First Thoughts on Fascist Fight Clubs (plus loving fighting and hating violence)

 

What follows are my first thoughts in response to two essays on the growth of MMA training within fascist far right groups in several countries. As 'first thoughts' I am well aware that this contribution is incomplete. In some respects, I feel that there is much more to say. In other respects, I feel I could perhaps have been more concise. But I wanted to get this first draft out there, in the hope of taking the conversation forward and generating further contributions.

 

A Guardian article published on 11^th September 2018 reports on the rise of 'fascist fight clubs' and argues that 'white nationalists [now] use MMA as a recruiting tool' (Zidan 2018b). After recounting the growth of such clubs, the author, Karim Zidan, asks, 'So why are white supremacist groups forming fight clubs and MMA promotions?' To Zidan, it is a no-brainer:

 

The answer lies in the violent nature of the sport and their ability to thrive within it. Over the years, fighters with links to the far-right have been involved in some of the world's most recognizable promotions, including the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and Strikeforce. (Zidan 2018b)

 

This contention was quickly challenged on the blog of the 'Love Fighting, Hate Violence' project, by Professor Janet O'Shea, who argued that:

 

Zidan's recourse to MMA's violence as an explanation for its appeal for fascists is a cop out. MMA, although a rough sport, is not necessarily more violent than other commercial spectacles, such as American football and ice hockey. It is certainly not the only sport in which people hurt and dominate one another for points and wins. It is not the only sport in which commercial interests brush up against athletic excellence. (O'Shea 2018)

 

O'Shea's essay then offers an alternative diagnosis: The current connection between MMA training within and as part of various ultra-right xenophobic nationalist groups has nothing to do with any inherent violence to MMA. The claim that MMA is inherently violent is an idea that O'Shea – and the wider 'Love Fighting, Hate Violence' project itself – contests (Channon n.d.). I will turn to this argument and a brief reflection on the 'Love Fighting, Hate Violence' (LFHV) project soon. But first, let us stay with O'Shea's reading of the reason for the attraction of ultra-right thugs to MMA. This, she argues, relates not to some inherent violence, but rather to the competitive structure of neoliberalism:

 

The inequalities of neoliberalism have fueled right wing populism, including its most vindictive forms of nativism, racism, and fascism. At the same time, the hard right continues to celebrate the individualism that produced such inequality in the first place. Given elite MMA's celebration of individualism, competition, and profit, it is devastating but not surprising to see it appropriated by the hard right. The current state of the sport makes for an easy ideological fit with the fundamental underpinning values of fascism.

 

The points O'Shea makes in regard to the ideological problems condensed into mainstream competitive MMA as a species of the genus 'sport' (or, rather, contemporary corporate mediatized sport) have value as part of a critique of neoliberalism's cultural consequences, which hinge on a fetishization of heroic individualism.  This relation has been much remarked and much critiqued for many years (Bowman 2003, 2007; O'Shea 2018).

 

But the problem in this case is that O'Shea's argument seems to hinge on a conflation or amphibology of logic. Most obviously, MMA is a very different kind of 'rough sport' to American football or ice hockey. (A fully satisfying discussion of these differences would take some considerable time and will have to be deferred, although I will keep touching upon this issue as we progress.) In fact, problematic conflations are equally at work in both O'Shea's and Zidan's articles. For instance, one major problem is this: In discussing MMA, we are neither necessarily, inherently, nor obviously discussing the UFC, Pride, or Strikeforce. But both Zidan and O'Shea proceed as if we are. Yet, in fact, to discuss and analyse the emergence of right-wing fight clubs, we really need to give our attention to some very different elements than the macro-structures of MMA as international big business.

 

Rather than this (Zidan discusses high profile right-wingers in MMA; O'Shea sticks to the trope of 'neoliberalism'), attention must go to the local contexts of MMA practice, MMA training, MMA clubs, MMA practitioners. To move from discussing why thugs might practice MMA into a critique of the neoliberal logic of the UFC feels a bit like moving from a discussion of why people like to kick footballs around together into a critique of FIFA, or taking a discussion of why people get into cooking pasta or rice into a critique of Italian or Chinese agricultural policy. Different versions of this conflation are at work in structuring both Zidan and O'Shea's discussion of MMA's alleged colonisation by fascist groups.

 

To be clear, I do not disagree with O'Shea's critique, or her points. I have many more problems with elements Zidan's claims. But O'Shea is the academic, like me, and she is also a colleague with whom I am often in dialogue; so I will focus my attention on her article, as a way to take the discussion forward.

 

Moreover, O'Shea is not really in disagreement with Zidan. It seems rather more that she is trying to take the discussion in a different direction. But I also think that what O'Shea is critiquing is not what Zidan's article was trying to talk about. In fact, in many ways, O'Shea's argument would stand better as a response to an earlier Guardian article by Zidan, which is more directly about professional MMA (in the form of the UFC) and its institutional connection with the real world of politics. The earlier article in question was titled 'Why the UFC is a perfect platform for Donald Trump's political ideology' (Zidan 2018a), and it explored Trump's support of and friendship with Dana White.

