After having tried and failed many decades ago to get a political economy journal to publish my review of Anti-Monopoly, I recently found yet another spin on analog board games demonizing socialism. Update: Target stores pulled it from its website, much to the chagrin of some RWNJ media.
In the spirit of monopoly games designed for niche markets like Duckopoly (U. of Oregon) or Monopoly: Bass Fishing Edition. this makes no pedagogical assumptions about actually providing social learning other than to reinforce stereotypes, in this case about socialism and socialists.
This seems designed for a Trumpian Xmas gag gift market, readers of National Review, or CPAC attendees not playing “hide the mushroom”. Reinforcing business students’ prejudices would be the optimal learning objective. If only people would put their smartphones away.
There was a different version pimped in 2016 because pitting Hillary against Bernie made sense to some entrepreneurs who never looked at Daily Kos’s pie-fights.
(2016) The object of SOCIALISM is to achieve total fairness and equality through the renting and selling of property under a modern, progressive, and populist public policy. The game consists of:
- An enlightened rulebook
- A quick-reference card
- New game tokens
- 20 “Fat Chance” cards
- 20 “Communism Chest” cards
The current state of the 2016 presidential elections is unlike anything in recent history. Our board game lightens the mood, adding some much-needed humor to an otherwise divisive election. We also satirize one of the country's most cherished board games in the process. Our Kickstarter has just opened for funding, and we invite you to add your voice before it's too late and the Press is tamped down by oppressive free market imperialism.
www.socialismgame.com/...
Aside from the oxymoronic title, this latest version could have been a moment to teach people about state-owned enterprises and monopoly pricing, or even have a round of naked Twister with the kinked demand curve. Like most attempts at satire, it comforts itself with simplistic rhetorical devices to amuse the users.
From the tagline "Winning is for capitalists" we can see right away that this game is not going to be friendly to whatever it deems "socialism" to be.
Because as we all know "socialists" never play sports or participate in any sort of competitive activity, like board games. 2/
Interestingly, the design of the game features the red socialist rose... do ordinary people who presumably hate "socialism" really know what this symbol even is? 3/
The player tokens include a typewriter, an old-timey phone, a pocket watch, a phonograph, and a CRT television set, presumably because "socialism" is so incredibly outdated? 4/
Spaces on the board include a snarkily named hospital and school, because apparently schools are supposed to produce losers and hospitals are only supposed to help some of the people. 5/
There are also tons of references to health food and veganism, despite the lack of any clear connection to socialism, apparently because what they share in common is that they are odious things that are fun to mock. 6/
It's also crucial to mock environmentalism because, haha, as we all know environmentalism is stupid and hilarious. 7/
It goes without saying that this game is entirely uninterested in trying to understand what socialism actually is and how it might function. 8/
For example, there is a community fund, and if a player doesn't have enough money to pay for something, the community fund automatically pays the difference. Which seems kinda socialist at first glance. 9/
But the community fund is gleefully and deliberately designed to be constantly running out of money. At this point, the only way to fill it back up and keep the game going is for players to donate money to it voluntarily.10/
So this is not really a socialist model. It's more of a billionaire philanthropy model.
It's akin to conservatives constantly saying, "If Warren Buffett likes taxes so much, why doesn't he just donate to the IRS?" 11/
And then confusedly, when it's time to pay taxes, the taxes do not go into the community fund, but rather are paid *from* the community fund to a private bank! 12/
Similarly, when you pass go, you get a $50 "living wage," which was presumably reduced from the usual $200 to emphasize that "socialism makes everyone poorer" or somesuch. 13/
But then when the minimum wage is increased, this wage doesn't actually increase, but instead, once again for no reason the community fund pays money to a private bank. 14/
Likewise, because "socialism" allegedly hates people doing well, a card lets you confiscate wealth from someone with some sort of vote.
But then, rather than actually redistributing that wealth to those less well off, the wealth is simply destroyed and removed from the game. 15/
Voting is also mocked. Maybe because voting creates market uncertainty for big banks and monopoly capitalists from whose perspective this game was apparently designed?
