Communalism

[Communist Mutant From Outer Space]

What are the revolutionary left's thoughts on Bookchin's Communalism? There doesn't seem to be a tendency for it on here, so I suspect it isn't popular. Why would this be? It appears to take the best parts of Marxism and Anarchism, as it intends; why is there so little of a following of this?

[The Feral Underclass]

What are the revolutionary left's thoughts on Bookchin's Communalism? There doesn't seem to be a tendency for it on here, so I suspect it isn't popular. Why would this be? It appears to take the best parts of Marxism and Anarchism, as it intends; why is there so little of a following of this?

Well there is currently a huge following of it in Rojava, where they have implemented or are attempting to implement these ideas throughout Rojava. Ocalan published a document called Democratic Confederalism that borrows heavily from Bookchin's ideas. These ideas are the basis for the revolution in Northern Syria.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

What are the revolutionary left's thoughts on Bookchin's Communalism? There doesn't seem to be a tendency for it on here, so I suspect it isn't popular. Why would this be? It appears to take the best parts of Marxism and Anarchism, as it intends; why is there so little of a following of this?

Decentralisation and the fetishisation of the local, "face-to-face" level aren't the best parts of anything, although they form the better part of what's wrong with the left today. Socialism has to think big - provide a bold vision for a common global future for the human species - and this mucking about with municipalities (!) is incompatible with that.

[Comrade #138672]

Relying on face-to-face communication seems nice, if you have social skills.

I have no idea how communalism is supposed to work in practice. Is it not another name for anarchism?

[The Feral Underclass]

This article was on FB. I've only skimmed it, but it seems pertinent.

ECOSOCIALISM AGAINST ISIS - A SALUTE TO MURRAY BOOKCHIN (http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/insight-research/ecosocialism-against-isis-a-salute-to-murray-bookchin.html)

[Aslan]

Any good explanations on communalism? Putting ASPhili's view aside, I've been flirting with syndicalism. I'd like to see other points of views on these topics.

[Sewer Socialist]

Is it the same thing as "libertarian municipalism"? If so, I don't see how it's not an even smaller version of socialism in one country - socialism in one county, in one city.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Whether you agree with this ideology or not, we need to study it and take it seriously. Since this is more or less the ideology being followed by our comrades in Rojava, it and the Maoist movements in East Asia are the only major socialist movements in the world that are being taken seriously on the world stage.

[Rafiq]

The problem however is that the Rojava phenomena is simply not a socialist one - we amply have nothing to learn from it. The 'communalist' aspect of society in Rojava, is nothing more than an extension of the national idiosyncrasy of the Kurds. That is not to say it is ahistorical as far as the middle east goes. On the contrary, the promising aspects of the prerogatives of the Kurds are there. But they are not 'socialist' ones - they are ones that are promising insofar as anyone is not a reactionary or a barbarian.

That is to say, the Kurdish 'experiment' is significant insofar as it might accentuate real existing predispositions toward sexual freedom, secularism and other such bourgeois-liberal "eurocentric" (as termed by mindless scum) values among Muslim societies. These are necessary predispositions for a Socialist movement, or, at least ones that could re-vitalize it. The Arab spring, a truly historical event, did more for Socialists in - say - Egypt than any event in the last 20 years.

We in the west as far as politics go have nothing to learn from the Kurd's confederalism. Nothing. It is a worthless model and I laugh at anyone who thinks that this can be translated to have a context in - say - the United States. One, have the Kurds accentuated social antagonisms that are also present in not only western countries, but a country like Egypt? No, not even close. Kurdish politics are thoroughly ethnic-based, born out of a struggle for not only national - but physical survival.

Of course, every socialist supports the Kurds against Erdogan. Every sane person supports the Kurds against ISIS (Opposition to ISIS, which is not even a political position as such, but so much of a banality as the consensual agreement between world-powers that they desire a good world). But thinking they are providing a model socialists can learn from is perverse.

[Spectre of Spartacism]

Whether you agree with this ideology or not, we need to study it and take it seriously. Since this is more or less the ideology being followed by our comrades in Rojava, it and the Maoist movements in East Asia are the only major socialist movements in the world that are being taken seriously on the world stage.

You call them comrades before you are even aware of what their politics are? That certainly sounds like a case of putting the cart before the horse. You have your own politics, but people who reify localism and believe that socialism or communism is a state of affairs that doesn't require a world-historical existence are generally not people I would consider to be comrades, because they are people who put their own city or regional or state governing body over the interests of the international working class.

[The Feral Underclass]

Let's be honest, if it was up to the Trots, all those fighting in Rojava would be dead or in prison. After all it's Trotskyists (http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1055/isis.html) who have offered critical support to Da'esh.

Rebuild the 4th International! Support Genocidal Islamists!...That'll show those impure proto-socialists in Rojava for setting up decentralised, democratically run municipals and collectivising property, the imperialist scum!

The Trot position is critical support for anti-imperialists, even those raping and murdering children, but not critical support for some socialist Kurds because they have benefited from allied bombings and aren't socialist enough?

[Spectre of Spartacism]

Let's be honest, if it was up to the Trots, all those fighting in Rojava would be dead or in prison. After all it's Trotskyists (http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1055/isis.html) who have offered critical support to Da'esh.

Rebuild the 4th International! Support Genocidal Islamists!...That'll show those impure proto-socialists in Rojava for setting up decentralised, democratically run municipals and collectivising property, the imperialist scum!

The Trot position is critical support for anti-imperialists, even those raping and murdering children, but not critical support for some socialists Kurds because they have benefited from allied bombings and aren't socialist enough?

Do you wish to discuss the contents of the article you linked, or is this just more moderator flame bait, an example of that civility you spent a good portion of another thread derailing by lecturing others about?

[The Feral Underclass]

And give you the opportunity to justify why you politically support child rapists and genocidal religious fundamentalists? No thanks.

[Spectre of Spartacism]

And give you the opportunity to justify why you politically support child rapists and genocidal religious fundamentalists? No thanks.

You really don't know what you're talking about and should probably stop flaming, since as a moderator you have a duty to set an example in terms of standards for discussion quality and abiding by the rules.

[The Feral Underclass]

You really don't know what you're talking about and should probably stop flaming, since as a moderator you have a duty to set an example in terms of standards for discussion quality and abiding by the rules.

If you've felt flamed or offended by my opinion that you politically support child rapists and genocidal religious fundamentalists, then of course I apologise unreservedly. (http://cdn.meme.am/images/300x/188585.jpg)

[Spectre of Spartacism]

If you've felt flamed or offended by my opinion that you politically support child rapists and genocidal religious fundamentalists, then of course I apologise unreservedly. (http://cdn.meme.am/images/300x/188585.jpg)

I'm certainly not offended. I was just under the impression that derailing threads with obvious flaming would be something that moderators would actively try to discourage. Instead, we have one here actively participating in the activity. Then again, I also care a little bit about the quality of discussion because I hope this forum can be a place for people to learn. This is the learning forum, isn't it?

On the substance of your criticism the ICL position in regards to the IS, the position is not "political support" of any kind, least of all for their acts of ravaging innocent civilians. As can be seen from the article, it's the position that when IS turns its weapons against the imperialists and people acting as proxies for them, the working class has an interest in supporting the striking of blows against the imperialists. The imperialists, your own government, are a far greater threat to the livelihood of the Kurds and workers around the world than a ragtag band of Islamic reactionaries whose organizational birth is actually attributable to imperialist meddling in the first place. You don't seem to understand this, and then make it sound like the ICL supports the political program of IS. It's dishonest.

The ICL and its offshoots have a long tradition of taking flack from other leftists for not flirting with extending support to reactionary Islamists, from the Ayatollahs in Iran to the semi-feudal mujahideen fighting as US proxies in Afghanistan. If you were interested in learning rather than stirring trouble, we can discuss this at more length in another thread.

The initial point I made, the one that seems to have triggered all this immaturity and deliberate provocation from you, is a legitimate one. If you mistake socialism with local control in confederacies or communes, you are going to end up siding with the local over the international working class. Sad but true.

[Sasha]

everybody chill the fuck down please, infraction to TFU for flaming.

[Sasha]

as to the subject at hand, i'm currently reading the last collection of Bookchin's late works "the next revolution" (http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239261/the-next-revolution-by-murray-bookchin/9781781685808/) at the moment. quite like it actually so far, seems like real politik (or maybe a "transitional program") for anarchists, better than most marxist shilling for social-democracy imho.

[John Nada]

Any good explanations on communalism? Putting ASPhili's view aside, I've been flirting with syndicalism. I'd like to see other points of views on these topics.I've read more Ocalan, still reading up more of Bookchin's works, but I'll give it a shot.

Both Ocalan and Bookchin sometimes use different nomenclature than Marxists or anarchists, but take and expand on both, among others.

Communalism is abolishing the state, hierarchies and property, and the economics and politics(not statecraft but direct democratic participation) towards that end. Bookchin didn't call communism/socialism/anarchy, communism/socialism/anarchy because he felt those terms came to mean 1. A repressive autocratic states, rather than a stateless, classless society. 2. Bourgeois liberals 3. Individualist lifestylists. So he was like,"Fuck this shit, Communalism with a capital 'C'!"(okay I don't think he said that, but almost like he could've).

