Carl Packman: the dodgy capitalism of the Olympics

Carl Packman deconstructs where the Olympics are going and why we should have considered human dignity a vital part of the Olympic legacy.

 

We good people most fondly remember the Mexico City Olympics of 1968 for the sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the black athletes who took home the gold and bronze medals in the men’s 200-meter race.

It was they who stood upon the podium, ready for the medal ceremony, wearing black socks, no shoes, civil rights badges and a raised clenched fist.

In that same year student riots threatened those Olympic games. It was the opinion of the most miltant groupings that the world looking in on Mexico oughtn’t be a priority. “No queremos Olimpiadas, queremos revolución” (We do not want Olympic Games, we want a revolution) was the slogan.

One extremist group known as Caos called for the sabotage of the Olympics and of “the society of spectacular consumption”. Today these two things are fused – Olympics and consumer spectacle are inseperable, and much of London has had to learn this the hard way.

As The Economist recently pointed out, the Roman Emperor Theodosius called for all further Olympic games to be banned on the grounds of their inherent paganism. “Some Britons”, the leader article notes, “are beginning to think he was of sound views.”

Britons, they suggest, “resent paying for the games and dread the traffic jams”. The expense is horrendous. All Olympic games since the 1960s have overspent, and the average overspend is 179%. But wait for it: the “budget for the games went up from an original estimate of £2.4 million in 2005 to £9.3 billion now.”

To look at the cost, however, is only one aspect of why the Olympic grand project went pear-shaped. I suggest there are four further reasons to think the games have been a grave mess:

 

1) It is doing nothing for East End communities

There are so many reasons to think Ken Livingstone should have remained the politician he once was, and not morph into a cynical old shadow of his former self, replete with flaws. The opinion on the Olympic games is one more case in point. When Horace Cutler, the Tory leader of the Greater London Council, speculated that the 1988 Olympic games should be entered through from Lower Lea, Ken called it a “gimmick” and a “fantasy”. A right-wing fantasy at that.

That all changed by the time 2008 came along when Livingstone was convinced that the whole thing could be a way of getting well-needed funds to East London and the Thames Gateway. The sports, for him, were a side-project. But whether he was being optimistic about his own plans, we’ll never know, losing the last election to Boris Johnson who defeated Ken in his last bid for his old job.

I get the feeling Ken was probably right when he called the benefits of the project to the people in the area a fantasy. The municipal housing schemes are not going to happen, instead Mayor Johnson favours part-buy part-rent, which will see tenants moving in and out all of the time, with the notion of community collapsed.

Owen Hatherley put it:

“The new developments in Stratford High Street, ten or so multicoloured buy-to-let towers, called things like “Icona” and “Aurora”, all designed by the corporate architects Stock Woolstonecroft, are gated and guarded against the impoverished area of London into which they were inserted.”

 

A colonisation by any other name.

Neil Fraser, author of the book Over the Border, the Other East End, has it right when he says change, and the idea of change, has been continual for a long time in this restless land by the Lea, but the whole point of the Lea Valley Regional Park Act was to preserve a land stretching between the Thames and the M25 for the recreation of the people of London. “A playground for Londoners against the background of London”.

Right now the area could not be further from this principle, instead dividing communities (Iain Sinclair reminds us about the long-established businesses closing down, travellers expelled from edgeland settlements, allotment holders turned out etc.) and pissing away the only possible benefit to it as it stands: the reallocation of funds towards a needed regeneration that was to boon everyone there.

It is worth, also, reminding ourselves of something that Arnau Oriol said, about his experience as a walker around the area:

“Since I started photographing the area many paths have been closed. I used to ride on my bike along a path down to the canal, and suddenly, there are places where you can’t walk freely anymore. Temporary colourful signs spread everywhere and wooden walls and electrified fences are erected. The common pedestrian feels isolated from this whole development show. The security is huge. I have been stopped many times or asked about what I was doing when wandering ‘suspiciously’ around.”

 

2) It is turning that bit of the East End in to a creepy state of exception

Demolish. Dig. Design. This was how the Olympic Delivery Authority described its milestones back in 2008. But they perhaps could have justifibly included Devious and Dodgy to the mix. Not content with turning the area, formerly a place that could accommodate for peaceful walks and bike rides along the canal, into an area of security paranoia, but also one with imposed blackout spots.

Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, in his essay Photography against the Olympic spectacle, where he used the expression blackout spots, says the area of Newham has since been used solely to reflect an intensive production of official imagery, diligently enforced by the police. “To this end”, he says, “the creation of an ‘Olympic state of exception’ … has become a defining feature of the Olympic mega-event”.

Certainly security for the games must be taken into consideration, but who could have foreseen the “long shadows of surface to air missiles over Tower Hamlets” and “warships moored along the Thames.” Drones that pass over shopping consumer arcades is a reality for the next few weeks, to be sure, though it has also been incorporated into the post-Olympic planning for the redevelopment of Stratford afterwards as well.

With typical bombast, Will Self described Westfield as “a temple to moribund consumerism …  a Hitlerian mass of post-pomo nonsense.” Although someone must see the worth in advantaging it with the biggest deployment of security the country has seen, possibly since the last world war. It’s being the design for the future of the area evidences nothing short of the oversecuritsation of the communal place, not too disimilar from the “shouting CCTV” which could be found in the London Borough of Camden.

When I spoke to Philip Kane, a member of the London Surrealist Group (who have for a long time opposed the Olympic games in London), he described this “corporate circus” as “the increasingly shrill demand that we should consume more, and consume faster; all wrapped up in glossy nationalism [inherent to which are] the destructive requirements of capitalism and miserablism.”

This is all being imposed among backdrops of a carefully protected official imagery – big brother and the coloured rings.

 

3) It is being done for the preservation of consumerism and the commodification of the sporting development of man, not of human dignity

As Nick Cohen described recently in his blog post about the games, it was the Olympics that won Britain, not the other way around. This describes the way in which the organising committee has coerced the British government in its creepy demands, what Cohen calls common nouns as private property.

The government has told courts they ought to take especial account of anyone other than officials using words from what’s called ‘List A’ — ‘Games’; ‘Two Thousand and Twelve’; ‘2012’; ‘twenty twelve’ together with words from ‘List B’ — ‘Gold’; ‘Silver’; ‘Bronze’; ‘London’; ‘medals’; ‘sponsors’; ‘summer’.

Furthermore, says Cohen, the state has granted powers to the police to “remove and destroy” anything infringing the exlcusive deals of the multi-million-dollar sponsors. This is the bottom line of the games itself, and what occupies so much of the work around it – the protection of these deals irrelevant to most people.

It was in the spirit of looking at this dubiousness that Mark Perryman, author of the book Why The Olympics Aren’t Good For Us, And How They Can Be, re-imagined the five rings of the Olympic symbol. One of those rings represented sport as a value, not a commodity.

In fact, nothing does down the hard work and training of athletes, sports men and women, than faceless corporations sucking anything they can from them, under the banner of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity – the second in the Fundamental Principles of Olympism.

Another of Perryman’s new symbols represent sport for all, and sport for free. On this, he reminds us of the true spirit of sport, through a personal recollection, and reminds us that all is not lost (in spite of the Olympics):

“I can see myself as part of a popular movement of people who enjoy sport purely for fun and therefore are the antithesis of all that the Olympics has come to represent. I run free, for free. No rules, no sponsors, no entry fee, no national pride, nobody’s stopwatch to calibrate the results except my own. I run because I can.”

 

4) It is an enabler of dodgy capitalism, and we hate that

To top this all off, the International Olympic Committee stands for everything we in the UK stand against. A report by One World Trust considered it to be the “least accountable, least transparent, least democratic of all the transnational organisations it looked at”. Considered against the creepiness, the consumerism and the neglect for community, it’s any wonder we in this country willingly allowed such a shady organisation to influence so much of London’s everyday life – unless of course this kind of capitalism is in fact typical of Britain’s. But surely that couldn’t be?

So can we have an Olympic games that doesn’t fall foul of all of these terrible things? As has been discussed we can enjoy sport, and in fact there is more sport to enjoy when all the airwaves we use to watch the games (at least the large majority of us who couldn’t get or afford tickets) aren’t clogged up with the plastic tat of the official sponsors. Sports fans like sports, and conglomerates pretend to like sports to ensure that sports fans consume their stuff. What of this is sporting exactly? I would contend that the Olympics is a perversion of the true enjoyment of sport – as pure and free as it has been expressed by Mark Perryman above.

Otherwise we could take the advice of the Surrealists whose plan it is to repatriate the games to Greece forever, “accompanied by the Parthenon marbles and placed at the disposal of all those resisting austerity on the streets, to be broken up into small chunks and hurled at the Troika.”