On February 16, the professional U.$. hockey league called "National Hockey League" (NHL) announced the cancellation of the season. The players and owners could not agree on salary caps per team, with players wanting $49 million per team and owners wanting it to be $6.5 million less.
Even on NBC television, the disgruntled fans led the announcer to point out how "big business" has made itself unpopular in this context. Fans spoke on TV about how they wanted the game played for its own sake.
MIM refers to this conflict as one of leisure-time dynamics. Although salaries make it possible to have professional sports, the public somehow still wants in the back of its mind that sports have intrinsic value, apart from money.
Sports for their own sake and sex for its own sake are similar agenda items when it comes to capitalism. In fact, with the existence of capitalism it is not possible to know when people have sex for its own sake and it is not possible to know who would be the champions in sports without the influence of having to entertain for money. As the professional basketball player Dennis Rodman explained, even he does not believe the NBA is about who is the best player or team. Instead it's about who the owners believe they should promote because of their capability to sell tickets and boost TV ratings.
In this particular conflict over hockey, the fans with a refined sense of leisure time gain some insight into the fight against capitalism. They realize that capitalism is destroying something they value external to money.
In most circumstances, people with a refined sense of leisure are contributing to capitalism's stability. We call these people "gender aristocracy." People who might otherwise be discontented find themselves entertained into apathy. Statistics on newspaper readership and TV viewing make it clear that such people are increasingly important while "hard news" reporting by MIM or the New York Times is less and less important in the majority-exploiter countries.
Another interesting point about the hockey season cancellation (and at the very least, the NHL has missed most of its season to negotiations thus far) is the salaries of the players, who average $1.8 million a year in salary. There are many foolish or deceptive "Marxists" who say that income does not matter and that hockey players are "proletariat," because they receive a paycheck and do not own the stadiums.
In contrast, genuine Marxists believe that income derives from access to the means of production. High income generally comes from access to the means of production. In this case, high income is so high it is access to the means of production itself. $1.8 million is not the means of subsistence. It is an amount to save in the form of access to the means of production--stocks, bonds and savings accounts. The annual interest from $1.8 million in an account somewhere is sufficient to live on-- proof that the average hockey player is not just petty-bourgeois but outright bourgeois. What matters is not who owns the skating rink but the fact that players are partners to the TV rights-access to the means of production in general, not particular lockerrooms or gyms.
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http://www.940news.com/news.php?cat=9&id=n0216110A