Bookchin was critical of syndicalism, because under modern capitalism "worker's running their factory" means workers "democratically running" her or his exploitation and competing with other workers in the market.
It remains to emphasize that libertarian municipalism is not merely an evocation of all traditional antistatist notions of politics. Just as it redefines politics to include face-to-face municipal democracies graduated to confederal levels, so it includes a municipalist and confederal approach to economics. Minimally, a libertarian municipalist economics calls for the municipalization of the economy, not its centralization into state-owned “nationalized” enterprises on the one hand or its reduction to “worker-controlled” forms of collectivistic capitalism on the other. Trade-union control of “worker controlled” enterprises (that is, syndicalism) has had its day. This should be evident to anyone who examines the bureaucracies that even revolutionary trade unions spawned during the Spanish Civil War of 1936. Today, corporate capitalism too is increasingly eager to bring the worker into complicity with his or her own exploitation by means of “workplace democracy.” Nor was the revolution in Spain or in other countries spared the existence of competition among worker-controlled enterprises for raw materials, markets, and profits. Even more recently, many Israeli kibbutzim have been failures as examples of nonexploitative, need-oriented enterprises, despite the high ideals with which they were initially founded.

Libertarian municipalism proposes a radically different form of economy one that is neither nationalized nor collectivized according to syndicalist precepts. It proposes that land and enterprises be placed increasingly in the custody of the community more precisely, the custody of citizens in free assemblies and their deputies in confederal councils. How work should be planned, what technologies should be used, how goods should be distributed are questions that can only be resolved in practice. The maxim “from each according to his or her ability, to each according to his or her needs” would seem a bedrock guide for an economically rational society, provided to be sure that goods are of the highest durability and quality, that needs are guided by rational and ecological standards, and that the ancient notions of limit and balance replace the bourgeois marketplace imperative of “grow or die.” http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-libertarian-municipalism-an-overview
Is it the same thing as "libertarian municipalism"? If so, I don't see how it's not an even smaller version of socialism in one country - socialism in one county, in one city.Libertarian municipalism isn't "socialism in one country/city". It's a strategy for dual power: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/gp/perspectives24.html

Funny thing, there was some candidates running for local elections in a city I used to live in that in retrospect, probably had libertarian municipalism as their campaign platform. I remember thinking,"Isn't that basically like the soviets(lower case "s"?). Got in third, votes comparable to the Republicans at times, and more than the so-called "Libertarian" Party. Bookchin actually hated that people were using libertarian municipalism as a tactic and justification for entryism and reformism, rather than a strategy for cultivating dual power outside the state.

Personally, I'm tired of the "Oh no! Not Socialism in One Country! You can't do that!" Not because the caricature that anyone actually wanted socialism in one country, even in the Soviet Union(I'm sure even Bukharin and Stalin would've loved successful revolutions in western Europe, I don't see why they wouldn't have). I'm not aware of any Marxist/anarchist movement that seriously wants that, beyond the recognition that the global revolution will have successes, failures and take time to spread. Rather, it's because it seems like rather than "You won't have socialism in only one country, it will spread and win, sooner or later. We'll all make sure of that, together," an internationalist call to arms and optimism it will succeed, it seems like it turns global revolution into a prisoner's dilemma times 7 billion. Any possibility of victory anywhere, except for the mythical First-World revolutionary wave that's simultaneously viewed as less likely than the extinction of humanity, is dismissed.

This isn't anything directed you(or really that question, which is a good question, nothing wrong with questioning anything:)), just an off-tangent rant on the defeatist zeitgeist that's rampant.:unsure:
The problem however is that the Rojava phenomena is simply not a socialist one - we amply have nothing to learn from it. The 'communalist' aspect of society in Rojava, is nothing more than an extension of the national idiosyncrasy of the Kurds. That is not to say it is ahistorical as far as the middle east goes. On the contrary, the promising aspects of the prerogatives of the Kurds are there. But they are not 'socialist' ones - they are ones that are promising insofar as anyone is not a reactionary or a barbarian.Rojava's pretty much carrying out a minimum program (which even in the US, Italy, Paraguay, wherever, would have so-called "national idiosyncrasies" due to differing material conditions) to lay the foundation for the uninterrupted march towards the maximum program of socialist revolution, to put it in more "orthodox" Marxian terms. Like Marxism, libertarian municipalism has a minimum/maximum strategy.

I disagree that there's nothing to learn from it, even if it completely fails. Marx and Engels regularly studied and commented on developments in pre-captialist countries like India, China and the Ottoman Empire. IIRC in the case of India, both initially wrongly thought that Britain's conquest could destroy the despotism of the local princes, chieftains and the general backwardness of the non-European mode of production. Basically spread the comparatively progressive capitalism as opposed to feudal absolutism, enabling the development of productive forces and set the stage for a future bourgeois-democratic revolution.

Yet they couldn't help but sympathize with the Indians' "war of their own style", and latter came to realize that Britain's colonization of India was entirely reactionary, a bloodbath upholding the worst corruption of Britain and capitalism combined with an intensification of of the local despotism, rather than its demise.

And IIRC, they considered the Opium Wars waged by Britain against China a travesty. Engels even called upon the Chinese nation to rise up and wage a "people's war"(!) against those he called the real savages and barbarians, the British.
That is to say, the Kurdish 'experiment' is significant insofar as it might accentuate real existing predispositions toward sexual freedom, secularism and other such bourgeois-liberal "eurocentric" (as termed by mindless scum) values among Muslim societies. These are necessary predispositions for a Socialist movement, or, at least ones that could re-vitalize it. The Arab spring, a truly historical event, did more for Socialists in - say - Egypt than any event in the last 20 years.Rather ironically yet tragically, it seems the only immediate positive development arising out of the Arab Spring is in Kurdistan. Virtually none could be said to have resulted in successful bourgeois-democratic revolutions except Rojava. A misleading term I might add, bourgeois-democratic, since in this era it's often led by the proletariat against a bourgeoisie overwhelmingly supportive of colonialism and semi-feudalism, and is supposed to clear the way for proletarian socialist revolutions. Probably why Maoists call it "new democratic" instead.

If anything, semi-feudalism and neo/semi-colonialism have grown stronger from Islamist and Bonapartist reaction. This is because, unlike what was a genuine but spontaneous and parochial revolt against autocracy and semi-feudal despotism, organizations like the PYD and its armed wing the YPG/YPJ already had a plan in place for such revolutionary situations. If there is no plan, those that are the most ruthless, well-funded and well-organized with an ideology aligned with the ruling class will take it over, and drive any potential revolution, democratic or socialist, into the ground.

Other parties and individuals complained at the beginning of the protests and Syria Civil War that the PYD was being "dictatorial" and unfairly seizing power by force. Yet many similar local committees that weren't dominated by the PYD are all dead. The Jihadists like Daesh and JAN jumped aboard and assassinated their unorganized rivals. Almost like a more extreme version of the fascists and right-"libertarians" joining the Occupy protests solely to subvert it.
We in the west as far as politics go have nothing to learn from the Kurd's confederalism. Nothing. It is a worthless model and I laugh at anyone who thinks that this can be translated to have a context in - say - the United States. One, have the Kurds accentuated social antagonisms that are also present in not only western countries, but a country like Egypt? No, not even close. Kurdish politics are thoroughly ethnic-based, born out of a struggle for not only national - but physical survival.Strange how all these theories and models get dreamed up in the west, but applied and worked out in practice in the east and global south.:confused: I don't see why it can never come back in the other direction.

It's as irrelevant to the US(which is imperialist-capitalist, having undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution long ago) as the revolutionary democratic-dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in Russia or the people's democratic-dictatorship in China. The minimum program in a semi-feudal country is not going to be the same as a minimum program in a bourgeois-"democratic" imperialist-capitalist country by default. This doesn't mean there's no lessons to be learned from the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, or any other ones.

The move from a minimum program of a bourgeois-democratic revolution leading to a Kurdish nation-state(possible provoking one in Turkey too, sparking revolutions in the oppressor nations is also the theory and point behind national liberation) to a democratic confederation of all the nations in the Middle East represents a major shift away from a strictly Kurdish nation-state based strategy. If carried out, this may well turn into a dictatorship of the proletariat on the socialist path, or at least a democratic-dictatorship as a prelude, to put it into Marxian or Leninist terms. Remember that the first dictatorship of the proletariat, the Paris Commune, was led not by Marxists, but Blanquists and Proudhonists.

Ocalan specifically mentions the divisions within the Arab nation are promoted by capitalism. He said a communalist approach could lead to a unified Arab democratic nation. And in Rojava, some major Arab tribes, with member extending across many states, have begun accepting democratic confederalism. Many soldiers in the YPG/YPJ are Arab. The Co-Vice President of Jazira Canton, Hussein Taza Al Azam is an Arab from the Shammar tribe. It's one of the largest Arab tribes with has millions of members in Iraq and Saudi Arabia too. The other Co-Vice President, Elizabeth Gawrie, is a Syriac woman. So they're building up not just a movement to liberate Kurds, but other nationalities too.
Of course, every socialist supports the Kurds against Erdogan. Every sane person supports the Kurds against ISIS (Opposition to ISIS, which is not even a political position as such, but so much of a banality as the consensual agreement between world-powers that they desire a good world). But thinking they are providing a model socialists can learn from is perverse.Forces of reaction like Daesh are an obstacle to the liberation of the proletariat and oppressed peoples, in Iraq and Syria most of all. Daesh represents the clergy, military officers, landlords and merchant classes. It's another expansionist state imposed on the Arabs and is attempting to conquer not just the Kurdish nation, but far flung places as Yemen, Afghanistan, the North Caucasus region and Nigeria. It's precisely the type of movement Lenin said must not highjack an anti-imperialist movement and be vigorously combated. I could imagine the proletariat of the Middle East moving closer to revolution with Daesh defeated, but not a Daesh victory leading to proletarian revolutions, least of all in Syria, Iraq and Kurdistan. Socialist could only hope to replicate any model of fighting it.

