15 Years Ago, Mad Men Quietly Began Its Engagement With Leftist Ideas

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the launch of Mad Men. The show isn’t just compelling narratively and aesthetically — it also features a little remarked upon consideration of left ideas.

The prestige drama Mad Men, which ran for seven seasons, beginning fifteen years ago this month, received plenty of awards and close readings from mainstream critics. The Left press largely slept on it, which is a shame: the series was not only very funny and poignant and offered viewers a lot to chew on about the changing politics and gender roles of the 1960s, but seemed to draw direct inspiration from socialist thought. Series creator Matthew Weiner tipped his hand that Mad Men would at least play with Marxist critiques of capitalism in the very first episode with two simple words: “It’s toasted.”

That advertising slogan is prominently featured in a classic mid-century Marxist text, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy. In an age when supermarket shelves were newly and fully stocked with competing technicolor boxes of breakfast cereal and the constant introduction of “new” and “improved” products, the two writers, associated with the Marxist magazine and book publisher Monthly Review, argued that “competition, which was the predominant form of market relations,” had been replaced by “large-scale enterprise producing a significant share of the output of an industry, or even several industries, and able to control its prices, the volume of production, and the types and amounts of its investments.”

Monopoly, in other words, wasn’t an occasional mistake of the capitalist system — now it was the system.

One of Baran and Sweezy’s central arguments is that the massive surplus value (or, more crudely, the profits) generated by monopoly capital could be democratically and equitably distributed to provide for the material needs of all members of society. Instead, it’s wasted.

One particularly egregious form of waste they target is the commercial advertising business, which was rapidly expanding in the 1960s. Instead of reinvesting surplus in innovation or using the lowered costs of production to make more products available to more people, advertising wastes vast fortunes on convincing consumers that one identical product is somehow superior to another.

In the process of advancing this argument, Baran and Sweezy cite a bit of Madison Avenue braggadocio from ad exec and author Rosser Reeves: the George Washington Hill tobacco company’s “It’s toasted” advertising campaign — “So, indeed, is every other cigarette, but no manufacturer has been shrewd enough to see the enormous possibility of such a simple story.”

The plot of Mad Men’s first episode centers on an impending Surgeon General report that will link smoking tobacco to lung cancer. This is a crisis for the series’ protagonist, Don Draper.

Not a health crisis, of course. In fact, Draper, the head of the creative department at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency, is first introduced smoking a cigarette and sketching out tobacco ad campaigns on the back of a cocktail napkin in preparation for a high-stakes meeting with his largest client, a tobacco company. Cigarette advertising had long emphasized the supposed therapeutic benefits of smoking, and the client wants a plan for how to continue selling a product when the public inevitably finds out it’s deadly.

“This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products,” Draper declares after some initial floundering.

To prove his point, Draper asks the men to describe how their cigarettes are made. His client, the patriarch of Lucky Strike, blathers on about insect-repellent seeds, the North Carolina sunshine, and the harvesting, curing, and toasting of the tobacco leaves.

“There you go!” Draper declares about the fact that tobacco leaves are toasted before they’re rolled into cancer sticks. When the owner’s son objects that all cigarette tobacco is toasted as part of the manufacturing process, the advertising agency’s head of creative counters, “No. Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike’s is toasted.”

This was not a famous advertising campaign. It’s hardly “Where’s the Beef?” and was for a completely different cigarette maker. It seems clear that Matthew Weiner read Monopoly Capital and drew some inspiration from it. But what, if anything, was he trying to say about the advanced stage of capitalism and artistic creativity in an industry built on lies and deception?

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