Capitalism: The Age of Unmasked Gods and Naked Kings

Editorial Note

 by International Initiative

The extraordinary conditions under which this book was written must be understood well. The author of the book was abducted from Kenya in a NATO operation and handed over to the Turkish state. Since his capture in 1999, Abdullah Öcalan has been kept under solitary confinement on İmralı Island prison, a military zone guarded by more than a thousand soldiers.

For more than 10 years, Öcalan was the only prisoner on the island. After 2009, other political prisoners have been brought to the İmralı prison, but this has not changed the regime of solitary confinement, a regime that keeps getting worse. During Öcalan’s incarceration, there has been an attempt to poison him, and he has been subjected to ill-treatment by prison personnel. The author does not have the means to communicate with the outside world, let alone the proper conditions to write a book. On the contrary: before 2009, he was often given cell-confinement penalties, which meant that his books, pen and paper would be taken away from him for long periods of time.

What you now hold in your hands is therefore not an ordinary book. Rather, it is part of Abdullah Öcalan’s hand-written submissions to the European Court of Human Rights. His latest set of submissions, called The Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, was written between 2008 and 2011, and the original Turkish edition of this volume was first published in July 2009. On several occasions, Öcalan insists that these defenses to the Court are not strictly related to the violations against his person or, in fact, not even limited to the Kurdish question: they address humanity at large, in defense of peoples, nature, and women.

We have tried to preserve the author’s style and use of language while at the same time making it a text that is easy to follow. Above all, however, we have tried to convey the meaning the author wishes to communicate. The original manuscript was hand-written in one go, and the author did not have a chance to re-read or edit the computer-written text. In presenting this volume to an English-speaking audience, we also want to draw attention to some additions we have made to this edition. The author did not use footnotes; they have all been added by the translator and the editors. Occasionally, bracketed remarks have been turned into footnotes, and are marked by the author’s initials [A.Ö.]. An index of names, places and certain terms has also been included at the end of the book. We must thank the editors, Riekie Harm and Arjen Harm; without their hard work, this edition would not have been possible.

The author has often stated his intense desire for discussing his writings with thinkers and activists from all over the world. Unfortunately, this is next to impossible. There is still no way of contacting Öcalan, and since July 2011, his right to defense has been completely ignored: although there are ongoing cases at several courts, he has not even had a single consultation with his lawyers. Still, despite the ever-worsening situation in Turkey, we continue the campaign for Öcalan’s freedom—not the least to make these discussions possible.

International Initiative

Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan—Peace in Kurdistan

Cologne, November 2016

Preface

 by Radha D’Souza

As I write this preface, I cannot help feeling how much more exciting my engagement with Öcalan’s text will be if I could sit face to face with him and discuss, over cups of chai as is common in the Eastern social settings, the issues he raises in this volume. Hopefully Öcalan will be released from prison and it will be possible to hear him speak to the text directly. Öcalan wrote this text as a defense statement in a submission to the European Court of Human Rights in 2008. That a court appearance was the only opportunity that Öcalan could avail of to communicate his thoughts to the wider world is testimony to the state of affairs in the world we live in, a world where democracy imprisons freedoms, where the thoughts of one man become a security threat to states with stockpiles of the most lethal weapons the world has ever produced. Yet, in a strange way, amidst dystopic visions and cognitive dissonance that envelops us today, it is reassuring that the age-old adage, the pen is mightier than the sword still rings true.

I cannot read Öcalan’s text in any other way except as a South Asian woman. The text is permeated with words, concepts, historical references, events, modes of reasoning, allegories, analogies and much else that connect to the wellsprings of shared intercultural meanings. The Middle East sits in the middle of the Occident and the Orient geographically and culturally. South Asia and the Middle East have close historical, cultural, intellectual and political ties with the Middle East that go back to the first river valley civilizations on the Euphrates and Tigris (Mesopotamia), the Nile (Egypt) and the Indus (India). Nothing demonstrates the closeness of our civilizations better than the Urdu language. Born from communications between Arabs, Persians, Turks and Indians, Urdu is the embodiment of the coming together of Middle Eastern, Persian and Indian civilizations. Before European colonization of our lands, our people, and our minds, the great philosophical and political debates and cultural exchanges of the time occurred between Middle Eastern, Persian and South Asian intellectuals. The confluence of Greek and Indian thought on the banks of the Tigris under the Abbasid caliphate in 8-9 centuries CE resulted in the flowering of philosophy and poetry, science and music in the centers of Baghdad, Kufa and Sinjar. Today, these sites are engulfed by destruction and unsurpassed human tragedy. The emotive meanings of those place names handed down to South Asian children through stories and folk-tales, the antics of Nasruddin Hodja for example, or Rumi’s story of the parrot and the merchant on a trip to Hindustan, infuse subconscious elements into our understandings of contemporary geopolitical events in the region. For many young Europeans and North Americans Kufa and Sinjar may be just place names that they hear from sound bites on TV news channels, but these place names have historical resonances in South Asia. As I read the text, I wondered whether Euro-American and Middle Eastern-Asian readers today will take away very different things from the text.