[DOOM]

Communism isn't some sort of tribal society, it'll surpass the productivity of capitalism. Large scale global production and transfer of goods according to a plan will be the major characteristics of production under communism and not local, communal production and exchange of what are effectively commodities between those communities.
How can we even talk about abolishing private property, when production isn't controlled by the whole society but by a community/clan/tribe and its laborers?

[The Feral Underclass]

Communism isn't some sort of tribal society, it'll surpass the productivity of capitalism. Large scale global production and transfer of goods according to a plan will be the major characteristics of production under communism and not local, communal production and exchange of what are effectively commodities between those communities.
How can we even talk about abolishing private property, when production isn't controlled by the whole society but by a community/clan/tribe and its laborers?

And your point is what?

[DOOM]

And your point is what?

Are you asking to spite me or are you being genuinely curious? It's not what communism will look like.

[The Feral Underclass]

Are you asking to spite me or are you being genuinely curious? It's not what communism will look like.

So your argument is that it's not communism so it won't look like communism?

It just seems like an entirely redundant argument to make if you take into consideration the content of this thread. Yeah, communalism isn't communism so it's not going to look like it, is it? But it exists as a movement and has socialist adherents in a conflict zone who are implementing its ideas. Now what? Making the tautological argument that you've made isn't really a particularly useful or edifying contribution to this debate. So my question to you is: What is the point?

[Guardia Rossa]

Bump

Interesting answer, it's always good to read what the people of the ideology in question have to say about it.

[John Nada]

Communism isn't some sort of tribal society, it'll surpass the productivity of capitalism. Large scale global production and transfer of goods according to a plan will be the major characteristics of production under communism and not local, communal production and exchange of what are effectively commodities between those communities.
How can we even talk about abolishing private property, when production isn't controlled by the whole society but by a community/clan/tribe and its laborers?Yes, this is true. Who's proposed a parochial tribal society where the law of value reigns is communism?:confused:

[The Feral Underclass]

Yes, this is true. Who's proposed a parochial tribal society where the law of value reigns is communism?:confused:

Is it even worth engaging with? This is a person who calls themselves a Marxist-Leninist and then has the audacity to lecture others about the reproduction of capitalist relations of production in a revolutionary situation.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

As can be seen from the article, it's the position that when IS turns its weapons against the imperialists and people acting as proxies for them, the working class has an interest in supporting the striking of blows against the imperialists.

I'm sorry, this is just so wrong on so many levels. IS is not an anti-imperialist force; it is an anti-civilisation and anti-progressive, pro-reactionary force that is based on a falsified view of the Islamic Empire of the middle ages. You can put your own 'anti-imperialist' spin on its actions all you want, but it is not waging a war against imperialism. Rather the opposite - the whole point of IS is to recreate, geographically, the sphere of power occupied by the Abbasids of the Islamic Empire, except in place of the rational enlightenment of the Abbasids, IS seeks to impose a uniformly extreme reading of 'Islam' (one that is not recognised by almost anyone else in the Muslim world outside the 30,000 or so IS fighters) on the people it subjugates in the territories it occupies.

To say that 'the working class' of Syria, or any other country, has anything to gain from supporting these reactionary scumbags is just idiotic, plainly wrong, and not supported by ANY evidence.


The imperialists, your own government, are a far greater threat to the livelihood of the Kurds and workers around the world than a ragtag band of Islamic reactionaries whose organizational birth is actually attributable to imperialist meddling in the first place. You don't seem to understand this, and then make it sound like the ICL supports the political program of IS. It's dishonest.

But who are you to tell the Kurds what to do and not to do? They are not stupid. They are critically welcoming coalition airstrikes precisely because it one of the few things that gives their amateur army the upper hand against the professional, well-equipped IS fighting force. I personally don't support Britain joining in these airstrikes, for various reasons, but i'm not going to sit here and moralise about what Kurds on the front line thousands of miles away should and should not do.


The initial point I made, the one that seems to have triggered all this immaturity and deliberate provocation from you, is a legitimate one. If you mistake socialism with local control in confederacies or communes, you are going to end up siding with the local over the international working class. Sad but true.

This is partially true, but I think it's also true that given the realities of the Syrian civil war, the bravery of the Rojavan Kurds in setting up a democratic experiment actually qualifies as socialistic in some ways; whilst they clearly 'haven't read Marx' per se, the idea of placing humanity above barbarity and democracy above military diktat is something that all socialists should stand uncritically behind, whether or not said ideology is draped in the red flag.

[DOOM]

So your argument is that it's not communism so it won't look like communism?

It just seems like an entirely redundant argument to make if you take into consideration the content of this thread. Yeah, communalism isn't communism so it's not going to look like it, is it? But it exists as a movement and has socialist adherents in a conflict zone who are implementing its ideas. Now what? Making the tautological argument that you've made isn't really a particularly useful or edifying contribution to this debate. So my question to you is: What is the point?
What is it then? What does it represent and how is it as a possible alternative to capitalism worth exploring? It doesn't challenge the pillars of capitalism - private property / division of labour - at all.

Now, even if the self-conception of communalism wasn't to represent an alternative to capitalism, the thing would be that the revolutionary left has supported numerous left-to-liberal movements, ranging from parliamentary SYRIZA to rebels like the Zapatistas, of whom all have disappointed the working class, at least up to this point. And they didn't fail because they aren't trying hard enough, some of them are actually pretty persistent. It's because their programm isn't as radical as it actually would have to be in order to invoke social change on a large, international scale, ie a socialist revolution ending private ownership of the means of production once and for all. Both the PKK and the Zapatistas are supporting property rights and the various socdem redeemers were all proven to be another disappointment. Now, you could say that they are the lesser evil in times of no revolutionary upheaval and that the Kurds would implement various progressive changes, from which workers actually could benefit, which might even happen. But in the end they are still supporting capitalism and I don't see why this would be interesting to anyone seriously interested in the international emancipation of the working class. Maybe I'm a pessimist but I believe that the period of romantic revolutions is over and that there's nothing to gain out of them anymore.



Yes, this is true. Who's proposed a parochial tribal society where the law of value reigns is communism?:confused:

I was trying to point out how communalism reminds me of modes of production, where production was organized and orchestrated by a clan or a tribe. At least most of small-scale-production-fetishists end up there, when they start talking about self-sufficiency or trading with other communes. Obviously the communalists wouldn't call their communities tribes, they'd probably give them a fancy leftish sounding name.
The problem is, that it isn't what a mode of production where the law of value has been dismantled will look like. To quote good ol' PCI/Bordiga/revanonwhaterr


“At the International Congress in Brussels, in 1868, one of my friends said (this was the First International and the way he expresses himself indicates that he was not a Bakuninist libertarian—): ‘Small private property is doomed by the verdict of science; great private property by justice. There remains then but one alternative. The soil must become the property of rural associations, or the property of the whole nation. The future will decide the question.’ I say, on the contrary: ‘The future will decide that the land can only be owned nationally. To give up the soil to the hands of associated rural laborers would be to surrender all society to one exclusive class of producers’.”
[Marx]
[...]
Finally, one may further explicate the proposition, which is so masterful in the highest sense of the term, in the following way: The socialist program is not expressed as either the abolition of the surrender of a sector of the productive means to a class of individuals, or to a minority of non-producers who live in leisure. The socialist program demands that no sector of production should be ruled by any single class, not even a class of producers, but by all of society. As a result, the land will not be transferred to associations of peasants, nor will it be transferred to the peasants as a class, but to all of society.
[...]
This Marxist theorem strikes a fatal blow at all communalism and syndicalism, as well as all “enterprise-based socialism” (see the relevant chapters of our “Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism”), because these old fashioned programs, superannuated and rotten, “surrender” indivisible energies of society to limited groups.

https://libcom.org/library/revolutionary-program-communist-society-eliminates-all-forms-ownership-land-instruments-


Is it even worth engaging with? This is a person [B]who calls themselves a Marxist-Leninist and then has the audacity to lecture others about the reproduction of capitalist relations of production in a revolutionary situation.

ayy lmao, I intentionally wrote "Leaninism".

[Rafiq]

I disagree that there's nothing to learn from it, even if it completely fails.

Juan, please don't misunderstand me. I am not saying there is nothing to learn from it IN GENERAL, I am saying as far as actually building a socialist movement in the west is concerned, there is nothing to learn from it. You really need to not get ahead of what I am saying here: ALL I am saying is that Leftists who perversely derive hope from the events in Rojava as a substitute for concretely approaching the conditions of their own countries are mindless.

I am not saying the Kurds have something to learn from us. ON THE CONTRARY, I already insinuated that the Kurds have NOTHING to learn from us. That is far, far beyond the point that is being made. There are many 'libertarians' in the west who believe that confederalism has an application to our western countries. I claim this is perverse. I do not claim it is perverse in the context of Rojava.


Yet they couldn't help but sympathize with the Indians' "war of their own style", and latter came to realize that Britain's colonization of India was entirely reactionary, a bloodbath upholding the worst corruption of Britain and capitalism combined with an intensification of of the local despotism, rather than its demise.

I went over this quite thoroughly around a year back, actually. In fact, Marx NEVER reversed his previous endorsement of British colonialism in India, he simply recognized that the colonialism had exhausted - in his mind - its world-historical worth as far as enabling the predispositions to a bourgeois democratic revolution in India or in other places in the East. British colonialization in India was abjectly reactionary at this point, but what the British had done before then was irreversible - that is to say, old despotism WAS dethroned and destroyed on a world-historic level, what remained of it was nothing more than a corrupted facade of very modern, capitalist brutality under the guise of some old traditionalism.

