Icewind Dale said:
I don't pretend to be an expert on Marxism or the Soviet Union, but my original post referred to the cold war, not Marxism. I know know, however, that Soviet communism is a complete and utter bastardization of what Marx pictured. The players indeed represent freedom and capitalism. They're fighting for their right to earn money in a free market that allows access to pursue capital. The owners are, afterall, trying to limit the amount of money players can make while, at the same time, exploiting the workers (in this case, the players) to make as much capital for themselves as possible.
I'm not exactly sure how you come to your conclusion. it's slightly off, I would say.
The players simply can't represent capitalism. Not possible. They have no capital invested in the league. The league drafts a player and incurs not only a loss of capital through salary investment, but the investment of a draft choice and the time and expertise that the league must acquire through spending capital in the form of time, material and expertise to develop the player who they can only hope will mature and eventually produce more capital for the owners in the form of paying customers. If the player doesn't work out, the capital is lost. So in this model, the capital risk is the owners, not the players. All the player brings to the table is his labor, or the sweat off his brow so to speak. Communism or socialism values the workers investment in manual labor to be of equal or greater value than that of the capitalist, who does not toil. You could say that in a free market economy the player is selling his labor to the highest bidder, which could be loosely defined as inherently capitalist, but that has nothing to do with either socialism or communism. I recommend
The Theory and Practice of Communism, by R. N. Carew Hunt, penguin, 1950. The cold war analogy doesn't work for me either. Communism ultimately collapsed in the Soviet Union because a goverment run economy simply can't provide the incentives required to create capital wealth, because no one gets rich. Without wealth there isn't the capital to create things like hockey leagues and the kind of industry that begets even more wealth and industry. If anything, the players are, again , like those self same communists, who, having their material needs taken care of, lack the incentive to perform at a high enough level that their labor creates more wealth for anyone accepting themselves. For capitalism to work, their labor must reward the capitalist by returning to him his investment, but must earn more for the capitalist than his intitial investment, thereby creating more capital for the capitalist to acquire more and better players. Without that excess capital creation, the value of their labor decreases. And that, my friend, brings us back to the current situation, where the capitalists are asking themselves, why they should expend precious capital on an over valued labor pool that is not producing benefits in sufficient amounts to sustain the endeavor. Another good book to read is Arthur Schlesinger Jr's
Crisis of the Old Order, Mariner Books.
-HckyFght.
P.S. Don't thank me, just send money.
