innumerable and unforgivable crimes of the Democratic Party, the organisation that he has consistently urged American voters to support. As Michael Parenti recounts:

Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist Party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic Party protected racial segregation and stymied all anti-lynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the “democratic socialist” anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic Party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism.

Whoops. Of course, Chomsky is perfectly happy to criticise the Democratic Party provided these criticisms do not undermine his audience’s willingness to vote for them again and again and again. He points out in his BBC interview that, despite the campaign rhetoric with which people were swept up in 2008, “there was no hope and there was no change” under the Obama regime. “The Democrats,” he observes, “gave up on the working class forty years ago. The working class is not their constituency. No one in the political system [represents the working class].” Yet despite this apparently damning indictment of American democracy (a representative system in which the majority of people are not represented is obviously not democratic), Chomsky frames this as an internal problem that the Democratic Party must address by itself.

His assessment of the situation in the UK is identical: the Labour Party, like the Democratic Party in the US, “did not represent the working class” through the neoliberal years, and is currently “split between the constituency and the parliamentary party” (in other words, the working class are not represented by their bourgeois representatives in parliament). Despite explaining in plain language that the UK’s political system is fundamentally and necessarily undemocratic, Chomsky simply declares that “the Labour Party has internal problems it has to deal with,” encouraging viewers to internalise the logic of the political spectacle, identify with their oppressors, and understand this lack of representation as a failure of the Labour Party to market itself successfully and not as an inevitable symptom of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. “These are internal problems to these decaying centrist institutions,” he concludes.

I am aware, of course, that Noam Chomsky knows a thing or two about how the media manufactures consent by filtering out critical voices. I think it is fair to argue, however, that if in exchange for being permitted to periodically remind people that class is important Chomsky is obliged to promote the Democratic Party (and by implication America’s sham democracy and aggressive imperialism) and insist that communism is evil and revolution impossible, he is not compromising but collaborating.

Before becoming a global celebrity, Žižek was the chief ideologist of the anti-communist, pseudo-left, ethnic separatist Liberal Democratic Party of Slovenia, but over the 1990s he transformed himself for the Anglophone market into a vaudeville Communist. This he accomplished by simply declaring himself a “Stalinist” and then proceeding to recycle Hitlerian anti-communist propaganda and vent Hitlerian complaints about liberalism to the already confused audiences of the imperial core university circuit.

A few days after Chomsky’s BBC appearance, Slavoj Žižek was invited to give a similarly enlightening interview for Channel 4 News. Like Chomsky, Žižek appears to have been briefed on the most essential Tory talking points before being allowed on air (Jeremy Corbyn is too “chaotic,” has no chance of winning, no clear vision, and so on and so on). He proceeds to extol the wisdom of inept empire theory (“President Obama, he did many stupid things…”), lament the EU referendum result when in fact it should be celebrated, and, channelling the “erratic Marxism” of Yanis Varoufakis, issue a few of his patented meaningless-but-“provocative” statements[5] (“I’m here a good Marxist—by this I mean…I have a deep admiration for capitalism. Let’s face it, capitalism is a wonder…”).

But the most striking thing about Žižek’s election interview is his obvious and craven policing of the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. “I’m not a Leninist, don’t be afraid,” he remarks early on, before repeating himself later: “we need…a stronger alternative—and don’t be afraid, I’m not talking about some new Leninist party or something.” At no point does he offer any explanation as to why “some new Leninist party or something” would be a bad thing, nor does his interviewer (Cathy Newman, another cardboard Oxford graduate) ask him to elaborate; successful socialist revolutions are simply forbidden territory for these “subversive” academics (unless it is to dismiss them out of hand). Fascism, on the other hand, is apparently a proposition that we must now consider thoroughly, weighing its “merits” as well as its unfortunate drawbacks…

“The left…doesn’t have an answer,” Žižek continues, embracing the impotent and diversionary hand-wringing that has become a defining characteristic of the celebrity left pundit. “We do not yet have the formula of what to do.” That we do in fact have a tried and tested formula of what to do is something that will never be discussed on national television, either in the UK or in the US, and to say this is not to offer some sort of fringe conspiracy theory. I have already written about the American press and its troubling relationship with the CIA, but a similar arrangement exists here in the United Kingdom. Defence of the status quo and a rigid anti-communist stance have been fundamental components of the BBC’s ethos since its creation. In 1933, following a Lunch with the Controller of Programmes, Brigadier Oswald ‘Jasper’ Harker, then head of MI5’s counter-espionage and counter-subversion branch, wrote approvingly of the BBC that its

general line is the one which we ourselves try to follow; that is to say that any political views which look upon the ballot box as the proper solution of their problems are reasonable politics; anything that goes outside the ballot box—such as communism or fascism[6]—is considered to be subversive if not seditious.

As Tom Mills explains in his recent book on the history of the Corporation, the BBC secretly and systematically vetted its staff, rooting out suspected communists and pacifists over a period of fifty years and only abandoning the practice in 1985 after a team of investigative journalists exposed what was happening. Of course, political vetting did not cease (the system was “revised and radically changed”), and senior BBC employees maintain close contact with MI5 and MI6, publishing and broadcasting whatever feckless propaganda is deemed expedient by the state.

It is sometimes imagined that the ‘death of deference’ in the 1960s, and the impact this had on journalistic culture, led to the combative style of political interviewing exemplified at the BBC by figures like Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys. While not entirely erroneous, this is something of a misreading. The social change of that era no doubt opened up space for this type of journalism; but the irreverent style stems less from the egalitarian spirit of the 1960s and ‘70s, and more from the bumptious posturing of the public school and Oxbridge debating societies, or the ‘moots’ at which would-be barristers pit their wits against one another.

Since the election was called, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg has been caught passing off a Tory campaign slogan for political analysis and regularly uses her Twitter account to assist the Tories and smear Jeremy Corbyn. Earlier this month, BBC political correspondent Eleanor Garnier, the daughter of Tory MP Edward Garnier, was sent to question Theresa May. You get the idea.

Faced with a critical and restless public increasingly uninclined to take for granted the credibility and authority of establishment journalism (the European Broadcasting Union has found the UK press the least trusted in Europe), the BBC has resorted to the same sort of desperate appeal we’ve seen from other decaying legacy media, casting itself as “the most trusted brand in news” in a recent advert. There is, of course, quite an important distinction between being trusted and being trustworthy, but I imagine the marketing geniuses at the BBC are very proud of themselves for this clever sleight of hand that will no doubt keep the proles fooled.

It’s not just the big transnational newspapers and broadcasters that find themselves edging towards the precipice, either. Regional newspapers across the UK have invented something called “trusted news day,” a perfectly natural event that you’d expect to see in any free society with a robust and healthy press. My own local newspaper, the Hastings Obscurer, recently published a series of very convincing features assuring its readers that it really is a very credible paper interested in facts and truth and things like that.

It is helpful, in my opinion, to view the election in this context—not as part of a supposed proliferation of “populist” movements in which Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Marine Le Pen are all lumped together and cast as “anti-establishment” (not one of them is), but as part of a battle between the working class and their oppressors. The “unexpected” and “undesirable” results we’ve seen in recent months signify a weakening of the capitalist news media’s hegemony, and this is a welcome development. The Guardian, for example, is currently haemorrhaging money as its readers become increasingly perplexed and frustrated by its hollow claims of conducting “independent, investigative journalism” while simultaneously publishing articles in praise of George Bush and Tony Blair. With any luck a Labour victory will finish it off.

What the 2012 dunk contest sought to do (among other things) was establish in the minds of its audience, through procedural rhetoric, the legitimacy of these sham democracies. Dunk contests, along with other kinds of interactive reality television, reinforce the logic of representative democracies in which voters collectively exercise only a limited control over superficial issues and are prohibited from addressing fundamental problems. The dunk contest will be sponsored by Sprite, whether we like it or not, just as the next prime minister of the United Kingdom will inevitably be sponsored by BAE Systems.

