Drama is possible because life is alienated from man. It is an alienated form of “playing” the essence of life alienated from man. Ultimately, the essence of life is given by the ruling ideological firmament, and it becomes the prism through which man sees himself and society: a masked slavery, a masked nothingness, a mutilated human image, a “pendulum of capitalist horror” become a lollypop, people laugh and cry over their destiny... In the theatre, life is being acted out, man being only an observer. The powers that keep him obedient in society take on a caricatured form. Apparently, man has control over them; he resists them. In reality, drama is the “relation” of man to the world that pins him down to the existing world. A “good performance” is the other side of a bad life. Actors are tragic products of a tragic world. Man does not experience the essence of his life by way of an active life; it is given to him by way of a “cultural sphere” that becomes a compensatory mechanism, a form of sterilization of the critical mind and active will. It is “cultured” to watch human sufferings on the stage, but it is “uncouth” to fight to eradicate injustice in life. The destruction of the human pleases the petty bourgeois: it helps him to shed his responsibility for the survival of the world and to lull himself into accepting the existing hopelessness. The theatre does not produce revolutionaries, but “audiences”. It is a form in which culture becomes devoid of the libertarian. Orpheus without Prometheus becomes Narcissus. All that proceeds is a virtual reality, which, as it becomes more realistic, offers man a better opportunity to escape reality. The theatre, cinema, concert hall, gallery, the church – all these are forms in which the illusory “world of culture” is institutionalized, and it is created as a “parallel world” to the everyday, hopelessly uncouth world and gives the petty bourgeois an apparent escape from capitalist nothingness to ensure his “elite” class social status.

The nature of sport as drama is conditioned by the role of sport in society. It is not an active integration into the ruling class, like the ancient Olympic Games and medieval chivalrous tournaments, but a supraclass phenomenon and as such means the integration of the oppressed into the spiritual orbit of the ruling class and their depolitization according to the principle panem et circences. Its purpose is to inseminate man with the ruling spirit, to pin him down to the existing world, destroy his mind, imagination, his hope of a better world... A sports spectacle is a modern pagan festival, which gives a fatal dimension to the ruling relations and values. It does not enable man to treat the existing world in a reasonable way, but completely integrates him into it. Man becomes the toy of destiny, the implement of the basic processes of capitalist reproduction. Sport abolishes the duality of reality and ideals. In it, there is no opposition between play and life: it represents life in its existential and essential sense. Sport is the authentic form of the playing of life and, thus, is its glorification, which is supposed to create a religious relation to the ruling values. Sport does not reflect the human; it is rather that man becomes a means for deification of the ruling relations and values. Sport is not an innocent children’s pastime; it is a ritualistic manifestation of submission to the ruling spirit and, thus, is the highest religious ceremony and liturgical in character. It is pervaded with a sacred serenity. Hence the importance of the “Olympic oath” (serment olympique): sport is the cult of the existing world, while man appears in the sports ritual as the symbolic incarnation of the spirit that rules the world. A sports spectacle is not an enactment of life; it is its reproduction: in it, the essence of the capitalist world appears in a condensed form. Rugby, boxing and other blood sports are immediate expressions of the “American way of life”, which is based on a ruthless Social Darwinism and a destructive progressivism – and becomes a planetary way of life (“globalism”).

The sports drama is an authentic way of playing out life – but one in which life, itself, is at stake. Sport is a drama without masks, without petty bourgeois lies, without invented plots that are meant to glorify criminals and obtain meaning for capitalist nothingness. Life, itself, continues without a “humanistic” and “artistic” veil. It is legal in sport to inflict serious physical injury and to kill, to mutilate children, to apply medical “treatment” that reduces sportsmen to laboratory rats, to turn the young into fascist hordes... The theatre represents the scenery of the world of lies and crime; sport represents its foundation. At the stadium, there is no human distance, there is nothing comical: gladiators are not entitled to laugh. An increasingly bloody life requires increasingly bloody sports spectacles, which are compensation to the oppressed for the daily increase in their misery. “The spectators love the smell of blood!” – this is the “golden rule” of sports show-business in the USA and other countries of the “free world”.

Sports stadiums were not built for the well-to-do (petty) bourgeois, as is the case with the theatre, which has an elitist following, but for the working “masses” deprived of their rights and for their children who are reduced to “hooligans”. The modern stadium appeared along with the modern industrial proletariat, at a time when workers had managed to obtain the eight-hour work-day – an era when the bourgeoisie was trying to “colonize the leisure time” of workers and thus prevent their political organization and integration into the ruling order. Stadiums are not designed to advance the “cultural education” of the oppressed, but to “pacify” (depolitization) them and to soothe their idiocy. “Sport is the cheapest spiritual food for the (working) masses and keeps them under control.” is the most accurate sociological (political) definition of sport. It was pronounced after the First World War, and at the height of the revolutionary movements in Europe, by the “father” of modern Olympism, Pierre de Coubertin. Sport is becoming a way of destroying class-consciousness and shifting the fight from the political to the sports arena. Stadiums are not the temples of culture but the brush-fires that purge the oppressed of their discontent. This purpose is what dictates their appearance: stadiums are modern concentration camps for people deprived of their civil and human rights. Everywhere in the capitalist world, where more and more people are becoming poorer, and fewer and fewer people are becoming rich, we have the same picture: wire fences, special police forces, trained dogs...

A match is an occasion for those increasingly deprived of his rights to vent their frustration, and it is not a reflection of human “evil” but an expression of their suffering and despair. Sports spectacles are a way of turning the critical and change-oriented potential of people deprived of their rights into aggression directed at the “opponents”, who belong to the same oppressed class, and a way of provoking war between them. This is the basis on which fan-groups are formed: instead of turning their discontent towards the ruling order, young people turn it towards other fan-groups who, themselves, are the victims of an inhuman order. “Supporting masses” are a form of degeneration of working-class youth, while the fanaticism of supporters is a form of their degenerated critical and change-oriented consciousness. Symbols and slogans under which the youth gather do not speak of freedom, brotherhood, peace, cooperation, love: they are of a fascist character. “Patriotism” without culture is barbarism. As far as sports “idols” are concerned, they are not fighting for freedom; they are the tools of capitalism for combating the libertarian mind and integrating the youth, reduced to a supporting “mass”, into the existing world. The increasingly bloody conflicts between different supporters are an inevitable consequence of the increasingly difficult position of young people in a world based on the principle “Money does not stink!”, and on the increasingly ruthless manipulation of the young, which springs from the fear that their discontent might turn against the ruling order and be used for building a new (just) world. On sports stadiums, the fresh mountain water, which overflows the deteriorating capitalist dam, turns into a swamp. Firecrackers and other fan paraphernalia do not express a joy of life: they are symbols of destruction. Torches are not sources of light: they suggest the flames that are consuming this world without a future.

The “intensity of life” for ancient man was conditioned by his tragic position as a “plaything of the gods” and his endeavors to do all that is possible during his short and meaningless life to achieve “fame” and thus gain Olympian immortality. In capitalism, the “intensity of life” is conditioned by the logic of capitalist reproduction: to achieve a better result (profit) in the shortest possible time. This logic prevails not only on a sports field, it conditions man’s entire life. In sport, there is no confrontation between life and human tragedy. It is one of the most important ways in which capitalism “reconciles” man to the existing world, which reduces him to an impersonal member of the worker-consumer “mass”: sport removes the tragic from the capitalist cosmos by depriving man of humanity. 

Ljubodrag Duci Simonovic is a former basketball champion, philosopher, filmmaker and author, with the Master in Law and PhD in comparative philosophy. He lives in Belgrade, Serbia.

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