Towards Stateless Democracy: Ideological Foundations of Rojava Autonomy and The Kurdish Movement in Turkey

TOWARDS
STATELESS DEMOCRACY
IDEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ROJAVA AUTONOMY
AND THE KURDISH MOVEMENT IN TURKEY
CCBYSA FreeLab 2015
This book wouldn't become real without the support of
many people, first of all Laurance Bahri and Sherman
Ghazi who gave the impulse necessary to start it.
The team of The International Initiative „Freedom for
Abdullah Ocalan – Peace in Kurdistan”, who complied
and translated the fundamental part: Democratic
Confederalism by Abdullah Ocalan, allowed us to use
their publication as a core part of this book.
Authors of the remaining texts and illustration decided to
support our initiative, making their work available for free and under the open
licence.
Finally, supporters of FreeLab and Rojava and our friends (online and AFK)
helped us with advices and constructive critics.
We are deeply thankful for this all.
Unless marked otherwise, all materials in this book are released under Creative
Commons – Attribution – Share Alike – Unported – 4.0
FreeLab Collective
https://freelab2014.wordpress.com
About us
Petros and Natasha (both in their fifties). For almost three years now we have
been living “off the grid”, as the full time social contributors. We run several
projects, in various ways related to cooperatives and selfgovernance.
Our views are strongly on the side of freedom; we support the commons and the
networked society. Petros is more technically oriented (hi, low and appropriate
technology). Natasha is a professional translator, healer and counsellor. She is
also a beginner gardener, in the way of Masanobu Fukuoka.
Recently we got involved into support of the Rojava Autonomy, its reconstruction
and redevelopment. We also watch closely The Greek Spring – current struggle of
Greeks against international plutocracy.
We are accompanied by two dogs – akitas, semivegetarians.
This work is released under licence Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike
4.0 Unported.
ABDULLAH OCALAN • JANET BIEHL • DILAR DIRIK • KRZYSZTOF NAWRATEK
TOWARDS
STATELESS
DEMOCRACY
IDEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
OF ROJAVA AUTONOMY
AND THE KURDISH MOVEMENT
IN TURKEY
The right of selfdetermination of the peoples
includes the right to a state of their own.
However, the foundation of a state does not
increase the freedom of a people. The system
of the United Nations that is based on nation
states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile,
nationstates have become serious obstacles
for any social development. Democratic
confederalism is the contrasting paradigm of
the oppressed people. Democratic
confederalism is a nonstate social paradigm.
It is not controlled by a state. At the same
time, democratic confederalism is the cultural
organizational blueprint of a democratic
nation. Democratic confederalism is based on
grassroots participation. Its decisionmaking
processes lie with the communities. Higher
levels only serve the coordination and
implementation of the will of the communities
that send their delegates to the general
assemblies. For limited space of time they are
both mouthpiece and executive institution.
However, the basic power of decision rests
with the local grassroots institutions.
Abdullah Ocalan
A WORD FROM EDITORS
„Democracy only there grows, where there is a

popular need of the masses. It emerges as the
reaction against the voracity of State, as a
necessary defence of the grassroot institutions,
selforganized economical and cultural interests of
the people against bureaucracy.”
Edward Abramowski1
We weren't able to go to Kobane, to bring you firsthand stories from
the front. We could only tell you the story of the siege, based on
relations of others, using our knowledge and analytical skills. Today,
when Kobane is free and ISIS in retreat, it is about time for you to
learn how come that Rojava Autonomy emerged, what are its roots
and what ideology grows out of them. It is important, as the ideals of
Rojava – ideals of the whole humanity – were the reason for the
defenders of Kobane to be so tough and invincible.
It started from the video clips on Youtube, showing girls with guns.
Then stories about the heroic battles with ISIS. They brought a lot of
emotions, but also questions: what is behind them, what drives them?
Then we learned not only that 40% of Rojava armed forces are female
warriors. We learned about totally separate female army – YPJ. About
mandatory copresidence on every level (except for female
organizations). How could it be possible in the region which – in the
eyes of the Europeans – is a stronghold of patriarchy? What is that
famous Democratic Confederalism which made Rojava possible? What
marvellous visions are needed to transgress “the one and the only”
reality of the patriarchal, capitalist nationstate? We discussed it a lot
within FreeLab and outside and we decided to publish a selection of
texts to help our Readers to understand Rojava better – and also to
look around them in a new way.
We decided to bring the ideals of Rojava closer to the European
reader. To show how the Kurdish resistance movement emerged, How
it transformed from a typical Marxist guerilla to the standard of quite
new ideals – ideals of a cooperative society. And how – out of this very
movement – the Revolution of Women bloomed, effectively creating
Rojava Autonomy.
We also try to show how the thoughts of Murray Bookchin, who
created and developed the libertarian municipalism movement, found
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abramowski
7
Towards Stateless Democracy
practical implementations in the mountains of Kurdistan. Obvious

thought is also that it can be implemented in Poland and Europe even
more easily. That is why we asked Dr Krzysztof Nawratek to show
Rojava in the context of current European political thinking.
We believe deeply that democratic confederalism, as it is implemented
in Rojava, is important for the whole Europe. It is an important
example of implementation of a just, selfgoverning political system in
an extremely hostile surrounding. American societies have their own
example of this kind – EZLN “benevolent junta” in Chiapas, Mexico.
We, in Europe, we have Rojava and their struggle for democratic
confederalism.
If we manage to trigger a discussion on it and to bring it closer to the
popular perception, our mission will be accomplished.
Originally, this book was published in Polish, but as we received
several requests to make it available in English, here it is. Enjoy.
8
DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERALISM*
ABDULLAH OCALAN. Born in 1848. In 1970' he got
involved in the struggle for freedom and equal rights for
Kurds in Turkey. In 1978 he was elected a leader of
PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party). In 1999 he was arested
in Kenya and deported to Turkey, where he was trialed
and sentenced to death. The sentence was later
changed into the lifetime prison, what he serves on the
Imrali Island. He is still coonsidered an undisputed
leader of PKK and the major part of Kurdish movement
in Turkey. He also prepared and implemented a radical
change in PKK's political line, which led to creation oof
the Rojava Autonomy.

PREFACE
For more than thirty years the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has
been struggling for the legitimate rights of the Kurdish people. Our
struggle, our fight for liberation turned the Kurdish question into an
international issue which affected the entire Middle East and brought
a solution of the Kurdish question within reach.
When the PKK was formed in the 1970s the international ideological
and political climate was characterized by the bipolar world of the
Cold War and the conflict between the socialist and the capitalist
camps. The PKK was inspired at that time by the rise of
decolonialization movements all over the world. In this context we
tried to find our own way in agreement with the particular situation in
our homeland. The PKK never regarded the Kurdish question as a
mere problem of ethnicity or nationhood. Rather, we believed, it was
the project of liberating the society and democratizing it. These aims
increasingly determined our actions since the 1990s.
We also recognized a causal link between the Kurdish question and
the global domination of the modern capitalist system. Without
questioning and challenging this link a solution would not be possible.
Otherwise we would only become involved in new dependencies.
So far, with a view to issues of ethnicity and nationhood like the
Kurdish question, which have their roots deep in history and at the
foundations of society, there seemed to be only one viable solution:
the creation of a nationstate, which was the paradigm of the
capitalist modernity at that time.
* Originally published at http://www.freedomfor
ocalan.com/english/download/OcalanDemocraticConfederalism.pdf
9
We did not believe, however, that any readymade political blueprints
would be able to sustainably improve the situation of the people in the
Middle East. Had it not been nationalism and nationstates which had
created so many problems in the Middle East?
Let us therefore take a closer look at the historical background of this
paradigm and see whether we can map a solution that avoids the trap
of nationalism and fits the situation of the Middle East better.
THE NATIONSTATE
BASICS
With the sedentarization of people they began to form an idea of the
area that they were living in, its extension and its boundaries, which
were mostly determined by nature and features of the landscape.
Clans and tribes that had settled in a certain area and lived there for
a long period of time developed the notions of a common identity and
of the homeland. The boundaries between what the tribes saw as their
homelands were not yet borders. Commerce, culture or language were
not restricted by the boundaries. Territorial borders remained flexible
for a long time. Feudal structures prevailed almost everywhere and
now and then dynastic monarchies or great multiethnic empires rose
with continuously changing borders and many different languages
and religious communities like the Roman Empire, the Austro
Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire or the British Empire. They
survived long periods of time and many political changes because
their feudal basis enabled them to distribute power flexibly over a
wide range of smaller secondary power centres.
Nationstate And Power
With the appearance of the nationstate trade, commerce and finance
pushed for political participation and subsequently added their power
to the traditional state structures. The development of the nationstate
at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution more than two hundred
years ago went hand in hand with the unregulated accumulation of
capital on the one hand and the unhindered exploitation of the fast
growing population on the other hand. The new bourgeoisie which
rose from this revolution wanted to take part in the political decisions
and state structures. Capitalism, their new economic system, thus
became an inherent component of the new nationstate. The nation
state needed the bourgeoisie and the power of the capital in order to
replace the old feudal order and its ideology which rested on tribal
10
Democratic Confederalism
structures and inherited rights by a new national ideology which

