Who Steals the Goose?

Untitled Goose Game may not be “leftist,” but its structure recalls the fight against enclosure

by Louis Evans

It’s a lovely morning in the village and you are a horrible goose.

– Untitled Goose Game tagline

Is Untitled Goose Game, the video game where you are a horrible goose, leftist?

Arriving at a definitive answer is trickier than it sounds. Certainly the game has been embraced by leftists. The goose became a left-wing protest meme, while the game’s designers cracked jokes about the goose chasing Margaret Thatcher out of office, ushering in enduring British social democracy. A Google search for “comrade goose” turns up roughly as many results as one for “comrade Gritty”, another unlikely synergy of consumer brand and leftist politics.

But beyond this surface level affinity, the leftist political substance of the game seems rather thin.

After all, this is a game where it is a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose. You run around the village going honk, flapping your wings, and making trouble. You sneak into yards, steal food, and break things. You trick villagers into increasingly absurd predicaments. There’s no context to your mayhem, no greater story—the creation of gentle chaos is the whole point. You’re just a goose.

What’s leftist about that? 

* * * * *

There’s a tendency in contemporary leftist analysis (there are certainly some important exceptions!) to act as if the history of revolutionary politics started in 1848 with the publication of The Communist Manifesto—or maybe, if we really stretch, in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille. Pre-Marxist socialism, when discussed at all, is usually treated as a basket of oddball utopians; pre-French revolutions are brushed away as inchoate peasant revolts.

But this dismissive approach to the precursors of modern leftism is profoundly misguided.

The basic elements of modern leftism—broadly speaking, the recognition of the moral urgency of social equality and organized efforts to further it—are as old as social inequality itself. Medieval peasants were no less aware than a modern worker that an elite aristocracy was lording it over them. Conquered farmers in ancient Sumeria undoubtedly had opinions about whether the god-king really was as godly or as kingly as was claimed. Even outside the human world, studies of baboon troops have found conflict and struggle about the level of violence and inequality that they permit in their civilizations.

The basic elements of modern leftism are as old as social inequality itself.

But although modern leftism can find common ground with active movements at almost any point in history, two factors have led to them being largely disregarded as meaningful precursors for modern leftism.

First, pre-industrial movements for equality generally emerged from—and were led by—the poor, meaning that any surviving accounts of these movements were usually written by their wealthy, literate enemies, and typically range from “broadly unsympathetic” to “outright opposition propaganda”. And second, the specific material concerns of historical underclasses were typically quite different from contemporary manifestations of leftist thought.  

But while a goose breaking into a guy’s yard and stealing his carrots is not an obvious symbol of any modern leftist praxis, it fits nicely into one of the major radical struggles of pre-industrial England: the struggle against enclosure. 

* * * * *

Although underdiscussed today, enclosure is one of the most significant events in the history of property rights. Without enclosure and the elimination of the commons, property itself would be quite different today. To understand these changes, we’ll take a quick tour through the history of property rights, the role of the “commons”, and the enclosure movement. 

Right now, our society operates from a modern conception of property. You own things: probably the phone or laptop you’re reading this on; the meal you’re eating; the shirt on your back; or the eyeglasses that a horrible goose is just about to steal off your head. If you’re lucky, perhaps you own a house, or land, or something more abstract like investments such as stocks. In all of these cases, “ownership” is a simple relationship of total domination between one person and one thing. 

If I own an apple, I can eat it, or sell it, or throw it in a lake, or leave it sitting on my picnic blanket. Each of those rights is equally implied by the fact that I own the apple. If I own an apple orchard, I can walk through it, pick apples up off the ground, pluck them from the trees, or build a fence to keep out pesky geese. I can even cut down the trees, dig a mine, build a skyscraper—anything I can come up with, really. To a modern reader, each of these statements are practically tautologies: an owner can exercise total, arbitrary control over the thing owned. That’s the golden law of ownership from Locke on down; that’s what property means in 2021.

But the concept of “property rights”—in the broad sense of the set of social conventions that regulate the relationships between people and things—has varied widely throughout human history. For instance, Roman and immediately post-Roman Europe generally recognized three components of ownership rights: “use”, “fruit”, and “abuse”, which could each be severed from the others. The “usufruct” owner of an apple orchard might be permitted to collect the fruit but not chop the trees. Aristocrats might own land but have no legal right to sell it, holding it in mandatory trust for their descendants. And so on. 

Pre-modern property arrangements were often characterized by a high degree of complex, interlocking rights and obligations.

More broadly, pre-modern property arrangements were often characterized by a high degree of complex, interlocking rights and obligations. My family tills this field every third year for this crop; your family gets half for two years out of every three for that crop, while the family across the stream, etcetera, etcetera. 

Complex property systems like this allow for rich, hybrid uses of land and resources, which support calorie security and resiliency—necessary for societies with limited technological bases and extreme vulnerability to natural fluctuations. But they also necessarily restrict the sort of total dominance that our modern systems of property imply.

