Today, corporate control over sports is rampant — and is extending its grip on public space in general. Recent Olympic Games and soccer World Cups have seen host countries suspend constitutionally guaranteed democratic rights in order to suppress criticism of these showpiece events and the brands that use them as a platform. Faced with mockery of aggressive advertising by brands like Coca Cola at the Euro 2020 championships, England manager Gareth Southgate insisted that such firms are crucial to investing in grassroots sport facilities.

But sports don’t have to be like this. In the interwar decades, a vibrant workers’ sports movement closely connected sports to working-class self-organization and a keen rejection of corporate promoters and professional clubs. In the 1920s, the organizations attached to the Socialist Workers’ Sport International (SASI) counted over one million members, while the Soviet-centered Red Sport International (RSI) had some two million. SASI’s Workers’ Olympiads were a particular high point of this movement: the 1931 games in Vienna had both more spectators and participants than the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

In Austria, the workers’ sports movement was closely connected to workers’ defense from the rising fascist threat. One of its most important figures was Julius Deutsch, who also founded the anti-fascist Schutzbund militia and became a military adviser in the Spanish Civil War. A valuable introduction to his life’s work appears in Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture, a selection of his writings published by PM Press. Gabriel Kuhn, who translated and edited the volume, spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about the cultural life of interwar socialism, workers’ sports, and Deutsch’s anti-fascism.