united all tribes and clans under the roof of the nation. In this way,
capitalism and nationstate became so closely linked to each other
that neither could be imagined to exist without the other. As a
consequence of this, exploitation was not only sanctioned by the state
but even encouraged and facilitated.
But above all the nationstate must be thought as the maximum form
of power. None of the other types of state have such a capacity of
power. One of the main reasons for this is that the upper part of the
middleclass has been linked to the process of monopolization in an
evermore increasing manner. The nationstate itself is the most
developed complete monopoly. It is the most developed unity of
monopolies such as trade, industrial, finance and power. One should
also think of ideological monopoly as an indivisible part of the power
monopoly.
The State And Its Religious Roots
The religious roots of the state have already been discussed in detail
(A. Ocalan, The Roots of Civilisation, London, 2007). Many
contemporary political concepts and notions have their origin in
religious or theological concepts or structures. In fact, a closer look
reveals that religion and divine imagination brought about the first
social identities in history. They formed the ideological glue of many
tribes and other prestate communities and defined their existence as
communities.
Later, after state structures had already developed, the traditional
links between state, power and society began to weaken. The sacred
and divine ideas and practices which had been present at the origin of
the community increasingly lost their meaning for the common
identity and were, instead, transferred onto power structures like
monarchs or dictators. The state and its power were derived from
divine will and law and its ruler became king by the grace of God.
They represented divine power on earth.
Today, most modern states call themselves secular, claiming that the
old bonds between religion and state have been severed and that
religion is no longer a part of the state. This is arguably only half the
truth. Even if religious institutions or representatives of the clergy do
no longer participate in political and social decisionmaking they still
do influence these decisions to an extent just as they are influenced
themselves by political or social ideas and developments. Therefore,
secularism, or laicism as it is called in Turkey, still contains religious
elements. The separation of state and religion is the result of a
11
political decision. It did not come naturally. This is why even today
power and state seem to be something given, godgiven we might even
say. Notions like secular state or secular power remain ambiguous.
The nationstate has also allocated a number of attributes which serve
to replace older religiously rooted attributes like: nation, fatherland,
national flag, national anthem, and many others. Particularly notions
like the unity of state and nation serve to transcend the material
political structures and are, as such, reminiscent of the prestate
unity with God. They have been put in the place of the divine.
When in former times a tribe subjugated another tribe its members
had to worship the gods of the victors. We may arguably call this
process a process of colonization, even assimilation. The nationstate
is a centralized state with quasidivine attributes that has completely
disarmed the society and monopolizes the use of force.
Bureaucracy And The NationState
Since the nationstate transcends its material basis, the citizens, it
assumes an existence beyond its political institutions. It needs
additional institutions of its own to protect its ideological basis as well
as legal, economic and religious structures. The resulting ever
expanding civil and military bureaucracy is expensive and serves only
the preservation of the transcendent state itself, which in turn
elevates the bureaucracy above the people.
During the European modernity the state had all means at its
disposal to expand its bureaucracy into all strata of the society. There
it grew like cancer infecting all lifelines of the society. Bureaucracy
and nationstate cannot exist without each other. If the nationstate is
the backbone of the capitalist modernity it certainly is the cage of the
natural society. Its bureaucracy secures the smooth functioning of the
system, secures the basis of the production of goods, and secures the
profits for the relevant economic actors in both the realsocialist and
the businessfriendly nationstate. The nationstate domesticates the
society in the name of capitalism and alienates the community from
its natural foundations. Any analysis meant to localize and solve
social problems needs to take a close look at these links.
NationState And Homogeneity
The nationstate in its original form aimed at the monopolization of all
social processes. Diversity and plurality had to be fought, an approach
that led into assimilation and genocide. It does not only exploit the
ideas and the labour potential of the society and colonize the heads of
12
the people in the name of capitalism. It also assimilates all kinds of
spiritual and intellectual ideas and cultures in order to preserve its
own existence. It aims at creating a single national culture, a single
national identity, and a single unified religious community. Thus it
also enforces a homogeneous citizenship. The notion of citizen has
been created as a result of the quest for such a homogeneity. The
citizenship of modernity defines nothing but the transition made from
private slavery to state slavery. Capitalism can not attain profit in the
absence of such modern slave armies. The homogenic national society
is the most artificial society to have ever been created and is the result
of the “social engineering project”.
These goals are generally accomplished by the use of force or by
financial incentives and have often resulted in the physical
annihilation of minorities, cultures, or languages or in forced
assimilation. The history of the last two centuries is full of examples
illustrating the violent attempts at creating a nation that corresponds
to the imaginary reality of a true nationstate.
NationState And Society
It is often said that the nationstate is concerned with the fate of the
common people. This is not true. Rather, it is the national governor of
the worldwide capitalist system, a vassal of the capitalist modernity
which is more deeply entangled in the dominant structures of the
capital than we usually tend to assume: It is a colony of the capital.
Regardless how nationalist the nationstate may present itself, it
serves to the same extent the capitalist processes of exploitation.
There is no other explanation for the horrible redistribution wars of
the capitalist modernity. Thus the nationstate is not with the
common people – it is an enemy of the peoples.
Relations between other nationstates and international monopolies
are coordinated by the diplomats of the nationstate. Without the
recognition by other nationstates none of them could survive. The
reason can be found in the logic of the worldwide capitalist system.
Nationstates which leave the phalanx of the capitalist system will be
overtaken by the same fate that the Saddam regime in Iraq
experienced or it will be brought to its knees by means of economic
embargoes.
Let us now derive some characteristics of the nationstate from the
example of the Republic of Turkey.
13
IDEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONSTATE
In the past the history of states was often equated with the history of
their rulers, which lent them almost divine qualities. This practice
changed with the rise of the nationstate. Now the entire state was
idealized and elevated to a divine level.
Nationalism
Assuming that we would compare the nationstate to a living god then
nationalism would be the correspondent religion. In spite of some
seemingly positive elements, nationstate and nationalism show
metaphysical characteristics. In this context, capitalist profit and the
accumulation of capital appear as categories shrouded in mystery.
There is a network of contradictory relations behind these terms that
is based on force and exploitation. Their heg emonic strive for power
serves the maximization of profits. In this sense, nationalism appears
as a quasireligious justification. Its true mission, however, is its
service to the virtually divine nationstate and its ideological vision
which pervades all areas of the society. Arts, science, and social
awareness: none of them is independent. A true intellectual
enlightenment therefore needs a fundamental analysis of these
elements of modernity.
Positivist Science
The paradigm of a positivist or descriptive science forms another
ideological pillar of the nationstate. It fuels nationalist ideology but
also laicism which has taken the form of a new religion. On the other
hand it is one of the ideological foundations of modernity and its
dogmata have influenced the social sciences sustainably. Positivism
can be circumscribed as a philosophical approach that is strictly
confined to the appearance of things, which it equates with reality
itself. Since in positivism appearance is reality, nothing that has no
appearance can be part of reality. We know from quantum physics,
astronomy, some fields of biology and even the gist of thought itself
that reality occurs in worlds that are beyond observable events. The
truth, in the relationship between the observed and the observer, has
mystified itself to the extent that it no longer fits any physical scale or
definition. Positivism denies this and thus, to an extent, resembles the
idol worshipping of ancient times, where the idol constitutes the image
of reality.
14
Sexism
Another ideological pillar of the nationstate is the sexism that
pervades the entire society. Many civilized systems have employed
sexism in order to preserve their own power. They enforced women’s
exploitation and used them as a valuable reservoir of cheap labour.
Women are also regarded as a valuable resource in so far as they
produce offspring and provide the reproduction of men. Thus, woman
is both a sexual object and a commodity. She is a tool for the
preservation of male power and can at best advance to become an
accessory of the patriarchal male society. On the one hand, the sexism
of the society of the nationstate strengthens the power of the men; on
the other hand the nationstate turns its society into a colony by the
exploitation of women. In this respect women can also be regarded as
an exploited nation.
In the course of the history of civilization the patriarchy consolidated
the traditional framework of hierarchies, which in the nationstate is
fuelled by sexism. Socially rooted sexism is just like nationalism an
ideological product of the nationstate and of power. Socially rooted
sexism is not less dangerous than capitalism. The patriarchy,
however, tries to hide these facts at any rate. This is understandable
with a view to the fact that all power relations and state ideologies are
fuelled by sexist concepts and behaviour. Without the repression of
the women the repression of the entire society is not conceivable. The
sexism within the nationstate society while on the one hand gives the
male the maximum power on the other hand turns the society
through the woman into the worst colony of all. Hence woman is the
historicalsociety’s colony nation which has reached its worst position
within the nationstate. All the power and state ideologies stem from
sexist attitudes and behaviour. Woman’s slavery is the most profound
and disguised social area where all types of slavery, oppression and
colonization are realized. Capitalism and nationstate act in full
awareness of this. Without woman’s slavery none of the other types of
slavery can exist let alone develop. Capitalism and nationstate denote
the most institutionalized dominant male. More boldly and openly
spoken: capitalism and nationstate are the monopolism of the
despotic and exploitative male.
15
Religiousness
Even if it acts seemingly like a secular state, the nationstate does not
shy away from using a mélange of nationalism and religion for its
purposes. The reason is simple: religion still plays an important part
in some societies or parts of them. In particular Islam is very agile in
this respect.
However, religion in the age of modernity does no longer play its
traditional role. Whether it is a radical of a moderate belief, religion in
the nationstate does no longer have a mission in the society. It can
only do what it is permitted by the nationstate. Its still existing
influence and its functionality, which can be misused for the
promotion of nationalism, are interesting aspects for the nationstate.
In some cases religion even takes on the part of nationalism. The
Shi’ah of Iran is one of the most powerful ideological weapons of the
Iranian state. In Turkey the Sunni ideology plays a similar but more
limited part.
THE KURDS AND THE NATIONSTATE
After the preceding short introduction into the nationstate and its
ideological basics we will now see why the foundation of a separate
Kurdish nationstate does not make sense for the Kurds. Over the last
decades the Kurds have not only struggled against repression by the
dominant powers and for the recognition of their existence but also for
the liberation of their society from the grip of feudalism. Hence it does
not make sense to replace the old chains by new ones or even enhance
the repression. This is what the foundation of a nationstate would
mean in the context of the capitalist modernity. Without opposition
against the capitalist modernity there will be no place for the
liberation of the peoples. This is why the founding of a Kurdish
nationstate is not an option for me.
The call for a separate nationstate results from the interests of the
ruling class or the interests of the bourgeoisie but does not reflect the
interests of the people since another state would only be the creation
of additional injustice and would curtail the right to freedom even
more.
The solution to the Kurdish question, therefore, needs to be found in
an approach that weakens the capitalist modernity or pushes it back.
There are historical reasons, social peculiarities and actual
developments as well as the fact that the settlement area of the Kurds
extends over the territories of four different countries which make a
democratic solution indispensable. Furthermore, there is also the
16
important fact that the entire Middle East suffers from a democracy
deficit. Thanks to the geostrategic situation of the Kurdish settlement
area successful Kurdish democratic projects promise to advance the
democratization of the Middle East in general. Let us call this
democratic project democratic confederalism.
DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERALISM
This kind of rule or administration can be called a nonstate political
administration or a democracy without a state. Democratic decision
making processes must not be confused with the processes known
from public administration. States only administrate while
democracies govern. States are founded on power; democracies are
based on collective consensus. Office in the state is determined by
decree, even though it may be in part legitimized by elections.
Democracies use direct elections. The state uses coercion as a
legitimate means. Democracies rest on voluntary participation.
Democratic confederalism is open towards other political groups and
factions. It is flexible, multicultural, antimonopo listic, and
consensusoriented. Ecology and feminism are central pillars. In the
frame of this kind of selfadministration an alternative economy will
become necessary, which increases the resources of the society
instead of exploiting them and thus does justice to the manifold needs
of the society.
PARTICIPATION AND THE DIVERSITY OF THE POLITICAL
LANDSCAPE
The contradictory composition of the society necessitates political
groups with both vertical and horizontal formations. Central, regional
and local groups need to be balanced in this way. Only they, each for
itself, are able to deal with its special concrete situation and develop
appropriate solutions for farreaching social problems. It is a natural
right to express one’s cultural, ethnic, or national identity with the
help of political associations. However, this right needs an ethical and
political society. Whether nationstate, republic, or democracy –
democratic confederalism is open for compromises concerning state or
governmental traditions. It allows for equal coexistence.
THE HERITAGE OF THE SOCIETY AND THE ACCUMULATION OF
HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE
Then again, democratic confederalism rests on the historical
experience of the society and its collective heritage. It is not an
17
arbitrary modern political system but, rather, accumulates history

and experience. It is the offspring of the life of the society. The state
continuously orientates itself towards centralism in order to pursue
the interests of the power monopolies. Just the opposite is true for
confederalism. Not the monopolies but the society is at the centre of
political focus. The heterogeneous structure of the society is in
contradiction to all forms of centralism. Distinct centralism only
results in social eruptions. Within living memory people have always
formed loose groups of clans, tribes or other communities with federal
qualities. In this way they were able to preserve their internal
autonomy. Even the internal government of empires employed diverse
methods of selfadministration for their different parts, which
included religious authorities, tribal councils, kingdoms, and even
republics. Hence it is important to understand, that even centralist
seeming empires follow a confederate organizational structure. The
centralist model is not an administrative model wanted by the society.
Instead, it has its source in the preservation of power of the
monopolies.
ETHICS AND POLITICAL AWARENESS
The classification of the society in categories and terms after a certain
pattern is produced artificially by the capitalist monopolies. What
counts in a society like that is not what you are but what you appear
to be. The putative alienation of the society from its own existence
encourages the withdrawal from active participation, a reaction which
is often called disenchantment with politics. However, societies are
essentially political and valueoriented. Economic, political,
ideological, and military monopolies are constructions which
contradict the nature of society by merely striving for the
accumulation of surplus. They do not create values. Nor can a
revolution create a new society. It can only influence the ethical and
political web of a society. Anything else is at the discretion of the
ethicsbased political society. I mentioned already that the capitalist
modernity enforces the centralization of the state. The political and
military power centres within the society have been deprived of their
influence. The nationstate as a modern substitute of monarchy left a
weakened and defenceless society behind. In this respect, legal order
and public peace only imply the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Power
constitutes itself in the central state and becomes one of the
fundamental administrative paradigms of modernity. This puts the
nationstate in contrast to democracy and republicanism. Our project
of “democratic modernity” is meant as an alternative draft to
modernity as we know it. It builds on democratic confederalism as a
18
fundamental political paradigm. Democratic modernity is the roof of
an ethicsbased political society. As long as we make the mistake to
believe that societies need to be homogeneous monolithic entities it
will be difficult to understand confederalism. Modernity’s history is
also a history of four centuries of cultural and physical genocide in
the name of an imaginary unitary society. Democratic confederalism
as a sociological category is the counterpart of this history and it rests
on the will to fight if necessary as well as on ethnic, cultural, and
political diversity.
The crisis of the financial system is an inherent consequence of the
capitalist nationstate. However, all efforts of the neoliberals to change
the nationstate have remained unsuccessful. The Middle East
provides instructive examples.
DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERALISM AND A DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL
SYSTEM
In contrast to a centralist and bureaucratic understanding of
administration and exercise of power confederalism poses a type of
political selfadministration where all groups of the society and all
cultural identities can express themselves in local meetings, general
conventions and councils. This understanding of democracy opens the
political space to all strata of the society and allows for the formation
of different and diverse political groups. In this way it also advances
the political integration of the society as a whole. Politics becomes a
part of everyday life. Without politics the crisis of the state cannot be
solved since the crisis is fuelled by a lack of representation of the
political society. Terms like federalism or self administration as they
can be found in liberal democracies need to be conceived anew.
Essentially, they should not be conceived as hierarchical levels of the
administration of the nationstate but rather as central tools of social
expression and participation. This, in turn, will advance the
politicization of the society. We do not need big theories here, what we
need is the will to lend expression to the social needs by strengthening
the autonomy of the social actors structurally and by creating the
conditions for the organization of the society as a whole. The creation
of an operational level where all kinds of social and political groups,
religious communities, or intellectual tendencies can express
themselves directly in all local decisionmaking processes can also be
called participative democracy. The stronger the participation the
more powerful is this kind of democracy. While the nationstate is in
contrast to democracy, and even denies it, democratic confederalism
constitutes a continuous democratic process.
19
The social actors, which are each for itself federative units, are the
germ cells of participative democracy. They can combine and associate
into new groups and confederations according to the situation. Each
of the political units involved in participative democracy is essentially
democratic. In this way, what we call democracy then is the
application of democratic processes of decisionmaking from the local
level to the global level in the framework of a continuous political
process. This process will affect the structure of the social web of the
society in contrast to the striving for homogeneity of the nationstate,
a construct that can only be realized by force thus bringing about the
loss of freedom.
I have already addressed the point that the local level is the level
where the decisions are made. However, the thinking leading to these
decisions needs to be in line with global issues. We need to become
aware of the fact that even villages and urban neighbourhoods require
confederate structures. All areas of the society need to be given to self
administration, all levels of it need to be free to participate.
DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERALISM AND SELFDEFENCE
Essentially, the nationstate is a militarily structured entity. Nation
states are eventually the products of all kinds of internal and external
warfare. None of the existing nationstates has come into existence all
by itself. Invariably, they have a record of wars. This process is not
limited to their founding phase but, rather, it builds on the
militarization of the entire society. The civil leadership of the state is
only an accessory of the military apparatus. Liberal democracies even
outdo this by painting their militaristic structures in democratic and
liberal colours. However, this does not keep them from seeking
authoritarian solutions at the highpoint of a crisis caused by the
system itself. Fascist exercise of power is the nature of the nation
state. Fascism is the purest form of the nationstate.
This militarization can only be pushed back with the help of self
defence. Societies without any mechanism of selfdefence lose their
identities, their capability of democratic decisionmaking, and their
political nature. Therefore, the selfdefence of a society is not limited
to the military dimension alone. It also presupposes the preservation
of its identity, its own political awareness, and a process of
democratization. Only then can we talk about selfdefence.
Against this background democratic confederalism can be called a
system of selfdefence of the society. Only with the help of confederate
networks can there be a basis to oppose the global domination of the
monopolies and nationstate militarism.
20
Against the network of monopolies we must build up an equally strong
network of social confederacies.
This means in particular that the social paradigm of confederalism
does not involve a military monopoly for the armed forces, which do
only have the task of ensuring the internal and external security. They
are under direct control of the democratic institutions. The society
itself must be able to determine their duties. One of their tasks will be
the defence of the free will of the society from internal and external
interventions. The composition of the military leadership needs to be
determined in equal terms and parts by both the political institutions
and the confederate groupings.
DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERALISM VERSUS STRIFE FOR HEGEMONY
In democratic confederalism there is no room for any kind of
hegemony striving. This is particularly true in the field of ideology.
Hegemony is a principle that is usually followed by the classic type of
civilization. Democratic civilizations reject hegemonic powers and
ideologies. Any ways of expression which cut across the boundaries of
democratic selfadministration would carry selfadministration and
freedom of expression ad absurdum. The collective handling of
matters of the society needs understanding, respect of dissenting
opinions and democratic ways of decisionmaking. This is in contrast
to the understanding of leadership in the capitalist modernity where
arbitrary bureaucratic decisions of nationstate character are
diametrically opposed to the democraticconfederate leadership in line
with ethic foundations. In democratic confederalism leadership
institutions do not need ideological legitimization. Hence, they need
not strive for hegemony.
DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERATE STRUCTURES AT A GLOBAL SCALE
Although in democratic confederalism the focus is on the local level,
organizing confederalism globally is not excluded. Contrariwise, we
need to put up a platform of national civil societies in terms of a
confederate assembly to oppose the United Nations as an association
of nationstates under the leadership of the superpowers. In this way
we might get better decisions with a view to peace, ecology, justice and
productivity in the world.
CONCLUSION
Democratic confederalism can be described as a kind of
selfadministration in contrast to the administration by the nation
21
state. However, under certain circumstances peaceful coexistence is
possible as long as the nationstate does not interfere with central
matters of selfadministration. All such interventions would call for
the selfdefence of the civil society.
Democratic confederalism is not at war with any nationstate but it
will not stand idly by at assimilation efforts. Revolutionary overthrow
or the foundation of a new state does not create sustainable change.
In the long run, freedom and justice can only be accomplished within
a democraticconfederate dynamic process. Neither total rejection nor
complete recognition of the state is useful for the democratic efforts of
the civil society. The overcoming of the state, particularly the nation
state, is a longterm process.
The state will be overcome when democratic confederalism has proved
its problemsolving capacities with a view to social issues. This does
not mean, though, that attacks by nationstates have to be accepted.
Democratic confederations will sustain selfdefence forces at all times.
Democratic confederations will not be limited to organize themselves
within a single particular territory. They will become crossborder
confederations when the societies concerned so desire.
PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERALISM
1. The right of selfdetermination of the peoples includes the right
to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does
not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United
Nations that is based on nationstates has remained inefficient.
Meanwhile, nationstates have become serious obstacles for any
social development. Democratic confederalism is the contrasting
paradigm of the oppressed people.
2. Democratic confederalism is a nonstate social paradigm. It is
not controlled by a state. At the same time, democratic
confederalism is the cultural organizational blueprint of a
democratic nation.
3. Democratic confederalism is based on grassroots participation.
Its decisionmaking processes lie with the communities. Higher
levels only serve the coordination and implementation of the will
of the communities that send their delegates to the general
assemblies. For limited space of time they are both mouthpiece
and executive institutions. However, the basic power of decision
rests with the local grassroots institutions.
4. In the Middle East, democracy cannot be imposed by the
capitalist system and its imperial powers which only damage
22
democracy. The propagation of grassroots democracy is