At the ONSET of mere CONTACT with western powers, the world historical character of the despotism is altered. The British, upon colonizing Nigeria, ruled by means of "indirect rule". Or the French in what is now Senegal, who ruled through puppets like Ahmadu Bamba and the mouride brotherhood, which to this day mystifies raw neocolonial exploitation with pretenses to 'old religious traditions'. My point is simple: Marx was not wrong in thinking that British colonialism destroyed the historic basis of Indian despotism. It did. It equipped the Indian masses with the ability to fight both the British and the local despots on bourgeois-democratic grounds. It destroyed the purported antagonism between the old traditional elements of society and the British, western colonizers - the true antagonism was now between the Indian democrats, now EVEN MORE democratic, universal than the British themselves, and British capital and its twisted 'traditionalist' agents. This is the dialectic of colonialism. Old societies are subsumed into a world totality dominated by Europe, and due to Europe's own internal antagonisms, this subsumption ends up biting them in the ass. There is not a single anti-colonial movement in history which was successful which did not follow this pattern (I.e. Nkrumah, Lumumba, all western educated).


And IIRC, they considered the Opium Wars waged by Britain against China a travesty. Engels even called upon the Chinese nation to rise up and wage a "people's war"(!) against those he called the real savages and barbarians, the British.

Well, let's look at an example of a real life of this. The Taiping Rebellion, which was bourgeois democratic in nature, egalitarian, and thoroughly anti-traditionalist. My point is: I totally agree with you, and Engels for that matter. The difference is that such a world-historic development would have not been possible without China's relationship to the world totality in general set forth by the western powers. Whether this was facilitated by direct domination and brutality, or an internal approximation to new conditions, as was the case with Japan, makes little difference. The Taiping rebellino would not have happened centuries ealrier. THIS IS THE POINT of the dialectic. Communism could have been wrought 50,000 B.C. - it is the social ANTAGONISM of present day capitalism which makes it possible. Likewise, it was the anti-colonial struggle alone which made Socialism possible in the colonized countries, which was NEVER presented as some return to the past (what past? What good past?) but a better future.


Rather ironically yet tragically, it seems the only immediate positive development arising out of the Arab Spring is in Kurdistan. Virtually none could be said to have resulted in successful bourgeois-democratic revolutions except Rojava. A misleading term I might add, bourgeois-democratic, since in this era it's often led by the proletariat against a bourgeoisie overwhelmingly supportive of colonialism and semi-feudalism, and is supposed to clear the way for proletarian socialist revolutions.

Yes, and that doesn't change my point: Kurdistan can be significant as far as the aroma of the 'Arab spring' is concerned. It is not dead. The Arab spring was the first great democratic upheaval of the peoples's of the near east. The antagonisms that which it was born out of, still remain - it wasn't some passing event that only left us Rojava. My point is that Rojava could potentially be significant in influencing another one, or CHANGE THE DISCOURSE OF POLITICS, more specifically, in Near Eastern states in a positive way. Already in Turkey there is a political polarization along the lines of attitudes toward the Kurds. If this could be made possible in Iran, this would be a great development.

My point is that this is not a proletarian uprising. I agree - let's call it a 'minimal action'. But the predispositions toward actually fulfilling a 'maximal' one, HAVE YET to be proven or shown. Kurdistan, if independent, would most likely become a modern bourgeois-democratic state than a socialist one, and this is plainly obvious - Rojava's 'experiment' is a tactical, provisional and emergency one. And it is interesting you mention new democracy, because it was precisely this which was a bourgeois revolution.

But anyway, even so - even if the Kurds are predominantly composed of proletarians (by the way, is this even true?), they are not class conscious proletarians, they are not acting for itself as a class. I mean, what if most of hezbollah were proletarians? Who cares, really? Most voting citizens in imperialist states are proletarians. The proletariat will always make the majority in modern capitalist contexts (i.e. premodern social formations could still exist).


If anything, semi-feudalism and neo/semi-colonialism have grown stronger from Islamist and Bonapartist reaction.

One must understand the dialectic here. Of course you are right - but was there ever a time in history that seemed more hopeless than the 1820's, following Wellington's victory?

That Islamists and Bonapartist reaction (I assume you mean Sisi here) gained from the Arab Spring only demonstrates what a powerful momentum it had - the more powerful the outburst of possibilities, the more vicious its downfall. But this is not the finite conclusion of the Arab spring. Islamism is nothing more than the accentuation of certain elements within it - once this fails the people of the near east, which it will, new possibilities will emerge.


It's as irrelevant to the US(which is imperialist-capitalist, having undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution long ago) as the revolutionary democratic-dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in Russia

In fact, this is wrong. The difference is that the October revolution WAS carried out under the leadership of the Russian INDUSTRIAL proletariat. This is why it had over-reaching ramifications for the worker's movement in the west - in the US, no distinction could be made between "anarchists" and "bolsheviks" on count of how prevalent the former were among the industrial working class. So the Bolsheviks clearly related to the conditions of the world proletariat. This is not the case in Rojava. You claim that Rojava is implementing a minimal program. Well, why do I agree with this?

Because if a proletarian movement were leading the Kurds, they would probably not differ that significantly as far as their immediate course of action is concerned. But a proletaria nmovement IS NOT leading the Kurds, so to claim that it is a minimal program assumes that the necessary predispositions to carrying out the 'maximal' one is there. There is not a shred of evidence to sustain this. Now, should socialists in the region support the Kurds? Yes, I already said so. But what is going on in Rojava is not a model for fighting capitalism in the west, not specifically, not ideologically, not in ANY way (UNLIKE the October revolution in Russia).

And frankly, 'democratic confderlaism' is not even a model that which the Egyptian, Tunisian, Lebanese, Jordanian, and more specifically - dispossessed elements in the monarchies have anything to learn from. It is not proletarian in character, as a method of organization. IN THE WEST, from the eye of the wesetrn observer it is a perversion.

People like the Feral Undercalss look at this shit and think it has some kind of application in the context of the UK. All I'm saying is that they are clowns - the Kurds are not providing a model for an anti-capitalist future. That's it. And certainly there was much to learn from the Russian revolution. The Chinese revolution, conversely, was not proletarian in any meaningful sense, it was not led by the Chinese proletariat, but a provisional social formation that was the vehicle of the bourgeois revolution, much like the Sans Cullottes. The Russian proletariat were only provisional insofar as they could not lead 'socialism in one country', which is why the dialectical legacy of the Russian revolution was Stalinism, or collectivization (i.e. the Russian peasantry, destroyed by the bureaucracy, as the new revolutionary agency).


The move from a minimum program of a bourgeois-democratic revolution leading to a Kurdish nation-state(possible provoking one in Turkey too, sparking revolutions in the oppressor nations is also the theory and point behind national liberation) to a democratic confederation of all the nations in the Middle East represents a major shift away from a strictly Kurdish nation-state based strategy. If carried out, this may well turn into a dictatorship of the proletariat on the socialist path, or at least a democratic-dictatorship as a prelude, to put it into Marxian or Leninist terms.

Two problems -

One, let's assume this is possible. Of course, it would be a great development - but one in present conditions which is highly unlikely as a result of MERE geopolitical realities. Of course, it is not impossible, but it would require a great leap of faith on behalf of the Kurds - just as, say, abandonment of Zionism among Jews in the late 40's would have required a great leap of faith to carry out the revolution in the Near East. They opted for the safe route. Will the Kurds act similarly? Time will tell, but as far as we are concerned, it is likely they will, and why? Because the Kurdish movement lacks ideological, theoretical sophistication, it is not proletarian in its ideological character, and its leadership is so far not even close to being predisposed to universalizing its 'program'. But if by some miracle it would become possible, then it would RADICALLY change the character of the Kurdish movement itself - that is to say, IF it becomes caught up in a wider Near eastern socialist revolution, or even a bourgeois-democratic one, then all of that bullshit confederalism, local direct democracy Western perverts, who know of its impossibility in ANY modern advanced capitalist context love to talk about, would be swept away by what would inevitably be a sophistication of political, theoretical approach to actually building a proletarian dictatorship - or even a modern state, proletarian or not.

The second problem concerns the Paris Commune. You are right that Marxists di not lead it. What fail to see is the GENERAL, UNIVERSAL immaturity of the socialist movement at this time. After the Paris Commune, socialism was polarized on Marxist vs. Anarchist grounds. This is not "repeatable" any more than the full adoption of the trajectory path of western industrializaiton, discovering the steam engine, culmunative technological innovation was necessary for the industrialization of Russia or China or ANY OTHER country. They simply adopted the modern technologies of their time.

So it is silly to think that the Kurds have some 'natural' trajectory path that could lead them to Marxism, or that more specifically - that democratic confederalism is a HISTORICALLY NECESSARY prelude to Marxism. It is not. It might be a prelude (again, unlikely, but who knows), but it is not a necessary one.


Ocalan specifically mentions the divisions within the Arab nation are promoted by capitalism. He said a communalist approach could lead to a unified Arab democratic nation.

Well he is wrong, and he will see that. None the less, it is good that you point out that the Kurds at least hope to relate to the other Arab nations, and it is THIS imperative - the democratic revolution - not any kind of localism or communalism, which makes the Kurds significant at a world-historical level. The Kurds are the most progressive nation in the whole of the Near east, no one can deny this. Remember, however, that many progressive Zionists were similar - and look what happened.

