Results 1 to 20 of 76
roarmag article on the new libertarian course of the PKK
The new PKK: unleashing a social revolution in Kurdistan
by Rafael Taylor on August 17, 2014
As the prospect of Kurdish independence becomes ever more imminent, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party transforms itself into a force for radical democracy.Excluded from negotiations and betrayed by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne after having been promised a state of their own by the World War I allies during the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds are the largest stateless minority in the world. But today, apart from a stubborn Iran, increasingly few obstacles remain to de jure Kurdish independence in northern Iraq. Turkey and Israel have pledged support while Syria and Iraq’s hands are tied by the rapid advances of the Islamic State (formerly ISIS).
With the Kurdish flag flying high over all official buildings and the Peshmerga keeping the Islamists at the gate with the assistance of long overdue US military aid, southern Kurdistan (Iraq) join their comrades in western Kurdistan (Syria) as the second de facto autonomous region of the new Kurdistan. They have already started exporting their own oil and have re-taken oil-rich Kirkuk, they have their own secular, elected parliament and pluralistic society, they have taken their bid for statehoodhood to the UN, and there is nothing the Iraqi government could do — or the US would do without Israeli support — to stop it.
The Kurdish struggle, however, is anything but narrowly nationalistic. In the mountains above Erbil, in the ancient heartland of Kurdistan winding across the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, a social revolution has been born.
Image: Current map of Syria and Iraq. Yellow shades in northern Syria are areas controlled by Syrian Kurds, green shades in northeastern Iraq are areas controlled by Iraqi Kurds (source: Wikimedia Commons).The Theory of Democratic Confederalism
At the turn of the century, as the lifelong US radical Murray Bookchin gave up on trying to revitalize the contemporary anarchist movement under his philosophy of social ecology, PKK founder and leader Abdullah Öcalan was arrested in Kenya by Turkish authorities and sentenced to death for treason. In the years that followed, the elderly anarchist gained an unlikely devotee in the hardened militant, whose paramilitary organization — the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — is widely listed as a terrorist organization for waging a violent war of national liberation against Turkey.
In his years in solitary confinement, running the PKK behind bars as his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, Öcalan adopted a form of libertarian socialism so obscure that few anarchists have even heard of it: Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism. Öcalan further modified, rarefied and rebranded Bookchin’s vision as “democratic confederalism,” with the consequence that the Group of Communities in Kurdistan (Koma Civakên Kurdistan or KCK), the PKK’s territorial experiment in a free and directly democratic society, has largely been kept a secret from the vast majority of anarchists, let alone the general public.
Although Öcalan’s conversion was the turning point, a broader renaissance of libertarian leftist and independent literature was sweeping through the mountains and passing hands between the rank-and-file after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. “[They] analysed books and articles by philosophers, feminists, (neo-)anarchists, libertarian communists, communalists, and social ecologists. That is how writers like Murray Bookchin [and others] came into their focus,” Kurdish activist Ercan Ayboga tells us.
Öcalan embarked, in his prison writings, on a thorough re-examination and self-criticism of the terrible violence, dogmatism, personality cult and authoritarianism he had fostered: “It has become clear that our theory, programme and praxis of the 1970s produced nothing but futile separatism and violence and, even worse, that the nationalism we should have opposed infested all of us. Even though we opposed it in principle and rhetoric, we nonetheless accepted it as inevitable.” Once the unquestioned leader, Öcalan now reasoned that “dogmatism is nurtured by abstract truths which become habitual ways of thinking. As soon as you put such general truths into words you feel like a high priest in the service of his god. That was the mistake I made.”
Öcalan, an atheist, was finally writing as a free-thinker, unshackled from Marxist-Leninist mythology. He indicated that he was seeking an “alternative to capitalism” and a “replacement for the collapsed model of … ‘really existing socialism’,” when he came across Bookchin. His theory of democratic confederalism developed out of a combination of inspiration from communalist intellectuals, “movements like the Zapatistas”, and other historical factors from the struggle in northern Kurdistan (Turkey). Öcalan proclaimed himself a student of Bookchin, and after a failed email correspondence with the elderly theorist, who was to his regret too sick for an exchange on his deathbed in 2004, the PKK celebrated him as “one of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century” on the occasion of Bookchin’s death two years later.
