Boxing and moral judgments
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“It’s the capitaalist equivalent of the Roman arena.”
That’s a bit like thinking that everyone who plays the guitar is Elvis. Most boxing takes place in small clubs.
Poor analogy. It’s no better because it takes place in small clubs. Elvis wasn’t much of a guitarist anyway.
In fact, not all gladiatorial contests were big arena events. The word “sport” was coined in the time of Claudius and referred to unplanned and spontaneous fights on a small scale.
Gladiatorial fights were originally funereal and continued to be part of the funeral rites of senators and VIPs during Roman times, until finally abolished by the more sensitive, cruelty-hating people known as the Vandals.So, no contact sports allowed in socialism? No motor racing coz it’s too dangerous? No martial arts or sumo? I could go on but you get my point. What’s a testosterone filled young man to do? – take up competitive knitting perhaps or tiddlywinks.
Fun fact. Robert Barltrop, of The Monument ‘fame’, was a boxer in his youth.
Link to the obligatory Socialist Standard article on boxing from yesteryear:
Ignoble art (1986)
“Link to the obligatory Socialist Standard article on boxing from yesteryear’
Note the difference in tone between this article and the short website front piece.
According to the blurb for his book on Jack London, Barltrop seems to have regarded himself as a re-incarnation of Jack London:
“Robert Barltrop has done many things. He has been a professional boxer and, at various times, a cartoonist, sign painter, labourer, schoolteacher, editor and, always, a writer.”
Barltrop is an Arthur Cravan-type figure. Arthur Cravan (Fabian Lloyd) was Oscar Wilde’s nephew, born in 1887 and disappeared in 1918 off Mexico (pursued by the British and US authorities as a flamboyant conscientious objector).
Like Barltrop, Cravan “did everything”, saying “I am all things” and refusing to give any one occupation when asked.
He defiantly promoted his uncle Oscar and wrote a preface for “The Soul of Man under Socialism”, a preface very rare and hard to obtain.
Friends with Jack Johnson the boxer (also on the run), the two made off with the purse from their 1916 staged boxing match in Barcelona. Cravan boarded a ship of men fleeing the war to New York, which also had Trotsky on board, with whom he had a fist fight.
When the US entered the war he joined other “slackers” in Mexico.Cravan had become Middleweight Champion of France by the fact no other contenders showed up. A very grainy and very short clip of him boxing in Barcelona can be seen on Youtube. Cravan could have been murdered by Allied authorities. There is even a theory he was the mysterious gringo who turned up during the filming of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and then walked off again into the desert.
Incidentally, “google” Robert Barltrop and a photo of Jack London pops up.
” So, no contact sports allowed in socialism?”
That’s not what is being said. Anything in which both parties are consenting is up to the consenting parties.
Boxing disappeared for centuries. Its reintroduction in late 17th century England is bound up with the birth of nationalism, as a recent biography of Daniel Mendoza shows.
Without nationalism and without money, who knows what there will be by way of consenting mutual battery?
Mating rituals in the animal kingdom involve individual males fighting prior to sexual coupling with females. Also among human natives of Java, where young men box with sharp reeds tied to their knuckles while watched by the young women of the village.
This dynamic has been exploited by boxing in the movies and by modern symbolism such as ring girls (who so annoy feminists) but whose role recognises the sexuality linking boxing to fertility rituals.
In the Middle Ages Christianity, being averse to sexuality, suppressed expressions of the sexual in all art. But unspoken rituals continued, with wrestling among peasants and, for the nobility, who could afford it, shows of armed violence in which knights would fight with swords and lances to win the favour of their chosen ladies.
Activities of all kinds are bound up with the society that produces them.
As industrialism intensified during the 18th and 19th centuries, so 18th century boxing was replaced with the much more lethal gloved boxing of today, with its strict timekeeping, the bell emulating the factory whistle demanding attention on the part of contestants and spectators. The downed fighter has ten seconds in which to rise and take more blows. No more can he rest when he chooses, swig a pint and return to the fight in his own time (which is why the old prizefights often lasted much longer, which shocks us today whose shorter timed fights are so much more lethal.Cravan boarded a ship of men fleeing the war to New York, which also had Trotsky on board, with whom he had a fist fight.
That’s interesting? What was the fight about and who won?
It was just a playabout. Had it been real, Trotsky wouldn’t have lasted a second. Cravan was what is known as a Man-Mountain.
The two corresponded afterwards until Cravan’s disappearance. He had married the poet Mina Loy and their daughter Fabienne died recently in Paris having never met her father.
A body of a large blond man was found by the Rio Grande murdered, his features destroyed, but whether he was Cravan we don’t know.
I believe the Kerr edition of Soul of Man included his preface.
Of course, as long as both consent, some gentlemen suitors for a lady’s hand may choose a duel à la Mark Twain: machine-guns at ten paces, whilst the lady watches, munching an apple.
But then still we might conclude that society should intervene to stop it, based upon love being an illness, a temporary state of insanity, from which the two males should be protected for their own good.
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