They oppose the Olympic Games and Capitalism itself. Are they leading a socialist revolution against the IOC?
Jules Boykoff’s new book looks at a potential transnational protest movement in the vein of American socialist thought.
In December 2018 I met Misako Ichimura in a small cafe in Tokyo’s Harajuku district. At the time I was a correspondent for Around the Rings on assignment covering the 2018 Association of National Olympic Committees General Assembly. I had used my only day off to interview Ichimura and Ayako Yoshida, members of the anti-Tokyo 2020 Olympics group Hangoin no Kai.
The interview was for a story I was working on at the time on the small, but vocal anti-Olympics group in Tokyo. For many reasons the story never was completed, and is a source of regret for me. You see, Ichimura is homeless herself and bravely fighting against a ruthless machine that has worked to displace some of Tokyo’s most vulnerable citizens to build multi-billion dollar venues in the city. I interviewed Ichimura for over an hour and learned about why she and others wanted to protest the Games in a country not known for resisting authority.
Around six months later I was off in a new job and once again saw Ichimura taking questions from journalists, as part of a press conference organized by the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. This time, she was flanked by Anne Orchier an activist from NOlympics LA. The press conference was part of a larger summit of anti-Olympics groups that had coalesced in Tokyo to coincide with the “One Year to Go” celebrations of Tokyo 2020. NOlympics LA and Hangorin no Kai organized the summit together and even produced a joint statement at the end with groups from France, Japan, South Korea, and the United States.
In his latest book looking at the political situation surrounding the Olympic Games Jules Boykoff takes a look at the creation of this summit from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, through the formation and growth of NOlympics LA and the group’s aims and implications.
NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo & Beyond is a look at the nexus between NOlympics LA fight against Los Angeles 2028 and how it intersects with the rise of Socialist discourse in the United States. Boykoff digs deep into how anti-Olympics activists largely have coalesced around the hyper-capitalism of the Games, and works to breakdown how the Olympics have become so commodified, how that creates problems for cities on a transnational scale and most recently how activists in the United States are not only opposing the Olympics, but organizing to create a lasting movement in the vein of Democratic Socialism.
The book comes at a curious time in the United States, as the U.S. left is currently in a contentious Presidential primary that could define the future of left-wing American politics for a generation. NOlympics LA did not sprout out of nowhere, in fact the group was born out of the LA chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the group aligned with Democratic front-runner Bernie Sanders.
Sanders almost led a remarkable political upset in 2015 challenging the Democratic Party front-runner Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Presidential nomination. He succeeded in pushing the party leftward, before Clinton was defeated in the 2016 election. Four years later Sanders is back trying to win the Presidency and his viewpoints have found a foothold among a majority of Americans under the age of 35.
Boykoff argues that to understand NOlympics LA readers need to understand the development of contemporary American socialist thought, just as to understand the impact the Olympics have on a city, one must look well beyond the sporting venues.
When not weaving through the theories of Thomas Piketty and David Harvey, Boykoff is looking at the differences that NOlympics LA take in opposing the Olympics than previous established groups in past bid and host cities. He concludes that most anti-Olympic groups had worked successfully to derail bids and bring groups together before, but NOlympics LA is uniquely positioned in its organizational skills and media savvy. Members have backgrounds in both Hollywood and journalism allowing them to tell a story that will resonate, while also not losing sight on the organizing needed to build a political coalition.
NOlympians is not just a case-study in NOlympics LA, it draws upon Boykoff’s experience in covering Olympics dissent to compare this moment to past ones. Commenting on a meeting ahead of the London 2012 Olympics, Boykoff is sure to not call the anti-Olympics summit in Tokyo a novel event, but says that activists must continue to do the work that has been done to truly build a transnational movement. That movement would be the true evolution of anti-Olympics groups from moving beyond tanking referendums to a credible, long-lasting foil to the International Olympic Committee.
Going beyond what most critiques of the Olympics offer, Boykoff even offers his own changes to the Olympic set-up to ensure citizen’s right to the city is protected.
If there are any limitations to the book it is a lack of perspectives from other groups working to keep the transnational spirit of these anti-capitalist groups alive. Boykoff offers his view on the appalling human rights situations in China ahead of Beijing 2022, but doesn’t explore if there is room for any kind of dissent fermenting abroad. Paris activists are briefly mentioned, but space that NOlympics LA has to coordinate in the next four years before the 2024 Summer Olympics isn’t explored.
Ultimately, the book is about Los Angeles and the position NOlympics LA finds itself in eight years until the Summer Olympics return to the United States. The future is uncertain, but for the first time a group is ready to tell its own story, not the IOC’s, for around a decade.
