Lizzie Magie, who invented The Landlord’s Game in 1903. I really admire her she was way ahead of her time. She was really pushing boundaries in her day. She was a performance artist, an inventor, and a feminist. She was exposed to lots of interesting ideas growing up. She was the daughter of a successful newspaper publisher who was a friend of the young Abraham Lincoln.
She was one of the more interesting women I’ve come across in my thirty years of looking at American history. What’s kind of ironic is that the game was based on a myth, as well. That’s a very self-serving narrative about what American capitalism is all about.
Monopoly guy how to#
And luck only plays a part in making a player the winner, because they know how to play the game the right way. The winner is always the smartest one at the table. Everyone starts with the same amount of money and has access to the bank, no matter who you are. Where else do we bow down and worship at the altar of unbridled capitalism, the way we do with Monopoly?Īs a game, it’s a mythic idea about American life and culture. If you play it by the rules, it’s a game that is usually over in two hours. That’s actually not in the rules and pumps more liquidity back into the system - it’s one of the reasons the game goes on forever. There was always a bucket of money in the middle and if you landed on “Free Parking,” you got all that money, because whenever people had to pay “Luxury Tax,” “Chance,” “Community Chest,” you put it in the center of the board. The game has now been customized by players. On some levels it’s this deeply American celebration of our deeply capitalist system. It’s the way we introduce our children to money, property, and real estate. Where else do we bow down and worship at the altar of unbridled capitalism, the way we do with Monopoly? It’s this rite of passage that we do generation after generation. Jacobin took a roll of the dice and was lucky enough to monopolize Stephen Ives’ time for an interview about Ruthless.
Monopoly guy series#
In the late 1990s Ives also made the mammoth series The West, which was executive produced by Ken Burns, with whom Ives shared an Emmy for 1990’s The Civil War. Ives’ other American Experience documentaries for PBS include 2003’s Seabiscuitand 2019’s Roads to Memphis, about the shadowy life of James Earl Ray and his fateful collision with Martin Luther King.
In Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History, writer/director Stephen Ives not only explores what the game Monopoly tells us about our economic system, but takes us behind the scenes to reveal its surprising origins as a piece of political agitprop, chronicling the courageous, real-world trustbuster behind the game who challenged and exposed the United States’ corporate behemoth in a David versus Goliath courtroom struggle of epic proportions.
But who would have thought that the same framework could also be brought to bear on the most popular board game in history? “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Theoreticians have applied Marx and Engels’s concept to analyses of literature, theater, cinema, academia, punditry, and more.
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