Thank you for listening.

[1] Obviously, I would be happier with a Labour victory than a Tory victory (the Tories will kill countless people both here and abroad); the point is that we are never presented with an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist choice, and thus are condemned to suffer in one way or another under the current bourgeois dictatorship.

[2] Incidentally, this was the first French election in my lifetime during which I could actually name more than two of the candidates—and this is not because I have recently taken a special interest in French politics. Even here in the UK, it was common for BBC news bulletins to lead with stories about Marine Le Pen, as though she were the most important person in Europe, her election inevitable.

[3] I disagree. Rather than erroneously referring to them as populists, we should call our political leaders what they are: fascists. The Tory Party is indeed a fascist party. They have rendered UKIP, formerly the UK’s burgeoning outsider fascist threat, utterly irrelevant politically by adopting all of its worst policies. The Tories adhere to any definition of fascism you might care to use. Thus, here in the UK, we are faced with precisely the same dilemma as in France: a fascist or a faux-outsider/collaborator.

[4] For all of Žižek’s faults (and there are many), at least he didn’t fall for this one during his Channel 4 interview.

[5] Some more of Žižek’s greatest hits, from The Fragile Absolute, a few pages of which I occasionally read when on the toilet: “…it is multicultural tolerance and permissiveness which induce real boredom”; “Marx’s fundamental mistake was to conclude…that a new, higher social order (Communism) is possible”; “…the critics of Communism were right when they claimed that Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy”; “…’actually existing Socialism’ failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to ‘have one’s cake and eat it’, to break out of capitalism while retaining its key ingredient.”

[6] This apparently anti-fascist orientation was never sincere, however (or, if it was, it was quickly abandoned). As Mills writes of the BBC’s arrangements in anticipation for the outbreak of war: “Speakers hostile to fascism were barred from broadcasting and Winston Churchill, who was unusual among his class for his antipathy to Nazism if not fascism per se, complained in 1938 that he had been ‘muzzled by the BBC’ following his last broadcast on German rearmament four years earlier.”

The Glass Backboard

Basketball, Apartheid, and Scientific Sexism

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling basketball apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. None of these struggles is ever easy, and even the smallest victories must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept, and to call that acceptance inevitable. — Nneka Ogwumike

A few years ago, Dallas Mavericks owner and exploitative parasite Mark Cuban made headlines in the sports world by suggesting that he might draft Brittney Griner, or at least invite her to play in the NBA’s Summer League to see whether or not she could earn a place on the Mavericks’ roster and thus become the first woman to play in the NBA. Predictably, Cuban’s (cynical and self-serving) remarks elicited derision from the usual parade of talking heads, and while it may briefly have generated a little extra interest in the Mavericks, it also placed Griner under considerable scrutiny and thrust upon her unreasonable expectations that evidently continue to haunt her.

One episode that sticks in my memory (and which has since been deleted from YouTube because the NBA fastidiously deletes any and all videos that might be construed as remotely controversial) involved Brent Barry—or perhaps Wally Szczerbiak; I don’t remember or particularly care—and a couple of other pundits laughing through bared teeth like the chauvinistic jackals they are at the very notion that a woman could compete in sport alongside men. “How is she going to guard Shaq?” they asked one another, hooting with merry laughter. Shaq, it is worth noting, had already retired by this time.

Such responses will be familiar to women, who are routinely met with condescension and scepticism even when competing against one another, let alone when challenging men. At the 1988 US Olympic trials, Florence Griffith Joyner ran 100 metres in 10.49 seconds, knocking an incredible 0.27 seconds off the existing world record. “No woman can run 10.49 legit,” declared Linford Christie, the men’s 100-metre winner at the 1992 Olympics. “I know what it feels like to run 10.49,” he continued, “and it’s hard.” For what it’s worth, Griffith Joyner never failed a drug test and her record has yet to be beaten.

All of this may appear reasonable enough to some readers. After all, it’s a scientific fact that men are, on average, bigger and stronger than women, and that they therefore make better athletes. It’s biology! But the female body is not just a collection of 60 billion cells organised into muscle and tissue, flesh and bone; it is also—and has been for centuries—the subject of a variety of discourses that are specific to particular periods and cultures and that, thankfully, are ever shifting. The way that Linford Christie et al. view women’s bodies is not in reality a matter of natural and immutable scientific fact. Rather, it echoes a kind of scientific sexism that has been practised for centuries and that we must endeavour to put to rest once and for all.

In the seventeenth century, women were placed at a severe disadvantage educationally. In their political development, for example, they were hindered through their lack of formal education in political rhetoric, their official exclusion from citizenship and government, the perception that women ought not to be involved in political affairs, and the view that it was immodest for a woman to write at all. Yet despite such—to contemporary eyes—obvious impediments to women’s intellectual development, they were widely assumed to be naturally inferior to men.

While in retrospect it ought to go without saying that men’s apparently superior intellect and achievements might lie in sources other than natural neural endowments, at the time it did need saying. After all, the objective and rational disciplines of science were on hand to explain and justify the gender status quo. In the seventeenth century, French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche declared women “incapable of penetrating to truths that are slightly difficult to discover,” claiming that “[e]verything abstract is incomprehensible to them.” The neurological explanation for this, he proposed, lay in “the delicacy of the brain fibres.”

Over the intervening centuries, the neurological explanations behind the different roles, occupations, and achievements experienced by women and men have been overhauled again and again as neuroscientific methods and modes of understanding have become ever more sophisticated. Early brain scientists, using the cutting-edge techniques of the time, busily filled empty skulls with pearl barley, carefully categorised head shapes using tape measures, and devoted careers to the obsessive weighing of brains. Infamously, they proposed that women’s intellectual inferiority must stem from their smaller and lighter brains, a phenomenon that came to be known among the Victorian public as “the missing five ounces of the female brain.”

Only when it became inescapably clear that brain weight did not correlate with intelligence did brain scientists acknowledge that men’s larger brains might merely reflect their larger bodies. Yet rather than abandon this avenue of inquiry, scientists instead undertook the search for a measure of relative—rather than absolute—brain weight that would leave the absolutely bigger-brained sex ahead.

Many ratios were tried—of brain weight to height, to body weight, to muscular mass, to the size of the heart, even (one begins to sense desperation) to some one bone, such as the humerus or radius. — Breanna Stewart

These days, most people would, one hopes, acknowledge that men and women are intellectual equals, and regard the above examples as amusing and primitive pseudo-science undertaken by the kind of rational and enlightened inquirer who begins by drawing a conclusion—i.e. that women are stupid—and proceeds to work backwards in order to “prove” why this is so. Thank goodness we’ve moved beyond such dubious “scientific” justifications for sexism, right?

Yet when we consider the history of women’s involvement in sport, the parallels between discourses concerning women’s bodies and discourses concerning women’s minds quickly become apparent. Pierre de Coubertin[1], founder of the International Olympic Committee and “father of the modern Olympic Games,” urged the prohibition of women’s participation in sport, arguing that the sight of the “body of a woman being smashed” was “indecent.” The Olympics, he declared, were to be dedicated to the “solemn and periodic exultation of male athleticism…with female applause as reward,” since “[n]o matter how toughened a sportswoman may be, her organism is not cut out to sustain certain shocks.”

Despite such fears, women were cautiously admitted to the more demanding track events in the early days of the Olympics, though the sight of exhausted female athletes fighting for their breath as they crossed the line of the 800 metres in 1928 was so repugnant to Olympic organisers that they removed the event from women’s schedules. Not until 1960 was the distance reinstated for women.