elementary. It is the only approach that can cope with diverse
ethnical groups, religions, and class differences. It also goes
together well with the traditional confederate structure of the
society.
5. Democratic confederalism in Kurdistan is an antinationalist
movement as well. It aims at realizing the right of selfdefence of
the peoples by the advancement of democracy in all parts of
Kurdistan without questioning the existing political borders. Its
goal is not the foundation of a Kurdish nationstate. The
movement intends to establish federal structures in Iran,
Turkey, Syria, and Iraq that are open for all Kurds and at the
same time form an umbrella confederation for all four parts of
Kurdistan.
PROBLEMS OF THE PEOPLES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND POSSIBLE
WAYS TO A SOLUTION
The national question is not a phantasm of the capitalist modernity.
Nevertheless it was the capitalist modernity which imposed the
national question on the society. The nation replaced the religious
community. However, the transition to a national society needs the
overcoming of the capitalist modernity if the nation is not to remain
the disguise of repressive monopolies.
As negative as is the overemphasis of the national category in the
Middle East as severe would be the consequences of neglecting the
collective national aspect. Hence the method in handling the issue
should not be ideological but scientific and not nationstatist but
based on the concept of democratic nation and democratic
communalism. The contents of such an approach are the fundamental
elements of democratic modernity.
Over the past two centuries nationalism and tendency for nation
states have been fuelled in the societies of the Middle East. The
national issues have not been solved but rather have been aggravated
in all areas of the society. Instead of cultivating productive
competition the capital enforces internal and external wars in the
name of the nationstate.
The theory of communalism would be an alternative to capitalism. In
the framework of democratic nations which do not strive for power
monopolies it may lead to peace in a region which has only been the
field of gory wars and genocides.
23
In this context we can speak of four majority nations: Arabs, Persians,
Turks, and Kurds. I do not wish to divide nations into majority or
minority as I do not find this to be appropriate. But due to
demographic considerations I shall speak of majority nations. In the
same context we may also use the term minority nations.
1. There are more than twenty Arab nationstates which divide the
Arab community and damage their societies by wars. This is one of
the main factors responsible for the alienation of cultural values and
the apparent hopelessness of the Arab national question. These
nationstates have not even been able to form a crossnational
economic community. They are the main reason of the problematic
situation of the Arab nation. A religiously motivated tribal nationalism
together with a sexist patriarchal society pervades all areas of the
society resulting in distinct conservatism and slavish obedience.
Nobody believes that the Arabs will be able to find an Arab national
solution to their internal and crossnational problems. However,
democratization and a communalist approach might provide such a
solution. Their weakness towards Israel, which the Arab nationstates
regard as a competitor, is not only the result of international support
by the hegemonic powers. Rather, it is the result of a strong internal
democratic and communal institutions within Israel. Over the last
century, the society of the Arab nation has been weakened by radical
nationalism and Islamism. Yet, if they are able to unite communal
socialism which they are not a stranger to with that of the
understanding of a democratic nation then they may be able to find
themselves a secure, longterm solution.
2. The Turks and Turkmens form another influential nation. They
share a similar understandings of power and ideology with the Arabs.
They are strict nationstatists and have a profound religious and
racial nationalism engraved in them. From a sociological point of view,
the Turks and Turkmens are quite different. The relations between
Turkmen and Turkish aristocracy resemble the tensed relations
between Bedouins and Arab aristocracy. They form a stratum whose
interests are compatible with democracy and communalism. The
national problems are quite complex.
The power strive of the nationstate, distinct nationalism and a sexist
patriarchal society prevail and create a very conservative society. The
family is regarded as the smallest cell of the state. Both individuals
and institutions have taken in these aspects. Turkish and Turkmen
communities struggle for power. Other ethnic groups are subjected to
a distinct policy of subjugation. The centralist power structures of the
Turkish nationstate and the rigid official ideology have prevented a
solution to the Kurdish question until today. The society is made to
24
believe that there is no alternative to the state. There is no balance
between the individual and the state. Obedience is regarded as the
greatest virtue.
In contrast to this, the theory of the democratic modernity offers an
adequate approach to all national communities in Turkey to solve
their national problems. Community based project of a democratic
Turkish confederation would both strengthen its internal unity and
and create the conditions for a peaceful coexistence with the
neighbours that it lives with. Borders have lost its former meaning
when it comes to social unity. In spite of geographic boundaries
today’s modern communication tools allow for a virtual unity between
individuals and communities wherever they are. A democratic
confederation of the Turkish national communities could be a
contribution to world peace and the system of democratic modernity.
3. The Kurdish national society is very complex. Worldwide, the Kurds
are the biggest nation without a state of their own. They have been
settling in their present settlement areas since the Neolithic.
Agriculture and stock breeding as well as their readiness to defend
themselves using the geographic advantages of their mountainous
homeland helped the Kurds to survive as a native people. The Kurdish
national question rises from the fact that they have been denied their
right to nationhood. Others tried to assimilate them, annihilate them,
and in the end flatly denied their existence. Not having a state of their
own has advantages and disadvantages. The excrescences of state
based civilizations have only been taken in to a limited extent. This
can be a benefit in the realization of alternative social concepts beyond
the capitalist modernity. Their settlement area is divided by the
national borders of four countries and lies in a geostrategically
important region, thus providing the Kurds a strategic advantage. The
Kurds do not have the chance to form a national society through the
use of statepower. Although there is a Kurdish political entity today
in IraqiKurdistan, it is not a nationstate but rather a parastatal
entity.
Kurdistan had also been home to Armenian and Aramaic minorities
before these fell victims to genocides. There are also smaller groups of
Arabs and Turks. Even today there are many different religions and
faiths living side by side there. There also rudiments of a clan and
tribal culture while there is almost no presence of urban culture there.
All these properties are a blessing for new democratic political
formations. Communal cooperatives in farming but also in the water
economy and the energy sector offer themselves as ideal ways of
production. The situation is also favourable for the development of an
25
ethical political society. Even the patriarchal ideology is less deeply

rooted here than in the neighbouring societies. This is beneficial for
the establishment of a democratic society where women’s freedom and
equality are to form one of the main pillars. It also offers the
conditions for the creation of a democratic environmentfriendly
nation in line with the paradigm of the democratic modernity. The
construction of a democratic nation based on multinational identities
is the ideal solution when faced with the deadend street nationstate.
The emerging entity could become a blueprint for the entire Middle
East and expand dynamically into neighbouring countries. Convincing
the neighbouring nations of this model shall change the fate of the
Middle East and shall reinforce the chance of democratic modernity to
create an alternative. In this sense, therefore, the freedom of the
Kurds and the democratization of their society would be synonymous
with the freedom of the whole region and its societies.
4. The reasons for today’s problems of the Persian or Iranian nation
can be found in the interventions of historical civilizations and the
capitalist modernity. Although their original identity was a result of
Zoroastrian and Mithraic tradition these have been annulled by a
derivative of Islam. Manichaeism that emerged as the synthesis of
Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism with Greek philosophy
was not able to prevail against the ideology of the official civilization.
Indeed, it went no further then to nurture the tradition of rebellion. It
has hence converted the Islamic tradition into Shi’ah denomination
and adopted it to be its latest civilizational ideology. Presently there
are efforts made to modernize itself by passing the elements of
capitalist modernity through its Shi’ah filter.
The Iranian society is multiethnic and multireligious and blessed
with a rich culture. All national and religious identities of the Middle
East can be found there. This diversity is in strong contrast to the
hegemonic claim of the theocracy, which cultivates a subtle religious
nationalism and the ruling class does not shrink back from anti
modernist propaganda whenever it serves their interests.
Revolutionary and democratic tendencies have been integrated by the
traditional civilization. A despotic regime skilfully governs the country.
The negative effects of American and European sanctions are not
negligible here.
Despite strong centralist efforts in Iran, from the grassroots already
some kind of federalism exists. When elements of demo cratic
civilisation and federalist elements including Azeris, Kurds, Baluchis,
Arabs, and Turkmens intersect, the project of a “Democratic
Confederation of Iran” can emerge and become attractive. Women’s
movement and communal traditions will play a special role here.
26
5. The Armenian national question contains one of the greatest