But my point? Their communlaism and 'confederalism' IS NOT a model that which a post-capitalist society could be built in the west. I am sure you agree. We live in advanced capitalist bourgeois democracies. The Near east is plagued with pre-modern social formations, despots and at this level the bourgeois liberals and any socialists could not disagree in their fundamental immediate aims of what to do. So no, Feral, among other confused liberals in the west - some bullshit about a 'localized, direct democracy' eco-socialism that has any relevance in western countries is literally so pathetic. It is vomit-worthy. These perverse pseudo-leftists take what is essentially at best a confused, immature and infantile theoretical discourse and praise it - the Kurds have an excuse - THEY don't.

Pseudo-leftists adopt this out of perverse laziness and philistinism. The kurds, conversely, have adopted it out of their own fight for survival against the ISIS foe. One can sympathize with the latter - but in order to truly take them seriously, we must ruthlessly criticize them. As for those Leftists who are substituting the necessary imperative of focusing on OUR OWN struggles with fantasies about the Kurds (which I am not accusing you of, but people like Feral), we have nothing to say to them.

"Communalism" and "eco-socialism" are reactionary in western contexts. IN our objectively socialized world, do people actually think this shit is even close to being feasible? These are perversions. They do not strike at the core of the real conditions and basis of life - which is OBJECTIVELY socialized today, all-encompassing, centralized, etc.

[Fourth Internationalist]

I'm sorry, this is just so wrong on so many levels. IS is not an anti-imperialist force; it is an anti-civilisation and anti-progressive, pro-reactionary force that is based on a falsified view of the Islamic Empire of the middle ages. You can put your own 'anti-imperialist' spin on its actions all you want, but it is not waging a war against imperialism. Rather the opposite - the whole point of IS is to recreate, geographically, the sphere of power occupied by the Abbasids of the Islamic Empire, except in place of the rational enlightenment of the Abbasids, IS seeks to impose a uniformly extreme reading of 'Islam' (one that is not recognised by almost anyone else in the Muslim world outside the 30,000 or so IS fighters) on the people it subjugates in the territories it occupies.

To say that 'the working class' of Syria, or any other country, has anything to gain from supporting these reactionary scumbags is just idiotic, plainly wrong, and not supported by ANY evidence.

I think it is important to distinguish between supporting certain actions aimed at imperialists, no matter who does those particular actions, versus politically supporting a particular group in an intercommunal conflict. Communists don't take sides in intercommunal conflicts between reactionary forces. However, we do not mind when one or more of those forces attack the imperialists. In fact, we say it is good for the imperialists to be attacked. Of course, any real struggle against imperialism must be turned into a struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat which can only be done by exposing and getting rid of misleaders like the Islamic State. But still, I am glad when a drone or imperialist soldier is destroyed, whether or not who destroyed it was a Bolshevik or a Jihadist!

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I'm sorry, this is just so wrong on so many levels. IS is not an anti-imperialist force;

And if anyone bothered to actually read Workers' Vanguard before posting these irrelevant "but think of the children!" rants, they would notice that the SL does not describe Daesh as anti-imperialist. Nor do they offer "critical support". Here is what WV actually says:

"Daniel Lazare engages in more than a little journalistic three-card monte to support his charge that WV describes the quite gruesome forces that constitute ISIS as anti-imperialist. In fact the word “anti-imperialist” was nowhere used in our response to Loren S. to describe the Islamic State. We made our position crystal clear in the very next sentence to the one from which Lazare draws his quote: “At the same time, we are in staunch political opposition to ISIS, whose bloodthirsty methods and retrograde outlook are truly repugnant.”

We do stand with ISIS when it targets the forces of U.S. imperialism and its proxies in the region. (Its military conflicts with the U.S. go unmentioned in Lazare’s letter.) As we have stressed since the U.S. began air strikes against ISIS last year, any setback for the U.S. and its proxies would impede imperialist designs for the region and be in the interests of the exploited and the oppressed. That statement no more means that ISIS is anti-imperialist than President Obama’s now-abandoned promise to withdraw U.S. military forces from the region made him a champion of world peace."

Now, I have my reservations concerning some of the formulations in WV. I don't see what "standing with" Daesh means. It made sense for Bolsheviks to "stand with" even the German puppet Zhordania against the imperialist encroachment of the Ottoman Army of Islam. This, unfortunately, is mostly posturing. But at no point do the SL alibi Daesh politically (as some people on this site do with Kurdish sectarianism, and as some people on this site did with the Islamist Syrian opposition, whose members have mostly defected to Daesh now).

In fact, Daesh, like all murderous sectarian gangs, is monstrous. But the monster that is Daesh did not appear out of nowhere; it did not leap fully-armed out of the forehead of some theologian, either. The monster was created by US imperialism. And now it has turned against its creator and is snapping its jaws at US forces. If it could throw the US out of the region, it would inadvertently do the workers of the region a great service, because as long as the US continues to interfere in the region the intervention will birth new monsters. Even if Daesh should be destroyed, it will be replaced by something else equally monstrous - or the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and Syria will be destroyed.


it is an anti-civilisation

No, it's not. Sticking random political epithets on things we dislike is not how serious debate is conducted.


and anti-progressive, pro-reactionary force that is based on a falsified view of the Islamic Empire of the middle ages.

As if the average Daesh member cares about the so-called "Islamic Empire", falsified or not. The basis of Daesh is not some airy-fairy metaphysics or creative history but Arab Sunni sectarianism. That is why many of the administrative staff of Daesh are former Baathists.


You can put your own 'anti-imperialist' spin on its actions all you want, but it is not waging a war against imperialism. Rather the opposite - the whole point of IS is to recreate, geographically, the sphere of power occupied by the Abbasids of the Islamic Empire, except in place of the rational enlightenment of the Abbasids, IS seeks to impose a uniformly extreme reading of 'Islam' (one that is not recognised by almost anyone else in the Muslim world outside the 30,000 or so IS fighters) on the people it subjugates in the territories it occupies.

Well, at least Spain is safe. Perhaps another movement can arise whose "point" is to recreate the Umayyad "sphere of power". Not to mention that many of the salient features of the "uniformly extreme reading of Islam" (why the quotes?) date to the Abbasid state, including the heavy seclusion of women. None of this has anything to do with Daesh, of course, because as per above members of Daesh are regular people involved in a fratricidal civil war, and Daesh is an expression of their sectarianism, not a historical reenactment society.

But more importantly, you're playing fast and loose with terms. Imperialism has a very specific meaning for us, and it certainly has nothing with the Abbasid or Ummayyad empire. Indeed, the chief imperialist power today, the US, does not proclaim itself to be an empire (Emperor Norton notwithstanding), and has not annexed a territory since 1947.


But who are you to tell the Kurds what to do and not to do?

What "Kurds"? "Kurds" aren't a homogeneous group. What you refer to as "the Kurds" is the PKK (and definitely not e.g. the Kurdish Hizbalah). Who are we to tell them what to do? Well, we're not telling them what to do. We're criticising their alliance with imperialism, acting as boots on the ground for the US. The same stupid moralist question can be posed about anything: who are we to criticise Ho Chi Minh's alliance with French imperialism, who are we to criticise Bandera's alliance with German imperialism?


This is partially true, but I think it's also true that given the realities of the Syrian civil war, the bravery of the Rojavan Kurds in setting up a democratic experiment actually qualifies as socialistic in some ways; whilst they clearly 'haven't read Marx' per se, the idea of placing humanity above barbarity and democracy above military diktat is something that all socialists should stand uncritically behind, whether or not said ideology is draped in the red flag.

Only it turns out that if you look closely at "humanity" it is revealed as military dictat of the PKK and its supreme leader comrade Ocalan and his magnificent mustache, which seems to feature prominently in various PKK-used flags.

But no. "Bravery" and "humanity" and "democracy" don't make socialism. Socialism has a very specific meaning. "Rojava" (which is simply the Kurdish term for "the West"; we might as well call Syria Bilad al-Sham) is not socialist because the means of production are in private hands, the economy consists of commodity production through wage labour and the bourgeois state hasn't been smashed (in fact the entire region is still mostly administered by Syrian officials).

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I think it is important to distinguish between supporting certain actions aimed at imperialists, no matter who does those particular actions, versus politically supporting a particular group in an intercommunal conflict. Communists don't take sides in intercommunal conflicts between reactionary forces. However, we do not mind when one or more of those forces attack the imperialists. In fact, we say it is good for the imperialists to be attacked. Of course, any real struggle against imperialism must be turned into a struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat which can only be done by exposing and getting rid of misleaders like the Islamic State. But still, I am glad when a drone or imperialist soldier is destroyed, whether or not who destroyed it was a Bolshevik or a Jihadist!

Again, you're completely missing the point. IS are not fighting an anti-imperialist war. The fact that they are brown and blowing up white people all over the place does not mean they are anti-imperialist. Remember that the majority of their victims are other middle eastern muslims, and further remember that the majority of bloodshed caused in the Syrian civil war is from Assad's side.

Cheer IS on as some prelude to anti-imperialist struggle all you want, it doesn't make it true. If you follow the evidence this becomes clear; obviously, some people choose to ignore evidence that doesn't fit their worldview.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

And if anyone bothered to actually read Workers' Vanguard before posting these irrelevant "but think of the children!" rants, they would notice that the SL does not describe Daesh as anti-imperialist. Nor do they offer "critical support". Here is what WV actually says:

"Daniel Lazare engages in more than a little journalistic three-card monte to support his charge that WV describes the quite gruesome forces that constitute ISIS as anti-imperialist. In fact the word “anti-imperialist” was nowhere used in our response to Loren S. to describe the Islamic State. We made our position crystal clear in the very next sentence to the one from which Lazare draws his quote: “At the same time, we are in staunch political opposition to ISIS, whose bloodthirsty methods and retrograde outlook are truly repugnant.”

