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Ballbuster?: True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman
Ball Buster? is the second edition (the original title was Class Struggle is the Name of the Game) of a straight forward business adventure story, with enough ups, downs, victories, defeats, and suspense to fill a Hitchcock film. It is also an extremely humorous autobiography, full of irony and satire, and sprinkled with scholarly insights, a critical view of business as seen from the inside, and a case study of the Marxist theory of embodiment, which states that the role you play in society is decisive in determining what kind of person you are.
292 pages, Paperback
First published January 14, 2002
About the author
Bertell Ollman
25 books40 followersBertell Ollman is a professor of politics at New York University. He teaches both dialectical methodology and socialist theory. He is the author of several academic works relating to Marxist theory.
Ollman is also the creator of Class Struggle, a board game based around his Marxist beliefs, and from 1978-1983 was president of Class Struggle, Inc., the company that initially produced and marketed the game. The game was later released by a major board game company, Avalon Hill. It received publicity due to its unusual and controversial theme.
Ollman is also the creator of Class Struggle, a board game based around his Marxist beliefs, and from 1978-1983 was president of Class Struggle, Inc., the company that initially produced and marketed the game. The game was later released by a major board game company, Avalon Hill. It received publicity due to its unusual and controversial theme.
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June 26, 2013
Well, can you run a small business along Marxist lines? Can you cross the wires and feed profit and accumulation back on themselves by aggressively marketing... a game that simulates class struggle? Can you make a monopoly clone that challenges the premises of monopoly itself? No, no, and also no.
Bertell Ollman, one-time teacher of Sean Hannity and tenured professor at NYU, attempted in the late 70s to design a boardgame called "Class Struggle" and then market and distribute it as a propaganda tool to popularize Marxist thought. What happened is that he and a bunch of friends started a small business, got miserably into debt, caused a stir in daily papers and left wing journals all across the country, sold almost a quarter of a million copies, and ended their run by selling the rights to distribute the game to Avalon Hill and peacing out. The book spends a brief section (too brief) on the actual design of the game, and then details the business aspects while also dealing with Ollman's concurrent struggle against the University of Maryland, whose political science department was trying to appoint him chairman, but whose president was bowing to pressure from the state senate and the governor to not appoint such an "outspoken" left-winger. Spoilers, he doesn't get appointed, and he also loses the libel suit he files against some conservative columnists who had libeled him.
The panel of judges that denied his suit was composed of people like Robert Bork, which was funny to read. At least Ollman had the pleasure of seeing Bork go through a similar public wringer when Bork was himself denied appointment to the supreme court for being a complete turd several years later.
On to the book's politics: Ollman's experience in the small-business world involves a tremendous amount of theater and pranking, what we might today call trolling. There's no other way to categorize his performance in front of the New York Chamber of Commerce, where he gives a speech at their annual meeting claiming that socialism is the only salvation for the harried, oppressed small businessman sandwiched between monopolists and "market realities" that seem to only apply to him. After TARP it's easy to see what he means. And the idea of advocating socialism for businessmen is technically correct, but it's also apparent in this book that the board of directors of the game company (Class Struggle, Inc.) have slightly different priorities than you'd expect. And that those priorities are modified- surprise- by the "realities" of running a small business. They let their two employees unionize without a fight, but Ollman agonizes over the decision and the money it's going to cost him, and the company makes a major PR blunder when they refuse to stop selling the game to a department store in New York whose workers are on strike. There are literally pictures of striking workers outside of a shop displaying "Class Struggle, the Boardgame" in the window, and one woman even apologizes to the strikers for breaking their picket, but, "I just want to get that game in the window." Is your fuckin mind blown yet?
In the end Ollman realizes that the way he's been forced to act as a small businessman, becoming a "ballbuster" with a reputation for ruthlessness with suppliers and distributors, has changed him and he has failed to change the nature of doing business. And he begins to question the worthiness of the game itself, as if distributing it is worth furthering the process that it's critiquing. The entire book is a excellent example of the problems with using capitalist processes to create something other than capitalism. In the age of "Human Rights Campaign" credit cards, "End Corporate Personhood" bumper stickers and the idea of entering the debt market to destroy debt, it's useful to see a Marxist try to start a business (and get justice from the courts, in the concurrent story) and get completely bludgeoned. It's almost as if it weren't down to technical arrangements but... social realities.
Near the end of the book Ollman verges dangerously close to supporting small business, and in his game the small business class can ally itself with either the workers or the capitalists, which reveals his biases. So it's not that much of a surprise when a fascist group in England calls him to offer their support for the book and ask him for distribution rights. They claim that he'd only have to make "minor alterations" to the text for them to put their stamp on it. Ollman is bewildered by this response but a lot of other Marxists, especially those who have, maybe, worked for a small business, wouldn't see it as a bolt from the blue like he does. He does admit that fascism and small business have had an affinity for one another but doesn't really analyze this.
