The Path to Destroying Capitalism Might Go Through a Software License

By Patrick Klepek, VICE

26 August 20

Video games, like many parts of modern life rooted in technology, are often built with open-source code. What if the licenses to use that code suddenly restricted who could use it, and told big corporations..."no"?

hen we think of radical action, ways of reconceptualizing basic assumptions about how the world should operate in pursuit of a more just society, chances are something as innocuous as a software license, a dump of text that determines what you can or cannot do with lines of code made by someone else, isn't what comes to mind. 

But license agreements govern how we use software and technology built with ideas, code, and tools made by other people. Few things are as nakedly political in games as the end user license agreements we are forced to accept before we are allowed to play them at all.

The Anti-Capitalist Software License (ACSL), written by programmer Everest Pipkin and designer Ramsey Nasser, imagines radical action within that framework. The license, made up of less than 300 words, has a clear goal: "contributing to a world beyond capitalism."

"The ACSL is partly manifesto," said Pipkin, "but it is also an actual license."

"A rising tide lifts all ships, we're told, which is fine and good if we're all in the same kind of ship," said Nasser. "But we're not. Some are in luxury yachts, some are in full on battleships, while the rest of us are in rowboats or swimming for our lives. I don't want to lift all ships, I don't want to lift the yachts and the death machines, I want to lift the ones that are struggling, the ones building a better world, and I would just as soon see the rest sink. The ACSL lets you say that explicitly and unapologetically."

The part-manifesto, part-license started as a social media joke by Nasser about a license that required the user to "dedicate a portion of their life, resources, and energy to the destruction of capitalism and the liberation of all people." It was clearly a shitpost, but Pipkin took it seriously, and following the suggestion that they actually write it, the ACSL was born.

The licence starts with a bold statement of principle, announcing "this is anti-capitalist software, released for free use by individuals and organizations that do not operate by capitalist principles." The tricky part, then, is defining what capitalist principles specifically means, because the license attempts to separate capitalism from the act of commerce.

To that end, the license asks the individual (or group) using the software must be part of one of four different and distinct categories: 

• An individual person, laboring for themselves


• A non-profit organization


• An educational institution


• An organization that seeks shared profit for all of its members, and allows non-members to set the cost of their labor

The last group is one that's being actively used at some studios, such as the Canadian co-op developer Ko-Op, but it's hardly widespread, video games or otherwise. It's rare.

If you're part of a company with a more traditional hierarchy (aka most people), then the license is only usable if the company is structured with owners being workers and workers, essentially, also being owners with equity and the ability to vote on the company's direction. 

And finally, the ACSL outright prevents usage by "law enforcement or military." 

If your takeaway from those requirements is that it would actively prevent most traditional companies from using anything with the ACSL attached to it, that's precisely the point. 

"The ACSL is a response to the failures of what I guess you could call the 'passive optimism' of many FOSS [free and open-source] licenses," said Nasser. "The idea is that if everyone is empowered by the code you release, equally and without qualification, then it's a net positive for all society."

One of the utopian phrases commonly associated with the Internet is "information wants to be free," and in line with that ethos is open-source software, where code developed by one can be used by all. It's a nice idea, but in reality, it means big corporations are regularly taking advantage of open-source code and building massive machines of capitalism. 

For example, Amazon's enormous and influential Amazon Web Services, which powers streaming services like Twitch and Netflix, has been accused of "strip-mining open-source technology."

"To quote Desmond Tutu," said Nasser, "'If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor' and FOSS adopts a neutral stance with respect to capitalism. The ACSL does not, and it gives us a way to say 'fuck that, these things are different, I support this and not that' and draw a line in the sand."

"There have been many approaches and proposals to address this kind of thing, including giving up on the idea of licenses entirely, a norms not rules approach that is appealing," said Pipkin. "However, we felt that the material conditions of the moment were best met in a material way, with a clear and strong text that can go directly into a project today.

Both Pipkin and Nasser have worked on games, and saw ways the industry could benefit. Pipkin, for example, has created and published code to enhance Epic's Unreal Engine.

"I live with the knowledge that America's Army is developed in Unreal, an engine I have also used and have also developed free software licensed code for," said Pipkin. "I don't know where that code has been copied. I gave up my rights to know in exchange for my code's 'freedom.'"

America's Army, a shooter developed by the U.S. government, is largely seen as a propagandist recruiting tool for the military, and it was made using Unreal Engine. 