The Practice of Democratic Confederalism
The PKK itself has apparently taken after their leader, not only adopting Bookchin’s specific brand of eco-anarchism, but actively internalizing the new philosophy in its strategy and tactics. The movement abandoned its bloody war for Stalinist/Maoist revolution and the terror tactics that came with it, and began perusing a largely non-violent strategy aimed at greater regional autonomy.
After decades of fratricidal betrayal, failed ceasefires, arbitrary arrests and renewed hostilities, on April 25 of this year the PKK announced an immediate withdrawal of its forces from Turkey and their deployment to northern Iraq, effectively ending its 30-year-old conflict with the Turkish state. The Turkish government simultaneously undertook a process of constitutional and legal reform to enshrine human and cultural rights for the Kurdish minority within its borders. This came as the final component of long-awaited negotiations between Öcalan and Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan as part of a peace process that began in 2012. There has been no PKK violence for a year and reasonable calls for the PKK to be delisted from the worlds’ terrorist lists are being made.
There remains, however, a dark history to the PKK — authoritarian practices which sit ill beside its new libertarian rhetoric. Raising money through the heroin trade, extortion, coercive conscription and general racketeering have been claimed or attributed to branches at various times. If true, no excuses can be made for this type of thuggish opportunism, despite the obvious irony that the genocidal Turkish state itself was in no-small part funded by a lucrative monopoly on the legal export of state-grown “medical” opiates to the West and made possible by its conscription and taxation for a massive counter-terrorism budget and oversized armed forces (Turkey has NATO’s second largest army after the US).
As is the customary hypocrisy of the war on terror, when national liberation movements mimic the brutality of the state, it is invariably the unrepresented who are branded as the terrorists. Öcalan himself describes this shameful period as one of “gangs within our organization and open banditry, [which] arranged needless, haphazard operations, sending young people to their death in droves.”
Anarchist Currents in the Struggle
As a further sign that it is abandoning its Marxist-Leninist ways, however, the PKK have recently begun to make explicit overtures to anarchist internationalism, even hosting a workshop at the International Anarchism Gathering in St. Imier, Switzerland in 2012, which lead to confusion, dismay and debate online, but which went largely unnoticed by the wider anarchist press.
Janet Biehl, Bookchin’s widow, is one of the few western anarchists to study the KCK on the ground, and has written extensively about her experiences on the New Compass website, also sharing interviews with Kurdish radicals involved in the day-to-day operations of the democratic assemblies and federal structures, as well as translating and publishing the first book-length anarchist study on the subject: Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan: The Council Movement, Gender Liberation, and Ecology (2013).
The only other English-speaking anarchist voice is the Kurdistan Anarchist Forum (KAF), a pacifist group of Iraqi Kurds living in Europe who claim not to “have any relationships with other leftist groups.” While supporting a federated Kurdistan, the KAF declares that it will “only support the PKK when they give up the armed struggle completely, engage in organising popular grassroots mass movements for the sake of achieving the people’s social demands, denounce and dismantle centralised and hierarchical modes of struggle and instead turn to federated autonomous local groups, end all relations and dealings with the states of the Middle East and the West, denounce charismatic power politics, and convert to anti-statism and anti-authoritarianism — only then will we be happy to cooperate with them fully.”
Following Bookchin to the Book
That day (minus the pacifism) might not be far off. The PKK/KCK appear to be following Bookchin’s social ecology to the book, with almost everything up to and including their contradictory participation in the state apparatus through elections, just as prescribed in the literature.
As Joost Jongerden and Ahmed Akkaya write, “Bookchin’s work differentiates between two ideas of politics, the Hellenic model and the Roman,” that is, direct and representative democracy. Bookchin sees his form of neo-anarchism as a practical revival of the ancient Athenian revolution. The “Athens model exists as a counter- and under-ground current, finding expression in the Paris Commune of 1871, the councils (soviets) in the spring-time of the revolution in Russia in 1917, and the Spanish Revolution in 1936.”
Bookchin’s communalism contains a five-step approach:
- Empowering existing municipalities through law in an attempt to localize decision-making power.