tragedies that the progress of the capitalist modernity has brought
about in the Middle East. The Armenians are a very old people. They
shared much of their settlement area with the Kurds. While the Kurds
live primarily on agriculture and animal husbandry the Armenians
engaged in arts and crafts. Just like the Kurds, the Armenians
cultivated a tradition of selfdefence. Apart from some short episodes
the Armenians never successfully founded a state. They rely on
Christian culture which gives them their identity and their faith in
salvation. Because of their religion they often suffered repression at
the hands of the Muslim majority. Hence, the emerging nationalism
bore fruit with the Armenian bourgeoisie. Soon there were differences
with the Turkish nationalists eventually ending in the genocide of the
Armenians by the Turks. Apart from the Jews the Armenians are the
secondlargest people which live primarily in the Diaspora. The
foundation of an Armenian state in the west of Azerbaijan, however,
did not solve the Armenian national question. The consequences of
the genocide can hardly be put into words. The search for the lost
country defines their national psyche and is at the heart of the
Armenian question. The issue is aggravated by the fact that these
areas have been settled by other people since then. Any concepts
based on a nationstate cannot offer a solution. There is neither a
homogenous population structure there nor any clear borders as is
required by the capitalist modernity. The thinking of their opponents
may be fascist; however, it is not enough to only bring the genocide to
one’s mind. Confederate structures could be an alternative for the
Armenians. The foundation of a democratic Armenian nation in line
with the paradigm of the democratic modernity promises the
Armenians an opportunity to reinvent themselves. It could enable
them to return to their place in the cultural plurality of the Middle
East. In the event that they renew themselves under the Armenian
democratic nation not only shall they continue to play their historical
role within the Middle East culture but they shall also find the right
path to liberation.
6. In modern times the Christian Arameans (Assyrians) also suffered
the fate of the Armenians. They too are one of the oldest people in the
Middle East. They shared a settlement area with the Kurds but also
with other people. Like the Armenians they suffered from repression
by the Muslim majority paving the way for Europeanstyle nationalism
among the Aramean bourgeoisie. Eventually the Arameans too fell
victims to genocide at the hands of the Turks under the leadership of
the fascist Committee of Unity and Progress. The collaborationist
Kurds lent a helping hand in this genocide. The question of Aramean
27
national society has its roots in the civilization but has also developed
further with Christianity and ideologies of modernity. For a solution
there is a need for a radical transformation of the Arameans. Their
real salvation may be to break away from the mentality of classical
civilization and capitalist modernity and instead embrace democratic
civilization and renew their rich cultural memory as an element of
democratic modernity in order to reconstruct themselves as the
“Aramean Democratic Nation”.
7. The history of the Jewish people also gives expression to the overall
problematic cultural history of the Middle East. The search for the
backdrop of expulsion, pogroms and genocide amounts to balancing
the accounts of the civilizations. The Jew ish community has taken up
the influences of the old Sumerian and Egyptian cultures as well as
those of regional tribal cultures. It has contributed a lot to the culture
of the Middle East. Like the Arameans they fell victims to extreme
developments of modernity. Against this background, intellectuals of
Jewish descent developed a complex point of view towards these
issues. However, this is by far not enough. For a solution of the
problems as they exist today a renewed appropriation of the history of
the Middle East is needed on a democratic basis. The Israeli nation
state is at war since its foundation. The slogan is: an eye for an eye.
Fire cannot be fought by fire, though. Even if Israel enjoys relative
security thanks to its international support, this is not a sustainable
solution. Nothing will be permanently safe as long as the capitalist
modernity has not been overcome.
The Palestine conflict makes it clear that the nationstate paradigm is
not helpful for a solution. There has been much bloodshed; what
remains is the difficult legacy of seemingly irresolvable problems. The
IsraelPalestine example shows the complete failure of the capitalist
modernity and the nationstate. The Jews belong to the culture
bearers of the Middle East. Denial of their right to existence is an
attack on the Middle East as such. Their transformation into a
democratic nation just as for Armenians and Arameans would make
their participation in a democratic confederation of the Middle East
easier. The project of an “EastAegean Democratic Confederation”
would be a positive start. Strict and exclusive national and religious
identities may evolve into flexible and open identities under this
project. Israel may also evolve into a more acceptable open democratic
nation. Undoubtedly though its neighbours must also go through
such a transformation.
Tensions and armed conflicts in the Middle East make a
transformation of the paradigm of modernity seem inevitable. Without
it a solution of the difficult social problems and national questions is
28
impossible. Democratic modernity offers an alternative to the system
that is unable to resolve problems.
8. The annihilation of Hellenic culture in Anatolia is a loss that cannot
be compensated. The ethnic cleansing arranged by the Turkish and
Greek nationstates in the first quarter of the last century has left its
mark. No state has the right to drive people from their ancestral
cultural region. Nevertheless, the nationstates showed their inhuman
approach towards such issues again and again. The attacks on the
Hellenic, Jewish, Aramean and Armenian cultures were stepped up
while Islam spread throughout the Middle East. This, in turn,
contributed to the decline of the MiddleEastern Civilization. The
Islamic culture has never been able to fill the emerging void. In the
19th century when the capitalist modernity advanced into the Middle
East it found a cultural desert created by selfinflicted cultural
erosion. Cultural diversity also strengthens the defence mechanism of
a society. Monocultures are less robust. Hence, the conquest of the
Middle East had not been difficult. The project of a homogeneous
nation as propagated by the nationstates furthered their cultural
decline.
9. The Caucasian ethnic groups also have social problems which are
not insignificant. Again and again they have migrated into the Middle
East and stimulated its cultures. They have unquestionably
contributed to its cultural wealth. The arrival of modernity almost
made these minority cultures disappear. They, too, would find their
adequate place in a confederate structure. Finally, let me state again
that the fundamental problems of the Middle East are deeply rooted in
the class civilization. They have tightened with the global crisis of the
capitalist modernity. This modernity and its claim to dominance
cannot offer any solutions not to mention a longterm perspective for
the MiddleEast region. The future is democratic confederalism.
29
BOOKCHIN, ÖCALAN, AND THE DIALECTICS
OF DEMOCRACY*
JANET BIEHL was the companion and collaborator of
Murray Bookchin from 1987 until his death in
2006. She is the author of The Politics of Social
Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (1997) and
numerous articles on social ecology. She edited
The Murray Bookchin Reader (1998). Her
biography of Bookchin, titled Ecology or
Catastrophe, will be published by Oxford
University Press in September 2015.
In February 1999, at the moment when Abdullah Öcalan was

abducted in Kenya, Murray Bookchin was living with me in
Burlington, Vermont. We watched Öcalan’s capture on the news
reports. He sympathized with the plight of the Kurds – he said so
whenever the subject came up – but he saw Öcalan as yet another
MarxistLeninist guerrilla leader, a latterday Stalinist. Murray had
been criticizing such people for decades, for misleading people’s
impulses toward freedom into authority, dogma, statism, and even –
all appearances to the contrary – acceptance of capitalism.
A STALINIST TURNED ECOLOGIST**
Bookchin himself had been a Stalinist back in the 1930s, as young
teenager; he left late in the decade and joined the Trotskyists. At the
time, the Trotskyists thought World War II would end in proletarian
socialist revolutions in Europe and the United States, the way World
War I had given rise to the Russian Revolution. During the war
Bookchin worked hard in a foundry to try to organize the workers to
rise up and make that revolution. But in 1945 they did not. The
Trotskyist movement, its firm prediction unfulfilled, collapsed. Many if
not most of its members gave up on Marxism and revolutionary
politics generally; they became academics or edited magazines,
working more or less within the system.
Bookchin too gave up on Marxism, since the proletariat had clearly
turned out not be revolutionary after all. But instead of going
mainstream, he and his friends did something unusual: they
* This speech was presented to the conference “Challenging Capitalist Modernity:
Alternative concepts and the Kurdish Question,” Hamburg, Germany, February
35, 2012. The audio source: http://soundcloud.com/freiheitxxi/bookchin
calanandthe
** Subtitles, asterisk footnotes and emphasised text – by editors.
31
remained social revolutionaries. They recalled that Trotsky, before his
assassination in 1940, had said that should the unthinkable happen –
should the war not end in revolution – then it would be necessary for
them to rethink Marxist doctrine itself. Bookchin and his friends got
together, meeting every week during the 1950s, and looked for ways to
renovate the revolutionary project, under new circumstances.
Capitalism, they remained certain, was an inherently, self
destructively flawed system. But if not the proletariat, then what was
its weak point? Bookchin realized, early in the 1950s, that its fatal
flaw was the fact that it was in conflict with the natural environment,
destructive both of nature and of human health. It industrialized
agriculture, tainting crops and by extension people with toxic
chemicals; it inflated cities to unbearably large, megalopolitan size,
cut off from nature, that turned people into automatons and damaged
both their bodies and their psyches. It pressured them through
advertising to spend their money on useless commodities, whose
production further harmed the environment. The crisis of capitalism,
then, would result not from the exploitation of the working class but
from the intolerable dehumanization of people and the destruction of
nature.
To create an ecological society, cities would have to be decentralized,
so people could live at a smaller scale and govern themselves and
grow food locally and use renewable energy. The new society would be
guided, not by the dictates of the market, or by the imperatives of a
state authority, but by people’s decisions. Their decisions would be
guided by ethics, on a communal scale. To create such a rational,
ecological society it, we would need viable institutions – what he called
“forms of freedom.” Both the revolutionary organization and the
institutions for the new society would have to be truly liberatory, so
they would not lead to a new Stalin, to yet another tyranny in the
name of socialism. Yet they would have to be strong enough to
suppress capitalism.
Those institutions, he realized, could only be democratic assemblies.
The present nationstate would have to be eliminated and its powers
devolve to citizens in assemblies. They, rather than the masters of
industry could make decisions, for example about the environment.
And since assemblies only worked in a locality, in order to function at
a broader geographical area, they would have to band together – to
confederate. He spent the next decades elaborating these ideas for an
ecological, democratic society. In the 1980s, for example, he said the
confederation of citizens assemblies would form a counterpower or a
dual power against the nationstate. He called this program libertarian
municipalism, later using the word communalism.
32
Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy
During those decades he tried to persuade other American and

European leftists of the importance of this project. But in those days
most of them were too busy admiring Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro.
Bookchin pointed out that they were dictators; leftists didn’t want to
hear such criticisms. Ecology and democracy are just petitebourgeois
ideas, they told him. The only people who listened to Bookchin were
anarchists, because his ideas were antistatist. He had become, in
fact, a highprofile anarchist.
He told the anarchists that his program for libertarian municipalism
was their natural politics, their obvious revolutionary theory. They
would listen to him respectfully, but then they’d tell him they didn’t
like local government any more than they liked any other kind; and
they objected to majority voting, because it meant the minority
wouldn’t get their way. They preferred nonpolitical communitarian
groups, cooperatives, radical bookstores, communes. Bookchin
thought such institutions were fine, but to make a serious revolution,
you needed a way to gain active, concrete, vested, structural, legal
political power. Libertarian municipalism was a way to do that, to get
a firm toehold against the nationstate.
He wooed the anarchists. He courted, pleaded with, wheedled, begged,
intoned, and scolded them. He did everything to persuade them that
libertarian municipalism was the way to make anarchism politically
relevant. But by 1999 – around the time of Öcalan’s arresthe was
finally admitting that he had failed, and he was in the process of
disengaging from anarchism.
TO CUT THE MESSENGER'S HEAD
With all that going on, we didn’t read much about Öcalan’s defense at
his trial, on charges of treason: we didn’t know, for example, that he
was undergoing a transformation similar to the one Bookchin had
undergone half a century earlier, that he was rejecting Marxism
Leninism in favor of democracy. He had concluded that Marxism was
authoritarian and dogmatic and unable to creatively approaching
current problems.1 We “must respond to the requirements of the
historical moment,” he told the prosecutors. To move forward, it was
necessary “to reassess principles, the programme and the mode of
action.”2 It was something Bookchin might have said in 1946.
Today, Öcalan told his Turkish prosecutors, rigid systems are
collapsing, and “national, cultural, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and
(1) Abdullah Öcalan, Declaration on the Democratic Solution of the Kurdish Question, 1999,
trans. Kurdistan Information Centre (London: Mespotamian Publishers, 1999), p. 106.
(2) Ibid., p. 44.
33
indeed regional problems are being solved by granting and applying
the broadest democratic standards.” 1 The PKK, he said, must give up
its goal of achieving a separate Kurdish state and adopt a democratic
program for Turkey as a whole.
Democracy, he said, is the key to the Kurdish question, because in a
democratic system, each citizen has rights and a vote, and everyone
participates equally regardless of ethnicity. The Turkish state could be
democratized, to acknowledge the existence of the Kurdish people and
their rights to language and culture. 2 It wasn’t assembly democracy,
such as Bookchin was advocating – it was a topdown approach.
Rather, “the goal is a democratic republic.”3
Democracy, he pointed out, was also the key to Turkey’s future, since
Turkey could not really be a democracy without the Kurds. Other
democratic countries had resolved their ethnic problems by including
oncemarginalized groups – and the inclusiveness and diversity made
them stronger. The United States, India, many other places with
ethnic issues more complex than Turkey’s had made progress on
ethnic inclusion and been all the stronger for it. Around the world,
acceptance turned differences into strengths. Whatever the Turkish
prosecutors might have thought of this message, they didn’t care for
the messenger – they convicted him and sentenced him to death, a
sentence later commuted to solitary confinement.
THE BEST ANARCHIST IS A FORMER MARXIST
Bookchin used to say that the best anarchists are the ones who were
formerly Marxists. They knew how to think, he said, how to draw out
the logic of ideas. And they understood dialectics. He would surely
have recognized this ability in Öcalan, had they met. Both men shared
a dialectical cast of mind, inherited from their common Marxist past.
Not that they were dialectical materialists – both understood that that
Marxist concept was inadequate, because historical causation is
multiple, not just economic. But both remained dialectical: in love
with history’s developmental processes.
Dialectics is a way of describing change – not kinetic kind of change
that is the concern of physics, but the developmental change that
occurs in organic life and in social history. Change progresses through
contradictions. In any given development, some of the old is preserved
while some of the new is added, resulting in an Aufhebung, or
transcendence. Both men were prone to think in terms of historical
(1) Ibid., p. 55.
(2) Ibid., p. 89-90.
(3) Ibid., p. 114.
34
development. Indeed, they wrote sweeping historical accounts of

