Football today functions as the crystallization of the highest stages of capitalist exploitation
Paweł Mościcki is a professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the author of numerous books and a blog: pawelmoscicki.net as well as substack pawelmoscicki.substack.com
Cross-posted from Pawel’s Substack
I’ll start with a confession, only to discredit it later. For today, the poetics of personal testimony is nothing more than opium for the people—people who, for the life of them, cannot and will not become a people.
Those who know me, or at least are familiar with what I write, know that, to put it mildly, I have a soft spot for football. And not just in the banal sense that, due to my upbringing, socialization, and the influence of advertising and propaganda machines, I passionately watch football matches. These days, in fact, I increasingly find myself realizing that they are more interesting to me—intellectually as well—than many art exhibitions or films. Because I have a soft spot for football also in the other banal sense (since that’s a cliché too) that I look for something more in it than just entertainment—a metaphor that allows me to understand the world in all its complexity, and sometimes simplify it enough to make it more tangible. I even wrote a book about it—what a banal thing to do.
Not that I spare any criticism in it regarding how world football fulfils its social obligations. Lessons of Football is, for the most part, one big complaint about the commercialization, conformization, and politicization of football, which today functions as the crystallization of the highest stages of capitalist exploitation. However, I have always believed that a weak force of the exact opposite still lies there — some strangely veiled promise that is almost utopian in nature. That is why, when I recently read an interview in which Louis Althusser explained that a football match in the neighbourhood is the quintessence of grassroots communism, I wasn’t all that surprised.
But even I, having been made aware of these critical platitudes (for there is absolutely nothing revelatory in these statements for anyone with eyes, ears, and a brain), still feel like boycotting this year’s World Cup. I consider entrusting the role of host to the United States a slap in the face to anyone who, in this completely deranged world, has not yet completely lost their sense of decency. What’s more, I decided on this boycott because I don’t see this outrageous fact becoming a subject of public discussion even for a moment. After launching its invasion of Ukraine, Russia was expelled from most international sporting competitions, including, consequently, all official FIFA events. One might agree with this decision were it not for the fact that it was made by the same people who are simultaneously allowing Israel—and even the U.S.—to remain in these competitions.
Russia is currently waging an illegal war in Ukraine— agreed. However, in practice, its illegality is condemned primarily by countries and organizations that have made illegal wars, coups d’état, and illegal sanctions starving entire nations their modus vivendi. That is why I couldn’t care less about this particular decision morally, because it is not based on any moral impulses, but solely on hypocrisy and imperialist interests. At the same time, the U.S. is waging at least three wars. First, the genocidal war in Gaza, which would not be possible without the financial, military, intelligence, political, and diplomatic support of the United States. Nor would it be necessary were it not for the interests of the global hegemon. It is supported, moreover, by the entire West, which, in parallel and with its characteristic obscene self-satisfaction, sanctions Russia for waging war. Second, the war in Iran, where the U.S. not only bombs whatever it can (with breaks and in rotation with Israel), but also holds the entire global economy hostage, attempting in this way to protect its waning dominance. Literally all of us could soon face the catastrophe of famine because a few morons have dreamed up yet another conquest. Third, the U.S. is also actively waging war against Russia in Ukraine, and if anyone still believes today that this isn’t the case—that the Americans are merely upholding democratic values there and playing a “supporting” role—they must have practiced ignorance the way ascetics once practiced fasting.
And it is precisely this country that was not only allowed to participate in the tournament but has become its host. I’ll skip over the fact that it has just barred a decorated Somali referee from entering its territory, is making it difficult for fans and players from participating countries (e.g., Iran, Uzbekistan, Iraq) to obtain visas, and so on and so forth. And what? Nothing! Silence! No one has absolutely any problem with this. Not a single one of the record 48 national teams has decided to make even the slightest show of protest. Can you imagine what would happen if a similar tournament were to take place in Russia today? Exactly. So take this difference in reactions and consider it a measure (if a measure is enough) of the hypocrisy we live in.
Nor is this just any kind of hypocrisy, but hypocrisy tied to the special status of the U.S. in the collective imagination of our part of the world. After all, it is permeated by subliminally accepted and practiced American exceptionalism, which—as Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong argued in their book—is inseparable from the discourse of “American innocence.” Something that is a crime when committed by anyone else, when done by the U.S. tenfold, is merely an act of “help”. It is worth remembering that this “American innocence goes hand in hand with white racism, imperialism, capitalism, and the U.S. war machine.” 1 For it is meant to neutralize the experience of these events as subject to normal moral and even political judgment. The fantasy of American exceptionalism is thus a “double fantasy” that combines exceptionalism and innocence into a single coherent daydream.
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However, talking about hypocrisy today seems like posturing itself, much like individual confessions that constantly reproduce the same clichés and truisms. By exposing these inconsistencies, we are still, in a sense, propping up the imperialist architecture of the West’s claims to universalism through the back door. We hold it accountable only for its shortcomings.
Something has changed in our collective experience to the extent that pointing the finger at conformists has itself become conformist. One of the most astute observers and most consistent critics of the third industrial revolution, Günther Anders, wrote about this insightfully. According to him, we live in a world where there are no longer conformists in the traditional sense, and all that remains on the scene is… conformism. “However, in conformism, the figure of the conformist does not play a decisive role. The term ‘conformist’ in and of itself no longer captures the image of a world subjected to conformization, or at least the image of the ‘process of conformization.’ What does this mean? That it is now rare (and must be rare) for individuals to transform themselves into ‘conformists’ through their own decisions and actions,” 2 he wrote.