The intellectual exchanges that enriched our pasts in the Middle East and in South Asia are consigned to the dustbins of history remembered, if at all, by exclusive circles of academic experts hidden in the concrete basements of distant universities. Öcalan must write, and so must I, about our histories and cultures, our pain and our suffering as nations and peoples through the conceptual vocabularies of Bookchin and Braudel, Foucault and Hegel, Marx and Weber, even to speak to people of the Middle East or South Asia. Who would understand it if I referred to Shah Walliullah’s (1703-1762) work on rise and decline of Empires and his theories of state? Yet many educated Indian, Turkish and Middle Eastern people will know Shah Walliullah’s European contemporaries Montesquieu or Vico or Gibbon, who also wrote about rise and decline of empires and the state. How many Middle Eastern people know about Indian freedom struggles or vice versa, yet even school children in both regions will know about the French, Russian and American revolutions? Those who control our minds rule over us. Those who rule over us control what we know, how we know, and how much we know. Öcalan’s concern in this text is the mentality that enslaves us, willingly even, to the destructive power of capitalism. This mentality makes us complicit in the destruction of society. His concern is to find ways to re-establish the mental structures that are needed to bring social life to the center-stage of our deliberations.

Öcalan begins this volume by interrogating the self, a tradition that has deep roots in the East. He locates himself in the longue durée of Middle Eastern history and its tryst with capitalism. Öcalan ends this book with his attempts to overcome the subject-object dichotomy without denying it, a non-dualist approach with deep roots in Eastern intellectual traditions. The thread that runs through the book is the antagonistic relations between states and communities but it ends with a call to put the World Democratic Confederacy, and regional democratic confederacies for Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia on the agenda for political change. These ideas resonate with Ubaiydullah Sindhi’s call for a confederation of Indian, Asian, and world nations written in the context of the Indian freedom struggle in 1922. In between, in four short chapters, Öcalan condenses histories of human civilizations from primitive communitarian stateless societies to Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Phoenician, Median, Persian, Greek, Roman, Islamic, Christian and modern civilizations. What is common to these civilizations as opposed to the primitive communitarian societies is the rise of the state as a repressive apparatus that centralizes power and appropriates wealth. Öcalan sees the institution of the state as the millstone around people that is grinding down their capacities to live as human beings.

States have always oppressed people but the capitalist state is the most advanced in techniques of repression. The capitalist state destroys the very conditions needed for the existence of society. Science and technology has aided and abetted the extraordinary concentration of power over the lives of people and the destiny of humanity. People have always rebelled against state oppression. In the histories of their rebellions lies the secrets of constructive knowledge to re-build society and the possibilities of different modes of being in the world. Therefore resistance, rebellion and constructing the new must become our way of life, a lesson that the poet-saints of the East, wrongly labelled mystics by the West, have repeated over and over again for centuries. There is no point in seeking power when we know it corrupts, or capture state power when we know it has always become oppressive. Yet we have a duty to struggle when the powers that be destroy the conditions necessary for life. Rebellion should accompany the equally important duty to re-build the conditions of life. Rebuilding the conditions for human life is possible only in communitarian social orders. Öcalan’s concern is that denial of social life, has rendered life meaningless and has led to the degeneration and decomposition of the society. Öcalan juxtaposes two parallel social orders which have always co-existed which he calls state civilization versus democratic civilization. It is possible for the two civilizations to coexist if they recognize and respect each other’s identities. As a South Asian reading the text, Öcalan’s engagement with power is infused with an approach that resonates with Sufi, Bhakti, Sikh and Buddhist traditions. I am reminded of a verse by Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia (d. 1325 AD):

You are not my fellow traveler.

