WWE's Bloodletting and the Price of Capitalism During a Pandemic

Ryder is among those cut in response to the pandemic
Photo Credit: WWE.com

COVID-19 has shown a lot of people's asses in the corporate world, at least in America. The media continues to publish unemployment numbers and dips in spending as if a novel virus wasn't ravaging the populace. Meanwhile, the "captains of industry," including a President who made his money by building things, declaring bankruptcy to get out of paying for those things, and profiting off them, are chomping at the bit to "reopen the economy," as if you can reopen an economy if the people who make it run are dropping dead in exponential increase. Every industry, whether deemed essential or not, have dealt furloughs to employees not to protect them, but to protect the bottom lines. That's capitalism; if you can't produce, you can't survive.

Some industries have been better than others, but across the board in America, the protections even for essential workers have been lacking to say the least. The lack of concern over workers comes from capital looking after its precious money, especially if they head publicly-owned and traded companies, like, for example, WWE. Vince McMahon at heart is an arch-capitalist trading in the most barbarically distilled form of it, where his assets, his product, isn't material but human. The mistake is to think that the wrestlers themselves are the product and not the thing they do, an important distinction especially given this country's shameful history with chattel slavery. I'm not sure the distinction in McMahon's head exists the way he acts.

Of course, WWE is different. It has to produce on its billion-dollar television contract due to the restrictive language contained therein. The revenue streams are still open, even if live gates are no longer in the picture. Additionally, the company had $500 million cash on hand for such emergency situations. They got the "essential business" tag from Florida's government too, after Linda McMahon made a hefty $18.5 million donation from her Super PAC. They should have been okay with going full steam ahead, especially if they planned on going forward with a skeleton crew of wrestlers the likes of which have been featured on RAW and Smackdown the last couple of weeks. A lot of the roster doesn't get paid if they don't work. It's shitty, but I guess something can be said for the security of knowing you have a place on the house show loops when you got back.

However, two days after being deemed essential enough to get McMahon's company the okay to operate in the state of Florida, several independent contractors and employees of the company were let go yesterday. The extent right now is not known because cuts from NXT haven't been completely publicized yet. However, the list of main roster names and producers is steep.

• Drake Maverick (Rockstar Spud)
• Zack Ryder
• Rusev
• Curt Hawkins
• The OC (Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson)
• Lio Rush
• Kurt Angle
• EC3
• Sarah Logan
• Deonna Purrazo
• MJ Jenkins
• Fit Finlay
• Kendo Kashin
• Ace Steel
• Aiden English
• Eric Young
• Heath Slater
• Lance Storm
• Mike Rotunda
• Shawn Daivari
• Mike Chioda
• Pat Buck
• Billy Kidman
• Sarah Stock
• Erick Rowan
• Mike and Maria Kanellis
• Primo and Epico Colon
• Andrea Listenberg, writer of the Otis/Mandy Rose story
• Scott Armstrong
• Aleksandar Jaksic
• Shane Helms
• No Way Jose
• Josiah Williams
• Dan Matha
• Serena Deeb
• Jon Quasto
• Alyssa Miles

Some of those names might not ring much of a bell. Some of them are downright infuriating in the short and long terms. Short term, WWE, which does not pay transportation costs for its workers domestically, called Sarah Logan and No Way Jose to come to the Performance Center to get squashed like bugs. In the long term, hoo boy. You can look at Zack Ryder, who revolutionized the way WWE did social media and grabbed the brass ring twice only for McMahon to violently yank it away from him both times. There's Maverick, who did everything asked of him and then some, including voluntarily pissing himself on television. Hell, he even made a work out of consummating his marriage to put over a title they only created because someone found Chuck Taylor's Instagram account for his 24/7 Championship a few years too late. Then there's Rusev, who responded to his real-life marriage being turned into a cuckold angle by taking his own money donating it to production staff who weren't getting paid. No one should have gotten fired, but these are guys who deserved it the least.

But "deserve" is such a loaded word under capitalism. What the worker deserves is rarely what they get, and everyone, from the media down to the labor themselves are trained to believe that it's the head of the business that deserves to reap benefits for the work that is done at lower levels in the company. The fact that labor is considered low level and wholly superfluous executive positions are considered high is why capitalism is a broken system that needs not reform but destruction. If capitalism were just, do you think the writer of the only story WWE has done in the last year that resonated with anyone but McMahon would've been let go? Hell, do you think any of these people would have been let go given WWE has so much money on hand? This is not a situation where the company is suffering and needs to let people go. These cuts were made in order to boost the stock and make McMahon and his shareholders even more money.

The cost of having those contracts on hand would have been $4 million per month. Assuming they were already paid for this month, that was a cost of $28 million to keep them around, maybe throw them a bone on television, or at least pay a downside guarantee even if they don't have one in their contracts. It would've cost not much more than Linda McMahon's Super PAC bribe to keep the company open, especially in the face of how much cash they have on hand with the influx of money on their television contracts and network subscriptions coming in. The most accurate distillation of capitalism, however, is in the beginning of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, where Ebenezer Scrooge refuses to give Bob Crachitt a raise and eschews donations because "the surplus population" needs to decrease. You can tell the Christmas novel is high fantasy because I can't imagine a rich person changing his heart even being visited by four ghosts showing him the wretchedness of his ways. Do you think Toots Mondt or Vincent J. McMahon could scare Vincent Kennedy McMahon straight? I'm not so sure.

I'm not entirely sure a wrestling fan can be radicalized by the business if outside forces haven't done so already. Even people who lean to the left have defended these cuts as "business decisions" even if they're clearly not necessitated by debts or other hardships. WWE is clearly better off than every other wrestling company. What I think might be worse are people who realize that it's a terrible series of actions but who hand-wave it because they don't expect better from a carny like McMahon, almost a tacit accepting when McMahon stands shuffling his foot saying "you can't bwame me, I'm just a cawny uWu." It almost excuses the fact that McMahon's capitalism is and has always been the most nakedly barbaric in existence. In retrospect, these cuts shouldn't have come as a surprise anyway. McMahon has always reacted as if his wrestlers were cattle and not people. Then again, just because it's not surprising doesn't mean it's not infuriating.