Capitalism and Sports

Just Do It? - Capitalism and Sports

In this issue...

• Just Do It?

• View from Left Field: Interview with Lester Rodney

• Standing Tall for Peace: Questions for Toni Smith

• Book Review - The Assassination of Julius Caesar, by Michael Parenti

• Poetry - Tables

• NEW! Marxist Quiz NEW!

Let’s start with a fact. People do not just "like" sports. Those who really know their game feel that it contains the basis for an entire ethics, that if we appreciate how the sport disciplines shape our minds and bodies we will have access to a model for living; and that, in playing, we will learn something about ourselves.

Lester Rodney was the sports editor of the Daily Worker between 1936 and 1958. His contributions to sports history and to the working-class movement is detailed in Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports by Irwin Silber (Temple University Press, 2003).

Editor’s Note: Toni Smith was the starting forward/center and team captain at Manhattanville College in New York and recently graduated. The media spotlight shone on her in the spring of 2003 as she, among millions of others, decided to protest US militarism and war.

Michael Parenti’s new people’s history of Ancient Rome is both timely and relevant. Written in his usual popular and accessible style, this book will make available to a wide working-class audience an easily understandable and reliable portrait of Rome.

Tables

Senior year, sixteen, balancing trays
of steak and beer to take to fat, drunk men.
Rancid women hissed steam, blamed me
for their children’s boredom and fickle tastes.

The struggle to integrate professional baseball, which should be seen as one of many democratic struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, is one in which the Communist Party USA, its press and its activists played a leading role.

Fascism – or more precisely, the "threat" of fascism – is a phenomenon that drives political strategy in this nation and abroad as evidenced by May’s PA discussion. Yet, despite its major importance, fascism has received surprisingly scant historical and theoretical attention on this side of the Atlantic in recent decades.

Transport workers are on the move under global capitalism. This fact points to the continuing relevance of Lenin’s argument in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism that in the major imperialist countries heavy industry will have a tendency to decay and be replaced with light manufacturing and transportation accompanied by the incredible growth of finance capital as the principal motor of imperialist development.

Somebody’s getting rich off of George W. Bush’s tax scheme. According to a recent AP report that looked at his tax records, the resident of the White House gave himself a tax break of over $41,000 in 2003.