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| Lesnar's preferential treatment shows how lack of class solidarity is ruining wrestling Photo Credit: WWE.com |
Lesnar is nominally labor in WWE. He's not part of the board nor does he get enough of a share of WWE's revenue that he could accrue a billion dollars. However, to treat him as part of the labor at large, even someone like Roman Reigns or Charlotte Flair, would be foolish. Yet, there's a sentiment among a contingent of WWE's critical defenders and even among the company's detractors he's an icon of labor because he's getting all this money to work few dates and thus is sticking it to Vince McMahon. This is a stilted way of looking at things that is only correct in the most technical way, and since wrestling in 2019 is not the Department of Bureaucracy from Futurama in the year 3000, it is not most correct way of looking at things. Lesnar, despite being in the labor class, receives perks more than any of his fellow workers do. He is, in essence, a teacher's pet so to speak.
Looking at Lesnar from a viewpoint of justification is dangerous. The "fuck you, I got mine" mentality that people assign to him as being beneficial is why "OK Boomer" was such an intense meme for about 15 minutes last week. If anything, Lesnar is an example of the utter lack of class solidarity that not only wrestlers have but labor worldwide has. Examples of working class revolutions in places like Chile this year and Poland in the waning days of Soviet Communism are few and far between, and in America, the working class is conditioned not to work with people for shared credit and a goal of something better but rather competing with people with a goal of credit and more money. No one has ever gotten rich off their labor in most businesses, and in sports where the average salaries are in the six figures, the people who pay their "exorbitant" salaries have net worths that make guys like Aaron Rodgers or Steph Curry look like paupers. The only class that has solidarity in the world is the super-rich one. While McMahon and Tony Khan are competing in business, you can bet your bottom dollar that their donations will go to politicians who will make sure they pay as little in taxes as possible.
To wit, Lesnar getting eight figures to work the lightest schedule in the company isn't good inasmuch is his supposed peers don't get as much and have to work far more dates, including untelevised house shows that are a vestige of a more primitive time in the business. Hell, he even got on McMahon's private jet out of Saudi Arabia when no other wrestler on the main roster did. Even the highest-paid and most prominent wrestlers like Reigns and Flair get the suction-portion of the plunger. Lesnar is still part of the plunger, but he's at the top, a place where he doesn't have to mire in the shit. If wrestlers, Lesnar or otherwise, had any sense of camaraderie, he would lobby to McMahon that everyone gets more money and fewer dates. He doesn't, and the worst part about is that if any other wrestler had Lesnar's bag, they'd do the same thing he would, whether it be obvious bootlickers like Seth Rollins and AJ Styles or folks about whose company man proclivities aren't as well known.
I posted a tweet the other day about how Lesnar refused to take one bump, hardcore or otherwise, for Jon Moxley when he was Dean Ambrose in WWE, while Kenny Omega, an executive vice president in All Elite Wrestling, allowed himself to be thrown into barbed wire, had a chain shoved into his mouth, and jumped from the top rope onto wooden planks. Omega, unlike Lesnar, is not in the working class, at least not anymore. EVPs are in the management class, an interstitial class that does the bidding of capital. They are labor, but they are as superfluous as the capital they obey. This doesn't mean that Omega and AEW are a labor paradise, because all you need to do to know about how the EVPs feel about class solidarity among its roster is ask Cody about labor unions. That being said, it was a far more selfless act from AEW management than anything WWE management has done vis a vis Lesnar.
The truth of the matter is that you can't blame Lesnar for not wanting to do even the tamest hardcore spots. If I had to guess, he voiced that concern well before WrestleMania 32, and yet McMahon continued to build Ambrose up with hardcore legends giving him weapons that he didn't come close to using successfully. Either the capital in this case didn't listen to Lesnar, or they did and went in with the build knowing that they'd be violating the Chekhov's Gun principle making Ambrose look like an utter chump. The latter feels more likely given how obsequious McMahon seems to be towards Lesnar. The moral of this story is that you can't fully blame Lesnar for playing into McMahon's siren song.
But you can blame Lesnar as far as you can blame nearly every other wrestler in the business for showing an insane lack of class solidarity. I guess the real culprit is Hulk Hogan who showed precedent that it's every wrestler for themselves by ratting out Bobby Heenan and Jesse Ventura planning on forming a union. Wrestlers more than any other industry's proletariat buy into what management says is best for them, and as long as that happens, the road towards exploitation and early graves will continue. Maybe Lesnar securing the bag is understandable to a point, but it's a clear sign that wrestling's caste system is hard to break, especially when people like McMahon have favorite sons that they give a small portion of their largesse to in order to keep the carrot dangled in front of everyone else who has to wait until they get hurt to get medical care and pay their way up and down the coasts out of their own depressed salaries. Only when they realize they're in it together and band together will things change for real.
