Monday, March 22, 2021

Labor Is Still Stronger Than Capital, Even In Wrestling

Much like she literally has Lacey Evans in a headlock here, Flair may have metaphorically had McMahon in one over Andrade's pending release.
Photo Credit: WWE.com

Professional wrestling is a multibillion-dollar global industry in 2021 with no small thanks going to WWE. Thanks to violating if not shattering decades of tradition and norms, Vince McMahon took the then-called World Wrestling Federation from its nominal territory stretching from Washington, DC to Maine and made it a nationally touring company. If you ask a majority of wrestling fans, however, whether or not WWE's product is "good," many will say that it is not, even if they watch between one and 11 hours of its output in any given week, spend money on a subscription to Peacock to get all the content they can, and venture every year to the host city for the flagship event, WrestleMania, to drop four figures of disposable income on a weekend full of the graps. Most of that sullied reputation begins and ends with McMahon as a figurehead for the company. One could ask why such a company that has less brand satisfaction than other peers among market leaders like Coca-Cola or McDonald's, even if it might have more brand loyalty, can make so much money. Shouldn't you have to be good at what you do to be profitable? The answer is obviously no because "available" and "convenient" often trump quality. But WWE feels like it's special in how bad it can be at any given time. The answer lies with McMahon himself.

As far as wrestling promoters go, McMahon is decidedly average. I know a lot of people use revenue and profit as the most important and sometimes only metric of how to judge a promoter, and it's hard to say he's bad when he's made the most money in history, even before considering the post-competition landscape, especially the current era where companies worth between 11 and 12 figures pay him ten figures for the right to provide them live simulacra of sporting events. Then again, the thesis that "anyone could book Steve Austin and Dwayne Johnson and make money" really was epitomized as Vince Russo, the Noo Yawka with the ego of the size of the Statue of Liberty and the brain the size of Pizza Rat's, was head of creative during those times and the company made gobs and gobs of money anyway. It also didn't hurt that he stumbled into Hulk Hogan in 1984 and John Cena in 2005 and was able to milk them for all they were worth. Again, it's not at all hard to sell tickets when the most proven way of making money in wrestling is having people on the roster that the masses wanted to see. I'm not sure there was anything difficult about making the decisions to "have Hulk Hogan win matches" or "let John Cena rap." But still, it's hard not to give him any credit.

However, his track record over nearly four decades of running a business I'm not even sure he likes has shown major cracks in the facade. One could say his overreliance on those can't-miss guys gave him tunnel vision and missed the boat on creating better ensembles to transition from era to era seamlessly. How many talented performers were just grist for the mill over the years? From Ricky Steamboat through CM Punk, his continual perception that what is huge now will remain huge forever has led him to use up-and-coming superstars with any kind of cache within the sphere of hardcore fans as cannon fodder for guys like Hogan or Cena, or even worse, for people who are members of the McMahon family by blood or marriage. 

Hell, even look at how many iconic wrestlers they've had on their roster that they've punted on since Vince, Jr. took over. Roddy Piper, Randy Savage, Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes, and Harley Race all are counted among the best of all-time, and yet to varying degrees they were mishandled or had their roles ultimately sacrificed to the ego of Hogan. When the sense came to McMahon to stop relying so much on the Hulkster and to have someone else be able to headline shows and be an ambassador for the company, he chose poorly. The Ultimate Warrior had two things going for him - a godlike physique and animal charisma, and both things made it seem like he was the guy to take the torch from Hogan. What McMahon either couldn't or refused to see was that he couldn't work a match to save his life, was legitimately crazy, and, the most important note for the purposes of the argument I'm making here, refused to take any of McMahon's bullshit. For that, he was painted as an outcast until he made up with the company late in life and accepted a Hall of Fame induction mere days before his death. This was after the company released a DVD set called The Self-Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior, which was a hit piece for a guy who headlined one WrestleMania and was part of the best match in the next one chronologically, all for the sin of telling McMahon where to stick it.