civilization, more than once, several times, parsing the dialectics of
domination and resistance, of states and tyrannies countered by
struggles for freedom. Unlike Marxists, they didn’t use dialectics to
predict some inevitable future revolt – they knew it could not predict.
Instead, they used it to raise possibilities, to identify potentialities, to
establish the historical foundations for what they thought should be
the next political step. They used it, consciously or not, for ethics – to
derive, from what has happened in the past, what ought to come next.
Both wrote, separately, about the origins of civilization: about primal
societies in the Paleolithic; about the rise of agriculture and private
property and class society; the rise of religion; of administration,
states, armies, and empires, of monarchs and nobility and feudalism.
And they discussed modernity, the rise of the Enlightenment, science,
technology, industrialism, capitalism. Just for convenience, I’m going
to call these historical accounts Civilization Narratives.
Bookchin wrote two major Civilization Narratives: The Ecology of
Freedom (1982) and Urbanization Against Cities (1986). 1 Öcalan wrote
several, such as The Roots of Civilization and parts of The PKK and
the Kurdish Question and even the more recent Road Map.2
A REVOLUTIONARY CITY – A CITY REVOLUTION
They harnessed their Civilization Narratives to serve current political
problematics. The Ecology of Freedom is, among other things, an
argument against mainstream, reformist environmentalists, in favor
radical social ecology. Bookchin wanted to show these cautious
liberals that they could aim for more than mere state reforms – that
they should and could think in terms of achieving an ecological
society. People lived communally in the past, and they could do so
again.
So he highlighted the early preliterate societies in human history that
he called “organic society,” tribal, communal and nonhierarchical,
living in cooperation with each other. He identified the specific
features that made them cooperative: the means of life were
(1) Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Rise and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo
Alto, Calif.: Cheshire Books, 1982); and The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of
Citizenship [later retitled Urbanization Against Cities] (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986).
(2) Abdullah Öcalan, Prison Writings: The Roots of Civilization, trans. Klaus Happel
(London: Pluto Press, 2007); and Prison Writings: The PKK and the Kurdish Question in
the 21st Century, trans. Klaus Happel (London: Transmedia, 2011). Neither Bookchin nor
Öcalan was an archaeologist or anthropologist; rather, in their accounts of prehistory and
early history, they use such professionals’ published findings.
35
distributed according to customs of usufruct (use of resources as

needed), complementarity (ethical mutuality), and the irreducible
minimum (the right of all to food, shelter, and clothing). 1 “From this
feeling of unity between the individual and the community emerges a
feeling of unity between the community and its environment,” he
wrote; these organic societies lived in harmony with the natural
world.2
He then traced a dialectical development: the rise of hierarchy,
immanently, out of organic society: patriarchy and the domination of
women; gerontocracy; shamans and priests; warriors and chiefs and
states; class society.3 Thereafter the idea of dominating nature arose,
reconceiving nature as an object to be exploited. For Bookchin,
hierarchy’s legacy of domination is countered by a longstanding legacy
of freedom – resistance movements throughout history that have
embodied principles from organic society – usufruct, complementarity,
the irreducible minimum. The potential still remains for a dialectical
transcendence of domination in a free cooperative society that could
make possible a cooperative relationship with nature. He called this
set of ideas social ecology.
That was 1982. In a second Civilization Narrative, Urbanization
Without Cities, he sought to establish the historical foundations for
assembly democracy. He found a tradition of citizens’ assemblies
especially in the ancient Athenian ecclesia; in early towns of Italy and
Germany and the Low countries; in the Russian veche of Pskov and
Novgorod; in the comuñero assemblies of sixteenthcentury Spain; in
the assemblies of the revolutionary Parisian sections of 1793; the
committees and councils of the American revolution; the Parisian
clubs of 1848; in the Paris Commune of 1871; the soviets of 1905 and
1917; the collectives of revolutionary Spain in 193637; and the New
England town meeting today, among others. He showed how (contrary
to Marxism) the venue for revolution was not the factory but the
municipality. Urbanization laid out the dialectical foundations for a
municipalist revolt for freedom against the nationstate.
LIVING IN A ZIGGURAT
Confined to solitude in his island prison, Öcalan dedicated himself to
study and writing, often Civilization Narratives. One of his
problematics, in Roots of Civilization (2001), was to show the need for
Turkey’s democratic republic to include the Kurds. He too described a
(1) Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, chap. 2.

(2) Ibid., pp. 46, 43.
(3) Ibid., chap. 3.
36
process of social evolution, the historical macroprocesses of

civilization, whose roots lay in Mesopotamia, at Sumer.
In his telling, the Ziggurat – a temple, an administrative center, and a
production site – was “the womb of state institutions.” 1 The topmost
floor was said to be the home of the gods, but the first floor was for
the production and storage of goods. The temple thus functioned as a
center of economic production. Rulers were elevated to divine status;
the rest of the people had to toil in their service, as workers in a
templecentered economy. The ziggurats were “the laboratories for the
encoding of human mindsets, the first asylums were the submissive
creature was created.“ They were “the first patriarchal households and
the first brothels.” The Sumerian priests who constructed them
became “the foremost architects of centralised political power.” Their
temples grew into cities, cities became states, and empires, and
civilization. But the nature of the phenomenon remained the same:
“The history of civilization amounts to nothing else than the
continuation of a Sumerian society grown in extension, branched out
and diversified, but retaining the same basic configuration.” 2 We are
still living in Sumer, still living in “this incredible intellectual
invention” that “has been controlling our entire history ever since.” 3 If
Sumerian civilization is the thesis, he said dialectically, we need an
antithesis, which we can find in, among other places, the Kurdish
question.4 Ethnic resistance to the Sumerian city is ancient as that
city itself. Today a transcendence of the Sumerian state may be found
in a fully democratic republic, home to both Kurds and Turks.
PARALLEL STORIES
I don’t know anything about Öcalan’s other intellectual influences –
the names Wallerstein, Braudel, and Foucault are often mentioned.
But it’s clear that in 2002 Öcalan started reading Bookchin
intensively, especially Ecology of Freedom and Urbanization Without
Cities. Thereafter, through his lawyers, he began recommending
Urbanization Without Cities to all mayors in Turkish Kurdistan and
Ecology of Freedom to all militants5.
(1) Öcalan, Roots, p. 6.

(2) Ibid., p. 53, 25, 98.
(3) Öcalan, PKK and Kurdish Question, p. 96
(4) Unlike Öcalan, Bookchin chose not to use the terms thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,
considering them an oversimplification of Hegel’s triad an sich, für sich, and an und für
sich.
(5) So I was told by the intermediary between Öcalan’s lawyers and Bookchin, who
wishes to remain anonymous here.
37
In the spring of 2004, he had his lawyers contact Murray, which they
did through an intermediary, who explained to Murray that Öcalan
considered himself his student, had acquired a good understanding of
his work, and was eager to make the ideas applicable to Middle
Eastern societies. He asked for a dialogue with Murray and sent one of
his manuscripts.
It would have been amazing, had that dialogue taken place.
Unfortunately Murray, at eightythree, was too sick to accept the
invitation and reluctantly, respectfully declined. Öcalan’s subsequent
writings show the influence of his study of Bookchin. His 2004 work
In Defense of the People is a Civilization Narrative that includes an
account of primal communal social forms, like Murray’s “organic
society,” the communal form of life that Öcalan renamed “natural
society.” In natural society, he wrote, people lived “as part of nature,”
and “human communities were part of the natural ecology.” He
presented an account of the rise of hierarchy that much resembled
Bookchin’s: the state “enforced hierarchy permanently and legitimized
the accumulation of values and goods.” Moreover, he said, the rise of
hierarchy introduced the idea of dominating nature: “Instead of being
a part of nature,” hierarchical society saw “nature increasingly as a
resource.” Öcalan even called attention to the process’s dialectical
nature: “natural society at the beginning of humankind forms the
thesis contrasted by the antithesis of the subsequent hierarchic and
statebased forms of society.”1
Their respective Civilization Narratives have many points of overlap
and difference that would be fascinating to explore, but in the
interests of conciseness, I’ll limit myself to one, the various ways they
wrote about Mesopotamia.
Öcalan, as I’ve said, emphasized that Mesopotamia was where
civilization began. Bookchin agreed, noting that writing began there:
“cuneiform writing (...) had its origins in the meticulous records the
temple clerks kept of products received and products of dispersed.”
Later “these ticks on clay tablets” became “narrative forms of script,” a
progressive development.2 He agreed that hierarchy, priesthoods, and
states began at Sumer, although he thought ancient Mesoamerican
civilizations underwent a parallel development. But what seems to
have been most compelling to him was the traces of resistance: in
Sumer, “the earliest ‘citystates’ were managed by ‘equalitarian
(1) Abdullah Öcalan, In Defense of the People (unpublished), chap. 1.2, “The Natural
Society,” English translation manuscript courtesy of the International Initiative Freedom
for Öcalan, Peace in Kurdistan. This book was published in German as Jenseits von Staat,
Macht, und Gewalt (Neuss: Mesopotamien Verlag, 2010).
(2) Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, p. 144.
38
assemblies,’ which possessed ‘freedom to an uncommon degree.’”1After
the rise of kingship “there is evidence of popular revolts, possibly to
restore the old social dispensation or to diminish the authority of the
bala [king].” Even “the governing ensi, or military overlords, were
repeatedly checked by popular assemblies.”2
And it fascinated him that it was at Sumer that the word freedom
(amargi) appeared for the first time in recorded history: in a Sumerian
cuneiform tablet that gives an account of a successful popular revolt
against a regal tyranny.3
Öcalan, after reading Bookchin, noted the use of the word amargi, but
otherwise didn’t pick up on this point. But he did trace traits of
Kurdish society to the Neolithic: “many characteristics and traits of
Kurdish society,” he said, especially the “mindset and material
basis, ... bear a resemblance to communities from the Neolithic.” 4
Even today Kurdish society bears the cooperative features of organic
society: “Throughout their whole history Kurds have favoured Clan
systems and tribal confederations and struggled to resist centralised
governments.”5 They are potentially bearers of freedom.
(1) Ibid., p. 129. He is drawing on the work of Henri Frankfort and Samuel Noah Kramer.
(2) Ibid., p. 95.
(3) Ibid., p. 168.
(4) Öcalan, PKK and Kurdish Question, p. 22.
(5) Öcalan, “The Declaration of Democratic Confederalism,” February 4, 2005, online at
http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=10174 .
39
A PRINCIPLE OF HOPE
As Marxists, Bookchin and Öcalan had both been taught that the
dialecticalmaterialist processes of history are inexorable and function
like laws, with inevitable outcomes, like the rise of the nationstate
and capitalism. But in The Ecology of Freedom, the exMarxist
Bookchin was at pains to discredit “such notions of social law and
teleology.” Not only had they been used “to achieve a ruthless
subjugation of the individual to suprahuman forces beyond human
control” – as in Stalinism; they denied “the ability of human will and
individual choice to shape the course of social events.” 1 They render
us captive to a belief in “economic and technical inexorability.” In fact,
he argued, even the rise of hierarchy was not inevitable, and if we put
aside the idea that it was, we may have “a vision that significantly
alters our image of a liberated future.” 2 That is, we lived communally
once, and we could live communally again. The buried memory of
organic society “functions unconsciously with an implicit commitment
to freedom.”3 I think that is the underlying, liberatory insight of The
Ecology of Freedom.
Reading Öcalan’s In Defense of the People, I sensed an exhilaration
that reminded me of how I felt when I first read Ecology of Freedom
back in 1985 – delighted by the insight that people once lived in
communal solidarity, and that the potential for it remains, and
inspired by the prospect that we could have it again, if we chose to
change our social arrangements. The concept of the “irreducible
minimum” simply has taken new names, like socialism. Ecology of
Freedom offers to readers what Murray used to call “a principle of
hope,” and that must have meant something to the imprisoned
Öcalan.
“The victory of capitalism was not simply fate,” Öcalan wrote in 2004.
“There could have been a different development.” To regard capitalism
and the nationstate as inevitable “leaves history to those in power.”
Rather, “there is always only a certain probability for things to happen
... there is always an option of freedom.4
The communal aspects of “natural society” persist in ethnic groups,
class movements, and religious and philosophical groups that struggle
for freedom. “Natural society has never ceased to exist,” he wrote. A
dialectical conflict between freedom and domination has persisted
throughout western history, “a constant battle between democratic
(1) Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, pp. 23-24.

(2) Ibid., p. 67.
(3) Ibid., p. 143.
(4) Öcalan, Defense of People, p. 41.
40
elements who refer to communal structures and those whose

instruments are power and war.” For “the communal society is in
permanent conflict with the hierarchic one.”1
Finally, Öcalan embraced social ecology. “The issue of social ecology
begins with civilization,” he wrote in 2004, because “the roots of
civilization” are where we find also “the beginnings of the destruction
of the natural environment.” Natural society was in a sense ecological
society. The same forces that destroy society from within also cut the
meaningful link to nature. Capitalism, he says, is antiecological, and
we need a specifically ethical revolt against it, “a conscious ethic
effort,” a “new social ethics that is in harmony with traditional
values.” The liberation of women is fundamental. And he called for a
“democraticecological society,” by which he meant “a moralbased
system that involves sustainable dialectical relations with nature, ...
where common welfare is achieved by means of direct democracy.”2
THE KURDS AGAINST SUMER
How did it all apply to the Kurdish question? Once again, he
emphasizes that achieving Kurdish freedom means achieving freedom
for everyone. “Any solution will have to include options not only valid
for the Kurdish people but for all people. That is, I am approaching
these problems based on one humanism, one humanity, one nature
and one universe.”3 But now, instead of through the democratic
republic, it is to be achieved through assembly democracy.
“Our first task,” he wrote, “is to push for democratization, for non
state structures, and communal organization.” Instead of focusing
solely on changing the Turkish constitution, he advocated that Kurds
create organizations at the local level: local town councils, municipal
administrations, down to urban districts, townships, and villages.
They should form new local political parties and economic
cooperatives, civil society organizations, and those that address
human rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, animal rights, and all
other issues to be addressed.
“Regional associations of municipal administrations” are needed, so
these local organizations and institutions would form a network. At
the topmost level, they are to be represented in a “General Congress of
the People,” which will address issues of “politics, selfdefense, law,
(1) Ibid., pp. 51, 65, 60.