I managed to catch up with Boykoff after reading his book for a short interview about his research. Find it below.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Olympics Everywhere: How did this book come together? Why go about it in this way and follow the trajectory of this group in Los Angeles, and tie it to a broader message of the renaissance of socialist thinking in the United States?
Jules Boykoff: Well, I think it has everything to do with the activists in Los Angeles because as you know I had already written three books about various aspects of the Olympic Games from the political history to the economics to activism, so to be honest I thought I was done writing about it at the project project level with the Olympics. Then along came these really interesting activists, and I hope that I capture that in the book how they are very different from activist groups that I had the pleasure of working with around the world.
For one they are socialists at this moment where socialism is making a real comeback in the United States. Democratic Socialism is in the mainstream news now thanks to the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Secondly, these activists just come out of Hollywood, so they have this tremendous amount of skills to produce videos and craft their message in a way that is pretty fascinating. Third, from the outset the activists in LA were internationalist in their approach, I think that comes a little bit because they are socialists and socialists tend to think more internationally and globally. For me, as someone who has followed this for a long time, I have always thought that was the next logical step for anti-Olympics activism, finding ways that made it consistently transnational and they were committed to doing that and making real strides to reaching out to groups around the world. Because of them, and their interesting approach I decided I wanted to take a deeper dive and situate what they are doing in the wider leftist political scene in the United States right now.
OE: Having watched this movement for many years from the sidelines this has been bubbling up for a while, would you agree?
JB: Yes, absolutely. I’ve had a front row seat to many of the efforts to make this a social movement rather than this moment of anti-Olympics activism. Because you know as well as anybody, no matter where the Olympics are held there are activist groups that pop up and then when the Olympics are done they go back to their regular activism and its a good game of whack a mole. The IOC and local police are the ones trying to whack down these groups with a mallet.
So it's been a long time coming. I’ve been at meetings in London, run by Julian Cheyne who’s very active on Twitter. So he put together a meeting from the time of the London Olympics that had people from South Korea, that had people from Rio, and then folks that were Circassians [representing Sochi]. So there have been efforts but it's easier said than done to create a transnational movement against the Olympic Games. The Games have tremendous advantages including this monstrous PR machine, lots of money to the tune of billions of dollars, and these activist groups tend to be resourceful but relatively resource-less compared to the IOC. So it is hard to do, but seeing it come together last summer was pretty special and for those of us there to see it, so we were all there for this and seeing this huge mobilization that they managed with all these people from all these countries - people came form France, Korea, Rio de Janeiro, and Los Angeles - and we’re walking through the streets of Shinjuku, this really hyper-capitalist space with neon lights and it was really moving. Afterwards we sat down and decompressed it out and said “Wow that was a lot of work that they did and it was this incredible thing” that was this next step that needs to challenge the Olympic machine, and they managed to do it, at least in this one instance.
The question remains: will they be able to continue that. That is the goal. I think what they are doing is special and interesting and worthy of our consideration especially given what is going on in the United States right now, with wider discussion about what does Democratic Socialism means. The group in LA is not only fighting the Olympics, but they are fully embedded in a number of struggles across the city in this really important historical moment.
OE: Having looked at different anti-Olympics groups you could always see the anti-capitalist message, [such as Hamburg opposition groups moving from Hamburg 2024 to protesting the Hamburg G20], so what is required to keep this movement self-sustaining and continuing to be a thorn in the IOC’s side going forward?
JB: I think the first thing is continuing as much as possible to show up for each other, even though it is difficult. Having everyone in the same room in Tokyo last summer was really huge. All the activists in LA will tell you, those connections that were forged in that moment and at protests, that is a major thing they are keeping an eye on moving forward. Second, the dagger of the referendum is something that could be discussed in a transnational context. You’ve covered it yourself how these bids can be overturned by these ballot measures, even the threat of a ballot measure can be enough in certain places. So the IOC appears, based on some comments form higher ups, in favor of having referenda put in the process of bidding. If activists were able to achieve that, it would be huge. It would actually allow people in the city to have a say before the Olympics come to town. To be honest the Olympics don’t have the positive public persona that they once did, they have to fight much harder and do things more quickly behind the scenes to get things done, as evidence by the Paris/Los Angeles deal where there was no referenda involved. I would say those two things alone would go pretty far because I think a lot of the rest of it is taking care of itself in a way. The activists have been working hard to making sure that people know about these underbelly elements of the Games, and I think journalists have become much more aware of them and are willing to talk about them with academics and human rights organizers, so a lot of the groundwork is being done collectively by those groups, so just capitalizing on those is the key moving forward.
