The Workers' Sport Internationals 1920-28

Bibliographic Data

ID10074720
AuthorsDavid A Steinberg (0000-0002-6461-789X, corresponding author)
Year1978
Volume13
Issue2
Pages233-251
Publication date1978-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002200947801300204
OpenAlexW2079545224
LanguageEN
Citations received12

Sport activity gives the working class an inner spiritual liberation and therefore diverts it from the cares and bothers of life', Fritz Wildung told a sport congress in 1922.1 'We must implant in youth the belief that the world needs a complete cultural renaissance, and that the old nationalist-capitalist culture is about to perish', he declared. 'The sport of the proletariat must be placed in the service of socialism. It should become a powerful lever of the new culture, whose bearer will be the proletariat. Sport is a chain-breaker for the youth of the proletariat, a liberator from physical and spiritual slavery.'2 To many of Wildung's comrades in the working-class political and trade union movements between the world wars, sport was merely an activity in which workers wasted time that could have been better used in the struggle for political and economic power. For millions of workers, however, sport was a vital aspect of the revolutionary movement. Workers' sport organizations existed in almost every country of Europe and in some of the countries of North and South America and Asia as well; by 1928 each of the two workers' sport internationals, the Socialist Workers' Sport International (originally the Lucerne Sport International) and the Red Sport International, counted well over two million members, making the sport movement by far the largest working class cultural movement. Recognizing that as workers won shorter working days and longer vacations they would have more leisure time, the sport internationals attempted to organize them during their free time, to isolate them from bourgeois cultural influences, and to make them aware that sport could be used to advance the revolutionary movement. Both sport internationals brought together worker sportsmen from all parts of the world in several festivals celebrating the new proletarian physical culture. They came to be involved

Communism · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Proletariat · Socialism · Sociology · Working class · Gender Studies · Law · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports and Physical Education Studies · Sports, Gender, and Society

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