Bracket busted? How about a nice Marxist critique of the NCAA tournament? Call it the theory of surplus value in high-tops . . .
On Melissa Harris-Perry's MSNBC show today, David Zirin, sports guy at the far-left Nation mag, called the NCAA tournament nothing less than "the organized theft of black wealth."
Zirin expanded his accusation to call the tournament the theft of "youth wealth." Speaking of wealth, Zirin has made a living out of adopting provocative positions, from supporting the boycott of Israeli athletes, to attributing dislike of Barry Bonds to--you guessed it--racism.
DAVID ZIRIN: Anyone who's watched the tournament this week knows what they saw. It's an incredible spectacle. It's absoulutely narcotic. It's a national obsession. More people interact with the NCAA tournament than even the Super Bowl. More money is bet on the NCAA tournament than the Super Bowl. And who are we really tuning in to watch? Who is wearing the corporate logos as they run up and down the court? It's the players: that's who we're watching and yet they do not get paid for it. And so we all become party to this kind of rank exploitation, Melissa. We become collectively corrupted, as myself included, as we watch this thing so assiduously. And I'll tell you what's so disturbing about it to me is that when you dispense with the niceties of it all, when we we stop trying to speak in politically correct language, what we're looking at is the organized theft of black wealth. And if we want to talk about it more broadly, the organized theft of youth wealth.
