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and book publisher Monthly Review, argued that “competition, which was the predominant form of market relations,” had been replaced by “large-scale enterprise producing a significant share of the output of an industry, or even several industries, and able to control its prices, the volume of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.