Pierre de Coubertin’s views were perfectly in line with those of his contemporaries. According to Victorian attitudes, sports that were appropriate for women were those that involved the projection of the body through space in aesthetically pleasing patterns, or those that required only light implements. Golf, for example, was ideal: it made minimal physical demands and could be played in full dress (and the languid elegance of the swing made the sight of female players pleasing to men’s eyes). It was a convention of Victorian society that women should appear decorative at all times, and so those who could afford to play tennis were expected to wear full skirts, tight corsets, high-necked, long-sleeved blouses, and boaters.

It was also believed by men that the kinds of physical changes brought on by regular exercise were liable to make women unsightly; strength was beautiful in men but ugly in women. Though wealthy and privileged women were permitted to compete at Wimbledon in the early 1920s, to actually train was considered vulgar, if not outright cheating.

The justification for all of this, as is usually the case with any form of discrimination, was a patronising—but scientifically objective!—concern for women’s wellbeing: it was for their own good. Menstruation—the eternal wound—was seen as a form of invalidity, and its beginning meant that young women would need to be careful in conserving their energy. Disabled by menstruation, women were often prohibited from competing against one another, let alone against men: if they tried to emulate their physically superior male counterparts, they would risk damaging their delicate selves.

Some schools of thought held that the enfeebling effects of menstruation could be offset by cold baths, deep breathing, and mild exercising, such as beanbag-throwing, hoops, or golf. Especially appropriate, according to Alice Tweedy, writing in Popular Science Monthly in 1892, were “homely gymnastics,” i.e. housework. Around this time, cycling was becoming a popular pastime in North America and Europe, and though women were permitted to cycle, there were suspicions about whether women’s bodies were up to the task. Many doctors believed that the peddling motion involved in operating a sewing machine would, conveniently, afford women sufficient exercise without any unnecessary risk or unsightly sweating.

The science of legislation, of jurisprudence, of political economy; the conduct of government in all its executive functions; the abstruse researches of erudition…the knowledge indispensable in the wide field of commercial enterprise…these, and other studies, pursuits, and occupations, assigned chiefly or entirely to men, demand the efforts of a mind endued with the powers of close and comprehensive reasoning, and of intense and continued application. — Wally Szczerbiak

These attitudes were—and continue to be—dangerous precisely because they feel intuitive, natural, inevitable. But is it really a scientific fact that men are inherently better at sport? Is it possible that there are factors other than average size and strength contributing to the disparity we see today between male and female athletic performance?

Consider Samuel Johnson’s famous quip: “much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.” The United Kingdom has produced up to (depending on how generous you want to be) eleven NBA players, only one of whom was actually any good[2]. Roughly 3,000 NBA players have come and gone over the last 50 years, so this isn’t a terribly impressive contribution from a country whose population is about 20% that of the United States. Few would argue that male citizens of the United Kingdom are in fact inherently, biologically bad at basketball, yet their collective achievements are, frankly, pathetic. The idea that the UK could compete with the USA in basketball is ludicrous: maybe, maybe, the very best player from the UK could cut it as a bench player in the NBA. Then again, maybe not.

Ask any Scotchman and they can tell you precisely what the problem is: the UK’s total lack of investment in sports, education, and culture (and indeed anything other than weapons and finance). Ever since Thatcher closed all of the basketball courts in the 1980s, we’ve had to struggle just to find somewhere to play. Absent are the facilities, the encouragement, the prestige that are available to young athletes in the United States. As long as these obstacles remain, the UK will never produce a Kristaps Porzingis or a Giannis Antetokounmpo. The parallels should be obvious. As Ellis Cashmore explains:

Over the years, women have not achieved as much as men; yet the conclusion that women cannot achieve the same levels does not follow logically from the original premise that they are biologically different. In fact, it coule be argued that, if women had been regarded as equally capable as men physically, then they would perform at similar standards, and that the only reason they do not is because they have been regarded as biologically incapable for so long.

To say this is not to deny that there are physical differences between women and men, but rather to acknowledge that striking physical differences exist between individual NBA players as well, and that these differences can be overcome and even put to great use. Biological differences between women and men are, in other words, of significantly less importance than our conceptions about them.

Women’s bodies—and, indeed, men’s bodies—are, in part, the products of discourses as well as of biological factors. Human bodies have been perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimilar cultures, subjected to various technologies and means of control, and incorporated into various different rhythms of production and consumption, pleasure and pain. Women were prescribed the role of delicate and decorative object in Victorian Europe, but Victorian values are hardly universal. In ancient Sparta and Crete, for example, athletic contests were part of young women’s education. In ancient Greek and Roman cultures, women would hunt, ride, swim, and run, though not (usually) engage in combat. By the time of the emergence in the nineteenth century of the organised, rule-bound activities we now recognise as sports, women were effectively pushed out of the picture and assigned roles as spectators. This was merely a matter of convention, not an inevitability.

While much has of course changed since the nineteenth century, these changes can be overstated, and it is crucial to acknowledge that female athletes still face innumerable—and unnecessary—obstacles. The obscene disparity in pay between WNBA players and their NBA counterparts, for example, is not a result of the natural and immutable forces of a supposedly impartial American free market. Under their current TV deal, WNBA teams each receive $1 million per year, but, according to Colin Davenport, they would be entitled to $4.3 million per year were they to be given the same percentage of revenue NBA teams receive. This would eliminate the need for women to play in Europe, China, and Australia during the offseason while their male peers enjoy a three-month holiday at the conclusion of their schedule.

For WNBA players, the basketball season rarely ends when the W schedule is complete, the WNBA’s official site proclaims cheerily. This need to play overseas during the offseason simply in order to receive a decent income isn’t just a nuisance and an indignity—it can cut legendary careers short. At a time when NBA players routinely receive rest days during their regular season in order to preserve their health, the fact that WNBA players are forced to play ceaselessly all year round in spite of the damage this is known to cause is simply disgraceful.

[T]he body is a process, not a thing: it is constantly changing physically and culturally. Sporting performance promotes changes in terms of muscular strength and oxygen uptake; changes in diet and climactic conditions induce bodily changes too, of course. In our particular culture and this stage in history we understand women and their association with men in one way; in another place and at another time, this relationship may be understood quite differently. It is a matter of convention that we organise sports into women’s and men’s events. It seems contradictory then to itemise the differences in adipose tissue, respiratory volumes, activity of sweat glands, etc. To do so would be to fall into the same trap as those who went to so much trouble to “prove” that women were simply not capable of sporting endeavour. — Lauren Jackson

Despite the recent addition of women’s boxing, which finally signalled the opening of all Olympic events to participation by both female and male athletes, there remain some important differences between the ways in which men and women are expected to compete. Women’s sports are generally played in shorter periods of time, or with smaller equipment, but in an event like athletics the difference is stark: men take part in six disciplines (floor, vault, pommel horse, high bar, parallel bars, and rings) while women do only four (floor, vault, uneven parallel bars, and balance beam). The resulting difference in demands produces strikingly different bodies compared with other sports: women gymnasts tend to be very small and thin in the upper body compared to the men. Thus, bodies are not strictly the products of blind and immutable biological factors but are the products of specific cultural and discursive inputs.

It is a matter of convention that sports like basketball prize strength and size, areas in which men generally possess an advantage over women. But what if more were done to conceive of sports that emphasise the physical traits from which women derive an advantage? There is evidence, for example, that women are actually able to outperform men in endurance and stamina events that last longer than two hours: women’s smaller bodies radiate heat more efficiently, and they tend to more effectively convert body fat into energy. Indeed, since official records for women’s marathon times began in 1964, the best women’s times have been improving at a faster rate than men’s times. By 1979, Greta Waitz had surpassed the fastest male marathon runner from 1925, Al Michaelson. Had women been permitted to compete in marathons alongside men since their inception in 1896, it is not unreasonable to assume that today’s top marathon runners would be women[3].

Cashmore, Ellis (2000) Making Sense of Sports. London: Routledge.

