‘Winning is for capitalists’? Socialist Monopoly takes a whack at America’s favorite bogeyman

A new “socialist” Monopoly reboot has won over conservatives and triggered eye-rolls from liberals – and mysteriously disappeared from store shelves faster than you can say “a spectre is haunting Europe.”

Monopoly: Socialism – subtitled “winning is for capitalists” and “what’s yours is ours” – has joined Hasbro’s increasingly bizarre stable of Monopoly spinoffs that now includes Monopoly Game of Thrones, Monopoly for Millennials, Monopoly Star Wars, and Monopoly Gamer. Or has it? As of Thursday night, the game is no longer listed on Target’s website, where it was sold for $19.99, and only a handful of copies are available on Amazon.com for the decidedly un-socialist price of $55.

The short-lived game has already found a champion in Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who rushed to its defense after a multi-tweet smackdown from academic Nicholas Kapur, who pointed out that almost nothing in the game bears any resemblance to socialism, either in theory or in practice.

“Why [do] Leftie academics so fear pointing out the manifest failures of socialism?” Cruz tweeted on Thursday, warming to the idea so much he even suggested a few other spinoffs for the clearly idea-hungry Hasbro.

In addition to his laugh-riot Cuba and Venezuela editions – both of which, unsurprisingly, leave out the role of the US in creating those states’ problems – Cruz proposed “the University edition: you imagine a magic money tree; you give everything free to anybody who wants it; nobody works, studies, or innovates; and everybody gets an A!”

“You could try the Finland version, where hairdressers can afford a home and a new car, vacations, and their kids get a free education from first grade through grad school. And no one loses a home or their life savings due to illness because everyone has healthcare,” one user retorted.

“Let’s do the capitalism failure edition now…the United States has a GDP of $19.39 trillion but more than one in ten, almost 40 million people, live in poverty,” another snarked.

Of course, not everyone disagreed with Cruz. “If Monopoly wanted to do socialism right, it would have 100,000,000 corpses as a token,” one user tweeted. “You have used the wrong pronoun, go directly to reeducation camp,” smirked another. 

Ironically, Monopoly is based on an early 20th century game created to satirize and condemn capitalist rent-seeking. And it’s a colossal irony of capitalism that slapping the word on what became a beloved board game for generations of children has robbed the word of some of its gravity, allowing big tech monopolies that might have warranted antitrust-law smackdowns 100 years ago to swell to massive proportions before they’re noticed.

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