Voting is portrayed as serving mainly to "shake things up" and something socialists are "constantly" doing. 16/
Of course the great irony here is that that the game we now know as "Monopoly" originally started out as "The Landlord's Game," invented by Georgist feminist comedian Lizzie Magie to satirize capitalist rent-seeking... 17/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landl…
But then the game was stolen by a male capitalist, made even more brutally and unironically captitalist, and sold to Parker Brothers, who later abused the legal system to get around copyright laws in a classic case of...capitalist rent-seeking. 18/
In sum, I can't quite figure out who the target audience of this game is. It would be as if other themed "Monopoly" games attempted to viciously mock the theme, like if Dog Monopoly mocked dogs and dog owners, or Star Wars monopoly mocked Star Wars fans for being nerds. 19/
I guess maybe in this golden age of "Euro-style" board games like Catan, nobody under 60 plays "Monopoly" anymore?
Maybe Hasbro actually knows its audience, and that audience is just hate-filled Boomers raised during the Cold War and triggered by whatever people under 40 do? 20/
Judging by this other Hasbro Monopoly game called "Monopoly for Millennials," the answers to these questions are yes and yes. 21/
Even Ted Cruz weighed in:
Kapur's thread has raised a huge amount of online discussion. Even US Republican Senator Ted Cruz got involved.
And he had some of his own ideas for future Monopoly games.
OTOH, we all take ourselves too seriously, even though there could be games suited for ecosocialists.
(2015) Game of Thrones and the End of Marxist Theory by Sam Kriss: What would a properly materialist reading of Game of Thrones look like?
There has been a worrying proliferation of this kind of haphazardness of late: newspapers are publishing Marxist theories of pencils, Marxist readings of Taylor Swift’s new album, Marxist accounts of why men have nipples. Institutions that would never dream of printing Marxist critiques of, say, the banking system, are perfectly happy to let the children of Karl critique our dreams.
In the most recent example, the Guardian has dredged up Paul Mason, the economics editor for Channel 4 News, to provide a historical materialist prediction for the upcoming seasons of Game of Thrones.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that — but these people should remember that Marxism is fire and danger: the theoretical approach that not only manages to comprehend capitalist relations, but proposes the abolition of those relations.
In other words, it’s the only joke that’s actually funny. Marxism sees the finely tuned logic of all currently existing societies, recognizes the absolute necessity of every element, and then pronounces the whole thing to be mad and stupid. It finally reveals that the rational world we’re living in now is in fact a fantasy world, full of snarks and grumpkins, as absurd as anything in the most overblown fictions.
Mason’s “Can Marxist theory predict the end of ‘Game of Thrones’?” misunderstands both fantasy and Marxism, most of all because it fails to grasp this important point. Part of its failure also has to do with its overreaching ambition — in the space of a short essay, Mason tries to forecast the future plotlines of Game of Thrones, account for the fall of feudalism and the rise of capitalism, and explain why people living under capitalist economies enjoy fantasy stories set amid medieval decay.
www.jacobinmag.com/...
OTOH post-socialism as a non-communist mode of production remains a topic for discussion, much like postmodernism or post-capitalism.
(2018)
In our time of unprecedented economic, social, technological, and environmental change, awareness of the need for new economic thinking is growing. Yet most government and business policies are still made looking through a rearview mirror.
This article outlines a new post-capitalist and post-socialist economic system. It describes building blocks for a new economics of partnerism that recognizes that our real wealth consists of the contributions of people and of nature. It demonstrates that to move toward a more sustainable and just system we must implement economic measurements, policies, and practices that recognize the enormous value of the essential work of caring for people, starting in early childhood, and caring for our natural life-support systems.
www.tikkun.org/…
www.opednews.com/…
www.postcapitalistproject.org/…
The subordination of the economies of the capitalist periphery to the needs of the imperialist metropolises enabled capitalism to pass its most explosive contradictions onto the less developed societies. In this respect, the October revolution, as well as the Yugoslav revolution, were the national products of an organic whole, a world system structured hierarchically.1 As a result, they combined features of the bourgeois democratic revolution (land reform and national sovereignty) and of the proletarian revolution (in their anti-capitalist dynamic), features of the most modem capitalist development and the legacy of pre-capitalist societies. In these revolutions, the question of a socialist transformation was posed in a context in which it was out of the question to avoid going through ‘the detour of the market’.
www.socialisteconomist.com/...