We do stand with ISIS when it targets the forces of U.S. imperialism and its proxies in the region. (Its military conflicts with the U.S. go unmentioned in Lazare’s letter.) As we have stressed since the U.S. began air strikes against ISIS last year, any setback for the U.S. and its proxies would impede imperialist designs for the region and be in the interests of the exploited and the oppressed. That statement no more means that ISIS is anti-imperialist than President Obama’s now-abandoned promise to withdraw U.S. military forces from the region made him a champion of world peace."

Now, I have my reservations concerning some of the formulations in WV. I don't see what "standing with" Daesh means. It made sense for Bolsheviks to "stand with" even the German puppet Zhordania against the imperialist encroachment of the Ottoman Army of Islam. This, unfortunately, is mostly posturing. But at no point do the SL alibi Daesh politically (as some people on this site do with Kurdish sectarianism, and as some people on this site did with the Islamist Syrian opposition, whose members have mostly defected to Daesh now).

The section you quoted is just disingenuous. To say 'we don't support IS politically' and then to say 'we stand by IS' is, as you say, concerning. It sounds very much like support without actually saying the world 'support', posturing or not.


In fact, Daesh, like all murderous sectarian gangs, is monstrous. But the monster that is Daesh did not appear out of nowhere; it did not leap fully-armed out of the forehead of some theologian, either. The monster was created by US imperialism. And now it has turned against its creator and is snapping its jaws at US forces. If it could throw the US out of the region, it would inadvertently do the workers of the region a great service, because as long as the US continues to interfere in the region the intervention will birth new monsters. Even if Daesh should be destroyed, it will be replaced by something else equally monstrous - or the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and Syria will be destroyed.

IS is not turning against US imperialism, though. That's not its aim, no matter how many times you repeat it. US foreign policy has a large responsibility for the current myriad of wars and sectarian battles raging in the middle east, but this is no simple imperial vs anti-imperial, US v ISIS conflict. To paint the situation as such is exactly the mis-reading that leads naive leftists virtually into bed with groups like IS (sorry, 'virtually standing by groups like IS').


No, it's not. Sticking random political epithets on things we dislike is not how serious debate is conducted.

Unless you view civilisation as extremist uniformity, chopping heads off and parading them in squares and so on, then yes it is perfectly legitimate to say IS are anti-civilisation.


As if the average Daesh member cares about the so-called "Islamic Empire", falsified or not. The basis of Daesh is not some airy-fairy metaphysics or creative history but Arab Sunni sectarianism. That is why many of the administrative staff of Daesh are former Baathists.

IS has an ideological basis that forms its strategy; that basis, as is belied by its name, is to roughly recreate the Abbasid empire's terrain, from central asia, through Baghdad, through to Cordoba.


What "Kurds"? "Kurds" aren't a homogeneous group. What you refer to as "the Kurds" is the PKK (and definitely not e.g. the Kurdish Hizbalah). Who are we to tell them what to do? Well, we're not telling them what to do. We're criticising their alliance with imperialism, acting as boots on the ground for the US. The same stupid moralist question can be posed about anything: who are we to criticise Ho Chi Minh's alliance with French imperialism, who are we to criticise Bandera's alliance with German imperialism?

Perhaps the moralist question of 'who are we...' was a mistake on my part.

I am not referring to the PKK. I am referring to Kurdish people living in Rojava, who are enthusiastically taking up democratic debate within the confines of Democratic Confederalism. Even the most cursory reading of news and viewing of videos confirms that this is the case.


Only it turns out that if you look closely at "humanity" it is revealed as military dictat of the PKK and its supreme leader comrade Ocalan and his magnificent mustache, which seems to feature prominently in various PKK-used flags.

Whilst the cult of Ocalan is perhaps difficult to understand and not perfect, as I say again any cursory viewing of the facts through newswires, reports, and videos suggests that what you are saying is not true.


But no. "Bravery" and "humanity" and "democracy" don't make socialism. Socialism has a very specific meaning. "Rojava" (which is simply the Kurdish term for "the West"; we might as well call Syria Bilad al-Sham) is not socialist because the means of production are in private hands, the economy consists of commodity production through wage labour and the bourgeois state hasn't been smashed (in fact the entire region is still mostly administered by Syrian officials).

What would a socialist do in the situations of the Kurds in Rojava, though? Lenin died whilst re-establishing private capital in Russia; not many people say he wasn't a socialist. To criticise the Kurds for not expropriating the means of production is silly, since it is clear that there are very few means of production to expropriate in Rojava, given its geopolitical situation (borders with Turkey, Turkey's interventions, and the massive fuck-off civil war raging all around it).

[Fourth Internationalist]

Again, you're completely missing the point. IS are not fighting an anti-imperialist war. The fact that they are brown and blowing up white people all over the place does not mean they are anti-imperialist. Remember that the majority of their victims are other middle eastern muslims, and further remember that the majority of bloodshed caused in the Syrian civil war is from Assad's side.

Cheer IS on as some prelude to anti-imperialist struggle all you want, it doesn't make it true. If you follow the evidence this becomes clear; obviously, some people choose to ignore evidence that doesn't fit their worldview.

Of course the Islamic State is not fighting an anti-imperialist war! That was my exact point when I state, "Of course, any real struggle against imperialism must be turned into a struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat which can only be done by exposing and getting rid of misleaders like the Islamic State." The only anti-imperialist war is a revolutionary class war for the rule of the working class.

You also interpreted this as arguing that the Islamic State is a prelude to anti-imperialist struggle. In fact, I think it is the opposite. The struggle against the Islamic State and all other bourgeois misleaders would be the only prelude to a genuine, realizable anti-imperialist struggle.

Further, you are arguing that I think anything they do is anti-imperialist. This is the opposite of what I think. I think when they shoot down an imperialist's drone, they are doing something anti-imperialist. This is literally an action against the imperialists, even if just for a moment being, that I support and all other communists should support (we do support destroying imperialist drones, yes?). The murder of innocent people, white or Arab, does not fall under that category of actions I support. I am glad when the Islamic State, or anyone else, shoots down a drone. I am not glad when they, or anyone else, murders innocent people.

[Spectre of Spartacism]

IS is not an anti-imperialist force; it is an anti-civilisation and anti-progressive, pro-reactionary force

It should be noted that if they signed up on the forum, we'd have moderators arguing that they should be welcome here, at least on the basis of being "anti-civ." Politics does make strange bed fellows, does it not?


To say that 'the working class' of Syria, or any other country, has anything to gain from supporting these reactionary scumbags is just idiotic, plainly wrong, and not supported by ANY evidence.

Who is calling for supporting IS? The WV article cited earlier was supporting the defeat of imperialism. Big difference. Revolutionaries do not support the political program of the IS. They do not want IS to win. They want the proletariat, fighting for international socialism, to win. It is possible to cheer on the destruction of American drones for a variety of reasons, without necessarily supporting the political program of the people doing the firing. That is the difference between political and military support, a basic component of Trotskyism that you don't seem to be familiar with. Revolutionaries support the targeting of imperialist forces, with the understanding that reactionary views of the kind that animate IS have a material basis in the decay of capitalism. In this view, capitalism is being opposed in a very mediated way with the targeting of imperialist forces, since imperialism is a vital prop to global capitalism as it staggers to its demise, creating sundry reactionary forces like IS in its wake.

If you think about it from this non-impressionistic, materialist perspective, it means that the defeat of American imperialists would be a huge defeat for IS, as IS was and is animated by the turmoil wreaked by imperialism over the past 100 years, especially the past 15. Not to mention that the only consistent anti-imperialists in the Islamist bunch, the ones not willing to broker a deal with compromises to the oppression of the imperialist bourgeoisie, would be the proletariat. But accepting this analysis would require a different methodology than the one you are working with, the one peddled by mainstream bourgeois media, etc.


But who are you to tell the Kurds what to do and not to do?

Who are you to question what I can and cannot say in regards to what people should do to achieve a particular goal? It is tiring, this game you incessantly play of declaring out of bounds the act of making an assertion about a topic a person isn't immediately experiencing himself or herself.


This is partially true, but I think it's also true that given the realities of the Syrian civil war, the bravery of the Rojavan Kurds in setting up a democratic experiment actually qualifies as socialistic in some ways; whilst they clearly 'haven't read Marx' per se, the idea of placing humanity above barbarity and democracy above military diktat is something that all socialists should stand uncritically behind, whether or not said ideology is draped in the red flag.

Setting up an experiment in bourgeois democracy is not something revolutionaries get behind.

[The Feral Underclass]

What is it then? What does it represent and how is it as a possible alternative to capitalism worth exploring? It doesn't challenge the pillars of capitalism - private property / division of labour - at all.

But that's not actually true. The communes in Rojava are challenging private property by creating worker run co-operatives that provide goods and services for free -- they're just not abolishing private property more generally. Their attempts to abolish the use of money also demonstrate a commitment to challenging capitalist relations of production. But of course the revolution so far has been a political one more than an economic one, I don't think any one can deny that.


Now, you could say that they are the lesser evil in times of no revolutionary upheaval and that the Kurds will implement various progressive changes, from which workers actually could benefit, which might even happen. But in the end they are still supporting capitalism and I don't see why this would be interesting to anyone seriously interested in the international emancipation of the working class. Maybe I'm a pessimist but I believe that the period of romantic revolutions is over and that there's nothing to gain out of them anymore.