(2) Ibid., chap. III.4.
(3) Ibid., p. 52.
41
morality, economy, science, arts, and welfare by means of

institutionalization, rules and control mechanisms.”
Gradually, as the democratic institutions spread, all of Turkey would
undergo a democratization. They would network across existing
national borders, to accelerate the advent of democratic civilization in
the whole region and produce not only freedom for the Kurds but a
geopolitical and cultural renewal. Ultimately a democratic confederal
union would embrace the whole of the Middle East. He named this
Kurdish version of libertarian municipalism “democratic
confederalism.”
In March 2005, Öcalan issued a Declaration of Democratic
Confederalism in Kurdistan. It called for “a grassroots democracy ...
based on the democratic communal structure of natural society.” It
“will establish village, towns and city assemblies and their delegates
will be entrusted with the real decisionmaking, which in effect means
that the people and the community will decide.” Öcalan’s democratic
confederalism preserves his brilliant move of linking the liberation of
Kurds to the liberation of humanity. It affirms individual rights and
freedom of expression for everyone, regardless of religious, ethnic, and
class differences. It “promotes an ecological model of society” and
supports women’s liberation. He urged this program upon his people:
“I am calling upon all sectors of society, in particular all women and
the youth, to set up their own democratic organisations and to govern
themselves.” When I visited Diyarbakir in the fall of 2011, I discovered
that Kurds in southeastern Anatolia were indeed putting this program
into practice.1
THE JANUSFACED STATE
By 20045, then, Öcalan had either given up on or shifted focus from
his effort to persuade the state to reform itself by democratizing from
the top down. “The idea of a democratization of the state,” he wrote in
2005, “is out of place.” He had concluded that the state was a
mechanism of oppression – “the organizational form of the ruling
class” and as such “one of the most dangerous phenomena in history.”
It is toxic to the democratic project, a “disease,” and while it is
around, “we will not be able to create a democratic system.” So Kurds
and their sympathizers “must never focus our efforts on the state” or
(1) “Kurdish Communalism,” interview with Ercan Ayboga by author, New Compass (Sept.
2011), http://newcompass.net/http%3A//newcompass.net/article/kurdish
communalism .
42
on becoming a state, because that would mean losing the democracy,
and playing “into the hands of the capitalist system.”1
That seems pretty unequivocal, and certainly in accord with
Bookchin’s revolutionary project. Bookchin posited that once citizen’s
assemblies were created and confederated, they would become a dual
power that could be pitted against the nationstate – and would
overthrow and replace it. He emphasized repeatedly the concept of
dual power, I should note, crediting it to Trotsky, who wrote, in his
History of the Russian Revolution, that after February 1917, when
various provisional liberal governments were in charge of the state,
the Petrograd soviet of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies became a dual
power against those governments; it later became a driver of the
October revolution. Similarly, the communalist confederation would a
counterpower, a dual power, in a revolutionary situation.
But Öcalan, in the same 2004 work (In Defense of the People), also
sends a contradictory message about the state: “It is not true, in my
opinion, that the state needs to be broken up and replaced by
something else.” It is “illusionary to reach for democracy by crushing
the state.” Rather, the state can and must become smaller, more
limited in scope. Some of its functions are necessary: for example,
public security, social security and national defense. The confederal
democracy’s congresses should solve problems “that the state cannot
solve singlehandedly.” A limited state can coexist with the democracy
“in parallel.”2 This contradiction seems to have bedeviled Öcalan
himself, who admits in seeming exasperation, “The state remains a
Janusfaced phenomenon.” I sense that the issue remains ambiguous
for him, and understandably so. Insightfully, he observes that “our
present time is an era of transition from state to democracy. In times
of transition, the old and the new often exist side by side.”3
Bookchin’s communalist movement never got as far, in practical
terms, as Öcalan’s has, but if it had, he would surely have faced the
same problem. The concept of a transitional program, which Bookchin
invoked in such occasions, may be useful here. He used to distinguish
between the minimum program (reforms on specific issues), the
transitional program (like Öcalan’s), and the maximum program
(socialism, a stateless assembly democracy). That distinction has a
revolutionary pedigree – Murray used to credit it to Trotsky. It’s a way
to retain a commitment to your longterm goals and principles while
dealing in the real, nonrevolutionary world.
(1) Ocalan, Defense of People, pp. 177, 24, 104, 177.

(2) Ibid., pp. 24, 106, 111, 106.
(3) Ibid., pp. 27, 178.
43
AMARGI!
In May 2004 Bookchin conveyed to Öcalan the message: “My hope is
that the Kurdish people will one day be able to establish a free,
rational society that will allow their brilliance once again to flourish.
They are fortunate indeed to have a leader of Mr. Öcalan’s talents to
guide them.”1 We later learned that this message was read aloud at
the Second General Assembly of the Kurdistan People’s Congress, in
the mountains, in the summer of 2004.
When Bookchin died in July 2006, the PKK assembly saluted “one of
the greatest social scientists of the 20th century.” He “introduced us
to the thought of social ecology” and “helped to develop socialist
theory in order for it to advance on a firmer basis.” He showed how to
make a new democratic system into a reality. “He has proposed the
concept of confederalism,” a model which we believe is creative and
realizable.” The assembly continued: Bookchin’s “thesis on the state,
power, and hierarchy will be implemented and realized through our
struggle (...) We will put this promise into practice this as the first
society that establishes a tangible democratic confederalism.” No
tribute could have made him happier; I only wish he could have heard
it. Perhaps he would have saluted them back with that first recorded
word for freedom, from Sumer: “Amargi!”
(1) Copy in author’s possession.
44
WHAT KIND OF KURDISTAN FOR WOMEN*?
DILAR DIRIK is a Kurdish activist and a PhD student
at the University of Cambridge. Her research focus
is Kurdistan and the Kurdish women's movement.
AZADÎ MEANS FREEDOM**
"Azadî" – Freedom. A notion that has captured the collective
imagination of the Kurdish people for a long time. "Free Kurdistan",
the seemingly unattainable ideal, has many shapes, depending on
where one situates oneself in the broad spectrum of Kurdish politics.
The increasing independence of the Kurdistan Regional Government
in South Kurdistan (Bashur) from the central Iraqi government, as
well as the immense gains of the Kurdish people in West Kurdistan
(Rojava) in spite of the Syrian civil war over the last year, have revived
the dream of a free life as Kurds in Kurdistan.
But what does freedom mean? Freedom for whom? The Kurdish
question is often conceptualized as a matter of international relations,
states, nationalism and territorial integrity. However, freedom is a
question that transcends ethnicity and artificial borders. In order to
be able to speak of a Kurdistan that deserves the attribute "free", all
members of the society must have equal access to this "freedom", not
just in the abstract legal sense. It is not the officiality of an entity
named Kurdistan (be this an independent state, a federal state, a
regional government or any other kind of Kurdish selfdetermination)
that determines the welfare of its population. One indicator of a
society's understanding of democracy and freedom is the situation of
women. For, what use is "a Kurdistan", if it will end up oppressing
half of its population?
Kurdish women face several layers of oppression as members of a
stateless nation in a largely patriarchal feudalIslamic context, and
hence struggle on multiple fronts. While the four different states over
* Originally published as
http://www.kurdishquestion.com/index.php/woman/whatkindofkurdistan
forwomen.html
** Subtitles, asterisk footnotes and emphasised text – by editors.
45
which Kurdistan is divided display strong patriarchal characteristics,
which oppress all women in their respective populations, Kurdish
women are further ethnically discriminated against as Kurds and are
usually members of the lowest socioeconomic class. And of course, the
feudalpatriarchal structures of Kurdistan's internal society restrict
women from living free and independent lives as well. Domestic abuse,
child and forced adult marriage, rape, honor killings, polygamy, i.e.
are often regarded as private issues, instead of problems that require
societal engagement and active public policy. This odd distinction
between the public and the private has cost many women their lives.
Kurdish men are often very outspoken against ethnic and class
discrimination, but many return home from protests and don't
reflect on their own power abuse, their own despotism, when they
issue violence against women and children in their "private" lives.
The widespread prevalence of violence against Kurdish women, and
frankly, women everywhere in the world, is a systemic problem thus,
the solution requires political measures.
THE WOMEN'S ISSUE??
The situation of women is not a "women's issue" and therefore must
not be dismissed as a specific, private issue that interests women
only. The question of gender equality is in fact a matter of democracy
and freedom of all of society; it is one (though not the only) standard
by which the ethics of a community should be measured. Since
capitalism, statism, and patriachy are interconnected, the struggle for
freedom must be radical and revolutionary it must regard women's
liberation as a central aim, not as a side issue.
Even though Kurdish women have a long history of fighting for
national liberation, alongside with men, they have often been
marginalized even in these liberation movements. While majoritarian
feminists in the four states over which Kurdistan is divided often
exclude Kurdish women from their struggle (by expecting them to
adopt the nationalist state doctrines or by patronizing them as victims
of a primitive, backward culture), maledominated chauvinist Kurdish
parties with very feudal, patriarchal structures, whose understanding
of freedom does not move beyond primitive, empty nationalism, often
silence women's voices as well.
Claiming that Kurdish women have always been stronger and more
emancipated than their neighbors (and historical sources seem to
imply this), should not be used as an excuse to stop fighting for
Kurdish women's rights. Though the remarkability of Kurdish women
46
What Kind of Kurdistan for Women? Dilar Dirik
in history in all four parts deserves acknowledgement, the many

