5-12-08, 9:17 am

A horror that millions of people saw on television occurred earlier this month. A horse that ran second in the Kentucky Derby, whipped by her jockey, collapsed and died after she crossed the finish line. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other Animal Rights activists (and I consider myself an animal rights activist) have called for the elimination of the whip in U.S. horse racing and the suspension of the jockey. Analysts of horse racing have made the point that medications block a horse feeling pain are legal, which makes it difficult for jockeys to know when a horse is in trouble because the horse makes no signs of trouble. Analysts have also made the point that the whip is banned in international racing, but continues to exist in North America.

There are many ramifications to these tragic events which give us insights into the way capitalism works? Before I begin to look at those ramifications, let begin by saying that I fully support PETA’s call for the immediate end of the whip in U.S. racing. I don’t see the jockey as the major culprit, as against the owners of the horses and the lack of serious regulation of horse racing which permits horrors like this to happen.

Although there is inspection in horse racing to prevent “doping,” (the use of speed drugs to help horses win and/or sedative drugs to help them lose) horses are given a variety of legal and illegal drugs to make them either run faster or slower and to keep them in races. Jockeys also live a world of drugs to keep their weight down, since every pound either adds or detracts to the possible outcome of races.

I would like to see horse racing (and dog racing for that matter) banned entirely since it exploits animals to propagate a parasitic gambling industry and the aristocratic pretensions of wealthy horse stable owners. But, I don’t see that happening in the foreseeable future. What can be done, though, is to create a serious independent regulation of the horse racing industry, eliminate whipping, seriously police drugging, and also tax the industry at a much higher level, the way industries which are considered sellers of vice, cigarettes and liquor are taxed at much higher levels. I would also advocate a serious attempt to restrict the on track and off track gambling industry in which many underfunded state governments have become complicit.

What are the ramifications that give us insight into how capitalism works? First capitalism transforms everything into commodities, including the labor used to produce all commodities. Race horses and jockeys are commodities. Capitalism operates on “markets” and has legions of brokers, “investment counselors,” to facilitate investment. Horse racing has its armies of handicappers and millions of people who read their evaluations of races the way others read the Wall Street Journal and the stock market reports.

There are probably more people for whom the racing form really is the “daily bible of the American Dream” than the Wall Street Journal. At least the racing form doesn’t have the obnoxious mean-spirited right-wing editorials that the Journal has, editorials written by editors who live off of labor that routinely insult workers and progressive activists in ways that the racing form would never dream of insulting horses.

Capitalism is also a vast gambling industry in which the fix is in for the house (not the sports books on the on track betting windows as in racing but the large corporations, the large investment banks, and brokerage houses, which use other people’s money to enrich themselves, even if their betting clients do sometimes benefit).

Capitalism fetishizes “risk,” which is the essence of gambling. Capitalism sees all social relations as about winners and losers, and needs to exploit all resources to win. The rules of capitalist “markets” are meant to be broken or rather evaded within the confines of capitalist law; free competition is about establishing monopoly and developing a state apparatus to protect privilege.

Even though horse racing has many owners with ancien regime pretensions and still calls itself the “sport of kings,” even though horses are not paid wages and de-skilled, animal rights activists make the points that race horses are made to run and prepared for racing before their bone structures are fully developed; the are bred and raised in ways that make them extremely fragile so that they will run faster and faster and win more and more races and garner more and more prestige and profits for their owners.

The most successful ones are then used as breeding horses to produce more fragile horses that will run faster and faster and garner more prestige and profits for the owners regardless of its effects on them. The least successful are often sold off and slaughtered for commercial use. All are routinely given drugs and medications to enhance their racing ability.

Capitalists keep drugs out of work places when it suits them in regard to labor efficiency (in the post bellum South, Black laborers were sometimes given cocaine to keep them awake and alert so that they could work longer hours and at a higher speed). Capitalism doesn’t sell off workers who can no longer work, but in its classic laissez-faire form (which reactionaries both romanticize and constantly seek to restore), treats them a much like feral animals, abandoning them to a world without social security, medical care, housing, leaving them to poor houses and prisons, the equivalent of shelters without the death penalty that shelters impose on animals they cannot place.

Capitalism can be abolished and replaced with socialism or it can, short of that, be reformed so as to provide at least for a foreseeable period of time protections for the working class in regard to wages, health care, housing, education, transportation and other vital human needs.

Horse racing, which is a very exploitative part of capitalism’s entertainment industry can also be abolished and replaced with less abusive and parasitic forms of entertainment. Or it can be reformed in the ways that animal rights activists and others, me included, have called for.

The future of horse racing, like the larger future of capitalism, will depend on the struggle of activists and working people to advance their interests against an entrenched power structure that exploits them and uses ideology to portray their exploitation in gambling and their cheering for animals whipped into racing against each other as they are pushed to fight against each other as both entertainment and something that they should preserve against “elitist” reformers. Hopefully, the Kentucky Derby horror will strengthen the forces demanding reform.