Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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Bookchin’s ideas were embraced by imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, and have helped to inspire experiments in decentralized democracy in Rojava
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PKK needed a new paradigm and had to give up Marxism because that was not happening for the Kurds. It needed to give up this ideal that the PKK had been fighting for to have a separate Kurdish state. He realized that that was not going to work, and was looking for new ideas.
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he realized that this set of ideas about bottom up democracy was incredibly relevant to the people who were the largest ethnic group on planet earth who never got a nation state.
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We’re never going to get a nation state, probably—it just doesn’t look like anything we can fight for still. But what we can do is try to achieve a degree of autonomy within existing national boundaries in the Middle East—in Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, the states where Kurds live—and carve out areas and have as much autonomy as we can get, and then govern ourselves through these kinds of assemblies and councils and committees that Bookchin is writing about.”
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embraced Democratic Confederalism.
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Rojavan Revolution. In July 19, of 2012, the moment came when basically Assad pulled his forces out of the Northeast to go fight the jihadist insurgents in the south—he couldn’t fight a two-front war. He knew he couldn’t defeat the Kurds allied with the jihadists, not that the Kurds would ever really do that, but they might to overthrow the dictatorship, so he couldn’t take that chance. So, he basically evacuated the northeast, not just militarily, but also pulled out of government buildings.
id545650180
everybody knew what would happen in the Middle East once the Kurds were in power: there would be payback against the Arabs that tortured them all these years. That’s how the cycle of revenge works in the Middle East: one gets the upper hand, and then takes revenge against the one that went before.
id545650413
Kurds and their allies did not do that. They said, “We are all in this together.” They had learned to work under the oppression of the Assad regime, and had learned to work together. And they said, “We’re going to do something new here. It’s not just that we will create democracy, and it’s not just that we will admit women as full participants, half of humanity, in this society,” which was amazing enough, “but we will break that cycle of revenge. We will work with people who want to work with us.”
id545650780
We went to a commune, the base unit. Actually, he chose to take me to one that was in an Arab village on the Euphrates River, and there were these Arab people discussing principles of self-governance.
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Then we went to a neighborhood council meeting in west Bohtan in Kobanî, which consisted of eight people, one man and one woman for each of the four urban areas that they represented, their delegates. So, there were four men and four women, and they were talking about their activities on all different levels, in peace, the economy, self-defense, education, sanitation, and health.
id545650823
we went to the city council in Kobanî, and I recognized some familiar faces because they had been at that neighborhood council meeting. They were the two delegates that the neighborhood council had sent to the Kobanî city council. They talked about how they managed, at their level, the kinds of problems they were dealing with, and again, in the same areas.
id545650840
from there, it’s the self-administration, a cantonal level body. In a way, it’s more of a state and more based on elected representatives than at this local level. It’s more like a representative democracy at the upper levels of the self administration. They do vote, they’re elected, and it’s more conventional. It’s not what Bookchin and Öcalan projected, but maybe it’s the best they can do right now because they are in a war situation against ISIS and threatened by Turkey.
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They combined the functions of self-government with social service. This is a communal society, and they look out for each other.
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then there’s a judicial structure parallel to that, as well, grounded in what they call peace and justice committees. The idea is to try to solve disputes at the local level as much as possible, without lawyers, using conflict resolution techniques.
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There’s a parallel women’s structure to deal only with women’s problems because their principle is that only women should decide on women’s problems.
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In Rojava, the messages are all about respecting and embracing each other, and accepting differences and not to try to convert people to your view, but respecting that people don’t have to look and think exactly like you to be part of your polity. That showed me how important messages from the center are because I think it’s really done a lot to ensure that the aim of communal solidarity stays strong there
id545629664
One of the brilliant things that the women’s movement did from the very beginning is from that moment in July 2012, they started knocking on women’s doors, talking to every single woman in every single household and saying, “If you need it, there’s a battered women’s shelter over there that we just built. If you need education and reproductive health facilities, we got it over there for you. If you need to take classes on healing, we’ve got we’ve got a school over there. And if you want to get involved in politics, here’s a women’s house that can show you how to do that.” They made sure that Arab women were aware of these new women’s institutions that were being set up so that they would be ready when the women were ready to come over and be free to.
id545629464
we are so terribly disempowered here in this country. As you mentioned, for all of our problems, we look at Congress and hope that they can do something about it, and don’t feel like we have any control over what they choose to do. It’s a set of very distant, wealthy people who have our fate in their hands. Whether we do anything about the climate depends on what how Joe Manchin feels about it in the morning, and I have no say over it whatsoever. You can get so deeply disaffected and hopeless in a system like that.
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to have a real life working model where ordinary people get to participate in politics, make decisions, and solve the problems that affect them, is something remarkable.
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how important the general education is because they have been able to overcome generations of hatred by education and messaging in Rojava. Another PKK institution is the academy—there are these little schools everywhere, and anybody of any age can go to them. They have academies on economics, democracy—academies where you can learn about all these different aspects of society. It’s a just general thing that people do where they study and absorb these messages of this ideology
id545629850
They’re all buried together. Women buried next to men, Kurds next to Arabs, and the markers are the same. A commander doesn’t have a more elaborate gravestone than a rank and file fighter. The headstones are uniform. You could see in the organization structure of their cemeteries what they value in the way they organize their society.
id545629883
it is so easy to become cynical about revolutionaries who talk of empowering the people because we’ve seen so many self-described socialists become authoritarians in power. We’ve seen everything from the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and in the 1960s, leftists adopting authoritarian, Maoist politics, to the point where you just inevitably think that any revolutionary movement ends in bloodbath and catastrophe. The ideals of a revolutionary democracy shouldn’t be abandoned