terrible manifestations of cruel violence against women illustrate the
realities on the ground and should serve as a reality check. If Kurdish
women enjoy a relatively high political status nowadays, this is a
result of constant, multifront struggle on the Kurdish woman's
part, not a given condition, inherent to Kurdish society!
The participation of women in liberation struggles or revolutionary
ambitions is not uniquely Kurdish. In all kinds of contexts, women
have often played active parts in the fight for freedom. Wartime,
uprisings, social unrest often provide women with space to assert
themselves and to demand representation in ways that normal,
civilian life would not permit. Their engagement in social
responsibilities, whether this be participation in the labor force,
political activism or active militantism, often legitimizes their demands
for emancipation. However, once the crisis situation is over, once
"liberation" or "revolution" is perceived to be achieved, a return to
previous antebellum normalcy and conservatism is often deemed
necessary to reestablish civil life. This often constitutes the
rearticulation of traditional gender roles, which are in turn
detrimental to the newly gained status of women. Unfortunately, it is
quite a common phenomenon that women suffer a backlash in their
rights "after liberation", "after the revolution", "once our land is free",
even if they were vibrant actors during the struggle. The hope that
once the overarching goal of general "freedom" is achieved, everyone in
the society will be free, has proven to be wishful thinking women
from the USA to Algeria to India to Vietnam can confirm that. The
most recent manifestation of this phenomenon is the status of women
in the socalled "Arab Spring" countries. Though over the last years
our TV screens were full of women, who protested against oppressive
regimes, and who played core roles in the movements, the situation of
women sometimes got even worse after the uprisings. This is due to
the fact that while general dissent and disillusionment from the
establishment often transcends gender, class, ethnicity and religion, it
is clear that the ones who have the most to gain from rising up are
women, the working class and oppressed minorities and groups. If
social movements don't pay attention to specificalities, new regimes
may just form new elites that oppress vulnerable groups in their own
ways. The need for autonomous, independent women's organizations
also resonates with the experience of struggling Kurdish women.
47
WOMEN'S MAP OF KURDISTAN
The region that has most commonly been termed as "free" is Southern
Kurdistan. There, the Kurds enjoy semiautonomy, have their own
governance structures and are no longer oppressed or persecuted due
to their ethnicity, as the Kurds in the other parts still are. The
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has in fact internationally been
praised for having established an economically strong, relatively
democratic entity, especially compared to the rest of the broken state
of Iraq. By being contrasted to Iraq, the KRG establishment often finds
legitimization, in spite of its deeply undemocratic internal structures.
While the dominant actors are extremely tribal, autocratic, and
corrupt, dissent is silenced and journalists are murdered under
dubious circumstances. The pragmatic KRG is friendly with
regimes such as Iran or Turkey, which brutally oppress their own
Kurdish population and even marginalizes autonomy ambitions of
the Kurds in Syria. Interestingly enough, it is also seems to be
the most unpleasant place for Kurdish women.
It is interesting that the Kurdish entity that is most statelike, most
integrated into the capitalist system, and which complies with the
requirements of the local powers such as Turkey and Iran, as well as
the international system, displays the least interest in women's rights
and the challenge of patriarchy. This tells us a lot about the ways in
which different forms of oppression intersect, but also about the
question of what kind of Kurdistan can be tolerated by the
international community.
Surely, one needs to take into account that South Kurdistan is a
developing region, but though the government has many tools to
somehow empower women, it doesn't seem to be interested to do so.
In theory, one would expect the women in South Kurdistan to have a
higher status compared to those in other parts of Kurdistan, since
they live in a prosperous region governed by Kurds, where they are no
longer persecuted because of their ethnicity. Even though the women
in South Kurdistan suffer fewer layers of oppression, they are victims
of the tribalist feudalism of the dominant parties, which seem to
regard empty nationalism and capitalist growth as an adequate
understaning of "freedom". Women in South Kurdistan are very active
in demanding their rights, but the KRG often fails to implement its
laws. Violence against women is an epidemic, even on the rise, yet the
government simply does not do enough to fight it. In 2011/12, almost
3000 cases of violence against women were recorded, but only 21
people were charged, leave alone all the unreported cases. The few
men who do get persecuted are often released soon again. Sometimes
48
the victims of male violence are even shamed and blamed for having
"provoked" the men. Since punishment does not appear as a deterrent
for male violence, the system perpetuates the oppression of women.
The lack of truly independent, nonpartisan women's
organizations is also very problematic. Many women's
organizations in South Kurdistan are even chaired by men!
Tribalist, feudalist politics undoubtedly encourage patriarchal
attitudes that are immense obstacles to women's liberation. While
tackling the expressions of violence against women seems to be on the
rise, there is no systematic challenge to the patriarchal system as a
whole.
Autonomous women's decisionmaking bodies are essential to
achieving the representation of women's specific interests. A topdown
approach to women's rights is often inadequate and reinforces
patriarchy in passive ways. Grassroots projects seem to be much more
effective to transform society: For instace, an independent
documentary project on Female Genital Mutilation (which only seems
to occur in South Kurdistan) has achieved a change in the law of the
KRG. Sadly, FGM is still widely practiced without punishment.
It is important to emphasize that this is in no way a condition that is
somehow native to South Kurdistan. The situation of women there is
in many ways due to the lack of interest of the political parties to
engage with women's liberation. It is a conscious political choice of the
maledominated parties. It does not have to be like that!
The notion of "Now that we have a 'free Kurdistan', let's not criticize it
too much" seems to be quite common, even though it is detrimental to
a genuine understanding of democracy and freedom for all.
Demanding the persecution of violence against women and more
representation of women's interests in the public sphere does not
mean that women are "not loyal to the state". Such a patriarchal state
seems hard to be loyal to. Women need to cross partisan affiliations
and actually develop into a women's movement, beyond small NGOs.
Women of South Kurdistan should not settle for any less, especially
since they have more tools, mechanisms, and resources to work
towards a more egalitarian society than Kurdish women in other parts
have available.
Even women in rather leftwing, socialist Kurdish parties have made
the experience that, without autonomous women's bodies, their voices
will be silenced in the patriarchal Kurdish society. Though the
Kurdistan Workers Party, PKK, is prominent for the many powerful
women within its ranks and its active commitment to women's
49
liberation, things were not always as easy for women in the PKK
guerrilla. In the 1980s, the demographic makeup of the PKK, which
initially started out within socialist university circles, was challenged,
when many people from the less educated, rural, feudal areas of
Kurdistan joined the mountains after their villages were destroyed by
the Turkish state. Most of these people were not exposed to ideals
such as socialism and feminism and hence pursued nationalism as
primary motivators in their national liberation fight. At that time,
many women in the guerrilla struggled to convince their male
comrades that they are equal comrades. The negative experience of
the fierce war of the 80s also neglected educational elements of the
guerrilla training, since the war was more urgent, but it made these
women realize one thing: We need autonomous women's
organizations!
The PKK and parties that share the same ideology managed to
create mechanisms that guarantee women's participation in the
political sphere and further challenge the patriarchal culture
itself. The PKK ideology is explicitly feminist and makes no
compromise when it comes to women's liberation. Different from
other Kurdish political parties, the PKK did not appeal to feudal, tribal
landlords to achieve its aims, but mobilized the rural areas, the
working class, youth and women.
The strength of the resulting women's movement illustrates that
the point in establishing structures such as copresidency (one
woman and one man sharing the chair) and 5050 gender splits in
committees on all administrative levels is no mere tokenism to
make women more visible. The officialization of women's
participation gives women an organizational backup to make sure
that their voice will not be compromised and it has actually challenged
and transformed Kurdish society in many ways. This in turn led to the
vast popularization of feminism in North Kurdistan. The women's
struggle is no longer an ideal in highranking elite activist circles, but
a prerequisite for the national liberation struggle. Male dominance is
not accepted in these political circles, from the top administrative
levels, down to local communities on the grassroots. This was
achieved through the establishment of autonomous women's bodies
within the movement.
Even though there are still many issues regarding violence against
women in North Kurdistan, the focus on gender equality as a measure
for society's freedom has in fact politicized women from young to old
and has established an incredibly popular women's movement. Many
Turkish women now seek advise from the rich treasure of Kurdish
50
women's experience. While Turkey now has a prime minister that

encourages women to marry young, cover up and make at least four
babies, and the three major parties in Turkey all have less than 5%
women in their ranks, the Kurdish BDP as well as the newly
established HDP proudly represent at least 40% women among their
parties, explicitly focusing on women's and LGBT issues. The Kurdish
women's movement itself criticizes patriarchy in Kurdistan most,
while emphasizing that their achievements so far in no way indicate
an end to the struggle.
Influenced by this stance on women's liberation, the dominant parties
in West Kurdistan, Rojava, have adopted the PKK ideology and also
enforce copresidency as well as a 5050 split in their political bodies.
By enshrining women's liberation in all legal, organizational and
ideological mechanisms of their governance structures from the very
start, including the defense forces, they make sure that women's
rights will not be compromised. Men with a history of domestic
violence or polygamy are excluded from organiations. Violence against
women and child marriage are outlawed and criminalized.
International observers that visit West Kurdistan express that they are
deeply impressed by the woman's revolution that emerged in spite of
the terrible Syrian civil war.
At the same time, the recently established cantons in West Kurdistan
firmly incorporated other ethnic and religious groups into their system
as well. In the spirit of the "democratic confederalism" paradigm, as
proposed by the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, they moved away from
seeking a state as a solution, since they believe states to be inherently
hegemonic establishments that don't represent the people. The
dominant parties stress that they do not want to secede from Syria,
but seek a democratic solution within existing borders, while
including minorities in the government and giving women an equal
voice in the construction of a "genderequal, ecological, radical grass
roots democratic system", where different ethnic and religious groups
can live as equals. The gains of the people in West Kurdistan have
repeatedly been attacked by the Assad regime as well as alQaeda
linked jihadist groups, who seem to be funded and supported partly
by Turkey.
It is interesting to observe that the most statelike, wealthy,
established and accepted Kurdish entity, the KRG is so inadequate at
observing women's rights, while West Kurdistan, in spite of economic
and political embargoes and the horrid war situation, does not seek
nationalism or a state, but democratic confederalism as a solution
and has already created so many structures to guarantee women's
representation. The international community's preferences are highly
51
interesting in this regard! While the KRG is often praised as a role

model for democracy in the region, West Kurdistan is completely
discarded.
If the international actors that advocate themselves as believers in
freedom and democracy in the Middle East would genuinely be
interested in peace in Syria, they would have probably supported the
progressive, secular governance project in West Kurdistan. But on the
contrary, the Kurds were excluded from the Geneva II Conference in
January 2014. Moreover, this partly happened with the support of the
KRG, which helped marginalize the gains in West Kurdistan, mostly
because the dominant parties there are – though not organizationally,
but ideologically – affiliated to the PKK, the traditional rival of the
governing party of the KRG.
The KRG's framework of progress, democracy, freedom, and modernity
does not challenge the global capitalist, statist, nationalist, patriarchal
system. That is why it seems to be the kind of Kurdistan that can be
tolerated by the international community, while parties with the
potential of upsetting the system are marginalized.
PATRIARCHY INTERNATIONAL
Recent events illustrate the gendered ways in which feminist
ideologies of some Kurdish parties are being attacked. In his attempt
to show that the is a friend of the Kurds, Turkish Prime Minister
Erdogan invited the KRG's president Masoud Barzanî to the inofficial
Kurdish capital Amed (Diyarbekir). Accompanied by singers such as
Sivan Perwer and Ibrahim Tatlises, known for their opportunism and
sexist feudalism themselves, a comedy of series of events was
launched in Amed. The meeting was overall an odd attempt to
marginalize the Kurds within Turkey, especially the PKK and the legal
Northern Kurdish parties such as the BDP.
In a wedding ceremony, the two rulers blessed the marriage of a few
hundred couples, all of which represented women in the image of the
mentality of both, Erdogan and Barzanî. Almost all of the brides wore
headscarfs, all the couples were very young. This assertion of
conservatism in the name of "peace" illustrated the similarity of the
patriarchal, feudal mentalities of the two rulers and their company. In
attempting to marginalize the PKK, the two rulers in fact ended up
marginalizing all Kurdish women. In this sense, this extremely
conservative wedding ceremony was more of a conscious insult to the
Kurdish women's movement than a display of happy coexistence of
the peoples.
52
But is the businesslike partnership between Barzanî and Erdogan

even surprising? Turkey does not have a problem with the KRG or
with just Kurds in general. The problem is one of ideology.
In the words of Selahattin Demirtas, copresident of the Kurdish
Peace and Democracy Party: "If we had wanted to, we could have
created ten Kurdistans already. It is not important to have a
state called Kurdistan, what matters is that we have a Kurdistan
with principles, with ideals".
The attitudes of local powers such as Iran and Turkey, who have
traditions of oppressing their own Kurdish populations, as well as the
behaviors of international powers show: a Kurdistan that is willing to
cooperate with these regimes, which maintains economic business ties
to these states and which is willing to marginalize more radical
Kurdish parties for its own opportunism can very well be tolerated by
the international community. A structure such as the KRG's, which is
compatible with the framework of the dominant system is accepted,
while political parties that challenge the capitalist, feudalpatriarchal
statist system are ostracized. This asymmetrical preference of the
international community exposes its true undemocratic face. And
Kurdish women experience all of this on their own bodies.
FEMINISM MEANS FREEDOM
In order for Kurdistan to be a genuinely free society, women's
liberation must under no circumstances be compromised. Criticizing
the Kurdistan Regional Government's failure on the part of women,
freedom of the press, etc. does not mean that one "divides" the Kurds.
What kind of society will South Kurdistan be, if people are taught not
to be critical in the fear of losing what has been achieved through so
much loss? Shouldn't people be critical, even if that means standing
up against one's own government? Isn't that the very essence of
democracy? Don't we owe that to all the people who died to construct
a society worth living in? Settling for less, for the sake of maintaining
the status quo, is freedom in the most abstract sense possible.
Certainly, the women of Kurdistan, who struggle on a daily basis,
deserve more than that.
Nationalism, capitalism, statism have been the supporting pillars of
patriarchy and often used women's bodies and behaviors to control
societies. The bar of freedom has become quite low in the global
capitalist, statist system in which we live in. Hence, it seems to be
rather tempting to be satisfied with the KRG, given that it has become
a fortress of capitalist modernity. Though, in copying the flaws and
53
shortcomings of the rest of the world, the KRG limits its

understanding of freedom immensely. Therefore, women should not
expect liberation through a statelike hegemonic structure. The
moment we start to define the fact that there is a Miss Kurdistan
beauty pageant in South Kurdistan as progress and modernity, we fall
for the exact same mechanisms that have enslaved humanity in the
first place. Is this what we understand as freedom? Unlimited
consumerism? Primitive nationalism? Copying elements of global
patriarchy and capitalism, labelling them with Kurdish flags in order
to praise ourselves as modern?
Freedom is not to be found in Turkish hotels, Iranian investments,
American foodchains, foreign sponsored beauty pageants or in
traditional Kurdish clothes. Freedom does not come once we can freely
say the word Kurdistan. Freedom is a neverending struggle, a process
of building an ethical, equal society. The real work starts after
"liberation" has been achieved. "Azadî" must be measured by the
liberation of women. What use is a Kurdish state, if it will
perpetuate rape culture, feminicide, the ageold disease of
patriarchy? Are rape apologist, sexist Kurdish governors and
official bodies really that much different from oppressive state
structures, even if they wear our traditional clothes?
"Kurdistan" itself does not equal freedom. A patriarchal Kurdistan is a
more insidious tyrant than the usual oppressors. Colonizing and
subjugating half of one's own community in a sexualized manner,
one's intimate partners can be a much more shameful and violent act
than foreign invasion.
Hence, Kurdistan's women must be the vanguards of a free society. It
takes courage to fight oppressive states, but sometimes it takes even
more courage to stand up against one's own community. For, it really
isn't a mere Kurdish governance, even a state, that is dangerous
to the dominant system. A much bigger threat to the hegemonic
structures is a politically active, conscious Kurdish woman.
54
POSTCAPITALISM:
NOT ONLY HERE, NOT ONLY NOW
Krzysztof Nawratek is Master of Architecture and MA
Architecture programme leader at the School of
Architecture, Design and Environment, Plymouth
University, United Kingdom. He was a member of the
Board of Experts European Prize for Urban Public
Space 2012 and 2014; a member of the selection panel
for the Polish contribution to the International
Architecture Biennial in Venice in 2012 and in 2014.
Krzysztof Nawratek is an urban theorist, author of City
as a Political Idea (Plymouth, University of Plymouth
Press, 2011), Holes in the Whole. Introduction to the
Urban Revolutions (Winchester, Zero Books, 2012), Re
Industrialisation and Progressive Urbanism (ed. New
York 2015), Architecture and Urbanism of Radical
Inclusivity (ed. Barcelona 2015) and several papers and
chapters in edited books.
It's almost impossible to imagine a local, anticapitalist revolution. It
can be all or nothing, because in the globalised world, capitalism is
the hegemonic system. With global revolution deemed unthinkable, we
flatly refuse to believe in any possibility of change.
CAPITALISM AS A REDUCTION*
To even begin considering the postcapitalist world, we need to answer
a fundamental question: what is the difference between capitalism
and noncapitalism? In my view, the easiest and the most convenient
way would be to assume, that capitalism is based on production of
hierarchical relationships of domination and subordination.
Those relationships are primarily guaranteed by the reduction of
the ways in which the actors of the socioeconomic environment
communicate (and therefore justify their own existence) to the
language based on the logic of profit.
In this context, a free market is a some kind of abstraction, which on
the one hand has claims to universality and on the other hand, it
drastically reduces the context. The free market is not evil in itself, it's
the violence that excludes from it all elements questioning quick and
easy profits for groups and forces dominating a given environment.
Capitalism is thus a reduction, a rejection of the context and
consequences of economic activities. It accumulates powerover
* Subtitles, asterisk footnotes and emphasised text – by editors.
55
(domination) but not necessarily powerto (agency). This