Women’s experience has historically been one of denial: they simply have not been allowed to enter sports on the basis of mistaken beliefs regarding their natural predisposition. Because of this, the encouragement, facilities, and, importantly, competition available to male athletes from an early age has not been extended to them. In the very few areas where the gates have recently been opened—the marathon being the obvious example—women’s progress has been extraordinary. Given open competition, women could achieve parity with men in virtually all events, apart from those very few that require the rawest of muscle power (while men will likely lag behind in events that require endless stamina). But more important than this is the fact that the vast majority of events require, above all, fineness of judgement, quickness of reaction, balance, and anticipation, and women have no disadvantages in these respects. Their only disadvantage is what men believe about them.

As Angela Davis once observed, sexism is an obstacle to socialist development and the eventual advent of communism. It is therefore imperative that we do away with it in all its forms. There can be only one course of action:

[1] Incidentally, there is also a medal named after Pierre de Coubertin, a sportsmanship award. Since its inauguration in 1964 it has been awarded to 18 men and one woman. Women, evidently, are lacking in sportsmanship as well as sporting prowess.

[2] Ben Gordon doesn’t count since he grew up in America: he was caught young.

[3] I therefore propose that men’s and women’s basketball be merged and that games be extended from 48 minutes to four hours.

Scooter Barry and the Eye of Power

Basketball, Solutionism, and Medium Theory

Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in wearable sports tech! — Scooter Barry

So we went down the bank of the foul ditch,
Going a little further into the pit
Which is stuffed with all the evil of the universe.

I recently happened across a video by BBALLBREAKDOWN creator and fellow communist Coach Nick in which he and Scooter Barry attempted to entice their viewers with the SOLIDshot smart sleeve. SOLIDshot, headquartered in Mountain View, California, have apparently created a compression sleeve—made from imported, high performance Italian fabric—that incorporates electronic sensors and promises its users “instant feedback + analytics.” The sensors in the sleeve track the movement of your arm, recording your shooting data, telling you whether your form is good or bad, and suggesting adjustments you may wish to make. Your data is stored on the sleeve, but you are encouraged to use the SOLIDshot app in order to “sync your data to the cloud.”

Sounds useful. So what’s the problem? Before we get into that, I’d like to make it absolutely clear from the outset that I am not anti-technology. I’m quite aware that quaint theories warning of the inherent evils of new technologies have been formulated (and invariably dismissed) since at least the fourth century BCE when Plato cautioned in the Phaedrus that the advent of writing would cause people’s memories to atrophy. Neither am I about to suggest that the use of such technology is a form of “cheating.” Media, as defined by Marshall McLuhan, can be “any extension of ourselves”—glasses, for instance—or “any new technology.” Professional basketball has always incorporated such things: players wear shoes, uniforms, headbands, mouth guards, use fitness equipment, etc. That basketball players make use of new technologies to augment their bodies is not of concern (although players who engage in body modification surgery in order to gain a competitive advantage must be policed more vigorously).

We can clearly see how this new smart sleeve has evolved from a long line of familiar low-tech ancestors (including an eerily similar product peddled by Scooter’s own father), so if its forerunners are merely harmless gadgets, what makes SOLIDshot’s latest product so dangerous? To invoke McLuhan[1] again, the medium is the message: “the personal and social consequences of any medium…result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs.”

The “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The SOLIDshot smart sleeve did not introduce surveillance or data-collection into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of basketball players. — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 8.

And it is precisely in terms of scale, the sheer quantity of data collected and shared, that these new-fangled smart devices—that is, any device with sensors that harvest data—differ from their predecessors. NBA players already operate under the all-seeing eye of the SportVU camera (another Silicon Valley innovation), which tracks and records their every move while on the court. The media establishment was swift and uncritical in its gushing endorsement of the SportVU system, hailing its leaguewide adoption as a revolution. Now, three years on, the unremittent surveillance of NBA players, the hoarding of data by teams—data to which players have limited access and which teams use to make personnel decisions—has been completely normalised. And we should not doubt for a moment that smart sleeves and other similar devices will soon become equally ubiquitous at the professional level. If the notion of players wearing smart tracking devices during live games sounds implausible to you, head on over to SOLIDshot’s FAQ section:

It will not be long, maybe a decade, before full-body smart suits (perhaps funded by EA Sports, the better to realistically capture and render player movements for their games) are adopted as part of the NBA’s compulsory uniform code. Just think of all that extra space for corporate logos! These suits, combined with the camera’s gaze, will provide an unprecedented quantity of data to be harvested and put to the service of private interests. Such innovations will not be limited to the professional sphere, either; amateur and recreational players will continue to mimic the pros, generating staggering amounts of data, most of which will be utterly meaningless to them and will no doubt be sold on to third parties without knowledge or consent.

We have, after all, been given every incentive in today’s nightmare hell-world to self-surveil wherever possible: sharing our location and our interests will allow us to view more relevant and personalised content online; diet and fitness apps will help us live healthier lives if we let them track us; “personal assistants” like Google Now or, more recently, Allo’s Google Assistant[2] will afford us more free time if we simply surrender all of our personal data, and so on. The basketball community in particular has been carefully primed to accept such concessions to Silicon Valley tech companies, viewing them as inevitable—even desirable.

Observers of the NBA cannot have failed to notice the swift rise of so-called “analytics” in recent years, as well as the accompanying rhetoric of efficiency, disruption, and other Silicon Valley jargon. While there are legitimate reasons to be sceptical of the kind of mass surveillance engendered by SportVU cameras and smart sleeves—its potential consequences for contract negotiations, for instance—these are rarely discussed. Instead, professional straw man Charles Barkley, the de facto leader of the NBA’s counter-analytics contingent, has plunged the discourse into the depths of the figurative toilet bowl with his inane blathering: “All these guys…who talk about analytics, they have one thing in common: they a bunch of guys who ain’t never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school.”

More circumspect and critical observers have either had their voices drowned out by a parade of anachronistic technophobes and chauvinistic macho men or are reluctant to speak up for fear of being associated with this crowd. Who, after all, would want to align themselves with Charles Barkley? His analytics tirade on Inside the NBA could have come straight from the script of Moneyball, a film in which Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill harness the arcane power of analytics to outwit and ridicule rooms full of befuddled old-school scouts, constructing their improbable super-team by reducing baseball to a maths equation. Disruptive!

You’re not even looking at the problem.

The language in this scene is particularly interesting. Of note is the focus on solving problems by thinking differently: the film is a transparent love letter to the solutionists of Silicon Valley. The solution that Brad Pitt has in mind does not, of course, involve collectively addressing the systemic problem that “it’s an unfair game,” that the uneven distribution of wealth precludes certain teams from competing. Rather, in the style of the glib tech nerd in his t-shirt and jeans, the solution our protagonist is searching for is wholly superficial, a stopgap measure that may work for his team, and for a time, but ultimately does nothing to promote parity in baseball (it is perhaps worth noting that since Billy Beane took over as general manager of the Oakland As in 1997, his team has managed to win a total of one playoff series). Likewise, the “solution” Silicon Valley has proposed to remedy the stagnant wages, unemployment, and obscene inequality inherent to capitalism is for workers to engage in increasingly precarious work, front all of the costs that would previously have been covered by their employer, and work incessantly for poverty wages. Your day belongs to you.

To reiterate, with Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the NBA itself all insisting that analytics and the invasive data-gathering techniques that fuel it are bringing about a new golden age of basketball, there is unlikely to be any real resistance from players or fans when the time comes to introduce smart uniforms. NBA teams will soon be granted access to a pool of data drawn from every complicit player on Earth, and once that happens they will inevitably contrive an arbitrary set of criteria for prospective players (must replicate a particular shooting form, possess certain physical qualities, take x number of shots per day, etc.). This predictive scouting will usher in a horde of counterfeit Stephen Currys, the original’s own movements and habits having been digitally captured and rendered as a formula for basketball greatness. The Curry blueprint[3], which will be sold to every other NBA team, and then to college teams and international teams, will serve as the standard for all incoming players, against which they can be measured “objectively” by algorithms.

