Must We Slaves to Our Footballing Passions?
On 16 December 2023 the Marxist philosopher and militant Antonio Negri passed from this world. As someone who has been inspired by his work and ideas – particularly his ongoing emphasis never accepting defeat, always looking for new spaces and routes of class struggle – this really affected me. In the English speaking world he has always been the most visible face from the autonomous movements from the 1960s and 1970s. There is always sadness when a comrade departs, even if they have lived a full and vibrant life, especially one filled with more than enough epic moments and drama to fill more than a few blockbuster movies. For this essay I do not want to respond to Negri’s passing and life more generally, as there have been many tributes to him, not to mention an academic cottage industry devoted to responding to his writing and ideas. Rather I want to reflect upon a much less aspect of Negri’s life, namely his relationship with football.
Negri was a lifelong supporter of AC Milan, so much so that he was one of the founders of the ultras group Brigate Rossonere. Formed in 1975 they managed to spread across Italy, and would collectively organize travel to away matches and funding of greater entry to matches. While that might seem surprising today, Tobias Jones in his book Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football explores how the early ultras groups tended to be associated with left wing politics. It is only later that the ultras scene became taken over by reactionary right wing politics and hooligan violence, only to then have those reactionary forces marginalized by the demands for greater safety and conditions more amenable to commercialized football. To describe this in autonomist politics terms, we could say that the ultras scene developed as a moment of political composition only to be decomposed by the forces of reaction, and then further by the commercialized demands of ‘modern football.’
In 1979 Negri and other militants were arrested in connection with the arrest and murder of the politician Aldo Moro. I’ve long wondered whether Negri later being accused of being the behind the scenes ‘wicked teacher’ and leader of the Red Brigades might have been at least partially formed in public consciousness, and particularly in the minds of the agents of the Italian state, because of his connection with the Brigate Rossonere. Probably not, but it makes you wonder. Negri denied any connection with the Red Brigades. Lacking any concrete forensic Negri was prosecuted based on his writings. A key passage used to claim that it showed Negri’s connection with the Red Brigades is a passage from his book Capitalist domination and working class sabotage (1977) where he declares that he immediately feels the warmth of proletarian community “every time I don the ski mask.” The assumption being that this is a declaration of a support for armed forms of expropriation and violence. But what if the mask is being donned not to engage in forms of armed political violence, but rather to join his comrades in the stadium’s south curva? Surely there is more proletarian community in the assembled community of football supporters than there is in the isolating actions of an armed vanguard?
It might seem that I’m stretching the point, and perhaps so, but with good reasons. Negri has stated that his footballing passions were the same as his political commitments. As a Marxist militant he wants to share in the joy of making revolution just as he wants to rejoice in the moments of sporting victory. This is politics and sports as far from separate but rather deeply entwined in each other. For Negri this is important through how sports come to operate as a space for realizing and engaging with intense passions, much as in the same way as dramatic arts. But Negri takes this further, not just using this as a metaphoric framing from the stands, but to claim that catenaccio, the style of defensive football developed in the 1960s, was shaped by the conditions of class struggle at the time. This kind of perspective is not unique to Negri but can also be seen elsewhere during those times, such as how someone like Paolo Sollier went from working at a FIAT factory to being playing professional football, all the while remaining a communist and giving public support to ultra-leftist campaigns and actions.
It can be quite exciting to see how moments of footballing glory could be connected to, or even be part of an emergent revolutionary class politics. There’s something intoxicating about those moments. But the deep-seated intermingling of sports and politics means also paying attention to the ways that they can operate as forms of political decomposition, undercutting our collective energies and struggles. What better illustration could there be for such ambivalence then the moment of Italy’s 1982 World Cup victory that led Negri and other militants, who were in jail at the time, to embrace the prison guards in a moment of a joy shared despite their very real condition of being inmates?
Less dramatically you could find something similar in history of AC Milan itself. Historically AC Milan’s fans tended to track leftwards politically, with Inter Milan fans being more on the right. This became much more muddled, not surprisingly, after Berlusconi became the owner of AC Milan, finding ways to turn his positions of media and cultural power into political power. When asked about this apparent contradiction, or least tension, Negri’s response was that was precisely why he could not leave: he was a slave to his passions. His connection with AC Milan came to him, as it does for many, from his father, and was likewise passed on to his children. I can certainly understand that. But when I’m left confused by is how Negri then proceeds to argue that it “is not necessary to take the economic organization of the club very seriously.”
This is the moment where I must speak ill of the recently departed, although hopefully briefly. When he says this Negri is being an idiot. Of course the economic organization of football clubs is important and should be taken seriously precisely because of our passionate attachments to the moments of joy and community that they create. Across his writing Negri is at his absolute best when he is theorizing what he calls autovalorization, or the self-expanding circuits of political composition and class struggle. These are moments and processes of great creativity. This is exactly what can be found in the development of footballing fan cultures. The warmth and humor of these assembled crowds can be immense. What is the footballing crowd if not a space for the potential development and emergence of what Negri and others call the multitude? The problem is when these moments of passion and joy are connected to, literally underpinned and profited from, by reactionary forces? That applies to situations from to a figure like Berlusconi turning AC Milan into a vehicle for his political ambitions to the City Footballing Group and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Group using football for sportswashing.
What would happen if we were able to turn the passion and creativity of the footballing multitudes not into another pointless online flame wars about tactics or the superiority of particular teams and players, but rather as fuel for creating new forms of economics democracy and self-government? If we must be passionate slaves, why can we not turn that servitude into part of building a better world? CLR James told us that every cook can govern, and it would not be a stretch to make a similar point about football players and fans. The question is turning our sporting voluntary servitude into the basis of new forms of community and commons rather than communities that are constantly harvested and exploited by the whims of multinational capital and sportswashing overlords.
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