Murray Bookchin and the Kurdish resistance
by Joris Leverink on August 9, 2015
Bookchin’s
municipalist ideas, once rejected by communists and anarchists alike,
have now come to inspire the Kurdish quest for democratic autonomy.
http://roarmag.org/2015/08/bookchin-kurdish-struggle-ocalan-rojava/
The introduction to the new book
The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso, 2015),
explains
how Murray Bookchin – born to Russian Jewish immigrants in New York
City in 1921 – was introduced to radical politics at the age of nine
when he joined the Young Pioneers, a Communist youth organization. This
would be the start of his ‘life on the left’ in which he would turn
from Stalinism to Trotskyism in the years running up to World War II
before defining himself as an anarchist in the late 1950s and
eventually identifying as a ‘communalist’ or ‘libertarian municipalist’
after the introduction of the idea of social ecology.
Even
though Bookchin never even attended college – except for a few classes
in radio technology right after World War II – he wrote dozens of books
and published hundreds of academic articles, besides founding several
journals and setting up the Institute for Social Ecology in 1974.
Possibly his most important contribution to radical politics was to
(re)introduce the concept of ecology to the arena of political thought.
Bookchin
opposed the ideas and practices of the emerging environmentalist
movements, accusing them of advocating mere “technical fixes” of
capitalism, counter-posing it to an ecological approach that seeks to
address the root causes of the systemic problem. In his view,
capitalism’s fatal flaw lay not in its exploitation of the working
class, as Marxists believe, but rather in its conflict with the natural
environment which, if allowed to develop unopposed, would inevitably
lead to the dehumanization of people and the destruction of nature.
The Next Revolution includes
the 1992 essay
The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society. In it, Bookchin argues that “the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very
idea
of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.” For
an ecological society to develop, first the inter-human domination must
be eradicated. According to Bookchin, “capitalism and its alter-ego,
‘state socialism,’ have brought all the historic problems of domination
to a head,” and the market economy, if it is not stopped, will succeed
in destroying our natural environment as a result of its “grow or die”
ideology.
For years, Bookchin sought to convince anarchist
groups in the US that his idea of libertarian municipalism — which, in
his own words “seeks to reclaim the public sphere for the exercise of
authentic citizenship while breaking away from the bleak cycle of
parliamentarism and its mystification of the ‘party’ mechanism as a
means for public representation” — was the key to making anarchism
politically and socially relevant again.
Libertarian municipalism
promotes the use of direct face-to-face assemblies in order to “steal”
the practice of politics back from the professional, careerist
politicians and place it back in the hands of citizens. Describing the
state as “a completely alien formation” and a “thorn in the side of
human development,” Bookchin presents libertarian municipalism as
“democratic to its core and non-hierarchical in its structure,” as well
as “premised on the struggle to achieve a rational and ecological
society.”
Much to Bookchin’s frustration, many anarchists refused
to adopt his ideas, unwilling to accept that, in order to remain
politically relevant and be able to make a real revolution, they would
have to participate in local government. Despite having politically
matured in the company of Marxists, syndicalists and anarchists,
Bookchin soon developed and maintained fundamental critiques of all of
these currents, leading not only to the development of his own idea of
social ecology but also leaving him with many critics on the left.
Kurdish resistance
In
the late 1970s, while Bookchin was struggling to gain recognition for
the value and importance of his theory of social ecology in the US, an
entirely different struggle was emerging on the other side of the
world. In the mountainous, predominantly Kurdish regions of
southeastern Turkey, an organization was founded that would eventually
come to adopt and adapt Bookchin’s social ecology.
The
organization called itself the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK after
its Kurdish acronym, and in 1984 it launched its first attacks against
the Turkish state. These first operations were soon followed by others
and eventually developed into a three-decade long armed struggle that
has still not been resolved.
The PKK was inspired by
Marxist-Leninist thought and fought for an independent Kurdish state
that would be founded upon socialist principles. The traditional
Kurdish homeland encompasses territories in modern-day Turkey, Iran,
Iraq and Syria, but had been carved up in the early 20th century, when a
deal was struck regarding the division of former Ottoman-Turkish
territory in the Middle East between France and the United Kingdom. The
borders between Turkey, Syria and Iraq were laid down in the infamous
Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916.
Despite the utopian desire of one
day seeing the different Kurdish territories united, the struggle of
the PKK focused primarily on the liberation of North Kurdistan, or
Bakur
— the Kurdish territories occupied by the Turkish state. Over the
course of the 1990s, however, the PKK slowly started to drift away from
its desire to found an independent Kurdish nation state and started
exploring other possibilities.
In 1999, Abdullah Öcalan — founder
and leader of the PKK — became the subject of a diplomatic row between
Turkey and Syria, from where he had been directing the PKK’s
operations after having been forced to flee Turkey two decades earlier.