Here we run into the perennial problem of algorithms: their presumed objectivity and quite real lack of transparency. We can’t examine Amazon’s algorithms; they are completely opaque and have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Amazon claims, perhaps correctly, that secrecy allows it to stay competitive. But can the same logic be applied to basketball? If no one can examine the algorithms—which is likely to be the case as predictive-scouting software will be built by private companies—we won’t know what biases and discriminatory practices are built into them. — Karl Malone

If the word “algorithm” doesn’t immediately fill you with dread, consider the fact that the supposedly objective algorithms increasingly utilised in the American criminal justice system have turned out to be blatantly racist tools of oppression. What, then, are the implications of predictive scouting for basketball? Firstly, it will erect a new and expensive barrier for entry into the world of professional basketball. Aspiring players will need to purchase costly basketball suits and other smart devices to monitor and record their body’s every move and function, and they will have to adhere to whatever strict regime has been determined—objectively, remember—to produce the best players. Those who cannot or will not submit to such invasive practices will simply drop off the basketball radar. Just as you are considered a deviant today if you do not maintain a social media presence, refusal to plug yourself into the basketball matrix will undoubtedly be viewed as evidence that you have something to hide.

As for those who are lucky enough to make it to the NBA in this grim dystopia, they will all play the same—most efficient—way for coaches who all coach the same—most efficient—way, rendering basketball games bland and joyless. Kemba Walker will languish on the bench; DeMar DeRozan, last of the dunk contest purists, will be excommunicated; John Shurna will be given an NBA contract (after using the SOLIDshot smart sleeve to fix his shooting mechanics, of course). “Nudging” and “incentivisation” will inevitably produce a particular kind of basketball subjectivity. Not only will all players be encouraged to master only one of a limited selection of skillsets, they will not have had cause to cultivate any sense of flair or creativity at any point in their playing lives (streetball and even idle practice having also been subordinated to the dictates of predictive algorithms). The NBA of tomorrow will penalise players who are short, inefficient, and who love to isolate. Who is such a system likely to exclude?

Solutionism is an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental, and narrow-minded solutions—the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences—to problems that are extremely complex, fluid, and contentious. […]. It’s not only that many problems are not suited to the quick-and-easy solutionist toolkit. It’s also that what many solutionists presume to be “problems” in need of solving are not problems at all; a deeper investigation into the very nature of these “problems” would reveal that the inefficiency, ambiguity, and opacity—whether in politics, sports, or everyday life—that the newly empowered geeks and solutionists are rallying against are not in any sense problematic. — Allen Iverson, Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech, 09/09/2016.

But what about the Spurs? Perhaps you enjoy watching five basketball androids dispassionately firing the ball around the court until they can find the best shot. Perhaps you can live without seeing Pierre Jackson score 30 points per game. Let’s examine the likelihood that the new analytics order will in fact deliver on its promise of crisp, efficient basketball.

Consider Uber, that ubiquitous and villainous taxi service posing as a technology company. Its standard sales pitch has always been that it offers individualised services (for the sacred bourgeois individual), and that these services are more convenient and efficient than anything the bloated government bureaucracies can hope to offer by way of public transportation. However, Uber has been able to provide its services at such competitive rates only because its backers are prepared to operate at a (staggering and unsustainable) loss in order to maintain their stranglehold on the market. Moreover, Uber has been quietly moving away from its individualised services, offering customers various incentives to walk to “unique pick-up spots” rather than have a driver come directly to their location, and to share rides with other passengers.

If Uber customers end up waiting at designated pick-up spots and catching rides that they share with other passengers, in what way will Uber’s service differ from public transport as it is currently deployed? Could it be that those responsible for administering public transport for decades did in fact know a thing or two about efficiency and sustainability after all? For all of its blustering about efficiency and personalisation, Uber has proven itself to be nothing more than a cuckoo in the nest, supplanting existing forms of public and private transportation without actually improving on their services in any appreciable way. What we’ll soon be left with, then, is the same expensive and inefficient transport system most of us are used to, only it’ll be run by a private monopoly, utterly opaque, unaccountable, and profit-driven. If you have any doubts whatsoever about the very serious dangers of letting private monopolies handle essential public transport, I invite you to catch a train in the UK.

By the same token, we should be suspicious of the transformative rhetoric issuing from the sports media establishment concerning the rise of analytics. Could smart suits help NBA teams uncover talented players that would otherwise have slipped through the net? Certainly this will be the pitch from the grinning Silicon Valley ghoul as he reclines in Vivek Ranadivé’s office. You want the next Stephen Curry? Our algorithms will find him for you by matching his data against our index of player profiles from around the world.

One, two, three, NICK ROCKS!

[1] McLuhan was a big fan of electronic mass media and probably would have loved the internet, and possibly even the Silicon Valley perverts who wish to colonise it for themselves: “Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree” could, with a little tweaking, be Facebook’s new slogan. But insofar as medium theorists like McLuhan invite us to consider more thoroughly the profound effects that new media can have on all aspects of a society, their work remains extremely valuable.

[2] Google Assistant promises to save you time by reading all of your messages, learning to mimic the way you communicate, and then replying to your messages on your behalf so that you don’t have to interact with your friends. I’m not making this up.

[3] Followed to its logical end, the current paradigm will bring us cybernetic body suits that can be programmed to imbue the wearer with the playing style and abilities of specific NBA players. The most talented basketball players will no longer compete professionally: a small elite will provide the suits with their abilities and professional basketball will be played by only the biggest and most athletically gifted people. Basketball will subsequently become a tactical game in which one’s strategy consists in determining when to deploy a particular player’s skillset: driving? Activate James Harden; shooting free throws?  Activate Stephen Curry; committing a personal foul? Activate Giannis Antetokounmpo. But enough of this—I don’t want to give tech leeches any big ideas. If you want to make this into a big-budget dystopian sports film, get at me.

Lin in the Art of Archery (Part 1)

Basketball, Kung Fu, and the Cold War

My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence—in which I do not for a moment believe—but that it operates, as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting. In other words, representations have purposes, they are effective much of the time, they accomplish one or many tasks. — Jeremy Lin

Just before the tip off of the 2012 Rookie Game in Orlando, Craig Sager said something very revealing. He was about to interview Ricky Rubio and Jeremy Lin, and, in introducing the two players to his television audience, he described both as having “travelled a long way to get here”[1]. Rubio, of course, had recently arrived in the NBA from Spain after a two year delay. But Jeremy Lin was a Harvard graduate who had lived most of his life in Palo Alto, California.

Now I should make it clear that I’m not out to get Craig Sager, bless him, or to call him a racist. I do, however, believe it is important to understand that in this brief remark we can detect echoes not only of centuries of orientalist rhetoric, but also of America’s Cold War ideology. This essay is not just an exploration of how, from his first successful start as a Knick, Jeremy Lin has been regarded with a patronising enthusiasm and seized upon greedily by the NBA in a cynical attempt to “tap into the Asian market.” Sager’s statement, I claim, hints at a more interesting—and far more sinister—story.

On the surface, awkward interviews in which Lin is asked by grinning white men to “give us a sense of that Mandarin,” to perform like a circus animal, may seem innocuous, even progressive; they are, after all, celebratory in tone, if a little clumsy. But to the more attuned and paranoid observer, they represent the latest chapter in the ongoing battle between the poisonous ideology of American capitalist “democracy” and the warm embrace of global communism, towards which it is our solemn duty to strive.

Lin, who was born in Los Angeles County and grew up in the epicentre of today’s neoliberal techno-plutocracy, the Bay Area, is a citizen of the United States. His first language is English. He is nevertheless rendered as the Other, as “Asian-American.” Just as, according to Homi Bhabha, the “mimic man” is “the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicised is emphatically not to be English,” so in the case of the Taiwanese-American basketball player, to be Americanised is emphatically not to be American. He or she becomes “almost the same but not quite,” or, as Bhabha subsequently remarks, “almost the same but not white.”