Tread your own path

May you be affluent.

And I downtrodden.

Öcalan, echoing Eastern poet-saint traditions, writes "military victories cannot bring freedom; they bring slavery." Rejection of worldly power and wealth calls for a different type of power (resilience) and wealth (human bonds) to realize the universal meanings of Life and human destiny. The source of this later type of power and wealth can only be found in human communities. Capitalism pollutes the wellsprings of the latter type of power and wealth that has sustained the resilience of communities throughout history.

For Marx, the point of departure for inquiries into capitalism was the emergence of commodity production as the general mode of social production. Commodity production spearheaded by European merchants and elites displaced rural populations, created an urban working class mired in poverty and the squalor of urbanization, state repression of the poor, and the disintegration of social order. A political exile from the Prussian state, Marx’s inquiry turns to European social history for answers. From European history, Marx drew the conclusion that classes and class-struggle was the primary driver of history and that the state is, as Marx described it, the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. For Öcalan, the point of departure is the displacement and disintegration of cohesive historically constituted communities, in particular rural communities, dispersed from their homelands, their identity, culture and history by empires of West and East. Öcalan too turns to history for answers, but for him that history is the larger history of empires, colonialism and imperialism. The history of the institution of the state is deeply entwined with the rise of empires. Communities preexisted states, indeed their labor and natural endowments have sustained states and empires in different civilizations.

Öcalan’s starting point is what latter-day Marxists problematized as the national question, a question that arose after Marx’s lifetime in the course of the Russian revolution. Confronted with external aggression by the Great Powers (Great Britain, France, Austria), and internal rebellions in the Russian colonies, Russian revolution’s solutions to the colonial question was very different from the Ottoman Empire’s which was also confronted with external aggression by Great Britain, France and Italy, and rebellions in the Ottoman colonies. The revolutionary Russian state offered its colonies a new deal, that is to say, a repudiation of unequal treaties with Tsarist Russia and a new constitutional basis for renewed alliances of the colonies to the Russian state. In contrast, the Ottoman colonies, European and Middle Eastern, were dismembered from the Ottoman state and forcibly allied to the Great Powers. In the end both suppressed rural communities and privileged urban industrialism. The World Wars transformed the problem of colonialism into a problem of cultural identity and put the national question on the agenda of global politics. Throughout the post-World War II period, national oppression and conflicts have preoccupied the hyphenated nation-state. The Kurdish struggle is one of those with a history going back to World War I. These conflicts are frequently manipulated by the big powers empowered and enriched by big capital. Nationality conflicts are typically fought around claims of independent statehood. Öcalan takes a new approach to the old national question. Contemporary history shows, he argues, that competing claims for statehood has only brought destruction of the very same communities in whose names the struggles are waged. His point of departure is the post-World War II era when global capitalism reached its peak in the fertile plains of Mesopotamia that is home to one of the oldest river-valley civilizations, and home to Öcalan.

In Europe, nationality and modern statehood were co-terminus and hence the hyphenated nation-state. In the colonies nationality and modern statehood were never co-terminus. Instead, they were shaped by colonial wars and interimperialist rivalries. Modern political ideologies, including liberalism, Marxism, socialism and anarchism, tend to conflate nationality with essentialist ethnocentrism or religious fundamentalism on the one hand and with statehood on the other. Communities and society as the point of departure for understanding capitalism puts Öcalan on a different track of enquiry. For Öcalan, the driver of history is the conflict between a repressive state which concentrates political and economic power and the struggles of communities to survive. This formulation takes the national question out of essentialist versus statist formulations and puts it on renewed historical footing. The conflict between communities and states is common to all civilizations. History cannot be reduced to class and class-struggles which is but one aspect of the struggle between state and communities. The genesis of capitalist exploitation and state power have deep roots in all human civilizations. Where there is a state, there are merchant financiers and property owners who keep the political class in power. In the East, the power of merchants and financiers were never legitimized. Throughout the history of civilization, and especially in the Middle East, these usurers and profiteers have always existed at the margins of society. […] Not even the most despotic administrators dared to legitimize them. While it is important to recover lost cultural and philosophical resources from the intellectual histories of the Middle East, it is important to recognize that Orientalism has distorted those traditions and there is no going back to a non-existent pristine past. The struggle of diverse communities to survive has reached a crisis point in contemporary capitalism which destroys the very fabric of sociality. The conflict between powerful states and resilient communities—that shapes and drives all other conflicts—has acquired a renewed urgency at present.