Warrior, Sid Vicious, Jeff Jarrett, and to an extent, Steve Austin all are exceptions to the rule. Austin and McMahon were never on the outs for too long, but the other three all played hardball with McMahon and only lost because attrition was against them. Yes, the reason why McMahon has been so successful is not because he's a good wrestling promoter or even a good businessman. No good businessman will sink the extreme amounts of money into things like a football league (twice!), a Times Square restaurant, or a bodybuilding federation that McMahon has. McMahon is rich and powerful because he knows a thing or two about exerting control from a position of capital. That's right, folks; Vincent Kennedy McMahon is America's greatest capitalist. This position was not earned by accident. Rather, it was the logical ending position of where management in wrestling was in comparison to labor.

Modern professional wrestling has its roots in carnival confidence games, where the endeavoring promoter would have a wrestler who would look like an average schlub but be well-versed in the arts of "hooking," or shoot-fighting. That promoter would make money by offering wagers for bouts that were clearly rigged in favor of that "hooker." The fighter or wrestler would have implicit trust that his promoter was smart enough to pick the biggest rube to fight to keep the winning streak going. Thus, the implicit trust between capital, as ramshackle as capital in a carnival setting could be, and labor was born. Over time, that paradigm evolved into putting on a show that was presented as a real sporting contest but was as staged as Vaudeville or the first moving pictures. When the audience was clued into the fact that it was all a work is a date that it shrouded in doubt; I gather kayfabe stopped being a rigid veil pulled over the crowd's eyes and more a spoken agreement by the workers not to break the fourth wall early on in pro wrestling's modern history. Either way, instead of trusting that the promoter wouldn't get that hooker put on the ground, in the hospital, or in a bodybag, the trust morphed into that manager being able to pull in a crowd that could be molded into return customers the next time they were in town. The stakes for the performer were lower, but the trust grew.

Over time, that kind of trust turned wrestling's workforce into the most amenable to capital among all other labor forces. The trust that the "boys" had for "the office" was unheard of in a time when unions became popular among all Americans. As the tide has shifted from unionization to government-assisted efforts to break them under the guise of euphemistic bullshit terms like "right to work," wrestling has positioned itself as ahead of the curve for once, and the biggest reason is McMahon weaponizing that trust against his locker room early on in his nationalization process. Once again, he was fortunate enough to have Hogan on his roster, because as valuable as he was as a star for the company, he as even more of an asset as a union buster. The Hulkster set the tone for obsequious behavior from the locker room towards McMahon by sniffing out an attempt and ratting it out to McMahon. Bobby Heenan and Jesse Ventura saw that the old model of putting faith in the office wasn't going to work with someone like McMahon. They were only going to see a bigger piece of the pie that came with national expansion by pooling together the locker room to bargain collectively. Because Hogan sniffed it out before they could recruit anyone in the WWF locker room (and if they'd unionized that locker room, it would've spread to Jim Crockett's and Verne Gagne's territories within months), McMahon was able to cement his stranglehold on his workforce.

The results of that one rat-bitch snitch have propagated like a single crack in a window branches out into a spiderweb of cracked glass, ready to shatter at the slightest touch. Now McMahon can wantonly fire talent for even making offhand cracks on Twitter about unionizing. He can unilaterally demand Twitch passwords so that he can take money that his talent earns in their spare time. He can make decrees that people's images belong to him and no one bats an eye because the locker room is so beaten down to the idea that collective action would be the end of the business. Even wrestlers who will never, ever sniff a WWE payday, or at least they wouldn't have sniffed one before McMahon turned his headhunting process from selective recruitment to a proverbial vacuum cleaner, defend McMahon's antilabor tactics. These people who will never even get a trickle out of the mighty Mississippi River's worth of revenue WWE takes in take up a sword and shield online for McMahon for free. That's how damaged the wrestling workforce is. It all comes from McMahon's utter destructive prowess at playing the capitalist game. It feels like he's in checkmate right now. If this were a video game, he'd be Ganondorf at the midpoint of Ocarina of Time and the rest of the wrestling world would be a sullied and ravaged Hyrule overrun with ghosts.