- Democratize those municipalities through grassroots assemblies.
- Unite municipalities “in regional networks and wider confederations … working to gradually replace nation-states with municipal confederations”, whilst insuring that “’higher’ levels of confederation have mainly coordinative and administrative functions.”
- “Unite progressive social movements” to strengthen civil society and establish “a common focal point for all citizens’ initiatives and movements”: the assemblies. This cooperation is “not [perused] because we expect to see always a harmonious consensus, but — on the contrary — because we believe in disagreement and deliberation. Society develops through debate and conflict.” In addition, the assemblies are to be secular, “fight[ing] against religious influences on politics and government,” and an “arena for class struggle.”
- In order to achieve their vision of a “classless society, based on collective political control over the socially important means of production,” the “municipalization of the economy,” and a “confederal allocation of resources to ensure balance between regions” is called for. In layman’s terms, this equates to a combination of worker self-management and participatory planning to meet social needs: classical anarchist economics.
As Eirik Eiglad, Bookchin’s former editor and KCK analyst, puts it:
Of particular importance is the need to combine the insights from progressive feminist and ecological movements together with new urban movements and citizens’ initiatives, as well as trade unions and local cooperatives and collectives … We believe that communalist ideas of an assembly-based democracy will contribute to making this progressive exchange of ideas possible on a more permanent basis, and with more direct political consequences. Still, communalism is not just a tactical way of uniting these radical movements. Our call for a municipal democracy is an attempt to bring reason and ethics to the forefront of public discussions.For Öcalan, democratic confederalism means a “democratic, ecological, gender-liberated society,” or simply “democracy without the state.” He explicitly contrasts “capitalist modernity” with “democratic modernity,” wherein the formers’ “three basic elements: capitalism, the nation-state, and industrialism” are replaced with a “democratic nation, communal economy, and ecological industry.” This entails “three projects: one for the democratic republic, one for democratic-confederalism and one for democratic autonomy.”
The concept of the “democratic republic” essentially refers to attaining long denied citizenship and civil rights for Kurds, including the ability to speak and teach their own language freely. Democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism both refer to the “autonomous capacities of people, a more direct, less representative form of political structure.”
Meanwhile, Jongerden and Akkaya note that “the free municipalism model aims to realize a bottom-up, participative administrative body, from local to provincial levels.” The “concept of the free citizen (ozgur yarttas) [is] its starting point,” which “includes basic civil liberties, such as the freedom of speech and organization.” The core unit of the model is the neighborhood assembly or the “councils,” as they are referred to interchangeably.
There is popular participation in the councils, including from non-Kurdish people, and whilst neighbourhood assemblies are strong in various provinces, “in Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkish Kurdistan, there are assemblies almost everywhere.” Elsewhere, “in the provinces of Hakkari and Sirnak … there are two parallel authorities [the KCK and the state], of which the democratic confederal structure is more powerful in practice.” The KCK in Turkey “is organized at the levels of the village (köy), urban neighbourhood (mahalle), district (ilçe), city (kent), and the region (bölge), which is referred to as “northern Kurdistan.”
The “highest” level of federation in northern Kurdistan, the DTK (Democratic Society Congress) is a mix of the rank-and-file delegated by their peers with recallable mandates, who make up 60 percent, and representatives from “more than five hundred civil society organizations, labor unions, and political parties,” who make up 40 percent, out of which approximately 6 percent is “reserved for representatives of religious minorities, academics, or others with a particular expertise.”
The proportion of the 40 percent who are similarly delegated from directly democratic, non-statist civil society groups compared to those who are unelected or elected party bureaucrats is unclear. Overlap of individuals between independent Kurdish movements and Kurdish political parties, as well as the internalization of many aspects of the directly democratic procedure by these parties, further complicates the situation. The informal consensus among witnesses, nevertheless, is that the majority of decision-making is directly democratic through one arrangement or other; that the majority of those decisions are made at the grassroots; and that the decisions are executed from the bottom-up in accordance with the federal structure.