"In my opinion, if ACSL offers a material change in the games industry it is in this," said Pipkin. "I want to allow others to reuse my work. I don't want that labor needlessly repeated again and again! But I also do not want to set that labor free entirely, to be used against my moral center. I do not want something I have made to commit violence in the world. Instead, I want it to be used to the advantage of those who are also fighting to stay afloat."

There are also many reasons games cost so much to make, but one of the primary drivers is the sheer number of assets—character models, textures, etc.—that are required to build the massive, shiny worlds that we all play around in. Lots of smaller projects, for example, use something like the Unity Asset Store to build their games. The ACSL could be tweaked to also apply to the license for a 3D model that's made by someone and then shared freely.

"Even games made by just one person hold within them an incredible amount of shared labor," said Pipkin.

There is a problem, for all the talk of revolution: the ACSL might not be legally enforceable partially because its lofty ambitions that might have unknown and unforeseeable legal loopholes and partially because it's a shitpost transformed into reality that its creators view more as a deterrent than anything else. If you wanted to take a big company to court over the ACSL, they don't guarantee it would hold up to scrutiny. The two are aware of this, which is why they caveat the ACSL as "part manifesto," but they are reading criticism and commentary about the ACSL and working on updates to it that may address these issues.

"In some ways, it is perhaps worth thinking of the ACSL as garlic," said Pipkin. "You're not sure if it's going to work on the vampires in the long run, but they sure as hell won't like it and either way it'll help you cook some dinner for your friends."

The Radicalism of Woody Guthrie

By Arvind Dilawar, Jacobin

26 August 20

Legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie is best known for his anthem “This Land Is Your Land,” which can come off as an innocuous ode to America if you aren’t listening closely. But the singer-songwriter was a lifelong socialist.

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate

He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts

When he drawed that color line

Here at his Beach Haven family project

oody Guthrie wrote those lyrics in the early 1950s, when he spent two years living in the Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn. The song, “Old Man Trump,” refers to Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, who owned the complex and allegedly barred Africans Americans from renting units. Guthrie, who had recently faced down a racist mob alongside Paul Robeson, minced no words when speaking about his landlord.

Guthrie’s lyrics might come as a surprise to those who know him solely for the schoolhouse version of “This Land is Your Land,” which seems like a paean to the National Parks Service. But Guthrie was a lifelong radical, who not only intended those lyrics much more literally than they’re typically sung, but who wrote three additional, often excluded verses challenging private property, poverty, and the capitalist state:

As I went walking I saw a sign there,

And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”

But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.

That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,

By the relief office I seen my people;

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking

Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;

Nobody living can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.

Jacobin contributor Arvind Dilawar spoke with Will Kaufman, author of three books on Woody Guthrie, about the folk singer’s music and politics — as well as how the two came to be divided. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

AD: Was American folk music always political? Or did Woody Guthrie bring politics to the genre?

WK: Woody would be the last to say that he was the first to bring politics to folk music. Folk music has always been political. Woody knew about Joe Hill, who wrote songs for the Industrial Workers of the World — the Wobblies — in the early twentieth century. He’d have known that the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century was driven by music.

AD: What were Guthrie’s politics? How did his perspective change over time?

WK: He was born into a conservative, generally racist Oklahoma household in 1912. His father was a supporter of the Ku Klu Klan, although there’s no documentary evidence that he was actually a Klan member. On a great recent recording — The Live Wire, the only recording of a full-length, live Guthrie performance that’s been released — you can hear him talk about how he used to think like his father and make political speeches for him as a child, but that as an adult, he grew to think along the exact opposite lines as his father.

This had to do with Woody’s education on the road: going through the Dust Bowl, seeing how badly the Dust Bowl migrants were treated in California, falling in with the Communist Party (CP) and the Popular Front (there’s no documentary evidence that Woody was a CP member, but he wrote for the People’s World and the Daily Worker, and was largely in sympathy with the communist movement, if not the party itself), serving in the United States Merchant Marine during the war, witnessing Jim Crow and the Cold War, and seeing his friends like Pete Seeger getting hauled before the McCarthy committee.

He saw a lot in a tragically short lifetime — he was only fifty-five when he died in 1967. He’d have to be made of stone for it not to change him.

AD: Although he wasn’t necessarily a card-holding member of the Communist Party, was Guthrie a communist?

WK: The way I’d describe his politics, vis-à-vis the CPUSA, is that he nailed his colors to the mast of the communist movement. He called it “plain old communism.” He was an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, and devoted socialist to the end of his life, but he was also too much of an individualist to fit into any party discipline or structure.

