The bourgeoisie expropriated working-class games to legitimate its own rule

Evidence

In England, organized sport had been a mass phenomenon, a spontaneous and public creation. And then, just as with land and labor, the rising bourgeoisie had expropriated it for their own purposes. Undisciplined, vulgar, and lacking self-confidence, they had sensed that their reliance on naked force in their personae as expropriators, exploiters, and imperialists would ultimately destroy them if they could not establish to their own satisfaction their right to rule: “They wanted a culture, a way of life of their own.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1254

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the enclosure logic — land and labor expropriated, now culture too — speaking to the reader’s interest in how hegemonic class power is constructed and reproduced. — connects to: Odysseus is the prototypical bourgeois hobbyist whose leisure confirms his power over labor; The bourgeoisie reframes exploitation as public service to justify it — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 736; Situationist playfulness got co-opted into harmless bourgeois amusements — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 340