Larvatus Prodeo

My attention has been drawn, by Nick Dyrenfurth, to John Passant’s Marxist class analysis of test cricket and the political significance of the outcome of last year’s Ashes series.

Time does not allow me the luxury of an extensive critique of John Passant’s position, beyond noting that if we accept his view that the defeat of a nation’s Test cricket team represents “a small step forward for the ideas of class struggle” in that nation, it surely follows that the victory of the opposing national team represents a step backward for the ideas of class struggle in their nation. Thus whatever incremental benefit to the workers’ cause may have accrued from the increase in Oz workers’ class consciousness arising from Australia’s loss of the Ashes, it must be set against the setback in the class consciousness of the English proletariat arising from England’s Ashes victory. As the UK remains more politically and economically significant within the capitalist world order than Australia, it follows, in answer to the question posed by this post’s title, that Mitchell Johnson’s mother’s contribution to the psychological disintegration of her son yielded a net benefit to the international bourgeoisie.

Trotskyist attempts at class analysis of cricket have an interesting history. At the time of World Series Cricket, most of the Trotskyist and Communist groups in Australia condemned WSC as representing all that was worst in capitalism, a position echoed by the Australian Union of Students at its 1979 Annual Council. This view was contested with customary polemical savagery by the Spartacist League, which argued that the pre-existing relationship between Test cricketers and their respective national cricket boards was essentially feudal and that Kerry Packer’s WSC was historically progressive as it freed the cricketers from feudal servitude and established capitalist wage-labour relations as the norm – and besides, WSC was more fun than the establishment version of the game. Unfortunately nobody picked up on the significance of replacing red balls with white ones!
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