I started watching football after some trauma and it's a good opiate. In godforsaken England, it's the real opiate of the masses. I still watch the EPL through pirate South African TV from Sri Lanka, and I'm struck by how many other opiates are advertised along with. Liquor, gambling, and fast food, marketed on a loop like the football game, everybody running in circles between hits. It's dopamine for dopes, and I was among them.

I say ‘was’ because I stopped watching football for Ramadan. Not that it's haram (and I'm a Buddhist anyways), but I have to wake up at 5 AM and can't stay up that late. In many ways, it feels like I have woken up through this. I'm not saying football is bad, life is hard, I get it, football is an escape. But it's not a way out, it's a holding pen. Especially if you look at the company football keeps, it's all rather evil. Like the civilization it springs from.

The easiest way to see this is to just look at it. Football literally wears its heart on its sleeve, via sponsors. Ted Reese made (or shared) an infographic of football jersey sponsors, and it's all gambling, financiers, and fossil fuels now. The shirts and signboards now visibly say GAMBLE GAMBLE GAMBLE, as the players gambol around. And the ads say GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE, holy cows and alcohol. I used to ignore all of this watching balls bounce around, rather than deal with what's inside my skull, but now that I'm trying to be more conscious I can see the sheer apostasy of it all. Sport offers religious ecstasy without the religion. Conquest without any consequence. Community as a commodity. Goals without getting anywhere. Achievements that just reset and start over. If Buddha broke the wheel, football is the wheel. Suffering as spectacle.

This isn't Reese's point, who is not so esoteric. Reese's point is comparing football jerseys to the jerseys of yore, when they used to advertise actual companies that made actual things, not fakes and frauds. Reese said, “A lot of replies asking what this has to do with capitalism. In short: Profit = growth = devaluation. Capital's profitability therefore becomes increasingly dependent on bleeding the public dry through taxes, rents, fines, etc.” Reese's point is, “The decaying nature of capitalism illustrated by Premier League football shirt sponsors.”

Indeed you can see that sponsors went from companies that made things or fed people to bookies, banker-wankers, and genocidal petro-states (SELA is Saudi tourism and Etihad and Emirates are UAE). The only company that makes anything real now is Snapdragon (processors) and Ed Sheeran, who at least makes people feel something. Reese connects this all to his declining rate of profit thesis, and laughed that “10 years of painstaking theorising, writing and agitation and this is what finally makes an impact.”

You can see this on charts as much as you want, or you can see it on shirts. Companies that used to hold stock of physical goods are now ephemeral stocks held by other companies. It's easy to scorn sports gambling, but the whole stock market is just genteel gambling, and ultimately a Ponzi. There's little value being created anymore (certainly in England) so it has to be made up. On these football jerseys, you can really see the decline of western capitalism in action. Gambling preys on men, bankers prey on everybody, and fossil fuels consume the planet as we know it. You can see the descent of the western economy into almost pure rent-seeking from those seeking rent on football jerseys.

As Reese explains, the rate of profit declines (not controversial) and “Capital's profitability therefore becomes increasingly dependent on bleeding the public dry through taxes, rents, fines, etc.” Hence you get the economic rise of pure gambling, financial disservices, and outright scams like crypto. Again, you can see it on charts or you can see it on shirts, it's the same phenomenon. As the rate of profit declines and corporations become decreasingly productive and increasingly predatory, it makes sense to nationalize them. Rent-seeking is a drag on the economy, not driving it forward. And they do get nationalized, just in the stupidest way possible.

AIG, for example, the old Manchester United sponsor crashed in 2008 and was bailed out with other big players, but the governments took no equity because they're not run like a business. Instead businesses are running governments into the ground, nationalizing their losses and privatizing the profits. Such a process—where companies crash out so hard they need government support—should lead to socialism, if a nation pays for something they rightly bought it. But this theoretically bedrock foundation of capitalism is lost because the rich simply don't want to find it.

Reese's thesis is that the consolidations and crashes we see should lead to socialism, because if things are consolidating, might as well own them in common. In his own words, he says, “more commodities are made in less time or with less labour, the labour time contained in the average commodity approaches zero, a historical limit to devaluation, making money, capital and commodification obsolete.” Jamie Merchant also said, “Traditionally, some form of planned economy is taken to be the alternative to market institutions, but there is not much planning happening here. Rather, this is something new: the abolition of the market without planning.” This is why communism is supposed to be a stage of history, and that history is moves this way is, in fact, a repeating process. However, bankers sit astride history, yelling stop! And for a while, frozen in time, like the top of a roller coaster, it does.

As I said, diminishing marginal returns is not controversial. I learned it in the frankly Hitler Youthian Economics 101 classes I took as an adult. Competition (alone) drives prices down. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter documented this process in civilization of all sorts, in his essential book, The Collapse Of Complex Societies. As he said in the tl;dr chapter,

It is the thesis of this chapter that return on investment in complexity varies, and that this variation follows a characteristic curve. More specifically, it is proposed that, in many crucial spheres, continued investment in sociopolitical complexity reaches a point where the benefits for such investment begin to decline, at first gradually, then with accelerated force. Thus, not only must a population allocate greater and greater amounts of resources to maintaining an evolving society, but after a certain point, higher amounts of this investment will yield smaller increments of return. Diminishing returns, it will be shown, are a recurrent aspect of sociopolitical evolution, and of investment in complexity. The principle of diminishing returns is one of the few phenomena of such regularity and predictability that economists are willing to call it a 'law' (Hadar 1966: 30).

Declining marginal returns are pretty much a natural law and declining profit margins is taught even within vulgar western economics. And you can see this happen in the western world, where their banks, carmakers, and ‘private’ sector have already died and are merely walking around on government support, zombified. If the government was actually ‘run like a business’ they would take equity for these bailouts and handouts, ie nationalize them. The system actually should have become socialist around 2008, if the system weren't so corrupt. I've repeating myself but history does, so deal with it.

As Reese continued, “Socialism, replacing private enterprise (producing commodified utilities) with social enterprise (producing decommodified utilities) is therefore becoming an economic necessity for the first time.” Just because it's a necessity, however, doesn't make it happen. Power concedes nothing without a demand and, as yet, western masses are distracted at the concession stand, getting nothing but empty calories. All across the Colosseums of the White Empire, enough people gather to overthrow their governments, but celebrate made up teams overthrowing each other. The entire western system is broken. You can see it in their broken toys, working men breaking their knees on the playing field, to keep the working masses on their knees a little longer.

Watching billionaires play with their toys while billions gamble on it, it seems increasingly obvious that the ‘free market’ is fixed. I remember when bookies had to be kept far away from sport, but now they're on the jerseys. The fix is in. Whatever happens on the field, the people on the top never lose, and capitalism without creative destruction is not very creative. All the west has today is nationalized capitalism (Nacism), where losses are socialized and gains are privatized. Heads I win, tails you lose, but thanks for buying the jersey. The capitalist classes get the food while the shit comes out the working end. Thus you get a state of prosperity for the rich and increasingly brutal austerity for society, with constant genocide on the TV and arrest if you complain about it. Play Naci games, win Naci prizes. That's increasingly how I feel about football. I used to enjoy it, but I don't enjoy this.