The Anti-Capitalist Software License
anticapitalist.software
anticapitalist.software
Not a lawyer, but I can easily imagine how “An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non-members” could be interpreted in dozens of different ways, making the use of any such licensed software a very dicey proposition.
How common is this in worker co-operatives? My guess is "doesn't exist anywhere" -- I'm guessing there's always some correlation between seniority and ownership share, even if it's just "you have to pass a short probationary period before you're an owner".
It sounds like they haven't really thought this through. Besides seniority -- does someone who's worked there for twenty years really deserve the same share of ownership that someone who started last week does? -- there's also hours to consider: does someone who works ten or twenty hours a week deserve the same share as someone who works forty hours a week? I think most would agree that doesn't really make sense, but the current wording of the license mandates it.
- the camp that believes pay should be proportional to the value produced;
or
- the camp that believes pay should be proportional to the effort put in.
The problem is that no one knows, how to evaluate this proportion. Assuming LTV makes sense, how to evaluate who contributes more: a designer or a programmer.
The Three Rivers Co-op (a consumer co-op) publishes their bylaws and explains how it works. Worker co-ops are similarly verbose on this as well. https://www.threeriversmarket.coop/co-op-membership/
If not then you could trivially fleece them by joining then immediately leaving with your share.
Sounds basically impossible to me. How do you ensure that you don’t exploit the labor of non-members? If you buy as much as even an office chair, or a pencil sharpener, or a carpet, or whatever, there were probably very many people involved and some of them were being exploited in that they were paid a very low amount for their work.
I feel like it would be more useful to describe the types of organizations to which the license refers in terms that might be more clear to people not already familiar. Perhaps I'll email them, or something - shame I can't open a PR.
Under non-capitalism ethical consumption would also be rare, as it would be common for money paid by a consumer to be stolen from another, since all labour is rewarded equally without regard to effort or ingenuity.
What other non-capitalist modes of economy exist? Agrarian society isn't too common, social democracy is a form of capitalism.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(economic_theory)
[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
That is the only communism that has ever existed at scale. Please stop trying to equate documented world history with personal subjective viewpoints.
> Various forms of mutualism [1], libertarian socialism [2], market socialism [3] and democratic state socialism [4] are all non-capitalisms.
As mentioned in the comment you're replying to, the countries described as social democracies (typically Nordic) are also capitalist.
What countries have mutualist economies?
As presented, your argument reduces to the claim that nothing which has not already been done can ever be done, which is so transparently absurd that I can't imagine it's what you actually intend to say.
You find that weak? OK.
I'm aware, being that I live in one, which is why I didn't mention social democracy. Democratic socialism is not social democracy which my reference explains.
> What countries have mutualist economies?
The question betrays a misunderstanding of what mutualism is.
That's not what I wrote. I asked for a model that scales. Generally economic systems are implemented nationally.
> Check your assumptions. They are wrong.
No. You don't have a working example of the system you are citing as a possible alternative. We're both aware of this.
Incidentally, if you'd read the link which the other poster provided on market socialism, you'd have noticed that it scales in exactly the same way that laissez-faire capitalism scales, making your critique unfounded.
Many further examples in history tend to be wiped out by those already in power. Furthermore, there were also no examples of capitalism before capitalism either, so it's not surprising.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities
Rare, but not outright impossible.
If I'm not mistaken, it's suggesting that you can only buy from other worker-owned cooperatives.
> If you buy as much as even an office chair, or a pencil sharpener, or a carpet, or whatever, there were probably very many people involved and some of them were being exploited in that they were paid a very low amount for their work.
If you're not buying from another worker-owned cooperative you could buy it second-hand, which isn't ordering any new labor to be done.
If this is what they intended and if this wasn't clear to you then I think that's a problem for the license because there's really no room for such ambiguity and interpretation. It's going to have to be a lot more explicit than it is for it to be useful.
At least that's how I find I most often see it used. Perhaps that's not what is actually happening here, but nothing I've seen so far distinguishes this example from any other of the type. Nor do I see any reason why this example deserves any more favorable consideration than any other.