Because the assemblies and the DTK are coordinated by the illegal KCK, of which the PKK is a part, they are designated as “terrorists” by Turkey and the so-called international community (the EU, United States and others), by association. The DTK also selects the candidates of the pro-Kurdish BDP (Peace and Democracy Party) for the Turkish Parliament, which in turn proposes “democratic autonomy” for Turkey, in some type of a combination of representative and direct democracy. In line with the federal model, it proposes the establishment of approximately 20 autonomous regions which would directly self-govern (in the anarchist and not the Swiss model) “education, health, culture, agriculture, industry, social services and security, women’s issues, youth and sports,” with the state continuing to conduct “foreign affairs, finance and defense.”
The Social Revolution Takes Off
On the ground, meanwhile, the revolution has already begun.
In Turkish Kurdistan, there is an independent educational movement of “academies” that hold discussion forums and seminars in neighborhoods. There is Culture Street, where Abdullah Demirbas, the mayor of Sur Municipality in Amed celebrates “the diversity of religions and belief systems,” declaring that “we have begun to restore a mosque, a Chaldean-Aramaic catholic church, an orthodox Armenian Church, and a Jewish Synagogue.” Elsewhere, Jongerden and Akkaya report, “DTP municipalities initiated a ‘multilingual municipality service,’ sparking heated debate. Municipality signs were erected in Kurdish and Turkish, and local shopkeepers followed suit.”
The liberation of women is pursued by the women themselves through the initiatives of the DTK’s Women’s Council, enforcing new rules like the “forty percent gender quota” in the assemblies. If a civil servant beats his wife, his salary is directly transferred to the survivor to provide for her financial security and use as she sees fit. “In Gewer, if a husband takes a second wife, half of his estate goes to his first.”
There are “Peace Villages”, new or transformed communities of cooperatives, implementing their own program fully outside of the logistical constraints of the Kurdish-Turkish war. The first such community was constructed in Hakkari province, bordering Iraq and Iran, where “several villages” joined the experiment. In Van province, an “ecological women’s village” is being built to shelter victims of domestic violence, supplying itself “with all or almost all the necessary energy.”
The KCK holds biennial meetings in the mountains with hundreds of delegates from all four countries, with the threat of the Islamic State to autonomous southern and western Kurdistan high on their agenda. The Iranian and Syrian KCK-affiliated parties, PJAK (Party for Free Life in Kurdistan) and PYD (Democratic Union Party) promote democratic confederalism as well. The Iraqi KCK party, PCDK (Party for a Democratic Solution in Kurdistan) is relatively insignificant, with the ruling centrist Kurdistan Democratic Party and its leader Massoud Barzani, president of Iraqi Kurdistan, only recently decriminalizing and starting to tolerate it.
In the northernmost mountainous areas in Iraqi Kurdistan where the majority of PKK and PJAK guerrillas live, however, radical literature and assemblies thrive, with integration between the mountains’ many Kurds continuing after decades of displacement. In recent weeks, these militants have come down from the northernmost mountains to fight alongside the Iraqi Peshmerga against ISIS, rescuing 20,000 Yazidi and Christians from the Sinjar Mountains and being visited by Barzani in a public display of gratitude and solidarity, much to the embarrassment of Turkey and the United States.
The Syrian PYD has followed Turkish Kurdistan’s lead in the revolutionary transformation of the autonomous region under its control since the outbreak of the civil war. After “waves of arrests” under Ba’athist repression, with “10,000 people [taken] into custody, among them mayors, local party leaders, deputies, cadres and activists … the Kurdish PYD forces ousted the Baath regime in northern Syria, or West Kurdistan, [and] local councils popped up everywhere.” Self-defense committees were improvised to provide “security in the wake of the collapse of the Ba’ath regime,” and “the first school teaching the Kurdish language” was established as the councils intervened in the equitable distribution of bread and gasoline.
In Turkish, Syrian and to a lesser extent Iraqi Kurdistan, women are now free to unveil and strongly encouraged to participate in social life. Old feudal ties are being broken, people are free to follow any or no religion, and ethnic and religious minorities live together peaceably. If they are able to confine the new caliphate, PYD autonomy in Syrian Kurdistan and KCK influence in Iraqi Kurdistan could ferment an even more profound explosion of revolutionary culture and values.