Say it. SAY IT AGAIN.

In order to understand why Americans negotiate issues of race and culture in such peculiar ways we need to take a trip back in time and space to Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on August 6th, 1945. The United States has committed many impressive crimes and atrocities, but perhaps its crowning achievement—its apex of evil—was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki[2]. The destruction of these two cities is best understood not as the end of World War II, but as the beginning of the Cold War. The bombs may have directly targeted Japan, but America was politically taking aim at the Soviet Union and the worldwide communist movement that was underway at the time.

While unscrupulous capitalists across Europe promoted and collaborated with the forces of fascism throughout the first half of the 1940s, communist groups had consistently offered strong resistance and fought for their homelands. In 1944, the Red Army of the Soviet Union rolled through Eastern Europe, liberating nation after nation from fascism. The victory of the Soviet Union over the most hated governments in the world caused the prestige of communism to soar, and communist movements emerged as legitimate and popular political forces in many nations during the immediate post-war period: the Finnish party won 23 per cent of the vote in 1945; the French party had over a million members; the Italian party over two million; the Danish party tripled in size; the Belgian party grew tenfold; in Greece, the communist party pursued an independent path of armed struggle against the villainous and despicable British-backed capitalist government. Capitalism was on the ropes.

In Japan, by contrast, the ground had been cleared for the cultivation of a pro-American, pro-capitalist government that would counteract the spreading communist revolutions in Asia. In the United States, Japan’s image was carefully rehabilitated during the 1950s, neutralising it as a political threat and paving the way for economic exchange. But there was another motive behind the increasing aestheticisation of Japan: a growing interest in Japanese style became an expression of the principle of freedom of choice, helping to distinguish American democracy from its Soviet counterpart. During the Cold War era, one of the most common ways that Americans compared communism and capitalist democracy was to say that the former encouraged sameness, denied individuality, and lacked style.

Americans thus came to admire, preserve, and appropriate the cultural richness of Japan, China, India, etc., as a means of distinguishing themselves and their tastes from other Americans and to craft the uniqueness of their identities. Cultural options from around the world allowed Americans to disrupt the monotony of a potentially homogeneous identity and reinforce the sense of bourgeois individuality and freedom already strongly embedded in the American ethos. In a paternalistic gesture, the United States would remember what communist China wished to forget: within the temple walls forged in the American imagination, the cultural legacy of China would be fully protected.

And it is to this imagined temple—the Shaolin temple, to be precise—we now turn. Consider Kung Fu, a television series so vexingly stupid and condescendingly racist that Charles Barkley undoubtedly owns the complete VHS box set. Kung Fu serves as a useful case study for two reasons: it underscores how seemingly “good” stereotypes—the sort that Jeremy Lin has come to know all too well—can be just as harmful as “bad” ones, and it will also allow me to bloviate a little more about the politics of violence.

Charles Barkley’s favourite TV show.

Kung Fu tells the story of Kwai Chang Caine—a half-Chinese, half-American monk—as he journeys through the Wild West fighting bad guys and dispensing justice. One of the actors originally considered for the part of Caine was Bruce Lee. Born in San Francisco and biracial in heritage (his mother, Grace Lee, was of Chinese and German descent), the martial arts superstar would have been perfect for the role. Yet, as his close friend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar later explained, there was just one problem: “whoever it was that decided such things made it clear to [him] that they didn’t think a Chinese man could be a hero in America. They passed over Bruce and gave the part, and the stardom, to David Carradine.”

In other words, it was felt that the (presumed) white American audience had to be able to visually see themselves in the figure of Caine, to see recognisable whiteness reflected back at them in the most visceral manner. This was precisely Caine’s function: as the protagonist and hero, Caine provided the primary identification for the viewer, who aspired to the show’s vision of fair-mindedness and spiritual acumen. Although Caine is obviously a minority as well, the fact that he is both Chinese and white allows a type of representational access for the dominant culture viewer that monoracial characters (or, rather, those who appear monoracial) do not share.

Thus, Jeremy Lin, like Bruce Lee, cannot be white America’s hero. Rather, Lin is destined to “carry the hopes of a continent on his shoulders,” while a player like Rex Walters—a Japanese-American who passes as white—can enjoy a career of peaceful mediocrity, free from scrutiny and sensationalism. “I don’t look Japanese,” says Walters, referring to his mother’s ethnicity. “When they see [Lin], it’s an Asian-American.”

At the height of the Cold War, Americans had cultivated an appetite for Chinese culture, provided it was mediated by a white man with whom they could identify. Likewise, today, as America engages in a new geopolitical war, encircling China militarily and economically via its “pivot to Asia,” NBA fans enjoy hearing “a sense of that Mandarin” so long as Jeremy Lin is kept at arm’s length, refused admission to the category “American.” Chinese culture may be commodified in order to sell alternate uniforms, but nobody is interested in hearing about the working conditions of Chinese labourers who, by their thankless toil, make the contemporary NBA spectacle possible.

But back to Kung Fu. As Jane Naomi Iwamura explains in her excellent book Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture, it is, like any other action show, bound to a narrative structure that requires the elements of intriguing conflict and satisfactory resolution within the space of less than half an hour. The television format thus colludes with a broader ideological view that finds such a moral recipe palatable, and for a show that attempts to deal with complex issues of racial oppression such an arrangement can be disastrous.

A clear example of Kung Fu’s Barkleyesque approach to matters of racial injustice occurs in the episode “Blood Brother” (January 19, 1973). Caine happens across the name of a man, Lin Wu, with whom he grew up in the Shaolin temple and searches the town for his old friend. Instead, he encounters Soong, an elderly Chinese man who is being viciously harassed by a group of drunken young men. Caine intervenes but is then thrown in jail “for his own protection,” suggesting the town’s racially fraught environment. As the story unfolds, it is revealed that the same young men are also responsible for killing Lin Wu and abandoning his body in the marshlands. The episode concludes when Caine finally helps to bring about their indictment.

By presenting only legal resolutions such as this, the show promotes the enactment of social justice via institutional channels of recourse (i.e., the law and the courts), and reaffirms the eventual effectiveness of these institutions. All alternative means of resistance to legal restitution are invariably written out of Kung Fu except one: pacifism. It is the ideal of absolute pacifism as proper response to racial injustice that, in fact, becomes the show’s significant message: if given the chance to kill or be killed by one’s oppressors, those who would choose the latter are, the viewer infers, more spiritually noble.

As John Furia, one of the producers of the show, later remarked about Kung Fu’s message, freedom comes by “freeing yourself of anger, and by freeing yourself of your own prejudices and by, in a sense, acting free.” This sort of response to racial oppression, while superficially appealing, places the responsibility for reconciliation squarely on the shoulders of the marginalised individual and perpetuates the dangerous illusion that peaceful resistance achieves anything whatsoever. In the eyes of the dominant—white—culture, the answer to racial oppression is indeed quite simple! By promoting an ideological contract that precludes other types of resolution, Kung Fu reinforces a hegemonic view that not only ignores the deep wounds of racial injustice by offering easy solutions, but also makes only one solution the morally correct one.

And so, to return to Craig Sager’s comment, we can now see that it was more than a mildly insensitive blunder. In fact, it was a message to the oppressed people of the United States of America: “it’s no excuse for people to go out there burning down people’s businesses, burning down police cars. That serves no purpose. That serves no purpose whatsoever.”

[1] I can’t actually remember precisely what he said, and I can no longer find footage of this interview, but this was the gist of it. If anybody out there has access to this footage and can correct me, I invite you to come forward. It is also possible, of course, that Sager meant it metaphorically, that he was referring to the fact that Lin’s journey to the NBA was made that much more arduous because of racial stereotyping. Lin was undrafted, after all. But I don’t care.

