Hasbro has a new Monopoly game out and it’s causing quite the fuss on Twitter. Monopoly Socialism is a twist on the original game, but portrays socialism in a mocking and negative light. The game, which is available at retailers now, was first called out on Twitter by Rutgers history professor Nick Kapur who said it was “mean-spirited and woefully ill-informed.”
In a Twitter thread, Kapur called out Hasbro, the world’s largest toymaker, for its sometimes questionable and oftentimes insulting components of the game. Kapur’s epic rant begins here:
I bought a copy of Hasbro's mean-spirited and woefully ill-informed "MONOPOLY: SOCIALISM" board game so you don't have to – a thread 1/ pic.twitter.com/YhZWDjkAnj
— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) August 21, 2019
He does an excellent job pointing out that Hasbro’s game mocking socialism doesn’t actually seem to know how socialism works:
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/ pic.twitter.com/3TcDI0t882
— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) August 21, 2019
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/ pic.twitter.com/8LBOk00laB
— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) August 21, 2019
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/ pic.twitter.com/6WwHZLKppG
— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) August 21, 2019
But when the game does seem to grasp the most basic components of socialism, it blasts them. You know, things like healthcare for all, which Hasbro seems to think is something to be derided. Oh, and Hasbro thinks public schools are for losers:
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/ pic.twitter.com/gcg3bUKrU1
— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) August 21, 2019
And then Kapur points out that much of the rest of the game is dedicated to just being mean to people who care about things that are unrelated to socialism. Hasbro’s game suggests the company also seems to hate environmental causes:
It's also crucial to mock environmentalism because, haha, as we all know environmentalism is stupid and hilarious. 7/ pic.twitter.com/dhXb29ANQR
— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) August 21, 2019
It also thinks veganism is for losers, apparently:
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/ pic.twitter.com/tKzkpQWZ36
— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) August 21, 2019
Voting is also very, very bad, for some reason:
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/ pic.twitter.com/TYlqGtCJ6p
— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) August 21, 2019
Matter of fact, Hasbro’s game seems to mock everything a lot of the people who buy its products care about. The one thing the company doesn’t mock is itself, a capitalist giant with seemingly no knowledge of the history of the gaming property it owns. Feminist Elizabeth Magie, the inventor of the game The Landlord’s Game, which inspired Monopoly, created it to satirize the very capitalist systems Hasbro thrives on today.
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/https://t.co/iafF9DF1wN pic.twitter.com/JRJv41sZNQ
— Nick Kapur (@nick_kapur) August 21, 2019