Brazil: Workers Struggle Trumps Sports Spectacle

Click here to access article by James Petras from VoltaireNet.

For decades social critics have bemoaned the influence of sports and entertainment spectacles in ‘distracting’ workers from struggling for their class interests. According to these analysts, ‘class consciousness’ was replaced by ‘mass’ consciousness. They argued that atomized individuals, manipulated by the mass media, were converted into passive consumers who identified with millionaire sports heroes, soap opera protagonists and film celebrities.

The culmination of this ‘mystification’ —mass distraction— were the ‘world championships’ watched by billions around the world and sponsored and financed by billionaire corporations....

Today, Brazil is the living refutation of this line of cultural-political analysis. Brazilians have been described as ‘football crazy’. Its teams have won the most number of World Cups. Its players are coveted by the owners of the most important teams in Europe. Its fans are said to “live and die with football” . . . Or so we are told.

Yet it is in Brazil where the biggest protests in the history of the World Cup have taken place.
[my emphasis]

More details on the events related to the World Cup in Brazil are supplied by an activist from India in an article entitled "A spectre on the World Cup".