Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Willie Osterweil — The Secret Sharing History of Monopoly

But Monopoly wasn’t actually designed to encourage ruthless cut-throat land grabs. Instead, the game was envisioned as a teaching tool about the injustice of landlords, one whose in-built ruthlessness would demonstrate the dangers of such practice. Called “The Landlord’s Game” when it was first invented by Lizzie Magie, in 1903, the game was in many ways similar to how it is played now.
But recently a remarkable rediscovery has been made: Magie designed advanced rules into the game which were made to demonstrate that everyone could live in harmony and sharing. They were never included in the Parker Brothers version, but, in all the early boxes, you were given an address to send to Magie for her advanced rules. If you did, under the heading of “For Advanced and Scientific Players”, Magie suggested a way to play where, rather than one person owning everything, all the players could share in the wealth.
Magie was a Georgist. The Georgists believed that people should be able to hold onto what they create with their own efforts, but that all things “found in nature”, especially land, are owned by all. For the Georgists, landlords were the root of all injustice, and they argued for a single progressive land value tax, to replace all other forms of taxation. This, they argued, since it would only tax wealth, could bring about equality and justice, and also break down the hegemony of the landlords.
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The Secret Sharing History of Monopoly
Willie Osterweil

4 comments:

David said...

Georgist Monopoly! Very interesting. There was a comment at Billy Blog that made the point that it wasn't "us" against the rentiers but that the rentiers were us:

It is not so much that the left has lost the ability to speak effectively, it has lost its electorate. Most voters in the UK and Australia are deeply reactionary rentiers, who want ever higher property (house, shares) prices to their own benefit and ever low wages or welfare for everybody else.

When 60-70% of voters are petty bourgeoisie, landlords (actually landladies mostly middle aged or older females), demanding massive tax-free capital gains year after year, at the expense if the working poor, there is no “progressive” story they can sympathize with. They believe that the working poor or the unemployed poor are their class enemies, exploiting them with parasitically high wages and welfare.

Tom Hickey said...

Yes, and this is not new. Marx and Engels realized that they faced the dual loyalties of the petite bourgeoisie, who were really more akin to the workers, but their meagre ownership in comparison with the haute bourgeoisie led them to ally with the haute bourgeoisie contra the poorer workers who owned nothing to speak of. They tried to make clear that it was not their intention to socialize the meagre ownership of the petite bourgeoisie, which was really immaterial in the power structure, but rather only the means of production that were owned and controlled by the haute bourgeoisie as the source of both wealth and political power.

Scott Baker said...

This is well-known to Georgists. Under the original rules, the game went on forever since collecting the land rent meant that everyone prospered, just as they would in real life. That was Lizzie Magie's intent - to have one set of rules to show how society could be under Georgist rules, and another under something closer to the Monopoly rules people use today, to show how all but the monopolist lose in the end. Of course, when it's only a game, people like to compete and try to win. In RL, people slip into poverty and have to pay all their surplus to the landlord and the bank...forever, and do not even collect $200 when they pass Go! Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game We had Richard Biddle as a special guest in my group, Common Ground-NYC a couple of years ago, and even showed a portion of the then-new movie "Under the Boardwalk" where they talk about the game's origins: http://www.monopolydocumentary.com/ (most of the movie is just a documentary about the cutthroat competition of major monopoly players of the world's most popular board game. Alas, the Landlord's game is as marginalized for most people as Georgism is.

john fremont said...

Related topic; Monopoly as an aid to explaining MMT. Playing Monopolis Monopoly: An inquiry into why we are making ourselves so miserable (h/t) Rodger Mitchell