 

Trump's political ideology can be taken as the most currently dominant version of what academics mean when they talk about 'neoliberalism'. In relation to this, O'Shea and Zidan seem relatively aligned. Indeed, if we take O'Shea's essay as a belated response to Zidan's earlier article, it can be read as providing valuable academic commentary and reflection on it, in terms of the wider cultural implications of a world in which the President of the USA and the President of the UFC cosy up to each other in various ways for mutual and reciprocal benefit.

 

This is not to say that Zidan and O'Shea are arguing exactly the same things or that they hold exactly the same positions. But the implicit proximity of their positions at least partly accounts for why O'Shea would regard Zidan's subsequent use of the idea that MMA is violent (as an explanation of its appeal for fascists) to be 'a cop out'. For, as O'Shea's analysis of the world of professional MMA makes plain, there is a hell of a lot more going on here than 'violence'.

 

This is where 'Love Fighting, Hate Violence' (hereafter LFHV) comes in. LFHV is an ethical, educational, academic and practical project that seeks to disarticulate or disassociate the all too easily presumed connection, conflation or equation between martial arts training (or martial arts fighting, in the form of sparring and competing) with violence. Stated bluntly: people tend to think that because martial arts make one or another form or reference to violence, or are in some way about violence, therefore they are violent. But LFHV argues that they are anything but. Rather, LFHV accentuates and tries to amplify the positive: showing martial arts to be convivial, consensual, communal, communitarian, ethical, enriching, enlightening, and so on; but not violent.

 

That is the thrust of the argument of LFHV. Violence is a very different thing to martial arts and combat sports. In this account, therefore, violence is non-consensual, deleterious, negative, damaging, terrifying, criminal, and so on and so forth. And martial arts and combat sports are not any of these things (Gong 2015).

 

Phrased in the language of political theory, the punches we throw at each other in training are not a moral, legal, social or political 'wrong' (Rancière 1998), because they are consensual. Any pain we encounter in our consensual martial arts practice is equivalent to the cuts, breaks, bumps and bruises that can and will be incurred during any of many types of physical and sporting activity.

 

Starting from this argument and orientation, the project of LFHV seeks to operate on many fronts, to try to educate practitioners and the public about the unfairness of the conflation of martial arts with violence and to encourage practitioners and the public to think about the ways we might be able to intervene into and militate against real violence of all kinds, specifically in relation to our own everyday lives and around or via martial arts training and practice.

 

This is a great project. It is based on and organised by an important and enlightening disambiguation. I fully support it and agree with much of its orientation. However, it strikes me as important to point out two things.

 

1.     The first is that the LFHV argument is precisely that – an argument. And (as LFHV itself well knows), the fundamental arguments that organise our thinking can and do have skewing effects on our reasoning and conclusions.

2.     The second is that part of the LFHV argument is the contention that martial arts training, practice, sparring and competition are neither inherently violent (in either an ontological, sociological, legal, intersubjective or political philosophy sense) nor do martial arts have any inherent or necessary morality, ethical position or political outlook or worldview attached to them. Martial arts can indeed be reclaimed pedagogically for ethically, morally, politically, and socially progressive causes. But, by the same token, this means that they can therefore also be claimed by any morality, outlook, ethos or cause. And they often are.

 

My sense is that point 1 (the LFHV argument that martial arts practice is not violent) can become an article of dogma that might blind advocates of LFHV to the implications of point 2 (that martial arts are eminently open to becoming connected with any worldview or outlook).

 

This may lead to what appear to be convoluted or contrived arguments. For instance, let us compare and contrast Zidan's and O'Shea's arguments about MMA and violence. Zidan argues that fascist gangs are using MMA to train for violence against any who oppose them on the street. In his argument, it is the promise of effective training for violent conflict that draws such types to MMA. O'Shea calls this a 'cop out'. This is because, on her account, MMA is no more violent than any other rough sport.

 

There is much more to O'Shea's argument, of course; but let's press 'pause' at this point. At this point, if we compare the opening moves of the two arguments, I would propose that Zidan's argument is stronger and makes more intuitive sense than O'Shea's. It's Occam's Razor. I can still agree with her that rugby or ice hockey are violent and rough; but if I were planning to take to the streets to start fights, I know I would most likely choose to practice MMA in order to prepare me for it, rather than rugby or hockey. In fact, if I were interested in taking the violence to a higher level, I might be more inclined to practice something involving various weapons, such as krav maga – although, given the famed Jewish and anti-Nazi origins of krav maga, it might be unlikely that I would practice it if I were indeed a far right, racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic thug. Perhaps if I were an anti-Nazi thug, then krav maga could become my discipline of choice. But reflecting on Nazi versus anti-Nazi thuggery is surely a discussion for another day.

