Organized games began as working-class cultural mediation against capitalist dislocation

Evidence

Cricket and football as organized games had begun as expressions of the “artistic instincts” of the English rural and artisan classes. … These games, more particularly their organization and their preindustrial spirit “untainted by any serious corruption,” were one aspect of the cultural mediation constructed by the working classes as a response to the historical processes of capitalist dislocation, expropriation, and a deepening alienation. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1248

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels E.P. Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English Working Class’ on cultural self-invention; also speaks to the reader’s goal of understanding how subordinate classes build autonomous traditions.
• DEEPTHINKING: The parallel between James and Thompson — both Marxist historians responding to political disillusionment, independently arriving at working-class cultural agency — is a dense genealogical insight about the Marxist tradition itself.