There's nothing romantic about what is happening in Rojava. It is brutal, messy and contradictory. But this is not an experiment in social democracy. This is not an attempt to get the state to manage capitalism more fairly. This is an anti-capitalist attempt to decentralise political and economic systems and challenge capitalist relations of production, while also, unfortunately, consisting of contradictions at the same time.

The statement "in the end" is fallacious since "the end" is nowhere in sight, and their "support for capitalism" is a lie. It's not a question of them supporting capitalism, it's a question of the revolution so far limiting itself to a process that reproduces capitalist relations. The question then is how do you challenge that? Without an effective left communist opposition outside and within the Rojavan revolution then it is going to be impossible.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

The section you quoted is just disingenuous. To say 'we don't support IS politically' and then to say 'we stand by IS' is, as you say, concerning. It sounds very much like support without actually saying the world 'support', posturing or not.

There is an obvious difference between wanting a specific military action by a group to succeed, and supporting the political programme of that group. Again I refer to Georgia: there, in order to check the advance of the Ottoman Army of Islam, the Bolsheviks found it necessary to support for a time military action by the Menshevik regime, including the destruction of infrastructure needed by the Ottomans. Obviously this does not mean the Bolsheviks supported the Menshevik political programme, and in fact when Baku was secure Moscow would organise the overthrow of the bourgeois Menshevik government.


IS is not turning against US imperialism, though. That's not its aim, no matter how many times you repeat it. US foreign policy has a large responsibility for the current myriad of wars and sectarian battles raging in the middle east, but this is no simple imperial vs anti-imperial, US v ISIS conflict. To paint the situation as such is exactly the mis-reading that leads naive leftists virtually into bed with groups like IS (sorry, 'virtually standing by groups like IS').

Daesh is currently being targeted by US forces, and is engaged in ground warfare against the PKK proxies for US imperialism. Those are the facts, and no matter of waffling about "aims" is going to make them go away.


Unless you view civilisation as extremist uniformity, chopping heads off and parading them in squares and so on, then yes it is perfectly legitimate to say IS are anti-civilisation.

Civilisation does in fact include "extremist uniformity", "chopping heads off" (thankfully the Islamic barbarism of Daesh is being opposed by such outstanding forces for human rights in the region as Iran, which indeed doesn't chop people's heads off but leaves them to slowly strangle on the gallows). It has since, well, the first state societies.


IS has an ideological basis that forms its strategy; that basis, as is belied by its name, is to roughly recreate the Abbasid empire's terrain, from central asia, through Baghdad, through to Cordoba.

Cordoba was never under the Abbasids. Indeed one might wonder why the Sunni Arab Daesh would choose the Abbasids to imitate, given their origin in a Shi'a insurgency and reliance on mawali administrators. But it's ridiculous to suggest that Daesh is some sort of historical reenactment society. Why isn't the Daesh attacking Turkey, for example, to reclaim former territories of the Hamadids and the Armenian emirate?


Perhaps the moralist question of 'who are we...' was a mistake on my part.

I am not referring to the PKK. I am referring to Kurdish people living in Rojava, who are enthusiastically taking up democratic debate within the confines of Democratic Confederalism. Even the most cursory reading of news and viewing of videos confirms that this is the case.

That's odd; to me, reading the news and "viewing videos" indicates that the PKK is ruling the "Rojava" statelet much as other factions in the civil war rule their own statelets, with more "democratic" rhetoric perhaps, but also with conscription, policies being dictated by the Supreme Leader and so on.


Whilst the cult of Ocalan is perhaps difficult to understand and not perfect, as I say again any cursory viewing of the facts through newswires, reports, and videos suggests that what you are saying is not true.

There is nothing particularly difficult to understand about the cult of personality surrounding Ocalan. Every Stalinist guerrilla leader has one. As for the supposed democratic debate in the PKK, it is sufficient to note that the PKK "converted" to "Democratic Confederalism" when the Supreme Leader personally did.

It's like a bad joke, a second-rate copy of the "you are all individuals" scene from the Life of Brian.


What would a socialist do in the situations of the Kurds in Rojava, though? Lenin died whilst re-establishing private capital in Russia; not many people say he wasn't a socialist. To criticise the Kurds for not expropriating the means of production is silly, since it is clear that there are very few means of production to expropriate in Rojava, given its geopolitical situation (borders with Turkey, Turkey's interventions, and the massive fuck-off civil war raging all around it).

Lenin didn't "die whilst re-establishing private capital". People have this crazy idea that everything was nationalised during Military Communism, but this simply wasn't true. Russia, mind, wasn't socialist either, as socialism is impossible in one country. But it was a state where the bourgeois state apparatus had been smashed and the workers ruled. The bourgeois state apparatus remains functioning in "Rojava". And obviously the workers don't rule in "Rojava". By the way, the excuse that "there aren't any means of production" is surreal. Dusty plains and all that, but do you think the people living in the region (not just Kurds, although if the PKK wins...) live by photosynthesis?


So your argument is that it's not communism so it won't look like communism?

It just seems like an entirely redundant argument to make if you take into consideration the content of this thread. Yeah, communalism isn't communism so it's not going to look like it, is it? But it exists as a movement and has socialist adherents in a conflict zone who are implementing its ideas. Now what?

So "communalism" isn't communism, but it has socialist adherents? You're either blatantly contradicting yourself, or you're inventing some kind of "socialism" that is not communism - much like the Stalinists with their notorious SioC, or the mutualists and other "anarchists" who want to retain markets. So far it seems many people on this thread think that "socialism" is cooperatives and democracy. Well then, we can say that this sort of socialism exists, doesn't challenge capitalism, and is a dead end that has nothing to do with what communists, whether anarchists or Marxists, want.

[The Feral Underclass]

There is an obvious difference between wanting a specific military action by a group to succeed, and supporting the political programme of that group.

But is there? These specific military actions by the group are made by the group in order to advance their political programme. I can't see how you can it can be logically consistent to argue for the success of a military action but not support the reason for the action. I mean, you can make that statement, but it doesn't really relate to reality particularly well. The two things are inextricably linked. The action doesn't exist in vaccuum of meaning. The action wouldn't even exist at all without the political programme.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

But is there? These specific military actions by the group are made by the group in order to advance their political programme. I can't see how you can it can be logically consistent to argue for the success of a military action but not support the reason for the action.

Again, I have given an example - the temporary Bolshevik support for military action by the DRG when the Baku oil fields were threatened by the Army of Islam.

[The Feral Underclass]

Again, I have given an example - the temporary Bolshevik support for military action by the DRG when the Baku oil fields were threatened by the Army of Islam.

I know nothing about this situation.

EDIT: I will look into it, but how do you think this examples deals with what I suggest is a logical inconsistency? Surely this is just another example of that inconsistency?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I know nothing about this situation.

What do you want to know?

[The Feral Underclass]

Well, I edited my post. If you gave a general background on the history and then answered my question, that would be lovely.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Well, I edited my post. If you gave a general background on the history and then answered my question, that would be lovely.

The Democratic Republic of Georgia was a Menshevik regime in modern Georgia and parts of surrounding Caucasian states, a bloody capitalist regime that persecuted Bolsheviks and national minorities. For much of its existence it was also a puppet of Germany.

In 1918, the Ottoman Army of Islam was, on the pretext of being "invited" by the (Ottoman puppet) Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, advancing on the Baku commune in order to seize the Baku oil fields. This would have been a disaster to the Bolshevik authorities, dependent on Baku oil. Now, the path of the Army of Islam took them through Georgia. The Georgian government resisted this, because the Germans, who were resigned to buying oil from Russia, didn't want Ottomans to seize the oil fields, jack up the prices and endanger German designs for the region. So the Georgians did everything short of openly declaring war on the Ottomans to impede the passage of the Army of Islam, blowing up bridges, holding up Ottoman forces and so on. At times the ramshackle Georgian forces and their German patrons openly clashed with Nuri-pasha's forces.

Now, a Menshevik is an infinitely more disgusting creature than an Islamist, as the latter openly admits to being reactionary. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks supported their actions - even though Georgia was a bloody capitalist regime, for their own petty reasons they were dealing blows on an imperialist force that was endangering the workers' republic. But this does not mean the Bolsheviks supported the Menshevik political programme - one would have to have slept through history class to claim that. In fact, when the Ukrainian front had stabilised, the Bolsheviks launched an invasion of Georgia and destroyed the Menshevik regime. There was nothing inconsistent about this.

[Spectre of Spartacism]

Blows against imperialism hurt IS, even when IS is dealing them. What do you think IS is? It's a band of Sunni militias led by dispossessed Baathists attempting to regain some foothold on state power, in a region where state power is the primary means of securing the creature comforts so many people in the West take for granted. If you strip away the grandiose rhetoric about religion, and analyze the actual politics, that's what it is. The talk about having a global caliphate is to be taken as seriously as the idea that the U.S. is a force for world peace and wants to secure global democracy. It's not that the leaders of these various entities don't believe it; it's that it only decisive in shaping the behavior of the rubes like Bill Maher, while for people who are interested in state power, either in building it or smashing it, an entirely different logic is at play.