The commons, in traditional English law, played a central role in exactly this sort of complex property system—these were “common” lands nominally under the control of a lord or landowner, but available for certain types of renewable use by common folk, such as forage, pasturage, and so on. These assets were a vital part of the peasantry’s budgets—and remember, since we’re talking the Medieval period, this means quite literally caloric budgets. The food made available through the commons was vital to peasants not starving.

“Enclosure” is an umbrella term referring to actions by landowners to exert total, exclusive ownership of the commons, the result of which was to deny the peasantry access to use these lands to feed themselves and their livestock. The landlords’ enclosure campaign lasted centuries (from roughly the 13th to the 19th centuries) and included both legal maneuvers and physical capture (e.g., building big fences).

Unsurprisingly, enclosure was wildly unpopular with the lower classes—so unpopular that peasant opposition frequently erupted into open revolt. 

Take Kett’s Rebellion, for example. In the late 1540s, peasants in Norfolk, fed up with the enclosures of their local landholders (along with a list of sundry other economic hardships), set off across the countryside, tearing up hedges and fences and filling in ditches. The uprising grew, sweeping along a sympathetic local landowner by the name of Kett, who was persuaded to tear down his own fences and adopt a leadership role. Then it grew some more, eventually forming a sixteen-thousand person rebel army that swam across a river, broke through a wall, and seized the market square of Norwich, then England’s second-most-populous city. (Sound like any chaotic waterfowl you’ve heard of?) Kett’s rebels even defeated the first royal army sent to suppress them, all the while still engaged in direct action against enclosure, tearing down walls and filling in ditches.

But a king has deep pockets, and a second, much larger royal army was able to suppress the rebels—killing thousands in open battle and hanging hundreds more, including Kett. 

Kett’s rebellion was roundly condemned in written histories for hundreds of years thereafter, until eventually rehabilitated by later leftist movements, from 1800s Socialists to this millennium’s Occupy and Green Party. 

Commons don’t exist anymore; all that’s left are public parks with vestigial names, like Boston Common.

 And this is how the larger story goes. Whether peasants petitioned the various levels of feudal power, engaged in scattered direct action, or rose up in open revolt (from Kett to the Midland levelers to countless more), the outcome was, eventually, the same. The lords/landowners had access to all of the relevant levers of power: local military supremacy in their estates, escalation dominance through royal armies, and law-making authority in Parliament.

And so they won.

Commons don’t exist anymore; all that’s left are public parks with vestigial names, like Boston Common. For that matter, English peasantry doesn’t really exist anymore either. There are plenty of poor people in England but few to none of them rely on common forage to put food on the table, or common pasturage to feed their cow, or sheep. Or goose.

* * * * *

Enclosure was a rich person’s movement and so it leaves a long trail of rich people’s apologetics. You can read in an economics textbook about how the Tragedy of the Commons—the supposed “economic law” that shared resources are not properly maintained—made traditional lifeways inefficient (they weren’t) or doomed to natural collapse (they didn’t). You can read about how the enclosure movement helped spur the industrial revolution by pushing the rural peasantry off of the land and into the big cities (this is probably true, but it’s truly weird to see this presented as a simple, positive, natural turn of events). Your economics textbooks will not tell you that enclosures were often criminal assaults on peasants’ recognized rights; they will not spare a single paragraph for the peasants who went hungry because their goose could no longer feed.

But there is a protest poem. It is anonymous and undated. It goes like this:

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from off the goose

And so on. It’s not the best piece of English poetic verse ever written. But it captures the fundamental alliance between state and capital better than countless more-sophisticated essays. 

And it has some advice:

Geese will still a common lack

Till they go and steal it back

* * * * *

Of course, the solution isn’t to go find the nearest landlord and tear down their fence. At the end of the day, the pastoral chaos of Untitled Goose Game is less about praxis than it is about passion; not so much Project Cybersin as spray-painted graffiti reading “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” When you play as Comrade Goose you never develop a detailed political program. But you do practice virtues central to vital leftist movements throughout history: indifference to existing property structures, skepticism of authority, and a fearless willingness to engage in direct action.

And so it’s worth keeping the goose in mind as we plunge headlong from industrial present into cybernetic future. In the 20th century the social-democratic settlement created a vast new dimension of common good for ordinary people, and the suits are still trying to carve it to pieces and feed it to the billionaires. In our 21st century sundry digital commons have effloresced in a great Cambrian explosion; and new landlords are building their fences and sharpening their knives.

The commons can serve us all; but we need to defend it. 

We could do worse than to imitate that happy warrior of freedom and equality, who topples fences, plunders fields, and lays waste the pride of the landlord; whose very body is a raised flag against the state-capital alliance; whose wings snap brooms and whose beak steals money; whose only battle cry is HONK. 

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