Spanish league goes on strike

La Liga won’t start until a new collective bargaining agreement is signed according the Spanish Players Association.

An act of solidarity is what has driven the Spanish Players Association (AFE) to call a work stoppage for the first and second round of the 2011-12 Liga BBVA season, as well as the Liga Adelante. After two months of talks with the National Football League (LFP) to make the players’ rights be respected, specifically those whose salaries were not being paid on time or at all, the AFE has decided to make a statement about their position by refusing to play the first two match days of the season, until a new and satisfactory collective bargaining agreement isn’t signed.

Work stoppages seem to be at the order of the day in the world of sports. The longest one in U.S. history came to an end just last month, after jeopardizing the dispute of America’s favorite sport this season: NFL football. Almost five months were consumed to finally reach an agreement between the players and team owners to end the lock-out.

Like a virus, the work stoppage searched for another victim, and found one in the NBA, that began its lock out last month and still has exhausting hours of talks ahead before a solution can be reached.

And that virus has now migrated into the old continent, mutating into a species that like a chameleon changes its looks according to its environment. Football is its new suit, and the Liga BBVA its prey. The remedy is no secret: put the AFE and LFP back on the same path.

LFP President Jose Luis Astiazaran doesn’t understand the AFE’s call for a strike, since in the last two months of talks two important improvements have been approved: the economic control and the wage guarantee fund. Despite this he doesn’t fear for negotiations to break with this strike.

What has driven the players to this situation that Astiazaran can’t understand is the experience that clubs like Rayo Vallecano went through last season, which they find inadmissible for a first division team. That the wages of those players were not paid on time led the AFE to think that the ruling collective bargaining contract needed modifications.

For anyone who knows what Marxism represents what is going on with this work stoppage in Spain or simultaneously in the NBA isn’t surprising at all, taking for granted that sports are nothing but the mirror of their society. The only method that they understand as effective to end with the exploitations that the respective ruling entities submit them, driven by capitalism, is through a proletarian revolution.

In sports players are the proletarian and through strikes they manifest their revolution, which wouldn’t be possible without the solidarity from all pushing in the same direction. In Spain the players from the big clubs have no reason of their own for being part of the work stoppage, but they have understood that some of their colleagues do have a reason of their own to claim for their help.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that without its prime matter a business can’t operate, therefore it’s just a matter of time for the players to get what they demand.