[2] I’ve been to both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This isn’t particularly relevant, but I enjoyed my time there and would recommend both. In Nagasaki there’s an oak tree that represents the friendship between Britain and Japan. It was brown and withered even in the middle of Spring.

LOL

 

LeBron James and the Path to Power

Basketball, Democracy, and Collective Bargaining

“The new CBA had to be split up into several texts so that they would look like simple amendments. […]. They would be regrouped in a treaty which had become colourless and painless. These various texts would be sent to NBA players who would vote on them separately. In that way, player opinion would be unwittingly led to adopt the provisions that the NBPA didn’t dare present to them straightforwardly.” — LeBron James, 2011.

With another NBA lockout pencilled in for 2017, NBA players must brace themselves and begin to consider alternative approaches to collective bargaining negotiations if they wish to avoid facing defeat yet again. Players need to consider the extent to which the National Basketball Players Association—the union that purports to promote the interests of all NBA players—really does serve them as effectively as it might. The NBPA is a labour union that democratically elects its leaders, yet when we look at its recent track record we see only concession, defeat, and, quite frankly, humiliation. Clearly something needs to be done, and perhaps the UK’s recent referendum on its membership of the European Union can provide some insight into the dangers of corrupt institutions and enable informed and radical NBA players to halt the worrying trends within their own union before it slips into the abyss.

As the referendum—held last Thursday—approached, the unscrupulous jackals of the UK press did their best to fabricate and promote the image of an EU that embodied peaceful and cosmopolitan values, an EU that protected the working poor and their fragile environment whilst guarding against the ever-looming threat of continental war.

Yet the European Union was not founded after the War in order to secure peace in Europe (it is not, in other words, the United Nations); rather, the EU originated as a Cold War bloc that sought to rebuild and protect monopoly capitalism in Western Europe. Far from keeping the peace, after the tragic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the EU expanded eastwards with great rapacity, and EU states have since helped destabilise Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and parts of Africa. Newer EU members have not enjoyed the prosperity promised them, but have instead been maintained as reservoirs of cheap labour and sites of outsourcing, and though their citizens may move freely across the Union’s internal borders, the outer borders of the EU have become increasingly militarised as its core members seek desperately to halt and expel the very people they are responsible for uprooting through their abominable and illegal conquests.

The EU is, in short, an exclusive and antidemocratic financiers club that has wrought unimaginable devastation upon refugees and the poorest people both within Europe and beyond its fortress walls. As Blairite worm and former EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson remarked in 2002, “we are all Thatcherites now.”

Why bring this up? The European Union is a trade bloc, not a labour union. In what way does it resemble the NBPA? Dear reader, the parallels are undeniable. Just as the EU Commission is headed by Jean-Claude Juncker—a man who, during his term as Prime Minister of Luxembourg, turned his home country into one of Europe’s biggest tax havens, and whose current imperative is to unwaveringly carry out the wishes of Europe’s ruling class of imperial gargoyles—so the NBPA’s highest ranking members are conniving and obsequious traitors who consistently sell their comrades out by capitulating to the demands of their bourgeois masters. In recent years, the NBPA has succeeded only in haemorrhaging money to team owners: most recently, in 2011, the share of basketball related income to which NBA players are entitled fell from 57 per cent to just 51 per cent, a disgrace of the highest order.

“I actually see [overseeing CBA negotiations] as an opportunity rather than a challenge.” — Adam Silver, 2015.

So how did this come about? In order to understand how the natural solidarity of NBA players has been so thoroughly eroded and undermined, we need look no further than current NBA Commissioner and shapeshifting reptilian Adam Silver. During an interview with Adrian Wojnarowski in December last year, Silver let slip his insidious plot to exploit the avarice of the NBA’s petit bourgeoisie:

As I’ve gotten to know a lot of the superstar players who are now in the league…they’ve become much more sophisticated as well. And so now, especially when you have of course Michael Jordan as a principle owner; but now Grant Hill is, you know, a significant part of the Atlanta Hawks’ new ownership group; you have Shaquille O’Neal in Sacramento; you have David Robinson in San Antonio; and a lot of people don’t know that Penny Hardaway has a small piece of the Memphis Grizzlies’ group; and so now, what’s changed in terms of the quality of these negotiations, you have a lot of the superstar players sitting there wanting to become owners one day, I think which is incredibly healthy, because what I always say to them even outside the context of bargaining is that the way I always try to do deals is to put myself in the other person’s shoes and, you know, try to anticipate what it is they want. […] . I think that to the extent that…those players…directly involved in these negotiations want to be owners one day and want to sit on the other side of the table, ‘profit’ for example doesn’t become a dirty word. [Emphasis mine.]

Indeed, “profit” is the mantra of the NBPA’s current executive board. The First Vice-President of the NBPA is none other than LeBron James; the Treasurer is James’ Cavaliers teammate James Jones; the President, Chris Paul, is a duplicitous insurance salesman and close personal friend of James. Other Vice Presidents include fashion mogul and art collector Carmelo Anthony as well as Silicon Valley tech lobbyists Stephen Curry and Andre Iguodala.

As I demonstrated in my last essay, LeBron James is a Machiavellian scoundrel of unmatched guile, concerned solely with his own rational self-interest. Would you trust him to negotiate on your behalf, knowing that in crunch time he thinks only in terms of isolation, of how he as an individual can best succeed?

Both the EU and the NBPA are, thus, corrupt and undemocratic institutions whose sole concern is to further the interests of global capital at the expense of the majority of their members. However, there remains one crucial point on which the NBPA differs from the EU: the NBPA can be reformed. In spite of what inspipd careerists like Owen Jones and “erratic Marxists” like Yanis Varoufakis may try to tell you, the fate of the EU was sealed with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, and any hope of reforming it from within, of introducing democracy or accountability, was emphatically laid to rest. Given these circumstances, the people of the United Kingdom had no choice but to unshackle themselves from this machine of imperialism and the crushing austerity, privatisation, and militarisation it has for so long engendered.

Just as the United Kingdom was bound inextricably to the grotesque Thatcherite project of the global oligarchy for as long as it remained a member of the EU, so the NBPA cannot succeed as long as the NBA’s petit bourgeois strata dominate CBA negotiations. NBA players face a slightly different challenge, however. To dissolve the NBPA and strike out alone as individuals would lead to certain doom. This is precisely what LeBron James and his fellow exploiters want; indeed, it is for this very reason that he and Stephen Curry conspired to produce the Randian spectacle of the 2016 NBA Finals! It must be understood that by “individual” James means no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible. Solidarity must be cultivated amongst the disaffected members of the NBPA and power democratically handed to black Muslims like Dennis Schröder—injustice is unacceptable in Islam and Muslims are divinely mandated to confront oppressors—and radical Marxists like Steve Nash.

NBA players must not repeat the mistakes of Europe. A brighter, more prosperous, more democratic future is possible for all. All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. Pass the ball.

LeBron James and the Virtue of Selfishness

Basketball, Big Data, and the Military Entertainment Complex

“Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.”
— LeBron James, game 7 post-game press conference, 19/06/2016.

The Golden State Warriors are famously owned by a sinister cabal of Silicon Valley vampires, so it should be no surprise that the team has embraced the latest in surveillance technologies and concomitant collection and analysis of data. The Warriors were among the first wave of NBA teams to install SportVU cameras—sophisticated data-tracking systems—in their arena, a move that has since been copied league-wide. In case you were wondering, SportVU cameras are owned by STATS LLC, which, in turn, is owned by Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm founded by Robert F. Smith, previously a Silicon Valley tech investor for Goldman Sachs.

