MARY PILON
Bloomsbury, 2015, 313 pages
Monopoly has never
been just a boardgame, not to the American feminist and anti-monopolist, Lizzie
Magie, who invented the game’s forerunner in 1904, nor to the US corporate
giant, Parker Brothers, which, in seeking to gain a copyright monopoly on Monopoly, stole Magie’s idea in 1935 and
ideologically cleansed her game from an anti-monopolist instructional tool into
an endorsement of monopoly capitalism.
The journalist, Mary Pilon’s, history of Monopoly’s copyright scandals narrates the
American origins of the hugely popular boardgame, better known in Australia
through the version licensed to English manufacturers with its London
properties from Old Kent Road to Mayfair.
With powerful monopolies dominating key industries and
unrestrainedly gouging consumers at the end of the nineteenth century, strategies
to ‘bust the trusts’ were being sought by progressives, amongst them Henry
George, the ‘single-tax’ politician who proposed to reduce poverty by taxing
only property and leaving working class income untaxed.
Magie was a single-taxer who invented her Landlord’s Game to spread the Georgist
word. Her game had two sets of rules – one
for a single-tax economy where no player could monopolise wealth, and one for monopoly
capitalism where all wealth concentrated to just one player. Modified, hand-made versions flourished
during the next three decades.
Amongst the commercial fans of Magie’s game was a
Depression-hit salesman, Charles Darrow, who claimed it was his invention when
he sold his intellectual property rights to the game, which he had patented
as Monopoly,
to Parker Bros. for $7,000 in 1935. The
rebadged game went on to sell and make millions for Parker Bros.
Parker Bros., who were aware that Darrow’s patent had been
fraudulently obtained, were vigilant in protecting their sole control of their
ill-gotten money-spinner. Rival financially-themed
games, and even unrelated games with the ‘-opoly’
suffix in their title (including Theopoly,
designed by priests), were bought out or legally threatened for patent
infringement.
The most serious potential obstacle to Parker Bros.’s bogus copyright
was taken care of by paying the game’s true inventor, Magie, a measly $500 for
her original patent for her Landlord’s
Game, allowing it and its anti-big-business ideology to fade into obscurity
whilst its monopolist set of rules became the sole set of Monopoly rules, endorsing corporate concentration and greed as
players aimed to bankrupt all others.
When a new ideological challenge emerged in the 1970s from an
anti-trust economics professor and anti-Vietnam-War activist, Ralph Anspach,
with his Anti-Monopoly, Parker Bros. deployed
the usual threat of litigation, supplemented by commercial intimidation of Anti-Monopoly’s potential distributors
and sellers, and a vindictive display of corporate power in ostentatiously burying
40,000 copies of Anti-Monopoly in a
Minnesota rubbish dump when an early court decision went Parker Bros. way. In 1983, however, after an epic eight year
legal stoush, Parker Bros. finally lost their case against Anti-Monopoly, an appeals court ruling that Monopoly’s Georgist progenitor had long been in the public domain,
rendering Monopoly’s trademark
void.
Like Anspach, Pilon is enamoured of the anti-monopolistic battle
by little business against big business.
Capitalism, they believe, can be beneficial for all if only the “right
to compete” were not stymied by the titans of corporate America and their profit-bloating,
restrictive copyrights. Even in an
oligopoly of small entrepreneurs, however, the profit principle is behind the harm
the capitalist economic system does and this needs to be challenged. There is a boardgame, and concept, for that -
the Marxist academic, Bertell Ollman’s, Class
Struggle – one to which all the players exploited by capitalism can share common
ownership.