On June 30, 2012, the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change (NCB), the broader revolutionary leftist coalition in Syria of which the PYD is the main group, has now embraced “the project of democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism as a possible model for Syria” as well.
Defending the Kurdish Revolution from IS
Turkey, in the meantime, has threatened to invade Kurdish territories if “terrorist bases are set up in Syria,” as hundreds of KCK (including PKK) fighters from across Kurdistan cross the border to defend Rojava (the West) from the advances of the Islamic State. The PYD alleges that Turkey’s moderate Islamist government is already engaged in a proxy war against them by facilitating the travel of international jihadists across the border to fight alongside the Islamists.
In Iraqi Kurdistan, Barzani, whose guerrillas fought alongside Turkey against the PKK in the 1990s in exchange for access to Western markets, has called for a “unified Kurdish front” in Syria through an alliance with the PYD. Barzani brokered the “Erbil Agreement” in 2012, forming the Kurdish National Council, with PYD leader Salih Muslim confirming that “all parties are serious and determined to continue working together.”
Still, while the study and practice of libertarian socialist ideas among the KCK leadership and rank-and-file is undoubtedly a positive development, it remains to be seen how serious they are about renouncing their bloody authoritarian past. The Kurdish struggle for self-determination and cultural sovereignty form a silver lining in the dark clouds gathering over the Islamic State and the bloody inter-fascist wars between Islamism, Ba’athism and religious sectarianism that gave birth to it.
A socially progressive and secular pan-Kurdish revolution with libertarian socialist elements, uniting the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds and re-invigorating the Turkish and Iranian struggles, may yet be a prospect. In the meantime, those of us who value the idea of civilization owe our gratitude to the Kurds, who are fighting the jihadists of Islamist fascism day and night on the frontlines in Syria and Iraq, defending radical democratic values with their lives.
“The Kurds have no friends but the mountains”
– Kurdish proverb
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater?
Here at least We shall be free
So this is why there were PKK members in the black bloc at Genoa...
I'd heard rumours of the PKK moving towards libertarianism - is it actually for real then?
"It is slaves, struggling to throw off their chains, who unleash the movement whereby history abolishes masters." - Raoul Vaneigem
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." - Karl Marx
"What distinguishes reform from revolution is not that revolution is violent, but that it links insurrection and communisation." - Gilles Dauvé
Yeah, I know some kurds and they confirmed this, one of them is a libertarian communist. However, there may still be some MLs.
La dialectique, peut-elle casser des briques?
yes, though like the article itself already touches on, it is to be seen whether a long functioning ML-styled organization can be truly transformed towards a libertarian movement, especially if it is seemingly as much if not more dictated from above as demanded from the grassroots. Not to mention what possible influences the wars in iraq and syria have and the de facto establishment of a bourgeois, oil rich kurdish nationstate in northen iraq are having.
some earlier post from me on the subject:
for now i remain skeptical but very interested. whether they succeed or not it is at least the most progressive movement of any substance in the middle east at the moment and as such deserves our attention.
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater?
Here at least We shall be free
Of course we need to support the PKK and YPG in its move away from the nationalist project and towards a more libertarian socialist project.
This can be a blueprint for all of the middle east whose nationalstates are just a product of the west, there have never really been real modern nationalstates in the middle east except the ones created by the west.
ISIS is tapping into that fact with their borderless Islamic State and the PKKs project may very well be the socialist answer to their fascism.
I'm reading this book titled Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan and it is pretty interesting if anyone wants to check it out. It talks about this new current.
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. ~ Karl Marx
formerly Triceramarx
Alright, so if you don't mind me asking, what does any of this have to do with socialism, if socialism is the destruction of class society? All this - Bookchin's city-state fetish, "democratic municipalities", "ecological industry", self-magagement all of this is more than possible within capitalism, as evidenced by Switzerland, by Ben Bella's bourgeois regime in Algeria, and so on.
I think you have misunderstood the project...evidenced by Switzerland, what?
i would say that for example the zapatista's have been a lot more succesful in creating a classless society with real communist potential (as in still operating within the reality of worldwide capitalism) than your dear Bolsheviks ever did.
so maybe give them a chance and see whether and how they fuck up and criticize them for that instead of relying on cheap strawman to discard them from the get go?