This license is not that, for all sorts of obvious reasons, which is a shame. Articulating a set of use principles in the extremely broad area the authors have an interest in is not impossible. Not only not impossible, but desirable. Software is leverage, and working to ensure leverage can only be used by the weaker party in any specific context is part of an equity protocol. If such a thing is going to exist, someone has to do the work to define it. One hopes they take a step back and give it another go.
https://coss.media/advent-of-ethos-licensing/
The most famous is the JSON Good-Not-Evil one.
I particularly like the term 'crayon license' for licenses drawn up by people without experience in writing licenses.
I severely doubt the practically and usability of this.
I would be interested to see an expert lawyers take on how to write this license, so that it could actually work and hold up in court.
The GPL is a work of genius in part because it encourages use and propagation.
Creating a stupid license blocks even legitimate users, which prevents the social program from progressing.
Also: would this then include Amazon pre-2001?
I believe all software should be either some variant of the GPL or GPL/Commercial dual. The latter is so a company can choose not to comply with the GPL but still give back to the project (financially).
Anti-capitalism is a strange ideology given recent history. Most flaws pointed at capitalism today actually stem from problems that most capitalists would take issue with (corruption, overregulation, underregulation etc.). The people who built the Soviet Union and other socialist countries weren't stupid, the task is just impossible.
The problem people have with capitalism isn't that it has failure modes; every economic ideology has those. The problem people have with capitalism is that, in a capitalist society, the failure modes of capitalism are the ones that are the problem, and it's very hard to see how the status quo could be repaired without having to be replaced.
(Which I think is fair. Look at what it took to fix it last time, and how long that hasn't lasted...)
Obviously the Soviet model was a failure, but I think it's a bit silly to use the failure of one competing model as an argument that no other model could ever succeed.
However it (and other failed communisms) are proof of particular failure modes. Given that these are the outcomes we know about, they are a reasonable null hypothesis.
Amongst modern proponents of socialism I have not so far seen anyone actually say how those failure modes would be avoided.
Now, if you want to argue that there are problems with economic planning, I'm right there with you. I think that market incentives have historically been a more reliable way of running an economy, and that market socialism [1] is a much more viable alternative than a state-planned economy. But it's worth noting that it's hard to make strong claims about the consequences of economic planning when it's never been implemented in a democratic society.
Regardless, concerns about the failure modes of authoritarian communist states don't really make sense in the context of market socialism, since it involves neither authoritarianism nor economic planning.
[clearly hasn't been lawyer-vetted, but any wild guesses?]
Not, I agree, that this would likely prove enforceable as written, but I think that's what they're going for. And maybe they're trying to elicit a test case? That makes more sense than some of the speculation at hand, I think.
I'd guess that this license is towards utopian ideals than actual reality.
IANAL but I'm just guessing no court would take this seriously.
Even if we do, the community can govern themselves.
It would have been entirely different had they not got involved.
There are definitely examples out there of more successful self-governance, though.
And if your starting point for why a term of a license is "we don't need laws", what exactly is the point of having a license anyway?
It is 'community enforcement', they volunteered didn't they, it's not by force, by state, or are being paid to do it.
The difference would be that they would be chosen from the community by the community, not external to it and chosen by external actors.
> "we don't need laws"
This confounds laws with law enforcement. The concepts you're missing are consent and cooperation.
I'm not the one making the claim that laws are a social construct and we don't need them.
Now you're confounding two further ideas. Laws are obviously a social construct, nobody serious is going to disagree with that. We create them, unlike the laws of nature.
Laws are a social construct. We do need them. Civilization has proven this time and again over thousands of years.
So law enforcement chosen by the community is not law enforcement?
The authors probably thought the meaning would be obvious to everyone because it was obvious to them, but that's not how binding legal contracts work.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities
For a "real", pro-freedom AND anti-capitalist software license, please consider GPL 3.
And for a "real", pro-freedom AND capitalism-agnostic software license, consider MIT.
I wouldn't say that GPL3 is "anti-capitalist". Rather, it's extremely pro-freedom and forces certain behavior on part of the capitalists that they aren't inclined to partake in on their own volition.
IMHO among the various OS licenses, GPL it's the more inclined toward anti-capitalism. But that's a personal reading.
Among various properly written and practical open source licenses Parity license is probably the most anti-capitalist one.
GPL mostly helps with freedoms for the users, which is still very useful.