If I were to assume that liberalism, socialism, Marxism, and anarchism are the only possible political theories and that Greco-Roman philosophical schools are the only schools of philosophy that we have as sources for our conceptual repertoire, then, undoubtedly, I would conclude from the above that Öcalan opposes liberalism, the ideology of capitalism, and comes close to a synthesis of Marxism and anarchism, the two consistently anti-liberal political ideologies to challenge capitalism and modernity. Öcalan does not permit me, the South Asian woman, such a rough and ready conclusion. For he writes quite explicitly in his critique of Western philosophy that Eastern thought seems to have grasped this reality [the unity of body and mind] expressing it in the saying all can be found in the human being. The way Indians greet each other by saying namaste expresses in everyday life the reality that Öcalan alludes to. For, namaste— from the Sanskrit root words namaha and as té means I salute (namaha) that (as té), or more simply, I salute that universe that is embodied in you. By saluting each other we acknowledge the universe that exists within each one of us. These are deeply philosophical concepts that permeates our cultural vocabularies.

Besides, how can I skip Öcalan’s references to the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali and Mansur Al-Hallaj? How can I brush aside the profound influence of thinkers like Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi on South Asian thought? These references to Eastern philosophy, history and metaphors means it is necessary to grasp the philosophical orientation that informs the text in order to appreciate Öcalan’s political conclusions. In the sections that follow I attempt, very briefly, to throw light on two concepts that inform Öcalan’s analysis of modernity, state, and community. One is philosophical dualism/non-dualism and the other is the interrelated concepts of nation and state. The two concepts, one in philosophy and the other in political theory, I wish to argue, are understood and addressed in markedly different ways in Western and Eastern intellectual traditions, used here in the broadest possible sense. I hope that making these latent ideas explicit will assist readers to appreciate Öcalan’s arguments. This is a text about philosophical musings. As Öcalan writes, without philosophy, history cannot be written.

Marx traces the emergence of all sorts of dualisms and binaries in analysis of society to the emergence of capitalism. In Grundrisse, Marx argues that in pre-capitalist societies communities were founded on the organic unity of nature and people. Capitalism forcibly tore apart organic communities by severing the ties of people to land and nature. Commodification transformed people’s relations with nature into private property relations, and relations between people into labor (class) relations. The forcible vivisection of nature from people by commodity production, argues Marx introduces all sorts of dualisms in society such as the dualism between nature/culture, capital/labor, state/citizen, public/private, economy/politics, public law/contract law, economics/ethics, and so forth. Öcalan’s starting point is the scientific method," which is founded on the subject/object dualism. The subject/object, the body/mind, material/spiritual, mind/matter dualisms have deeper roots, long before the rise of capitalism in Greco-Roman philosophical traditions. Indeed, the categories and concepts in Greco-Roman intellectual traditions provided the conceptual repertoire for capitalism, and the legal and ideological resources for positivist science.

If we turn to philosophy instead of sociology or political economy, it is possible to see that the dominant mode of reasoning in Western philosophy is dualism. As early as Thales of Miletus (d. 547 BCE) we begin to see mind/matter dualism. The British philosopher Roy Bhaskar argued that one can go as far back as Plato and we will find that certain problems in philosophy keep returning again and again in the West. Dualisms are sustained by antagonisms (thesis versus antithesis), which in turn produces more antagonisms. An endless cycle of thesis-antithesis conflicts follows as each synthesis generates a new conflictual thesis and antithesis. In this mode of dualist thinking, conflicts are perpetual and endless, indeed conflicts are the drivers of life itself. Philosophy of science straddles the dualisms, but does not help to transcend them. Öcalan’s critique of scientific method is that it is founded on philosophical dualism. He writes, the distinction between subject and object has roots that can be taken back all the way to Plato. Plato’s famous theory of the duality of Forms (ideas) and their simple observable reflections is the basis of all subsequently postulated dualisms. Philosophical dualism focuses on identifying difference, oppositions, confrontations and acts as the source of conflicts. Western philosophy and positivist science argue that struggles and conflicts are necessary for motion, movement, evolution, progress and history. In this tradition, facts, empirical phenomenon and the material world have primacy over ontology or cosmology. Positivist science, Öcalan writes, founded on the subject-object dichotomy is nothing but the legitimization of slavery."

