Explaining about Marxism to a grandchild

Sometimes, for a laugh, instead of Monopoly we play the board game Class Struggle with our older (12-year-old) granddaughter. The board game pits the workers against the capitalists.

How to explain the sentiment behind this very out-of-the-ordinary game?

We live in a class-divided society. There are very rich people, middle-class-people, very poor people. There are people who own society’s productive assets, from which they derive profits, and people who work for the owners (their labor contributing to the profits).

There will never be, doesn’t need to be, full equality . . . but for some to feel themselves to be in a whole different class from others is stupid . . . elitist, oppressive, unjust, mean-spirited, a source of social distortion and contention . . . etc. etc.

Many people have been critical of our divided society. Some strive for social change based on the ideas of Karl Marx: The working class will insist that society’s productive assets be taken out of private hands and “socialized” (meaning: owned collectively, run democratically). After that’s done there will no longer be a basis for class division.

It’s not hard to see the appeal of that worldview. The person who invented the board game was an adherent. He intended the game to be educational. But as you play it, you do get a sense of how fantastic (fantasy-deformed) the worldview is; how divorced from reality.

We play with tongue-in-cheek. If asked, I explain the above. But then I add: “Class division is a very bad thing, but it will only be overcome when our lifeways get back to being community-based. In a real community people would not treat each other that way.” I think a 12-year-old can understand that.