ABSTRACT
There exists a diversity of left wing sentiment amongst football supporters, embracing impulses toward politics such as anti-fascism, anti-commercialization, anti-sectarianism or anti-consumerism. The major social scars or social fault lines of each society also influence the diversity of such left wing sentiment: how they interrelate, how they make for novel, loose alliances (anti-sectarianism and anti-fascism, for example) and, indeed, their contradictory outcomes. This very degree of diversity between ostensibly left wing supporter affiliations perhaps begs the question of whether the unity implicit to the term ‘left wing’ has any validity at all; whether this unity amounts to anything more substantial that an elective affinity between different fan movements that are eclectic, unstable and fragile, liable to crumble at any given time. This study argues that there is a more substantial unity in this diversity and that it can be revealed through a Marxist analysis of the political economy of football. An understanding of the essential politics of football supporters will be seen to be predicated on an understanding of the peculiarities of the football industry, which runs to a different rhythm to the ‘logic’ of capitalist production. Making this argument, however, necessitates that, in the first instance, a
review of traditional approaches taken by Marxism towards the football industry must be undertaken. This review concludes that such traditional approaches – based on a static understanding of capitalist relations of production – must be rejected.
