An Olympic Games in Boston? What’s at Stake for the City’s Oppressed and Exploited Majority?
By Danny Haiphong
If we lived in a socialist society, the Olympics would emphasize collective development and achievement. The games would be planned around the needs of the people and employment in the games would pay a living wage. Everyone would have their basic needs met. The means of production and property would be socialized rather than privatized for profit. The games would develop the spiritual and physical needs of society. All revenues generated by the games would be redistributed in the form of free healthcare, education, housing, and social development
However, we do not live in a socialist society. The enduring capitalist crisis is showing no signs of slowing up in cities across the US. In a period where gentrification, homelessness, and poverty are increasing working class misery, the City of Boston was named the “best” place for the 2024 Olympic Games. Dave Zirin, sports political analyst for “the Nation” magazine, wrote a letter the city’s residents to protest the label. He did so with the understanding that Boston’s long history of racism and subservience to monopoly capital would only be strengthened by the presence of the Olympic spectacle. And there is nothing like the massive profits these games produce for the capitalist class that make them so dangerous for working class and oppressed people.
Zirin explains how the Olympics really operate under capitalism. The Olympics bring the capitalist class another avenue from which to carry out its privatization and militarization agenda. Governments become indebted to the plunder of monopoly developers. The police and military are given more resources to repress the people from standing up to exploitation and occupation. When the Olympics leave town, the state uses the debt incurred from the Olympics to carry out austerity measures. This happened most recently in Greece (2004) and London (2012).
A 2024 Olympic games in Boston would exacerbate the exploitation imposed on working class people, especially Black people, in the city. Boston’s homeless population has increased by the highest percentage in the country in recent years. The city responded to the housing crisis by closing the largest homeless shelter in October. Furthermore, a greater Boston area community action program (Tri-CAP) shut down in mid-December despite the fact that Boston, and most cities surrounding Boston for that matter, have become unlivable due to gentrification. Since the police murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, Boston’s Black community has protested the Boston Police’s role as enforcers of white supremacy.
An Olympic games in Boston would strengthen the rule of capitalism and racism in Boston. The city has served as the capitalist ruling class’s hub for investment and exploitation on the Northeastern coast of the country. During the colonial period, Boston was the center for merchant production in the areas of shipping, light industry, and the slave trade. The slave trade of Africans and the genocide of indigenous peoples enriched a newly formed capitalist class of bankers and industrialists. The formation of white supremacy in colonial Virginia opened the door for the Northern ruling class to institute a deep divide between white workers and Black chattel slaves.
During Reconstruction and into the 20th century, Boston’s capitalist class and its local politicians utilized white supremacy to protect their interests from newly freed Black labor. It did so through the division of political power based on racism and bribery. Immigrant groups that had previously experienced racism, such as the Irish, were suddenly deemed “white.” Leaders in European immigrant groups were identified and bought off into whiteness. These leaders organized a violent KKK-like (with the Klan’s help) buffer between the state and the Black community. The rule of white supremacy protected white-imposed segregation in the city years after the Civil Rights Movement had struck victories in the areas of voting, education, and public access.
White supremacist groups remained organized into the 1970’s. In 1974, the left movement in the city of Boston dealt a huge blow to white power by winning racial integration of the public school system. Neighborhood schools were eliminated in favor of a system of busing that integrated municipal districts. Since then, the left in the US nationally has declined. Austerity, privatization, steady economic decline, and permanent war necessitated the monopolization of the media and a white supremacist ideological assault on Black and poor people. It was in this period that the prison-state, police, and military began to consolidate to repress the potential of revolutionary struggle against the conditions of last stage capitalism. A political vacuum dominated by pro-imperialist, right-wing currents emerged. More and more progressive elements aligned with the Democratic Party while radicals and revolutionaries were suppressed.
The capitalist class took advantage of these conditions by making Boston affordable only to corporate developers and bourgeois (white) classes. It did so with a relative amount of secrecy to those outside of the city. When workers, oppressed people, and those outside of the ruling class think of Boston, they mostly think of its sports teams. Boston is often ill-referred to as one of the most gentrified and poorest cities of the region. The city’s police force is not at the forefront of the national conversation around police brutality despite its racist stop and frisk policy and the close relationship the BPD has with the Department of Homeland Security and US intelligence. Only now is the militancy of the #BlackLivesMatter movement rightfully changing the reactionary narrative around policing in Boston.
While resistance in Boston is still in its developing stages, the misery of the working class and oppressed is at an all time high. Even in subzero temperatures, the Boston school bus drivers union Local 8751, #BlackLivesMatter, Fight Imperialism Stand Together, and the Boston Homeless Solidarity Committee came together to speak out against the mayor’s State of the City Address on January 13th. Only days later, #BlackLivesMatter shut down the I-93 highway and ensured everyone knew the movement for Black life is not dying.
These developments are positive signs that strategic unity can be built among the various organizations struggling against the oppressive conditions of racism and capitalism in Boston. However, there is still much work to be done. The Olympic Games bid in Boston must be a part of the broader movement for revolutionary change in the city. The movement against police brutality has changed the narrative in the US around racism and police brutality. Now is the time to unite the advanced, organize with the oppressed, and demand what the capitalist system won’t give. Then, we take it and build a new system entirely.
Danny Haiphong is an organizer for Fight Imperialism Stand Together (FIST) in Boston. He is also a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report. Danny can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com and FIST can be reached at bostonfist@gmail.com