In the Eastern intellectual traditions, by contrast, the dominant mode of reasoning is non-dualism. Concepts of unity in diversity, unity in duality, and the oneness of life-forms, led Eastern philosophers to uncover the underlying unity that holds apparently opposing phenomena together. Conflicts and struggles are not to be denied, but the underlying unity of the world should also be acknowledged. Is it not a miracle that in spite of all our differences, conflicts, antagonisms, the world has continued for as long as it has? That the universe acts in unity? And, that for all capitalism’s scientific efforts over five hundred years, we are unable to say we have conquered nature? If anything, we are only now finding out that nature fights back to reclaim itself, and more and more we are seeing that nature fights back with ecological vengeance. Eastern philosophers asked questions about the continuities in life, the miracle of cosmological unity that sustains so much diversity and difference. Human beings are unique because they have instincts, intelligence, and intuition to grasp empirical, rational, and ontological realities. The questions for philosophy in the East were about the eternal nature of Life with a capital L, that continues in spite of the regularity of death and destruction; the cohesion of society and history persists despite the diversity, difference and discord in social life. As Öcalan writes, it seems that the sole purpose of life is to find the mystery of the universe in the resolution of this dual antagonism, life and death.

Eastern philosophers sought answers for their questions in ontology and cosmology. They treated perception and empirical phenomenon as secondary to ontological truths about Life which were, in their view eternal truths. These philosophical ideas gave rise to non-dualist science, a science that recognized the contingency of human life on nature, the contingency of individual life on communitarian collective lives, and the inner lives of individuals, call it whatever: aesthetic, ethical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual. These ontological truths meant Eastern science saw the role of science not as an endless frontier open to human conquest but as an endowment, a gift from nature, God, or whatever, which may be used to sustain life, which may be enriched, but it must always be held in trust for future generations. Individual lives were transient, whereas Life was eternal. Individuals were trustees of nature’s endowment and science must take account of the place of human beings in the universe when they investigate nature. As an endowment, nature’s gift cannot be appropriated and owned as private property. The opening lines of the Rig Veda, life lives on life for example sets up a deep ecological principle: that is to say, if we want Life to continue, we must make sure we conserve it. Jainism since 7 BCE has advocated the methodology of anekantavada or the philosophy of many-sidedness. Anekantavada invites us to move away from dualist arguments like A is right and B is wrong or the reverse and ask instead: if A is right and B is also right what is the nature of reality that makes A see what A sees and B see what B sees. Mind and matter, economic and political, material and spiritual lives are not antithetical relations in Eastern intellectual traditions. Earning a living is necessary condition for life, but at the same time earning an honest living requires deep spiritual commitment, just as spiritual life requires fulfilling biological needs (food, clothing shelter and such).

Non-dualist thought produced a very different type of political philosophy. Politics is ethical action. When discord, disunity and divisions occur, when states and kings become tyrannical, when reproduction of the conditions for human life become impossible, then, human beings must rebel, indeed it is their duty to rebel. The purpose of rebellion is to restore society and regenerate the conditions needed for human life to continue. The Sufi pirs, the bhakti saints, the sikh gurus, insisted on the unity of this worldly life constituted by communities (civil society) and states (political power) and other worldly life which is concerned about the human purpose, human destiny, human conditions and humanity’s place in the universe. Politics as ethical actions must bring the two dimensions of life and Life, the empirical life and the cosmic life, together here and now in what we do and how we do it. The present is the site where the past and the future co-exist.