Overall I came to the book hoping for game design insights and got something completely different. Ollman is a great humorist, and his humility and ability to appreciate the people he's dealing with while holding a simultaneous critical opinion of the system they're a part of is admirable. I just wish he had taken his instincts- to support the strikers at the department store, for example, further.
Also Soft Skull is kind of a legit press (i.e. not a dude in his basement) but the book had all sorts of funny formatting errors, like chapter headings that were at the top of the next page when the chapter actually started on the page before, and inexplicable empty space (a page that's half filled with text that starts up at the top of the next page, like if there was supposed to be a long footnote but it got erased??) and weird shit like that. Not a big deal but like I said, weird. four point one red stars, and, as he says in the acknowledgements, a freight reduction of ten percent to Comrade Ollman.
Bertell Ollman, one-time teacher of Sean Hannity and tenured professor at NYU, attempted in the late 70s to design a boardgame called "Class Struggle" and then market and distribute it as a propaganda tool to popularize Marxist thought. What happened is that he and a bunch of friends started a small business, got miserably into debt, caused a stir in daily papers and left wing journals all across the country, sold almost a quarter of a million copies, and ended their run by selling the rights to distribute the game to Avalon Hill and peacing out. The book spends a brief section (too brief) on the actual design of the game, and then details the business aspects while also dealing with Ollman's concurrent struggle against the University of Maryland, whose political science department was trying to appoint him chairman, but whose president was bowing to pressure from the state senate and the governor to not appoint such an "outspoken" left-winger. Spoilers, he doesn't get appointed, and he also loses the libel suit he files against some conservative columnists who had libeled him.
The panel of judges that denied his suit was composed of people like Robert Bork, which was funny to read. At least Ollman had the pleasure of seeing Bork go through a similar public wringer when Bork was himself denied appointment to the supreme court for being a complete turd several years later.
On to the book's politics: Ollman's experience in the small-business world involves a tremendous amount of theater and pranking, what we might today call trolling. There's no other way to categorize his performance in front of the New York Chamber of Commerce, where he gives a speech at their annual meeting claiming that socialism is the only salvation for the harried, oppressed small businessman sandwiched between monopolists and "market realities" that seem to only apply to him. After TARP it's easy to see what he means. And the idea of advocating socialism for businessmen is technically correct, but it's also apparent in this book that the board of directors of the game company (Class Struggle, Inc.) have slightly different priorities than you'd expect. And that those priorities are modified- surprise- by the "realities" of running a small business. They let their two employees unionize without a fight, but Ollman agonizes over the decision and the money it's going to cost him, and the company makes a major PR blunder when they refuse to stop selling the game to a department store in New York whose workers are on strike. There are literally pictures of striking workers outside of a shop displaying "Class Struggle, the Boardgame" in the window, and one woman even apologizes to the strikers for breaking their picket, but, "I just want to get that game in the window." Is your fuckin mind blown yet?
In the end Ollman realizes that the way he's been forced to act as a small businessman, becoming a "ballbuster" with a reputation for ruthlessness with suppliers and distributors, has changed him and he has failed to change the nature of doing business. And he begins to question the worthiness of the game itself, as if distributing it is worth furthering the process that it's critiquing. The entire book is a excellent example of the problems with using capitalist processes to create something other than capitalism. In the age of "Human Rights Campaign" credit cards, "End Corporate Personhood" bumper stickers and the idea of entering the debt market to destroy debt, it's useful to see a Marxist try to start a business (and get justice from the courts, in the concurrent story) and get completely bludgeoned. It's almost as if it weren't down to technical arrangements but... social realities.
Near the end of the book Ollman verges dangerously close to supporting small business, and in his game the small business class can ally itself with either the workers or the capitalists, which reveals his biases. So it's not that much of a surprise when a fascist group in England calls him to offer their support for the book and ask him for distribution rights. They claim that he'd only have to make "minor alterations" to the text for them to put their stamp on it. Ollman is bewildered by this response but a lot of other Marxists, especially those who have, maybe, worked for a small business, wouldn't see it as a bolt from the blue like he does. He does admit that fascism and small business have had an affinity for one another but doesn't really analyze this.
Overall I came to the book hoping for game design insights and got something completely different. Ollman is a great humorist, and his humility and ability to appreciate the people he's dealing with while holding a simultaneous critical opinion of the system they're a part of is admirable. I just wish he had taken his instincts- to support the strikers at the department store, for example, further.
Also Soft Skull is kind of a legit press (i.e. not a dude in his basement) but the book had all sorts of funny formatting errors, like chapter headings that were at the top of the next page when the chapter actually started on the page before, and inexplicable empty space (a page that's half filled with text that starts up at the top of the next page, like if there was supposed to be a long footnote but it got erased??) and weird shit like that. Not a big deal but like I said, weird. four point one red stars, and, as he says in the acknowledgements, a freight reduction of ten percent to Comrade Ollman.
Displaying 1 of 1 review