When considered solely within the context of basketball, the ubiquity of SportVU cameras does not seem disturbing at all; in fact, the move to install them in every arena has by all accounts been a wonderful development that will no doubt revolutionise the way we understand and play basketball. However, when understood within a wider context, as one of countless manifestations of the Silicon Valley imperative to impose a panoptic environment on an unwitting society, the Warriors’ thirst for data is representative of a far more unsettling trend. Just as Oakland’s basketball team was an early adopter of SportVU cameras, so the city of Oakland itself was among the first American cities to install ShotSpotter systems. Another Silicon Valley innovation, ShotSpotter networks consist of hundreds of hidden microphones and sensors placed throughout cities that alert local police to the sound of gunshots (and, potentially, other noises) while also triangulating their location.

Silicon Valley’s tech entrepreneurs have been buying up NBA teams for quite some time now, yet the figures that make up the Warriors’ ownership group appear significantly more menacing than their counterparts in Los Angeles and Sacramento: comically exuberant Steve Ballmer did us the favour of displacing Donald Sterling, while comically impotent Vivek Ranadivé’s curious vision of an “NBA 3.0” has yet to bear any fruit. By contrast, Warriors’ majority owner Joe Lacob has made it absolutely clear that he and his consortium of pestiferous venture capitalists intend to apply the “efficient” neoliberal logic of the Valley to their NBA team (and to accept credit for its success), condemning both players and fans to increasingly invasive surveillance practices.

Recently unveiled plans for the Warriors’ new San Francisco arena.

While much has been written about the gentrification of the Golden State Warriors by Silicon Valley parasites (ticket prices have risen to outrageous heights, affluent tech nerds view Warriors games as “networking opportunities,” the team will be moving from the traditionally blue-collar city of Oakland to a new arena in its more prosperous neighbour San Francisco in the near future, etc.), my intention is not to bemoan the death of the “real” sports fan at the hands of these contemptible Bay Area hipsters. Rather, I am interested in what the Warriors’ success in embracing the Silicon Valley ethos signifies to basketball viewers everywhere. If Hollywood films convey the ideology of the American ruling class[1], can the other entertainment industry spectacles such as the NBA Finals tell us something about our relationship with Silicon Valley tech companies, “big data,” and the global panopticon? Perhaps. Warriors’ co-owner Peter Guber is, after all, a Hollywood producer.

The Warriors have quickly transformed into an analytics giant, the quintessential Smart Team. This has caused some to dislike them, notably television jesters like Charles Barkley and assorted old school types who still believe in asinine mantras like “live by the three, die by the three.” The team has come to represent Silicon Valley, and much of America (and indeed the wider world) resent them for it. They’re successful, and we enjoy what they produce, but they’re arrogant, and there exists a vague but persistent sense that they’re changing things in a way that, while perhaps positive overall, is without consequences.

The Cavaliers, on the other hand, have been cast as the gritty, downtrodden team of the proletariat. The city of Cleveland itself has endured a sustained onslaught from the capitalist class that has wrought all manner of economic hardship—declining industry, rampant unemployment, transfer of wealth from the public sector to the private, etc.—and in terms of professional sports its citizens have had little to celebrate.

As for the players, LeBron James’ stubborn orthodoxy provides a stark contrast to Stephen Curry’s iconoclastic style. While Curry has turned basketball convention on its head, routinely attempting—and making—what would traditionally be regarded as “bad shots,” James plays with the familiar chauvinism of the archetypal basketball star: the ball is always in his hands—often as he stands stationary for ten seconds at a time—and he invariably falls back on heroic isolation plays in tough situations. This familiar basketball logic has been with us for decades, and while it has in recent years been abandoned by some of the more forward-thinking teams (Spurs, Hawks, Celtics, Warriors), it persists throughout the NBA today.

The Cavaliers, of course, are owned by Dan Gilbert, not the city of Cleveland. An NBA championship will not alleviate any of the crushing economic problems currently immiserating the city’s residents, but will rather empower one of their greatest antagonists. Gilbert’s mortgage lending company has been accused of, among other things, fraud, falsifying loan documentation, and scamming customers with deliberately misleading interest rates. Moreover, LeBron James, far from being an archetypal people’s champion, had previously left Cleveland for a state with no income tax in order to form a super team so that he could more easily win championships (an endeavour he abandoned when a more lucrative situation presented itself).

Nevertheless, the 2016 NBA Finals will be regarded as an instance of traditional basketball values defeating new-fangled data-driven methods, of the common man succeeding with his meagre means in the face of “elites” with infinite resources at their disposal. Heart-warming stuff! I’ve forgotten all of my problems already.

On a deeper level, however, this represents the apparent triumph of the atomised individual over the slick and seemingly irresistible powers of Silicon Valley tech monopolies. Yet this isn’t a heart-warming or inspirational narrative precisely because it adheres to the very bourgeois logic that the Valley touts as the solution to our collective ills. The hacker and the entrepreneur may occupy polar positions, but they are analogous, as their intersection in Silicon Valley clearly demonstrates.

As the welfare state crumbles throughout the world, Silicon Valley has stepped in to provide us all with tantalising solutions. Private tech companies will take care of our health and replace our inefficient public transport systems. Rather than overcoming the problem of obesity on a societal level by creating better city infrastructure and regulating powerful food corporations, we are encouraged to pursue solutions that we can undertake as individuals, with fitness devices that track our activities (and generate a wealth of data for private companies). Instead of working with labour unions to reduce working hours, Google Now will act as our secretary and afford us more free time without our having to lift a finger. Our problems, we are to infer, can be overcome with “ethical consumerism” and “political awareness.” Vote with your wallet! Write to your local politician!

Yet such platitudes are not only insufficient, but harmful. Monopolies own the infrastructures that allow them to provide these services, preventing the development of any viable alternatives. Moreover, politicians have no (class) interest in proposing alternative models. Instead, they simply advocate appropriating the same tools that private companies already use and applying them to the same evil ends, only under a different brand.

We cannot solve the problems that we face today—or oppose the kinds of “solutions” offered by Silicon Valley—if we insist on acting only as individual consumers, applying the logic of the market to political revolution[2]. Just as Max Schrems will not succeed in toppling Facebook, so the isolationist cannot, in the long run, defeat the type of basketball that the Golden State Warriors typically play. Team basketball is good basketball. The Warriors won a record 73 games this year for a reason: it’s the best way to play basketball. Their eventual defeat at the hands of the Cavaliers does not change this fact; NBA teams are not suddenly going to begin running isolation sets all game (though the Toronto Raptors must feel degree of vindication). This Cleveland victory was a mirage, a comforting myth in the same vein as the Hollywood film. It provides the citizens of Cleveland with vicarious relief from the unending torment of a life lived in Ohio, and it tempts the rest of us with the erroneous notion that in order to thwart global capitalism we need only alter our individual behaviour and can comfortably elide the underlying systemic issues that give rise to, among other things, wealth inequality, environmental destruction, and war.

By defeating the Golden State Warriors, LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers have embraced and advanced the pernicious ideologies of Randian objectivism and American imperialsim. The Golden State Warriors may have lost the NBA finals, but this was a decisive victory for Joe Lacob and the diabolical legion of Bay Area tech nerds that may ultimately be the ruin of us all.

[1] This, incidentally, can be seen clearly in the Independence Day adverts that aired incessantly during the Finals [edit: the original video I linked to has been deleted, but this one contains essentially the same message]:

The United States Army assures us that the heroism and virtue depicted in Hollywood films is inspired by the real heroism and virtue embodied by the United States Army. Thus, the audience may use a film like Independence Day as a stand-in for actual war coverage, substituting the brutal realities of American imperialism for sanitised and satisfying battles between Americans and belligerent, incomprehensible aliens. This is not just about cinema, however: “when they find a way to win, no matter what”—this is clearly a reference to the basketball broadcast that the advert interrupts, and is encouragement to view the struggle on the court as having wider implications.

[2] This should under no circumstances be read as an endorsement of the European Union.