The East never developed a theory of divine rights of kings as ideological justification for power. The first principle of Islam, there is no God but Allah, insures against despotism of kings and subjects them to a higher law. Throughout history, popular rebellions have overthrown kings and reduced mighty states and empires to dust. Nor did the East develop laws of inheritance like primogeniture that allows land to be inherited by the oldest male to the exclusion of other sons and daughters. The oldest male is undoubtedly privileged, but equally he has additional responsibilities that requires him to hold land in trust for the extended family, take responsibility of the elderly, the sick, destitute relatives, and less able members of the community. Consequently, the institution of private property never acquired the kind of historical stability and continuity that it did in European societies. Depending on how we see these histories, we could argue that power and wealth created stable states and empires and landed aristocracies in the West. The political stability came at the cost of internal cohesion of communities. The East was colonized, subjugated, and frequently appeared chaotic. But communities remained resilient amidst the political chaos. Their inner resilience continues to challenge powers of states and empires to this day.

Öcalan is worried that the spread of modernity may lead to disintegration of society that have remained resilient so far. Modernity, by denying the social life, has rendered life meaningless and has led to the degeneration and decomposition of the society. It is therefore important to overcome Orientalist approaches to Middle Eastern culture and thought, and instead recover from it philosophical and conceptual resources necessary to address the disintegration of society and community which disorganizes the conditions necessary for human life. Seen as a whole, this text seeks to transcend dualist approaches by moving away from adversarial conceptualizations of nature versus human beings as in liberal science, or communities against states as in anarchist thought, or politics versus economics as in socialist thought, and seeks to synthesize different approaches to modernity by adopting non-dualist approaches to diverse oppositional ideologies. These philosophical differences need to be borne in mind to avoid confusions in the readers" minds about Öcalan’s evaluations with reservations and qualifications of different modernist solutions offered by Western political theories to the problems of modernity.

Öcalan is satirical when he writes, "I am thankful for Hegel’s insightful description of state as God descending to earth and Napoleon as God’s march on earth. […] I read the Hegelian philosophy and saw how the new god came down to earth as the nation-state and began its walk in the shape of Napoleon. Critique of the nation-state is a central thread in the text. Unfortunately, I must rely on a translation of the text, an English translation at that, because of my ignorance of Turkish language. With these limitations, I would like to alert readers to two words that are central to ideas constitutive of the European nation-state. Hegel more than any other European philosopher provides the hyphen to concepts of nation and state. The word quom in Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Urdu is often translated as nation and the word watan is translated as homeland. The words quom and watan" do not have identical conceptual content in Middle Eastern/South Asian languages as in English.

The hyphenation of nation and state in European modernity follows a particular understanding of nation and statehood. The Oxford English dictionary defines homeland as a person’s or a people’s native land. This dictionary also defines nation as a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory. A state is defined as a sovereign state of which most of the citizens or subjects are united also by factors which define a nation, such as language or common descent. And, the nation-state is a sovereign state of which most of the citizens or subjects are united also by factors which define a nation, such as language or common descent. It is important to note that territoriality is common to all the four words in the English language. There is a historical sequencing in the definitions, with homeland being primal nativist identity with land and the nation-state as the coalescence of family, civil society, citizenship and statehood at the pinnacle of historical development. The idea of nation-state conjoins concept of historically constituted communities and historically evolved institution of the state occupying defined territories. In Europe, nations and states were coterminous and coevolved. This is not the conceptual content of the words quom and watan.

In the East, territoriality and historically constituted communities are not necessarily coterminous. It is possible to have quoms, that is to say, historically constituted communities without territory. Equally it is possible for several quoms to belong to the same watan, which means that several historically constituted communities can have a shared homeland. These significant differences in the meanings are lost in transliteration. Modernity brought with it real difficulties of translating concepts of quom and watan into modern political vocabulary of the hyphenated nation-state. Depending on the nature and type of anti-colonial nationalism in different parts of the Islamic world in Arabia, Maghreb, Turkey, Persia and South Asia, the evolution of the word quom to the modern day quomiya translated as nationalism and watan to wataniya translated as patriotism or citizenship, evolved along very different trajectories and acquired different modern meanings in different regions. In South Asia, a diverse continent where many quoms have shared a common watan for a long period in history, the leaders of the radical anti-colonial Ghadar movement called for a radically different constitutional model for azad Hindustan (free India) after the end of British colonialism. Their vision of a free Hindustan consisted of establishing a confederation of quoms with a shared watan. They called for a federation of the republics of India, where each quom of Hindustan would form a confederation and Hindustan would be home to all those who live there and made it their home. Unfortunately, the liberal, modernist meanings of nation and state prevailed and the struggles for control of nation-states and bloody partitions continue. The very fact that common words with shared meanings acquired diverse meanings under specific contexts of anti-colonial movements suggests the need for caution in the way ideas about nation, nation-state and communities are understood in English and Eastern languages. Equally, it should alert us to the way we read Öcalan’s juxtaposition of community and state in the text. If we understand community as quom and state as the territorial authority, the arguments about reconciliation between state and community in the text becomes easier to grasp.

