Here's Monopoly: Socialism, a primer on socialism by dipshits, for dipshits
The people who own Monopoly, a board game that everyone plays and nobody really seems to like all that much, are always trying to find ways to broaden its appeal. Hasbro has, in the past, allowed the internet to vote on new game pieces, tried to get a board game musical going on Broadway, occasionally says stuff about making a movie, and puts out themed versions of Monopoly that range from harmless pop culture tie-ins to ill-conceived junk like Monopoly For Millennials.
Not content merely to release the millennial version (whose box features the Monopoly Man wearing a participation ribbon above a tagline that reads, “Forget real estate. You can’t afford it anyway”), Hasbro has one-upped itself with something even worse: Monopoly: Socialism.
Historian Nick Kapur has fallen on our collective (collectivist?) sword by running down a detailed list of the officially-licensed, braindead parody in a long Twitter thread that does a great job of pointing out the myriads ways in which it sucks.
Kapur sets himself a big task by trying to identify the head-spinning misunderstanding of socialism Hasbro has put forth here. He mentions how it draws on old-fashioned, Cold War-era iconography, denigrates universal health care, and, for whatever reason, veganism and environmentalism, and models “socialist” tax collection and social benefits as processes wherein people pay into a meager community fund and spend on taxes that go to the bank rather than back toward the public.