If the IS is an aspiring state, and it is, then the question becomes: what task for the proletariat in Rojava/northern Syria? Not the proletariat just of that area, but the international working class, as the working class can only ever be international at this point anyway. And here I think it is clear, the task is to smash the bourgeois state. But right now, in that region, there are four powers jockeying to try to establish bourgeois order in the region, the incredibly powerful imperialists operating at the behest of multi-trillion dollar cartels, the teetering Syrian state of Assad backed by Russian forces trying to maintain some foothold of influence in the region, the PKK operating at the behest of those imperialists under the guise of establishing "independence" for their people, and then a bunch of cynical ex-Baathists who have enlisted a few true-believer fanatics to their side.

Revolutionaries have no political side among those bourgeois fractions. None of them has put forward an independent proletarian program. None of them represents socialism. At best one of those fractions has mastered the art of "local is beautiful" sloganeering to tug at the heart strings of the predominantly petty bourgeois sensibilities of the liberal intelligentsia and pseudo-left in the Western imperialist states. Ultimately, they all need to be struggled against politically.

But the politics of the situation is the result of a particular global configuration of class power, and capitalist state power specifically, as it has developed unevenly throughout the world. Capitalism developed first in Western Europe and spread throughout much of Europe and Anglo-America, only disseminating to Asia, Africa, and South America at a time when developing industries in those regions were controlled by the much larger, older, and usually politically influential industries of the same kind in the early developing countries. The point here isn't a history lesson, but to make the point that not all aspirants to state power are created equal, that revolutionaries have a duty to understand the way these different aspiring bourgeois state leaders have different relationships to the international proletariat.

The Sunni militants aren't happy with how the U.S. intervened to tip the previous balance of ethnic (in that region, often synonymous with class) forces in the region, and is now fighting tooth-and-nail to restore the old order. Its goal, ultimately, is to get a bigger slice of the bourgeois pie. Far from being "anti-civilization" it is very much animated by a particular vision of modernity, one that mixes rigid codes of personal conduct (symbolic in their minds of a rejection of Western political and social control) with 21st-century ways of doing business, since doing business is the only way any state can survive in the international system.

To the extent that they establish the state that they hope can encapsulate the old pre-2003 order, they will only be able to do so by making some kind of peace with the Western imperialists and vice versa, in order to carve out a space in which the state can sink its economic foundations. This means trading with the imperialist powers (even in the days of the toughest sanctions with Iran, American companies has hundreds of millions of dollars in economic transactions in the country). It means cooperating economically with the imperialist powers. Because it will be a bourgeois state, it will have to prioritize its business relationships, its capitalist economic foundations, over any high-minded notions of independent national development.

And this is what I mean when I say that blows against imperialism are mediated blows against IS. To the extent that IS "wins" and becomes an actual state, it becomes less and less distinct from any other bourgeois state. It will end up serving the same master, and that master is not Allah. That master is capital. One look at how sclerotic and cynical the Ayatollahs in Iran appear now should leave no doubt about whether Heaven or Earth will triumph when it comes to determining how a state power will function. Its die-hard faction will become increasingly alienated and marginalized as the Islamic State becomes more concerned about being a State than it does about being Islamic in some premodern fundamentalist sense. Meanwhile, Sunni workers who might support the IS in order to eek out a better life will have a different understanding of how to organize the state than the captains of the burgeoning industries there. The entity as it now exists will come apart at the seams along class lines. Blows against imperialist forces undermine the IS because the removal of more overt forms of super-exploitation and political control by imperialists will clarify for workers around the world the similarity of class interests, the incestuousness of relationships, between Islamic capital and Imperialist capital. It will clarify for workers that the IS is just aspiring to become a form of, and can only ever be, junior partners in a system dominated by the big boys of capital down the street.

Once imperialism is not understood as "bad things" or "military fighting," but is understood as an economic maneuver by the more advanced capitalist countries to dictate and benefit from the capitalist development of the less advanced countries, once it is understood that the military dominance of those imperialist powers represents the essence of capitalism at its present stage and not just some incidental pock mark, it becomes possible to understand how a blow against imperialist forces is implicitly a blow against capitalism, and how the struggle for national self-determination implicitly points toward the only force capable of delivering it: the working class, united for socialism.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Daesh is currently being targeted by US forces, and is engaged in ground warfare against the PKK proxies for US imperialism. Those are the facts, and no matter of waffling about "aims" is going to make them go away.

But these are not facts. Saying the PKK are proxies for US imperialism is your own interpretation of the situation, it is not a fact in and of itself.


Civilisation does in fact include "extremist uniformity", "chopping heads off" (thankfully the Islamic barbarism of Daesh is being opposed by such outstanding forces for human rights in the region as Iran, which indeed doesn't chop people's heads off but leaves them to slowly strangle on the gallows). It has since, well, the first state societies.

Isn't it true that civilisation is a process? I'm not seeking to say that western liberal democracies are the pinnacle of civilisation, but it would certainly be fair to assume that leftists agree that moving from societies based on capital and corporal punishment to societies based on rehabilitation, and moving from societies based on war and power to societies based on peace and equality would equate to progress under civilisation.


Cordoba was never under the Abbasids. Indeed one might wonder why the Sunni Arab Daesh would choose the Abbasids to imitate, given their origin in a Shi'a insurgency and reliance on mawali administrators. But it's ridiculous to suggest that Daesh is some sort of historical reenactment society. Why isn't the Daesh attacking Turkey, for example, to reclaim former territories of the Hamadids and the Armenian emirate?

My mistake, I misread a slightly confusing map re: Abbasid and Ummayad caliphates. Though from what I understand, there was a closeness between the two caliphates that extended to trade, the translation movement and intellectual and administrative affairs that meant an 'islamic empire' stretched from Asia to Cordoba. Perhaps I am overstating this element.

I imagine that IS isn't attacking Turkey because Turkey is offering them practical and logistical support.


That's odd; to me, reading the news and "viewing videos" indicates that the PKK is ruling the "Rojava" statelet much as other factions in the civil war rule their own statelets, with more "democratic" rhetoric perhaps, but also with conscription, policies being dictated by the Supreme Leader and so on.

I haven't gotten that impression. For a state under siege, democratic involvement seems remarkable.


Lenin didn't "die whilst re-establishing private capital". People have this crazy idea that everything was nationalised during Military Communism, but this simply wasn't true. Russia, mind, wasn't socialist either, as socialism is impossible in one country. But it was a state where the bourgeois state apparatus had been smashed and the workers ruled. The bourgeois state apparatus remains functioning in "Rojava". And obviously the workers don't rule in "Rojava". By the way, the excuse that "there aren't any means of production" is surreal. Dusty plains and all that, but do you think the people living in the region (not just Kurds, although if the PKK wins...) live by photosynthesis?

So on the one hand in Russia the 'workers' ruled because some people that represented them carried out the New Economic Policy, and this makes them socialists, yet in Rojava when something similar happens those people aren't considered socialists simply because of...what? I'm confused. Aside from red flags and paying homage to Marx et al., I don't see the difference.

[The Feral Underclass]

The Democratic Republic of Georgia was a Menshevik regime in modern Georgia and parts of surrounding Caucasian states, a bloody capitalist regime that persecuted Bolsheviks and national minorities. For much of its existence it was also a puppet of Germany.

In 1918, the Ottoman Army of Islam was, on the pretext of being "invited" by the (Ottoman puppet) Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, advancing on the Baku commune in order to seize the Baku oil fields. This would have been a disaster to the Bolshevik authorities, dependent on Baku oil. Now, the path of the Army of Islam took them through Georgia. The Georgian government resisted this, because the Germans, who were resigned to buying oil from Russia, didn't want Ottomans to seize the oil fields, jack up the prices and endanger German designs for the region. So the Georgians did everything short of openly declaring war on the Ottomans to impede the passage of the Army of Islam, blowing up bridges, holding up Ottoman forces and so on. At times the ramshackle Georgian forces and their German patrons openly clashed with Nuri-pasha's forces.

Now, a Menshevik is an infinitely more disgusting creature than an Islamist, as the latter openly admits to being reactionary. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks supported their actions - even though Georgia was a bloody capitalist regime, for their own petty reasons they were dealing blows on an imperialist force that was endangering the workers' republic. But this does not mean the Bolsheviks supported the Menshevik political programme - one would have to have slept through history class to claim that. In fact, when the Ukrainian front had stabilised, the Bolsheviks launched an invasion of Georgia and destroyed the Menshevik regime. There was nothing inconsistent about this.

So if we compare this particular event with the Spartacist League defending Daesh, what benefit will the Spartacist League receive from this support? In your example the Bolsheviks (who are a nation state here, not a political sect) sought to benefit from their support of their enemies because they needed oil. This seems like a very specific practical benefit. The Spartacist League on the other hand is a tiny political sect that has no relation whatsoever with the events in Syria nor any military or strategic operation in the West that could possibly benefit from such support.

There is clearly a quantifiable difference between a large nation state such as that led by the Bolshevik government, deceiving and ultimately reasserting control over an historically subjugated imperial satellite for its own economic purposes, and a political sect defending/supporting a genocidal, child raping, religious extremist organisation that, as of yet, seems to be for no strategic or military purpose. Surely this isn't just a matter of principle?

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Is there any analysis of the economic program and political model in Rojava not whipped up by Leftist sycophants for the PYD or people who take a fundamentalist sectarian stance against "communalism"? It might help answer some of these questions.

Basically, it seems people are arguing for their assumptions with insufficient evidence.

[The Feral Underclass]

Lol. I don't think you'd find many on this board who were even mildly supportive of the PYD, let alone sycophantic towards them.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Lol. I don't think you'd find many on this board who were even mildly supportive of the PYD, let alone sycophantic towards them.
I wasn't speaking of posters, but external sources of information.