Anti-Revolutionary Wear!

This design has been around for a bit, but I'm just now getting around to it.  Or at least, I'm just getting around to admitting that I (sometimes/maybe/often) have this problem...

I hear you naysayers...soccer shouldn't concern me as an "opiate of the masses"!  You'll bemoan the dozens and dozens of amateur/professional soccer clubs founded by employers looking to keep workers occupied or more pointedly, away from radical thoughts or activities.  Shoot, even I enjoy sharing this tidbit about the foundation of Thames Ironworks F.C. - later to become West Ham United - when I'm talking to people about the club I support.

"Hills, who had been involved in a bitter industrial dispute with his employees that year, thought that the formation of a football club might help improve the mood of his workforce. On 29th June, 1895, Hills announced in his newspaper, the Thames Ironworks Gazette, that he intended to establish a football club. The information appeared under the headline: "The importance of co-operation between workers and management". He referred to the dispute that had just taken place and insisted he wanted to "wipe away the bitterness left by the recent strike". Hills added: "Thank God this midsummer madness is passed and gone; inequities and anomalies have been done away with and now, under the Good Fellowship system and Profit Sharing Scheme, every worker knows that his individual and social rights are absolutely secured.""

Forget about your grievances you shipbuilding mob - kick around a ball and get cozy with Chairman Hills!  After all, he swears your social rights are now "absolutely secured!"  Look at these workers from the first Thames Ironworks club below - do they look fooled?

No, dear readers.  I'll don this shirt at a organizing meeting, or while taking part in a workplace action.  For I take more stock in this idea, as eloquently shared by Gabriel Kuhn in his book Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics:

"The instrumentalization of football has little to do with the game itself.  The powerful instrumentalize everything, including sports, arts, and consumer culture. An "opiate of the masses" is not dependent on football; if football disappears, another opiate will be found. In other words, the solution is not to fight football but to fight a power structure that relies on mass control and distraction."

Gabriel Kuhn's book is available through PM Press here.