Comment on a Marxist critique of Free Software

2026-05-16

I just read an article by Abhijit A.M. in The Anvil journal. Its title is The Decline of the Copyleft Free Software Movement and Its Ideological Limitations. It is subtitled A Marxist Critique of the Free Software Movement. It makes several interesting points about the state of free software and the role of the open source movement.

The thrust of the critique is that (i) free software ideology is rooted in anarchism which itself is beholden to capitalist categories and (ii) free software is not fighting commodification of software in an effective way because it is ideologically incapable of opposing commodification as such.

In the ~15.000-word essay, the author makes references to colonialism, Australian Aboriginals, Tsarist Russia, Proudhon’s and Marx’s comments on property, the bourgeoisie, and many other familiar talking points that will amuse the Marxist faithful. What the author fails to do is give us a concrete idea of what their alternative is. By that, I do not mean that we should convert to Marxism. Rather, to give us a proof of what they have right now and a step-by-step proposal on how to proceed. To put it in software development terms, share the code and send us the patch.

But there is no such thing. The catch-22 with Marxism is that the world it promises does not truly exist unless everything is Marxist. So we have to contend with lengthy and dense diatribes instead. To this end, the article concludes with the following pompous yet ultimately uninspiring remarks:

For the FSM [Free Software Movement] to grow its strength and existence, it is imperative to reinvigorate its fight against the OSM [Open Source Movement], and the spirit to defeat monopolistic corporate control of software; the resistance to commercialization of software needs to be pursued politically more explicitly and not implicitly in an ‘economist’ fashion by focussing on the production and distribution process. Moreover, without a general opposition to the capitalist system and capitalist mode of production, and with mere opposition to the symptoms of monopoly capitalism and big capital in general, the movement is bound to be circumscribed by the basic logic of capitalism, as we have already seen. It must depart from the incorrect political and philosophical positions that it has assumed, in order to be able to develop a really revolutionary and subversive character.

After this ebb, the true fillip to the FSM is possible now only with the rise of the larger working-class movement, that aims to destroy private property not only in software (impossible anyway!), but in general.

What exactly should we be doing to carve this “revolutionary and subversive character” out of what we have? Nothing! These are just words.

What I make of the article is that the author has either not done anything practical in their life or has yet to develop such a habit. I find it ironic that countless hours are spent on criticising the bourgeoisie as if those critics lead some pagan-style life in the countryside where they toil all day under the beating sun with nothing but a pickax.

In my experience, the average Marxist intellectual is not agrarian (starting with Marx and Engels, of course), lives in a city, typically has an office job like in the academia, yet will pontificate about the frailties of the bourgeois world and the virtues of working peoples.

Everyone can share their opinion on what Richard Stallman and friends got right or wrong. What matters is that Richard et al. actually did—and still do—something that had/has material implications for lots of people over the course of decades.

The best kind of criticism is an alternative implementation and/or a lifestyle that embodies the virtues one purports to uphold. To put it in software terms once again, fork it and share your findings. Abhijit A.M. has not demonstrated anything of the sort.

The free software movement does not fall into the aforementioned catch-22 trap because it understands that one cannot change everything in order to change something. Richard Stallman is a person who knows how to turn an idea into an application. This is a quality that contributors to free software have and are thus empowered to make changes to their individual and collective experience.

If I need to abolish capitalism to write an extension for GNU Emacs (of which I have tens), then I am simply not writing an extension for Emacs. If that same constraint applies, then Emacs does not exist to begin with. But because Richard and friends share their work in the form of code and documentation, anyone can in principle learn and then give something back as well.

I got into free software without any technical background and put in the effort to learn. Me and everyone involved are sharing knowledge and programs, which improve parts of our life.

Yes, this is freedom in principle because it assumes that someone has access to the computer, the Internet, et cetera. Can the world be a better place? Sure, though we have to start somewhere. Something is better than nothing—and we get “something” by acting accordingly, often at the individual level.

If I have to put my faith in some wider working-class movement to make things happen, I am effectively hoping that actually heterogeneous and heteroclite people, most of whom have no relevant technical acumen and insights into the particularities of my computing needs will somehow contribute to what I need. Do we have any results of this kind that would give us hope? Has the wider working class as such done something that we can point to in order to switch away from free software? I think not. So what I do instead is proceed by initiative and benefit from the initiatives of others like me (in the free software community and more broadly).

The working class is a useful descriptor for some shared qualities. Though it is necessarily a simplistic construct. It does not account for the peculiarities of locality and culture nor is it sensitive to the relevance of its constituent individuals to any given area of interest or field of endeavour.

If I want to discuss poetry, for example, I can only do so in the presence of artists or artistically inclined folk. Those without such disposition will not be keen interlocutors or, worse, will have some bigoted comment to make about men who enjoy poetry (on several occasions I have been told by such working class people how classical music, painting, and poetry, among others, are “gay”—so fragile is their vaunted alpha masculinity that it cannot tolerate a violin).

My suggestion to Abhijit A.M. and anyone who has ideas about the world is to show us results instead of merely telling us what is wrong with the status quo. If you are not showing, but are merely telling, then you are doing it wrong.