The conditions under which the text was written and smuggled out as defense statement in the European Court means that it would be unfair to read the text as if it were written by an erudite philosopher writing in the comfortable environment of a university. For that very reason, the value of this text lies in the fact that it comes from a person who has engaged in real struggles in the real world and continues to do so under conditions of solitary confinement for over seventeen years. It is refreshing to see philosophy return to politics.

Introduction

As I pursue my defense against the capitalist system, I know that I have to start by breaking loose from its system of mental chains.1 If we want to free ourselves from capitalism, we must reject worshiping it like the golden calf, because, make no mistake, just as a Muslim should call out Bismillah! (In the name of God) before undertaking a new venture, capitalism imposes its own sacred dictates upon us.

The first of the capitalist dictates that we must reject is its so-called scientific method. This method is not the ethics and morality of freedom that have passed through the filter of social life and that will exist as long as human society exists. On the contrary, I am talking about a most advanced, servile attitude to life, which, precisely by denying social life, has rendered life meaningless and has led to the degeneration and decomposition of society; I am talking about the material and immaterial culture that has spawned this attitude.

My fundamental argument for attempting this break can be nothing but myself. Descartes was not even aware that his philosophy provided the basis for capitalism.2 While he doubted everything, should he not have suspected himself as well? More importantly, how did he end up in such a situation? There are other examples of such stages of doubt in history: the construction of god by the Sumerian priests, the deep theistic doubts of Prophet Abraham—last of its example being Prophet Muhammad’s venture—and the Ionian skepticism. At such historical stages, both the new mentality that has been entered into and the previous mentalities that need to be rejected have the characteristics that radically re-mold the society or, at the very least, provide the fundamental paradigm for this remolding. The real reason behind the doubt is the failure of the deep-rooted mentality (or ideological structure) to respond to the newly emerging lifestyle. The mental structures needed for the new life are quite difficult to develop, requiring a profound progress of one’s personality. No matter what one might call such doubting—whether a prophetic action, a philosophical phase or a scientific discovery—in essence they all pursue the answer to the same need: How will the mental structures of the new social life be established? The terrible skepticism is characteristic of this intermediate stage. The splendid lives of Descartes, Spinoza and Erasmus bear the traces of such a historical phase in a location that became the cradle of capitalism’s permanent rise in the sixteenth century, that is, the modern-day Netherlands.

My life story coincides with the beginning of the 1950’s when the drive of global capitalism of the era reached its peak. On the other hand, my place of birth is the most fertile land in the upper part of Mesopotamia—the Fertile Crescent enveloped by the Taurus-Zagros mountains—the location where the remnants of the oldest and most deep-rooted mentalities can still be found, and where the Neolithic age and the initial urban civilizations existed for very long periods: These are the mountain skirts that bore the civilization.3

My imprisonment on İmralı Island and being condemned to live in a single person dungeon by the wardens of the capitalist system (a punishment exceeding that allotted by Zeus by binding Prometheus to a rock in the Caucasus) compelled me to come to understand the antagonism between their system and myself. I remind myself of these historical facts and analyze them over and over again in order to understand what really is afoot, so as not to stare myself blind on the role of the Republic of Turkey. If I were to fall into this trap, I would have become nothing more than the bull that keeps on attacking the red cape; the Republic of Turkey has no doubt been reduced to the bullfighter. These are the predetermined roles we are required to play continuously and efficiently. However, what is necessary is for us—for me—to define the true masters of this savage game—a king’s game—by taking into account all relevant facts.

To prevent delusions that affect the society as a whole, we need to reconsider the example of Karl Marx. No one can doubt the seriousness with which Marx endeavored to analyze capitalism and to break its stranglehold on society. However, it is also generally accepted that the enormous movements for social change inspired by him could not overcome being capitalism’s best servants.4 In this sense, it is clear that I shall not be a mere Marxist disciple.

While trying to define my identity, I think it is worthwhile to understand