distinction is – in my view – of paramount importance for the
project of the postcapitalist world.
STATE VS. CAPITALISM
The current Greek minister of finance, Yanis Varoufakis, in his text
„How I became an erratic Marxist” published in The Guardian 1
reminds us, that the integral part of human work is freedom, and it is
that freedom that allows for creativity and in turn, the production of
values. Capital is committed to the total commodification of work, but
if it were to succeed, freedom would disappear. The fully commodfied
work would become mechanical reproduction. Absolute capitalism
would mean its own destruction.
Varoufakis shifts the focus from equality to freedom, but it is
important to note, that this freedom implies the existence of the
exterior to the capitalist domain. The exterior, understood as some
kind of a „free remnant”. To understand how inhomogeneous
hierarchical systems produce the free remnant, I will introduce the
term „negative autonomy”. This is how I will be defining the actions
performed by the subordinated structure to fulfil the tasks assigned
by the structure of a higher order. However, there is always some
kind of void between what is demanded by the higher structure
and the actual work performed by the structure of the lower
order.
That void is freedom mentioned by Varoufakis. This is the free
remnant allowing for rebellion, for revolution or simply – innovation.
From this perspective, the mechanism of hierarchical orders contains
a hidden, unrevolutional possibility of social change, even in a hostile
economic, political and social environment. But most importantly – to
assume this perspective is allowing us to break free from the delusion
of the homogeneity of global capitalism. It is then the hierarchy itself
that contains the seed for the revolution.
Here and now, in the European context, two paths emerge for those
who are looking to determine their own destiny. There is a Hungarian
model, which is an attempt to establish a kind of national neo
liberalism within the European Union, and probably not totally
consciously referring to models tested in South Korea and to some
extent, China. The Hungarian model doesn't question capitalism, it
doesn't even challenge its neoliberal version, it only challenges the
(1) http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanisvaroufakishowi
becameanerraticmarxist
56
Postcapitalism: not only here, not only now
unlimited freedom of the global capital to operate in its territory. Its
free remnant is used to attack foreign, nonHungarian capital, and
political opponents as well as those who don't fit into this vision of the
new Hungarian capitalism – the poor.
A slightly different path was chosen by the Greeks under the
leadership of the newly elected leftwing government. Like Hungary,
Greece doesn't reject the reality of capitalism, even if the dream is to
overcome it in the future, it is trying to – or at least seemingly so – to
create conditions in which the postcapitalist society will be able to
emerge and grow. Brutally aggressive conditions imposed on the new
Greek government by the European institutions leave very little room
for manoeuvre, however, the free remnant exists and SYRIZA
government seems to be looking for ways how to use it to build
institutions of a society based on solidarity and empathy.
A NONSTATE POSTCAPITALISM?
The belief in the possibility of building a postcapitalist condition in
the 'cracks' of the existing capitalist system is not new – a similar
mechanism was described by Edward Abramowski1, who in
cooperation saw a force capable of abolishing both capitalism and the
state. Both Hungarian and Greek models assume weakening of the
global capitalism in the context of strenghtened national state,
therefore a question of a third path emerges. A path that could be
chosen when institutions of the state are beyond control of the anti
capitalist forces.
It is a fundamental issue because it relates to the possibility of
building a postcapitalist society in a hostile environment at any scale.
If we assume that the capitalist state – at least in theory – can create a
kind of a special zone in order to experiment with postcapitalist
economic models (to some extent based on the reversed mechanism
used by the Communist China in Special Economic Zones), then it
would only be possible in the state where the government would be
capable of challenging the capitalist status quo. This is the model,
that perhaps we will be able to observe in Greece and possibly in
Spain.
At the moment, however, the most interesting attempts of searching
beyond global capitalism are happening in the Middle East.
Little is known about the economic system within ISIS, but it seems to
be a kind of cancerous form of capitalism based on pillage and
destruction. People living in Syria territories controlled by ISIS still
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abramowski
57
use the infrastructure supplied by the Syrian state, moreover, some
income there is paid directly by the Syrian government in Damascus!
So if ISIS is a cancerous tissue of global capitalism, the Autonomous
Region Rojava is an attempt to build inclusive, noncapitalist social
institutions. This heroic experiment is directly inspired by Abdullah
Ocalan and his concept of democratic confederalism. The comparison
with ISIS – as it may sound impropriate – is important because it
shows two different ways of reaching beyond the established models of
the state organisation. ISIS is based on pillage and exploitation, and
only in a very limited way, it is capable of bringing about something
new. We don't really know what model of state the leaders of ISIS
imagine, it's possible, as suggested by some, that they simply
have no vision, as ISIS would be a tool for the apocalypse, an
islamic version of the Jones sect, preparing for the end of the
world.
Ocalan's democratic confederalism – clearly inspired by Murray
Bookchin's philosophy has nothing to do with this apocalyptic
prospect. It is set to build structures that will make this world a better
place. The one thing that makes the Ocalan's project so
fascinating is its positivist* character. Ocalan allows for self
defence but renounces violence. This is not a vision of building
on ruins but building on wastelands. Although inspired by secular
thought, it contains an obvious link to the Christian tradition by
bringing to mind the words of Jesus: 'the stone rejected by the
builders became the cornerstone.' If ISIS is a parasite feeding on
the crumbling and weak structures of Syria and Iraq, the project
of democratic confederalism recognises the state as a structure
constituted by the social diversity. In this view, the state is (a
largely successful) attempt to translate diverse social activity and
presence into a homogeneous language of citizenship, controlled
by the state bureaucracy.
From this perspective, and in the light of the Ocalan's thought, ISIS is
the most repulsive form of state. If Hegel saw in bureaucracy a
universal platform that allows the social multitude to exist and
communicate, the project of democratic confederalism rejects any
transcendence and assumes communication without intermediaries. It
leads to a model of a radical direct democracy, very localised and
fragmented. However, as demonstrated by the struggle for Kobane,
also allowing for the adoption of the unifying ethical framework of
* “Positivism” here refers to a social movemeenet in Poland in 19 th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism_in_Poland
58
Postcapitalism: not only here, not only now
sister and brotherhood, used for effective work within larger

community.
AGAINST HOMOGENISATION
The Ocalan's thought opposes the homogenising force of state and
citizenship. Subsequently, it is obvious then, that it automatically
opposes all versions of fundamentalism. Fundamentalisms construct
a simplified version of society and culture using fragments of the past
and as a result they become extremely homogeneous. What Ocalan
proposes, and what people in Rojava are trying to achieve, is the
inverse of fundamentalism – not the rejection of the past (which is an
exterior to the – at least contemporary capitalism) but drawing from
its richness and diversity. On the one hand, the democratic
confederalism searches for spatial cracks to break free out of
capitalism and on the other hand, using history, it roots itself in the
time outside of it. This double – spatial and temporal – exit from
capitalism seems to me a truly fascinating way of thinking. It is also
one of the very few examples when the appeal to the past is not a part
of a conservative narrative, on the contrary – the reinforcement for the
present revolution comes directly from the past.
As I wrote above, the experimental model of Rojava is extremely
important for all those who are serious about building (even if
only as a theoretical model) postcapitalist society, but unable (or
unwilling) to rely on the good will or conniving of the
government.
It seems to me, that one of the key clues how to build such a society
can be found in the manifesto of the The Kurdistan Woman’s
Liberation Movement (YAJK)
“Before everything women’s ideology cannot exist without land.
The art of harvest and the art of production are connected to
women’s artistry. This means that the first principle of the
women’s ideology is a woman’s connection to the land it is born
on; in other words, patriotism.”1
DOWN TO EARTH
At first sight, these words might sound disturbingly similar to the idea
of the return to the national community and perhaps the nationstate.
However, nothing could be further from the truth – YAJK simply
focuses on the support that every social structure needs to exist. To
(1) http://www.pkkonline.com/en/index.php?sys=article&artID=180
59
talk about the relationship with the land and production, it is to talk
about the point of origin. It's about the need to find support, the need
for a space where biological and cultural survival is possible. It is in
my view very important and is a rejection of the postmodern Deleuzian
fantasies of nomadic political subject. This spatial base is also the key
element constituting the free remnant, allowing for the construction of
the postcapitalist society.
The base space becomes then a common space, a shared 'plane',
which is used – cultivated by the members of the community. Again
– the emphasis on the community as an entity composed of diverse
elements, is only conceivable if the possessive relationship with the
land is rejected, and the land is accepted as a multifaceted entity that
allows various groups to use it in various ways; the entity existing
outside of now, submerged in the past and at the same time reaching
into the future.
As I tried to prove, the extraordinary value of Ocalan's lays in the
way he treats ideas such as time and space, often used by the
reactionist theory and practice, and even fascist reaction. The
way Ocalan responds to those ideas reveals their radical and
revolutionary potential. It is an invaluable lesson for all those
who dream of a better, postcapitalist world.
Plymouth, March 2015
60
CONTENTS
A Word From Editors......................................................................................................... 7
Abdullah Ocalan. Democratic Confederalism..............................................................9
Preface............................................................................................................................................9
The NationState.........................................................................................................................10
Democratic Confederalism........................................................................................................17
Principles of Democratic Confederalism.................................................................................22
Problems of the Peoples in the Middle East and Possible Ways to a Solution..................23
Janet Biehl. Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy............................31
A Stalinist turned ecologist.......................................................................................................31
To cut the messenger's head......................................................................................................33
The best Anarchist is a former Marxist....................................................................................34
A Revolutionary City – a City Revolution..............................................................................35
Living in a Ziggurat....................................................................................................................36
Parallel Stories.............................................................................................................................37
A Principle of Hope....................................................................................................................40
The Kurds against Sumer..........................................................................................................41
The Janusfaced State..................................................................................................................42
Amargi!.........................................................................................................................................44
Dilar Dirik. What Kind of Kurdistan for Women?............................................................45
Azadî Means Freedom...............................................................................................................45
The Women's Issue??..................................................................................................................46
Women's Map of Kurdistan......................................................................................................47
Patriarchy International.............................................................................................................52
Feminism Means Freedom........................................................................................................53
Krzysztof Nawratek. Postcapitalism: not only here, not only now.............................55
Capitalism as a reduction..........................................................................................................55
State vs. Capitalism.....................................................................................................................56
A Nonstate Postcapitalism?....................................................................................................57
Against Homogenisation...........................................................................................................58
Down to Earth.............................................................................................................................59

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What are some of the principles of Democratic Confederalism according to Ocalan?

What are some of the principles of Democratic Confederalism according to Ocalan?

TOWARDS

„Democracy only there grows, where there is a

practical implementations in the mountains of Kurdistan. Obvious

structures and inherited rights by a new national ideology which

arbitrary modern political system but, rather, accumulates history

democracy. The propagation of grass­roots democracy is

ethical political society. Even the patriarchal ideology is less deeply

5. The Armenian national question contains one of the greatest

In February 1999, at the moment when Abdullah Öcalan was

During those decades he tried to persuade other American and

development. Indeed, they wrote sweeping historical accounts of

distributed according to customs of usufruct (use of resources as

(1) Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, chap. 2.

process of social evolution, the historical macro­processes of

(1) Öcalan, Roots, p. 6.

(1) Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, pp. 23-24.

elements who refer to communal structures and those whose

(1) Ibid., pp. 51, 65, 60.

morality, economy, science, arts, and welfare by means of

(1) Ocalan, Defense of People, pp. 177, 24, 104, 177.

(1) Copy in author’s possession.

in history in all four parts deserves acknowledgement, the many

women's experience. While Turkey now has a prime minister that

interesting in this regard! While the KRG is often praised as a role

But is the business­like partnership between Barzanî and Erdogan

shortcomings of the rest of the world, the KRG limits its

(domination) but not necessarily power­to (agency). This

* “Positivism” here refers to a social movemeenet in Poland in 19 th century.

sister­ and brotherhood, used for effective work within larger

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democracy. The propagation of grassroots democracy is

process of social evolution, the historical macroprocesses of

But is the businesslike partnership between Barzanî and Erdogan

(domination) but not necessarily powerto (agency). This

sister and brotherhood, used for effective work within larger