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater?
Here at least We shall be free
What the PYD and TEV-DEM say they are trying to implement in Syria is a liberal democracy similar to the Swiss model. Bookchin's Communalism is something different entirely. The abolition of commodity production, markets, money, 'the economy', has, of course, nothing in common with the Swiss model. But 870 has a tendency to lie about and misconstrue his opponents political positions.
pew pew pew
I agree sasha that we have to be critical (sceptical?) of a change towards libertarian socialism that comes not only from above, but in a seeming moment of epiphany from an absent autocrat.
I'm also a bit sceptical as to the deference to Bookchin; it would be more promising to see a plurality of libertarian ideas being reference in the PKKs ideological move towards libertarianism.
However, it is certainly a positive step, insofar as the outcome of the process (Regardless of whether it started at the top or at the grassroots) positions the PKK in opposition to crass nationalism and towards a radically progressive change in Kurdish society, should they ever manage to gain social liberation from occupation.
as far as i heard there i also a widening variety of anarchist and zapatista literature being spread among both the people living in the towns under YPG control and among the pkk-insurgents in the mountains.
A person that i know with close family ties to PKK members also said that since a few years this kind of literature is also not only not suppressed anymore by the commanders (as it was previously) but actually encouraged to be shared.
And while the talk by the PKK on the anarchist international confrence in st imier should certainly been seen as a public relations move fact is that they did attend the whole conference.
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater?
Here at least We shall be free
Are you guys writing "libertarian" because you forgot how to spell "liberal" or do you really think there is a difference?
there is also the increased support from Syriac and Armanian christians even going so far as taking up arms in the YPG as they are the most effective protection against religious and ethnic persecution in the region.
and last but not least they are cobbling sweet homemade tanks together, how can one be dismissive of that:
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater?
Here at least We shall be free
Switzerland shows that decentralisation, municipal governance, referenda etc. are more than compatible with capitalism.
Well, you might say that, but that would only reflect on your politics. Obviously the Zapatistas haven't been successful in creating a classless society, as you can't have communism in oneOriginally Posted by Sashacountryregion (!). So what have the Zapatistas accomplished? Set up some cooperatives? Become media darlings? I'm sure the bourgeoisie are running for their lives as we speak.
I don't think the PKK will "fuck up", I think what they're trying to accomplish has nothing to do with ending class society. They can have all of the confederations of municipalities and ecological industry (i.e. green capitalism!) they want, as long as the means of production are in private hands nothing has changed.
So now i as an Anarchist have to argue a form of "transitional state" (as seen from a Communization theoretical perspective) with a Bolshevik?
revelft, where actual if not perfect revolutionary movements get burnt to the ground while being supportive of bourgeois military-junta's and bonapartist dictatorships is just fine...
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater?
Here at least We shall be free
Yeah uh, someone who is not on the ignore list of 870, explain to this idiot that none of that is what Communalism is. 870, pathological strawmanning, etc.
pew pew pew
A transitional state is a state that is transitioning into something. I don't see the evidence that the PKK area is transitioning into another mode of production or that it has the capacity to do so, as even the most elementary measures associated with a transitional state - the expropriation of the bourgeoisie etc. are not in place, and the projected "future state" is some pseudo-Proudhonian confederation of municipalities nonsense instead of a society where the means of production are held in common and operated by society to satisfy the needs of its members.
Don't worry, though, you will find a lot of ostensible "Bolsheviks" who are really into this sort of nonsense. Guess that's better than going on coffee-picking expeditions.
There is a difference between experimenting with different models of statehood, fulfilling your "ideals" and acting as a class.
Social ecology is not Communist. Social ecology is an argument: that capital is better fulfilled under these "ideal" means than hegemonic ones.
[FONT="Courier New"] “We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Revolution and of the new order of life. ”
― Felix Dzerzhinsky [/FONT]
لا شيء يمكن وقف محاكم التفتيش للثورة
I think that sceptical is a better view.
I don't think that anybody who knows the PKK thinks that there has been any real change. The PKK is still a reactionary nationalist organisation as it always has been. I think the fact that it openly advocates ethnic cleansingin Syria should be enough to give this away.
Devrim
