A sign placed above Olympic Park in Brazil reads, “The Olympics Bring So Much More Than Just the Olympics.” For the international working class, that slogan carries a lethal meaning. The media hype for the Olympics hides the Games’ vicious anti-worker reality. Behind the surface appearance of internationalism, beyond the flags and costumes and music, lies a relentless promotion of nationalism—the capitalists’ essential tool to keep workers loyal to “their” nation and “their” bosses.
Rulers worldwide, and especially rival bosses in the U.S., Russia and China, need intensified nationalism to prepare the working class for wider war. The real winner of the 2016 Olympics is imperialism; these Games are another step toward devastation for the working class. Workers in Brazil have already experienced this terror firsthand—and are fighting back.
Sport and Racism
Every four years, workers in host cities are sold the lie that the Olympics will develop the local economy and create jobs. The reality is something else: more racist police murders, more forced evictions, ever-worsening conditions for Rio’s working class.
According to a report by the World Cup and Olympics Popular Committee of Rio de Janeiro, racist killings by police and mass incarcerations in Rio have increased sharply in years with large sporting events: the 2007 Pan American Games, the 2014 World Cup, the run-up to the 2016 Olympics. Over the 12 months ending this May, killings by police in Rio were up 135 percent. Black workers make up 52 percent of Rio’s population, but represent 77 percent of those killed by police (Human Rights Watch, 7/7). In total, Rio police have killed more than 8,000 people in the past decade.
Under the guise of fighting drug trafficking, there is now a permanent military police presence in many favelas, (Rio’s working-class neighborhoods.) More than 85,000 security forces patrol the streets.
Like the police murders of Black youth in the U.S., the mass murder of Black workers in Rio is the most open expression of Olympic terror. For the most part it occurred under the so-called “Workers’” Party government of the recently deposed, China-leaning Dilma Rousseff (see CHALLENGE, 4/20). With the installation of the pro-U.S. faction of Brazilian capitalists, open racism figures only to get worse. According to the Huffington Post (8/3), “the Olympics opening ceremony may have already won a gold medal for bad taste”—that is, racism. Only mounting pressure forced the organizers to cut a skit “in which Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen appears to be robbed by a black boy.”
Sponsors of Imperialist War
Top U.S. capitalist institutions are invested to make these Games go smoothly and reflect well upon their friends in the Brazilian ruling class. Among the biggest sponsors of the Rio Olympics is Dow Chemical, one the world’s leading merchants of war. During World War I, Dow produced the tear gas still used by cops today. After World War II, the company perfected Napalm, a sticky, flammable jelly; between 1963 and 1973, U.S. imperialism dropped 388,000 tons of it on workers and peasants in Vietnam. Dow Chemical’s board of directors includes the president and CEO of U.S. Bank, a main-wing, finance capital institution that maintains racist neighborhood segregation in cities like Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Philando Castile was murdered by racist police in July. PL’ers, education workers, and youth marched on the U.S. Bank for its role in financing and profiting from segregation and racist police terror (see CHALLENGE, 8/10).
Another key sponsor is aerospace company Boeing, a U.S. military source of fighter jets, drones and nuclear missiles. These warmakers are invested in helping the U.S. bosses enlist the regional imperialist bosses of Brazil against Russian and Chinese imperialism (see page 2). In 2013, Rousseff had snubbed Boeing from winning a $4.5 billion contract for new fighter jets, blaming the company’s unwillingness to share technology with Brazil’s military (Bloomberg, 12/19/13). Boeing’s concerns likely stemmed from a Rousseff visit to Russia where she and President Vladimir Putin signed “breakthrough” agreements on sharing “research, development and production” of military technology (Pravda, 5/2/13).
Eviction and Fightback
While Brazil will spend nearly $20 billion on the Olympics, the country is currently in the midst of its worst recession since the 1930s. Of Rio’s 6.3 million residents, 1.4 million live in poverty-ridden favelas. Gentrification in some “pacified” favelas has driven up real estate values and priced residents out. Mass evictions and forced relocations have displaced more than 77,000 people, bringing Rio’s homeless population to over 800,000.
But workers have fought back, often with women taking the lead. For years, residents of the Vila Autodromo community have resisted evictions and home demolitions related to nearby Olympic Park construction. In 2014, thousands of Olympic Village construction workers clashed with security forces over benefits and working conditions. Public prosecutors found that workers were living in conditions so squalid—with rats, cockroaches, and open sewage—that they were comparable to slavery (Reuters, 8/15/15).
Last year, residents fought off police-led evictions by pelting the cops with rocks. This year, workers repeatedly charged lines of police around the Olympic torch-bearers, attempting to extinguish the flame in protest. Days before the Games were set to begin, customs officials and dockworkers began a work slowdown. Workers were protesting wage increases promised by the misleader Rousseff but never delivered.
The bosses’ media mostly ignores the workers and youth of Brazil fighting in the streets, focusing instead on the Games. They have hyped the Russian scandal around performance-enhancing drugs, conveniently overlooking the long and sordid history of U.S. doping at the Olympics (New York Times, 8/4). Workers have no stake in siding with any nation’s Olympic team, just as they have no side in the inter-imperialist rivalries mirrored by the Games.
Communist Sports: Solidarity First, Competition Second
Under capitalism, cheating and drugs reflect a drive to “win at all costs.” But this reactionary outlook is a win for the bosses and a disaster for our class. Before every major imperialist world war, the capitalists set the stage by intensifying nationalism, racism, and sexism—anti-worker ideologies promoted by the Olympic Games. So when the U.S. bosses’ media cheer that this Olympics is “resurrecting a Cold War rivalry” (CNN, 8/8) between the U.S. and Russia, it’s the task of communists in Progressive Labor Party to learn from militant workers in Brazil and fight that much harder for internationalism.
PLP is organizing in more than two dozen countries for communism, drawing inspiration from the first workers’ states like the Soviet Union. Soviet workers fought the “win at all costs” mentality by building free gymnasiums while cultivating a physical culture of health and wellness. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, leftist workers and students encouraged mass participation in sports under the slogan, “Friendship first, competition second.” They emphasized the fundamental unity of the working class over the temporary rivalry of competition. Communists fight for a world where all workers can reach their full potential.
Workers have no nation. We have one class, the international working class. We have one flag—the red flag. The capitalist bosses hope that every worker waving a national flag is a potential soldier for imperialist war. PL’ers and friends must respond to this nationalist hysteria by selling CHALLENGE and using it to organize for multiracial unity, internationalism and communist revolution. That’s the spirit of communism, where “winning” for the working class means seizing state power and building a communist world!