AD: How was Guthrie’s music both embraced and ignored by political actors, organizations, and movements?

WK: In the late 1930s, he had a very small audience of Dust Bowl migrants on Los Angeles radio. That’s when he began singing political songs. He moved to New York City in 1940, and during his productive years there — only about twelve years of recording and performing, before Huntington’s disease put him out of commission — he probably wasn’t much noticed beyond the city’s bohemian or leftist milieu.

It wasn’t until his torch was picked up by a new generation, what’s been called “Woody’s Children,” that his work became more widely known. Pete Seeger was largely the link between these two generations. Woody was still in the hospital while Pete began to take his songs to a wider audience. Then behind Pete were the likes of Bob Dylan; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Tom Paxton; Joan Baez — all of whom were devoted acolytes.

AD: How were some of Guthrie’s songs, like “This Land is Your Land,” depoliticized when he himself remained such a political artist?

WK: That’s a complex question requiring a complex answer. First of all, yes, he was indeed “a political artist,” but we’ve been finding out lately how much more expansive an artist he was, beyond the political dimension. In addition to being a songwriter, he was a poet, novelist, playwright, painter, illustrator, sculptor, and essayist — truly a modern, often abstract, artist in all senses of the word.

He engaged with subjects such as love, sex, the environment, science and technology, mass communications, cinema, theater, and literature. He was cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and urban, behind the pose of the unlettered “Okie Bard” or “Dust Bowl Balladeer.” He had a great interest in Jewish culture and history, having married into a Jewish family, and he even wrote some songs in Yiddish. (My book Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues focuses on all his modern expansiveness.) So there’s a lot of his work that can be depoliticized by folks who are looking to do that.

With “This Land Is Your Land,” we’re not sure exactly why it was depoliticized or even who was responsible for it. We know that the original manuscript contains the three anti-capitalist verses that probably weren’t sung at too many Republican Party conventions, and we know there’s only one version that Woody recorded with the verse against private property.

Pete Seeger believed that the short, anodyne, apolitical version that most of us sang in school was down to Woody treating that song just as one of thousands of his songs: casually. He’d forget verses or not bother to sing them depending on his mood. Possibly he was constricted by the three-minute time limit often imposed on 78 RPM recordings, producing the truncated version that was largely picked up and first circulated through school songbooks. And that particular version of “This Land” is what got Woody noticed — and, as his friend Irwin Silber said, “They’ve taken a revolutionary and turned him into a conservationist!”

AD: How did Guthrie’s politics affect his musical career? In Woody Guthrie, American Radical, he comes across as a musician wanting to be part of a radical labor movement, but that movement both fails to recognize his value and largely abandons its radicalism.

WK: There were only a few brief episodes when Guthrie sought a musical “career” — when the lure of monetary reward was attractive to him — such as his roughly twelve weeks on CBS radio after the war or when he was briefly a cast member of the radio show “Pipe Smoking Time,” for which he bastardized his Dust Bowl Ballad, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” into a contemptible jingle. He hated himself for having done this.

It is true, though, that often he wanted to be part of the labor movement more than the movement wanted him. Pete Seeger remembered the two of them going to sing at a union meeting in the Midwest somewhere, and the delegates were irritated with them, saying, “We’ve got work to do. What are these hillbilly singers doing here?”

Having said this, there were chapters or sectors within the labor movement who were happy for him to be part of the struggle, usually on a more local basis, on picket lines or for fundraisers or whatever. I think we get into trouble when we begin to talk about a unified, monolithic “labor movement” anyway. Surely, no such animal ever existed in America.

AD: Both Bob Dylan and The Beatles have cited Guthrie as an inspiration. What lasting influence did he have on music? And is there any corresponding influence on politics to speak of?

WK: Woody’s influence on music is easier to identify than his influence on politics. After all, if you’re going to influence someone like Dylan, or The Beatles, or, later, Joe Strummer, Bruce Springsteen, and Billy Bragg, that’s going to have a huge impact. He seemed to define the “singer-songwriter” for so many people.

In terms of political influence, it’s hard to say. I do know that something of Woody’s often pops up during a political debate or a time of political crisis. For instance, the scathing verses and prose that he wrote about his racist landlord, Fred Trump, back in the 1950s — as you can imagine, they’ve been referenced a lot over the past four years.

I discovered those writings in the Woody Guthrie Archives back in 2014 and revealed them to the world in 2016, just after Donald Trump announced his candidacy. And as the 2020 election approaches, I imagine we’ll be seeing a few more references to “Old Man Trump,” as Woody called him.