OE: You focused on Los Angeles with this, how does these activists being in the moment where they are having eight years of opportunity to build their movement and working with other groups around the world and trying to make this transnational movement benefit from this place in time to benefit from this collective action?
JB: It is both a plus and a minus. When you are in LA no one is talking about the Olympics in general because they are so far down the road. The city has a humanitarian crisis of homelessness sitting in plain sight, there are all manner of other issues to deal with. In that sense having that big a lag time has been a difficult thing for the LA organizers.
On the other hand it provides an incredible opportunity to do the sort of work on the ground that they have been doing. Getting a stronger base of groups in solidarity as partners, doing the actual work on the streets who are going to be affected by the Olympics, and talking to those folks and then perhaps at an opportune moment getting a referendum when all the groundwork is done. That would have been much more difficult to do if it was the traditional seven year lag time. So it is both a curse and a huge blessing from an organizational perspective because these activists are about organizing, not just mobilizing. They are not just mobilizing people for big protests they are about organizing them for the long term. They are doing the work that needs to be done on the ground, the glory-free hard work of meeting people in their neighborhoods, on the streets, having difficult conversations and building a strong case against the Olympics.
Even if it doesn’t lose money, and I think there are a lot of questions around the finances of the [2028 Olympics] that are not being discussed as much as they should, they are doing the hard work of organizing people that wouldn’t have been possible if there wasn’t that 11 year lag time.
OE: We’ve seen mega-sporting events really become flash-points for political movement in other countries outside the United States, in hindsight as we look back on those the effects they had were beyond what anyone expected in some ways that were unexpected (and in Brazil’s case very negative). How is this movement building itself to avoid that?
JB: As someone else who spent time in Brazil, it was complex political situation there and there were so many moving parts and those protests against the Confederations Cup and against the World cup were really significant in terms of what you were describing, but also in terms of laying the groundwork for the anti-Olympics groups who were active there.
I think that in the United States in LA, when I talked to them, they are being more concerned about being involved in more meaningful ways and activist struggles on the ground in LA and showing up for these community partners, and showing that they are not going anywhere and trying to get the support of the Democratic Socialist of America chapter, which they have. I put it in the book, and I interviewed one guy who is more of a DSA guy than being involved in NOlympics, and he said that he thinks the only reason the mayor would know who the DSA LA is, is because of NOlympics. That’s pretty huge to get on the radar of the mayor of the city who has an enormous amount of power in LA through various disruptive actions by being involved on the ground by putting pressure through social media. With that being the more immediate concern you kind of have to see where the chips fall. There is only so much you can control as an activist group. We’ll see what happens with Trump and everything with the upcoming election, those are things that could play a role down the role, but now its just fighting against inequality and with the marginalized in Los Angeles and seeing where those larger political chips fall.
OE: There is one last question I wanted to ask you. Who do you hope reads this book and what do you hope they take away when they read this book?
JB: Oh wow, that’s a good question. There are different groups of people I would like to read the book. One is people who care about justice and fairness in general who don’t have to be sports fans and that can see that there are people working very hard on these issues in creative ways and “piggy-jacking” these different large sporting events. In other words, piggybacking these events and hijacking them for their own political purposes that there are a lot of lessons to be learned from these groups. So I hope there’s a general people who care about the world who read it.
I also hope that folks who are open-minded to thinking critically about the Olympics read it. Because I try to condense in that opening chapter what I think, after studying this for a long time, are the main problems that the Olympics bring to the host city. There are certain things that are not Rio problems, or Tokyo problems, but are Olympic problems that other cities import when they host the Olympics. For the general person who is open minded who also likes sports, I hope to think you should be able to embrace complexity rather than encourage the death of complexity. So I kind of want sports fans who are open minded to read it as well.
I definitely want activists who are involved in pushing for social justice in a democratic socialist fashion, I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from what the activists in Los Angeles are doing in terms of getting involved in the ground in your city, so I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from these activists. What I think they are doing is pretty remarkable. I guess those are the main people, and I guess one other group that fortunately is athletes who are also open minded who are thinking critically about the Games even if they are an Olympic athlete. I would love for them to read the book to see what’s going on with the Olympics and better understand why there may be protests around the Games they are striving so hard to participate in. I just feel like there are so many smart athletes at this particular moment who are being buoyed by powerful social movements, I would just love for them to have a one-stop shop to see what the issues are for the Olympics and see why people may be protesting them.
That’s the thing about this book there are just so many different parts and I’m trying to bring them together in one stream and hopefully it works a little bit.
NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo & Beyond is out this April from Fernwood Publishing. It is distributed in the US through Columbia University Press. If you are interested in pre-ordering the book you can do so here from Fernwood Publishing or Columbia University Press.