The whole'Hog
Sir: For archivists of the contemporary bour- geois mind, Mr G. E. Hubbard's letter (2 May), with its dithering liberal uncertainty about who is being 'quite serious,' and Mr Paul de • Hevesy's (9 May), with its pride in the King's English, may well prove to be collecte,s items. They are, .I am afraid, characteristic of the general intellectual tardiness under late capitalism. Theirs are undialectical attempts to come to grips with the hard and tough- minded theses of the sociology of soccer, and their evasiveness is as unmuscular as unsport- ing. As Lenin used to point out, the masses have to vote with their feet! One must really make a better contest of it if the revolution isn't simply to stroll to its final triumph: Either funnier, gentlemen —or more ferocious. Humour has always been a saving grace of our ruling-classes. The choice is still theirs to laugh, or to face grimly the confrontation. What progressive purpose is served by repeating the hoary Etonian propo- sition that sports are like 'the playing field of life itself'? (Yes, and the referee is alwaN an agent of the monopolistic bosses!) Such sentiments can only confirm Marx—and Marcuse—in their scientific analyses. A long time ago Eduard Bernstein, the ally of `the renegade Kautsky,' made a similar effort to discredit Marx by suggesting that in all the years Marx had lived in England the 'old mole. had never learned to appreciate the devotio' the English proletariat to—sports! So began Bernstein's revisionism, and all SPECTATOR readers surely know what that led to! (Look at Czechoslovakia, remember Vietnam, and don't forget Mayor Daley.)
What can we (`Marcuse, Lasky') do—Mr Hubbard asks in a typical outburst of the ideological despair'which marks what Caudwell called `a dying culture'—to change the empti- ness of people's lives, to change the `drab week' which he mistakenly thinks of as 'inevitable, unavoidable'? What must be done is on the historical agenda of the day. Change the system! This will provide an authentic out- let for the human enthusiasm now so traduced on a thousand pitches, for it will only be Saturday's `excitement and variation' writ large. Dialectics are our arsenal, and revolution is the spur.
25 Haymarket, London SW1 Melvin 1. Lasky
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