 

The point is, in this particular face-off, if Zidan's argument is a 'cop out' because it conflates MMA and/with violence, then O'Shea's argument equally a cop out because it obfuscates and sidesteps the issue of violence rather than clarifying it. To my mind, both articles are also cop outs in the next step that they take, in which they each in their own way turn to one or another higher echelon of mediatised MMA, referring either to the figures or the values of the professional MMA world.

 

But this is not really where the real issues are. I think both are looking up when they should be looking down. Indeed, both O'Shea and Zidan acknowledge that these issues relate principally to the realm that we might call MMA at a 'street level'. Yet both pay scant attention to it. Zidan's article – as its title announces – seems to be organised by this spectre, through and through; and O'Shea certainly seems to want to get into a discussion of it. Unfortunately, the closest either gets to a serious consideration of the relation between MMA and violent political entities or identities is, in the one article, in Zidan's claims that the far right uses MMA gyms to 'recruit' people, and, in the other article, in O'Shea's argument that what makes MMA violent are the global inequalities generated and celebrated by neoliberalism and the ways that all of this might generate populist political identities.

 

Tm my mind, this last point (about the making of political identities) is where the real issue is (Laclau 1994). Understanding this and working out ways to intervene may well be the challenge for scholars, activists and practitioners today who really do love fighting but hate violence. But I would propose that this is the dimension that is currently most lacking within both of these texts.

 

Their orientations are, in broad terms, not in contradiction. Certainly, O'Shea does not actually disagree with Zidan, whom she proposes 'is both right and wrong'. As she continues: 'there is a violent undercurrent to how much of MMA is practiced. But it's not the fighting that makes MMA violent'. It is at this point that O'Shea segues into her argument that what makes MMA violent are global inequalities generated and celebrated by neoliberalism. Zidan, for his part, bleakly concludes:

 

It is likely that white-nationalist fight gyms will continue to sprout across North America and Europe for the foreseeable future. Their ability to not only operate in the open, but to also establish a worldwide network of violent, well-trained white supremacists, emphasizes the extent of the problems facing Western society.

 

There is no mention of anti-fascist fight clubs and whether they are similarly a part of the problem – but this, too, is a discussion for another day. The point to be made here is that, in actual fact, Zidan and O'Shea seem to agree or to be aligned in many respects; such as:

 

1.     They both argue that this is an emergent problem.

2.     They both concur that the violent far right is using MMA to train its foot soldiers, and

3.     That the ideological structure of professional sport MMA is in one or another way at least partly culpable.

 

To my mind, there are three propositions here. Furthermore, we might accept any one of them without having to accept the others. It will require considerable empirical study and analysis to establish the scale, logics, internal workings, features and wider ramifications of each of these claims. Doing so certainly seems to me to be an urgent task for martial arts studies today.

 

Yet, clarifying the scale, nature, features, political dimensions and cultural logic of the object of analysis is only stage one of any truly committed project. Stage two involves working out the possible form and content of any possible intervention.

 

The problem of how to intervene, what constitutes an intervention, whether academic work itself is enough, whether, when and in what ways to draw a line between academic and political work, and so on, are all hugely problematic issues (Bowman 2007, 2008). To suggest that academics should step out of a purely analytical orientation, or step out of the 'ivory tower' and try to change the world that they otherwise only study, is in itself a proposition that might be roundly rejected in some academic traditions (Wetzler 2015).

 

To her credit and to the credit of the LFHV project, O'Shea herself begins to offer some suggestions in answer to the well-worn and time-honoured question 'What is to be done?' she writes:

 

As martial artists, there is much we can do to contest the fascist usurping of combat sport. The MMA community, along with the broader martial arts community, can and should disavow the embrace of this sport by the far right. Martial arts instructors need to take their responsibilities seriously, by attending carefully to who is in their classes and to what motivates their students. But we cannot stop there. We must also, consciously and intentionally, refigure our training practices to support inclusion, cooperation, and equality. We need to question the conventions of and the values enacted by our games and sports, not just the combat-oriented ones, to determine if they support violence or inclusion. Only then can we most effectively resist and condemn the fascist effort to legitimize violence through sport.

 

Personally, I have a range of problems with this list of suggestions. But at least O'Shea is making suggestions. So, although I may feel like I disagree with her – maybe even passionately – surely this situation of apparent disagreement is actually what might be referred to as what they call one of violent agreement. We're arguing, but deep down we agree, and we're overarchingly arguing for the same thing.

 

For in the end, one thing seems crystal clear: if we want to keep this kind of politics and this mode of organisation out of martial arts, self-defence and combat sports practices, one thing we have to face up to is the fact that we need to articulate and fight for a different politics, a different mode of organisation. As LFHV feels on its pulse, martial artists need to fight for the way they are seen and what they are. This fight is not one of violence. It is one based principally on winning arguments. Which is why what we argue and the way we argue matters. Making one wrong move in any kind of fight can end it for you. We need to train harder to win more fights better.