However, every now and again, the specter of collective action can still spring up from the cracks and show that that son of a bitch McMahon isn't some invincible overlord who can only be taken down by another, potentially worse billionaire robber baron. Manuel Alfonso Andrade Orpozea, known formerly as La Sombra and most recently as merely "Andrade," has been languishing in WWE for the better part of a year. Yes, COVID-19 has had an impact on the roster, but it also hasn't stopped WWE from building guys into forces of nature, whether they deserved it like Bobby Lashley or were dudes who probably shouldn't have even been signed in Austin Theory (whose big push on main was shuttled to NXT as Johnny Gargano's lil' buddy, to be fair). You have a multitalented wrestler who has machismo oozing out of every pore, and you can't push him because.... why? Some believe it's because he didn't pick up English fast enough. Others have the idea that his benching was some weird revenge ploy by McMahon for having the temerity to date Charlotte Flair, which might seem like a leap on the surface, but given how people like McMahon, who is an accused rapist, and his buddy Donald Trump are on record as how they treat women may not seem as farfetched. No matter what the reason, having a wrestler the caliber of Andrade on the roster and not having him on TV at least every other week, or in a company like WWE that has TV time out the ass, EVERY week, is a sin.

So, Andrade did what any reasonable blue-chip wrestler with a hankering to be in the ring doing important things for big money would do. He asked for his release a week ago today. As with every other release request that was made to McMahon, that request was denied. It looked that unless some other virus that gave WWE the opportunity to shed salaries in order to maximize profits during a quarantine came up, Andrade would be languishing for the rest of his contract and then some, because McMahon loves the bullshit move adding time to a contract for "dates lost to injury." Given that house shows have ground to a halt, there was reason to believe Andrade could have been a prisoner for a long, long time.

Enter Charlotte Flair.

The most decorated and perhaps most supported woman wrestler in WWE history was on the poster for WrestleMania, an event that she was rumored to be challenging for, and presumably winning, the RAW Women's Championship on, until she wasn't anymore. The first reaction was she was pulled off the poster because she might be starting her filming role for the remake of Walking Tall. Then reports started to leak out that she and WWE might have come to an impasse. The thing about being in a relationship with someone is you care about their well-being, and reports have had Flair pitching ideas to creative for Andrade. If you're being told that you are the Queen and management loves you and they keep throwing title belts and TV stories at you, you might think you have some pull in the company. So imagine you go to bat for your boyfriend, who, just spitballing here, might be able to add something to weekly television, a weekly television that keeps losing viewers. Sure, it might not matter how many people watch now if you're getting billions of dollars from no fewer than three distribution deals, two of which from the same multinational media conglomerate who seems to love the smell of your shit, but declining numbers when you're a capitalist strongman with a genetic jackhammer between your legs is bad news. You're supposed to have infinite growth! These circumstances should be troubling, and be that as it may, you, the Queen and the daughter of wrestling royalty and the one management says is the biggest, most important star, are told that your ideas are shit and now the guy who wants to get out isn't allowed out.

You know where I'm going with this.

I'm not sure how things went down backstage, but whatever happened, Andrade got his release as a result. It doesn't take a genius, though, to think Flair may have said some things that McMahon told her she might regret. In truth, if she did, and she leveraged her own star to sit out the rest of her contract and then sail on down the Atlantic Seaboard to, say, Jacksonville to be their own personal female Jon Moxley-level signing on behalf of her boyfriend, then she proved every mewling jackass who thinks unionization would ruin professional wrestling wrong. If that was the case, and I'm not saying it is, because I don't have backstage access, then collective action between two, just two members of the workforce, was able to put McMahon in a position where he had to act in favor of labor in order to preserve his own self-interests. If two people can do that, imagine what hundreds of people can do?

Vince McMahon is a capitalist, and he's quite good at playing that game. Absolutely no single capitalist can withstand sustained collective action from a labor force without which that capitalist cannot provide goods and/or services. Andrew Carnegie couldn't win. John D. Rockefeller couldn't either. Not Henry Ford or the cabal of jackals who own sports franchises either. The only people who can stop a union from forming are the "boys" themselves. McMahon can't fire all of them, because no matter how much of a capitalist ubermensch he thinks he is, he and his family and his nerd-ass son-in-law can't do five hours of mainline television a week without wrestlers, especially if all the wrestlers he fires are the stars with name cache.