Back to Basics: Class, Social Theory, and Sport

Abstract

It is relatively easy to understand why Marxism has been increasingly discredited in recent years both in the sociology of sport and in the social sciences more generally. Guilty by association with the failed attempts to construct communist societies, it has also come under attack from a variety of sources for its economic reductionism and its perceived inability to think beyond class. Even those Marxists such as Gramsci, who are invoked within the sociology of sport by exponents of cultural studies, are lauded not for their Marxism per se but rather for their (mistakenly inferred) willingness to play down the significance of political economy. This essay argues, however, that much has been lost as a result of the retreat from Marxism, and specifically, the abandonment of the belief in the ultimate determinacy of the economic realm and the importance of social class. This is not meant to imply that other sources of identity, together with the various forms of discrimination suffered by a host of different social groups, do not matter or that their materiality cannot be linked effectively to class-based analysis. One might argue, however, that the interests of those groups have been better served in recent years by academic sociologists than have the interests of the poor. With that in mind, the time has come, perhaps, for Marxist sociologists of sport to offer fewer apologies and to replace these with a more robust defense of the subtleties of historical materialism as properly understood. At the very least this means reviving the argument that our identities can best be understood in terms of economics.