Thursday, September 16, 2004

Solidarity Forever (NHL-Style)

By Jordy Cummings

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Posted 09/16 | Add a Comment

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  1. Interesting article. However, with all due respect, I cannot agree that the remuneration of professional athletes “is close to exactly how a progressive, even syndicalist enterprise should operate.” Neither can I agree that it approaches a “par-economic” model. 

    If the model were pareconomic then the players should be remunerated equally for their sacrifice and risk. This is not the case. The players, as you pointed out, are rewarded for achieving certain productivity indicators and their popularity. If it were a pareconomic system then journeymen players should earn approximately the same as the “star” ( a concept that is anathema in a progressive sports universe) players assuming that they are all showing up for games and practice and working equally hard to help the team win.

    Posted by kim from  on  09/17  at  03:31 PM

  2. it is closer to Parecon than anything else though....I think that if all players were renumerated equally - and still highly given the revenue they produce, the player’s association would back such a plan.

    Posted by j cummings from  on  09/17  at  03:56 PM

  3. I have to agree with kim.  If we are talking specifically about the Parecon that Mike Albert and Robin Hahnel came up with, then it is most definitely not Pareconomic.  Albert often uses Michael Jordan as an example of how remuneration according to ability is the wrong way to go.

    Personally, I’m not a big fan of most unions.  Especially the big ones.  And unions for people in the top 3-5% of the income brackets just seems kind of silly to me.  Unions are supposed to be about producing class consciousness and struggle.  Players unions are just designed to turn millionaires into multimillionaires.  I don’t think their accomplishments trickle down to other people.  Maybe you could elaborate on that point, Jordy.

    I also don’t like police officers unions.  I mean, wtf do the paid thugs of capital want with a union?  Makes no sense.

    Posted by Justin Felux from  on  09/17  at  10:07 PM

  4. To answer Justin’s point:

    I am not a purist in terms of parecon, I was just stating that in terms of derivation of capital, athletes, “cultural workers” in general, recieve a higher share.  I used the phrase though perhaps - with it being branded - I should have used “democratic.” Nothing I wrote precluded the possibility as well of what many sports labor activists have put forward of an equal distribution of the franchise’s capital - thus Michael Jordan is not paid any more than Craig Hodges, so to speak.

    As it stands, I learned the phrase “participatory economics” from a high school economics teacher, nothing to do with Albert, and it dwelled on how some firms (Nokia in Finland, for one) are worker owned.  This has much to do with the brand of non-statist socialism that Albert espouses (though I think there are some truly awful things about his particular brand of participatory economics, in terms of privacy of consumption, potential for monopolization of information if not capital (and in my understanding these days tehy are often the same thing) and in terms of its appeal to justice and morality, as opposed to the organic whole...Marx and Bakunin, all the young hegelians never based their critique on capitalism on the issue of justice, it was about fair share of capital.) By adding this liberalism to an economic theory, there is all sorts of moralism as well as determinism...but that is my own opinion.  As it stands, I shouldn’t have used the phrase.

    But I want to dwell on a larger issue that I have with Justin’s comments, vis-a-vis unions and money in general.  Perhaps it is because I have never associated socialism with asceticism, rather with gaining a share of the productive wealth gained by workers, I don’t make distinctions between humans, except in terms of capitalists and workers or bosses and workers.  Police are workers, they have every right to a union.  That these unions are often corrupt is true, but that these unions are often (as in Toronto) a force against the racist oligarghy is often true as well.

    In ters of the broader picture, EVERYONE should have union protection - that is the point of any form of economic egalitarianism.  Unions are not supposed to produce class struggle by instilling conciousness.  Unions are there to protect workers interests.  The hoobajoob about conciousness et. al is true, and unions are often delinquent in this duty.  But their first job is wrestling capital from management to labor.  The more capital there is, the more labor gets, ideally. 

    Instead of bitching about players unions and other large unions, progressives should simply call for extremely high tax rates on millionaires....thus further spreading the gain.

    Posted by j cummings from  on  09/18  at  12:08 PM

  5. I meant in the sentence “productive wealth gained by workers” as “produced by workers.” I’ll add something that Nader said in a talk a few years ago, that the world’s GDP if divided equally across the population, and even adjusted for environmental problems, would still create a planet of multimillionaires.

    Posted by j cummings from  on  09/18  at  12:14 PM
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