Condemning individual conformist attitudes or hypocrisy in an individual’s behavior makes sense when these are exceptions and depend precisely on character or individual decisions. But today’s world is based on elaborate systems of conformization, which have made hypocrisy a condition for any participation in it. A principle of socialization as such. It is no longer a decision or a character trait, but a point of access to the infrastructure of today’s world. An attempt to consistently avoid this practical and structural hypocrisy makes individual life so unbearable that it becomes, de facto, impossible.
As Anders shows, today’s conformism is governed by the laws of “social agnosticism.” This refers to a situation in which “people fulfilling specific social roles do not recognize one another in those roles. And indeed (…) they do not recognize their own roles, and thus themselves.” 3 Hosting the World Cup in the U.S. means creating a religious festival for agnostics. The only thing is that today’s agnostics profess their religion in a way that eludes the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious. Neither the biblical formula about sinners who “do not know what they do” nor the formula of cynical reason, as referenced by Slavoj Žižek—which recognizes in contemporary ideology the capacity to deceive people even though they essentially “know what they are doing”—applies here. Today, hypocrisy is rather a habit, a behavioral structure, a habitus—that is, something that, under the conditions defined by contemporary capitalism, is actually a natural way of experiencing the world. This habit is simply a matter of going with the flow of events, which allows one not to see them as a series of catastrophes.
In his analysis of conformism, Anders also notes that contemporary experience is an experience through negation. If we distinguish between two levels of experience—one related to pure affection, the other to the form of apperception, that is, conscious sensation — then we must conclude that “what we constantly experience (in the sense of ‘affection’) is not experienced by us (in the sense of ‘apperception’). The conditions of experience are not the objects of experience. (…) “The ‘scheme of compulsion’ has become a conditio sine qua non of life (…). Similarly: a pedestrian does not ‘experience’ the fact of gravity; and certainly not as a specific, limiting means of compulsion.” 4 To keep these reflections relevant, one need only substitute hypocrisy for gravity. And note that football, as a media phenomenon, is one of the most intense ways of organizing this unifying non-experience. Instead of the banality of evil, what we have here is the banality of the even.
Our social gravity, however, requires further clarification, for it is by no means the case that this pull does not draw us in a specific direction. In the West, the condition for experience—and even for everyday social functioning—is absolute blindness to the criminal nature of American imperialism. This is because we live under its umbrella, and all our ideological, moral, and aesthetic reflexes are largely, if not entirely, produced by that imperialism. It is this American regime that teaches us politics and its language, provides entertainment, directs intellectual fashions, and introduces new moral “dilemmas” that it has already consumed itself. That is why there is no American crime (that is the crime of American Empire) that would not go unpunished.
To make it easier to solve this riddle—this secret, which is that there is no secret at all (as is the case with ideology)—American imperialists have even named the main AI system used to set targets in their military operations “Palantir.” And it still doesn’t help. The United States could rename Washington to Sauronville, and we would still visit it with the feeling that we are paying a visit to a city of elves.
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Please, do not treat this confession as proof of nonconformism. There is nothing more cliché than professional rebellion. Anders had already recognized this when he stated that the nonconformists of his time were, in essence, old-fashioned hypocrites. For they believed that their individual stance was detached from the overall conditions of social conformity. Reflective conformists—to cite yet another example—act no differently; they invariably play the “realists” in order to conceal their cynicism. I am referring to all those poor creatures from the planet “I prefer American imperialism. It is, after all, a democratic country.” It is as if to say in 1942 that “I prefer Nazism. At least you can listen to Wagner in peace.”
Instead of wasting energy on maintaining the illusion of nonconformism, it is better to think about practicing minimal ethics. You can start by setting limits on your own hypocrisy. Any limits at all. I know that even this kind of slight change in one’s own habits—especially for a cause other than one’s own self-development—is very difficult in an era of institutionalized compulsion to conform. But one can at least try and, in the process, feel how strong these invisible pressures, incentives, and admonitions are, by means of which we are kept in a state of sacred idiocy. One can practice this communally, preferably among groups just as seduced as we are.
Second strategy: overturning the hierarchy of conformism that surrounds us. Putin behind bars? By all means, but first Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, Trump, and that whole pack of degenerates whose legacy is stained with the blood of millions, yet who are still placed as if on the other side of the moral Rubicon. Let’s treat first things first and then deal with the rest. Perhaps along the way we’ll manage to build a political community purified enough of its own hypocrisy that its claims to judge anyone won’t sound quite so absurd.
This minimalist ethics is, of course, merely a modest substitute for authentic change, hastily constructed in times of the teleological suspension of politics. For Søren Kierkegaard, the concept of the “teleological suspension of ethics” meant setting aside universal moral principles in favor of total submission to a direct relationship with God. Even then, and perhaps especially then, when He expects behaviors that seem immoral (remember Isaac?). Today’s world is largely a theological suspension of politics, which has become the permanent subordination of all former political values to capitalist mechanisms of accumulation. A minimal ethic is necessary for survival in this world of universal neutralization, but only while awaiting the moment when authentic politics returns to these wretched lands and begins to transform this system.
In a situation where politics and ethics are teleologically suspended, setting the limits of one’s own conformity and overturning the hierarchy of the hypocrisy surrounding us is, in fact, a gradual, local, and likely slow process of suspending this suspension. Perhaps this is the path to the World Cup in something else than mendacity.
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