THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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a place where at least a hollow space arises. Fresh air is taken in, alcohol washes down the dust, card­playing kills time, and is moreover the desire not just to succumb
to chance but to be able to play with it and even to win something off somebody else. This has the double effect here that the working day, the business day is
abandoned and at the same time its forms continue in a ‘lightened’ way. Sociability as a whole largely repeats the relations between people and things which
predominate in society and constitute it in each case. These relations prevail even in the downtrodden class that has come off badly, although it has or could have
particular interest in distinguishing the hours after work from the working day in terms of form and especially of content. But this kind of thing is not simple, not even
where a contrasting will exists; sociability as the form of play in a society confirms this society even in escaping it. And sociability keeps people up to scratch all the
more, the less those who have come off badly lament existing social conditions themselves but only the singular place they occupy in them. Indeed as we have seen:
pleasure then serves as a substitute for what has not been attained in the capitalist struggle for life and its approved forms. The drive to win in card­playing and the
poker face imperative for it, together with its straight and crooked paths, is in sport the assiduity, transferred there, of competition that appeared free. To the same
extent that this competition is made economically impossible, the contest in sport beckons. It beckons not only its practising enthusiasts but much more, by means of
empathy with the sides, the thousands upon thousands of Sunday spectators at the professional match. It is true that even Greek wrestling matches and medieval
tournaments had displayed ‘competition’: but it was not a busy one as yet. This contest reflected, in the upper class of the time, no economic struggle, its participants
rather resembled that ‘high­minded’ man whom Aristotle praises for ‘going hesitantly and idly through life except where an honour or a work require him’. The emotion
was the desire of distinction not of friction, it was Eros for the goal, with the loser as the ‘second winner’, not as a rival who goes bankrupt from the stock exchange.
Mutatis mutandis this kind of contest is also possible in a post­capitalist society; the Soviet Union is already using it today. Whereas the pleasure taken in sport by
capitalist employees necessarily displays all the features of competing in its contest, in other words: of the substitute in the form of play for the socially disappeared free
competition. It is not admitted by capital that this competition (make way for efficiency, the marshal's baton in every knapsack)*
* Bloch adapts a German phrase here to mean that everyone is a potential leader of men.