Syria refused to house and protect the rebel leader any longer,
leaving Öcalan with little choice but to leave the country in search of
another refuge. Not long after, he was arrested in Kenya and
extradited to Turkey where he was condemned to death — a punishment
that was later changed to life imprisonment.
Öcalan’s capture was
a breaking point for the PKK’s independence struggle. Shortly
afterwards, the organization revoked its claims to an independent state
in favor of demanding more autonomy at the local level. In jail,
Öcalan began to familiarize himself with the works of Bookchin, whose
writings on social transformation influenced him to give up on the
ideal of an independent nation-state and rather pursue an alternative
course he termed ‘Democratic Confederalism’.
Several years
earlier, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the PKK had
already started to critically reflect on the concept of the nation
state. None of the traditional homelands of the Kurds were exclusively
Kurdish. A state founded and controlled by Kurds would thus
automatically host large minority groups, creating the potential for the
repression of ethnic and religious minorities in the same way the
Kurds themselves had been repressed for many years. As such, a Kurdish
state increasingly came to be seen as a continuation of, rather than a
solution to, the existing problems in the region.
Finally,
having analyzed the interdependence of capitalism and the nation state
on the one hand, and between patriarchy and centralized state power on
the other, Öcalan realized that real freedom and independence could only
come about once the movement had severed all ties with these
institutionalized forms of repression and exploitation.
Democratic Confederalism
In his 2005 pamphlet,
Declaration of Democratic Confederalism,
Abdullah Öcalan formally and definitively broke with the PKK’s earlier
aspirations of founding an independent Kurdish nation state. “The
system of nation states,” he argues in the document, “has become a
serious barrier to the development of society and democracy and freedom
since the end of the 20th century.”
In Öcalan’s view, the only
way out of the crisis in the Middle East is the establishment of a
democratic confederal system “that will derive its strength directly
from the people, and not from globalization based on nation states.”
According to the imprisoned rebel leader, “neither the capitalist
system nor the pressure of imperialist forces will lead to democracy;
except to serve their own interests. The task is to assist in
developing a grassroots-based democracy … which takes into
consideration the religious, ethnic and class differences in society.”
Soon
after Öcalan’s call for the development of a democratic confederalist
model, the Democratic Society Congress (DTK) was founded in Diyarbakir.
During an assembly in 2011 the body launched its Call for Democratic
Autonomy in which it demanded autonomy from the state in the fields of
politics, justice, self-defense, culture, society, economics, ecology
and diplomacy. The reaction of the Turkish state was predictable:
setting out on a path of confrontation and criminalization, it
immediately banned the DTK.
It is no coincidence that the idea of
Democratic Confederalism, as developed by Öcalan, shows many parallels
with Bookchin’s ideas of social ecology. In the early 2000s Öcalan had
begun to read
Ecology of Freedom and
Urbanization Without Cities
while in prison and soon after declared himself a student of
Bookchin’s. Through his lawyers, Öcalan attempted to set up a meeting
with the radical thinker to figure out ways in which Bookchin’s ideas
could be made applicable to the Middle Eastern context.
Unfortunately,
due to Bookchin’s poor health at the time, this meeting never took
place, but he did send a message to Öcalan in May 2004: “My hope is
that the Kurdish people will one day be able to establish a free,
rational society that will allow their brilliance once again to
flourish. They are fortunate indeed to have a leader of Mr. Öcalan’s
talents to guide them.”
In return, and as a form of
acknowledgement of Bookchin’s critical influence on the Kurdish
movement, a PKK assembly honored him as “one of the greatest social
scientists of the 20th century” when he died in July 2006. They
expressed their hope that the Kurds would be the first society to
establish democratic confederalism, calling the project “creative and
realizable.”
Dual power, confederalism and social ecology
Over
the past decade, democratic confederalism has slowly but surely become
an integral part of Kurdish society. Three elements of Bookchin’s
thought have particularly influenced the development of a “democratic
modernity” across Kurdistan: the concept of “dual power,” the confederal
structure as proposed by Bookchin under the header of libertarian
municipalism, and the theory of social ecology which traces the roots of
many contemporary struggles back to the origins of civilization and
places the natural environment at the heart of the solution to these
problems.
Dual Power:
The
concept of dual power has been one of the main reasons why Bookchin’s
body of work was rejected by anarchist, communist and syndicalist
groups. Rather than advocating the abolition of the state through an
uprising of the proletariat, he suggested that by developing alternative
institutions in the form of popular assemblies and neighborhood
committees — and notably by taking part in municipal elections — the
power of the state could be “hollowed out” from below, eventually making
it superfluous.
Bookchin’s disposition towards taking over and
building institutions of power stems from his analysis of politics as
opposed to statecraft. According to Bookchin, “Marxists, revolutionary
syndicalists, and authentic anarchists all have a fallacious
understanding of politics, which should be conceived as the civic arena
and the institutions by which people democratically and directly
manage their community affairs.” What normally is referred to as
“politics” Bookchin views as “statecraft,” or the kind of business
professional politicians occupy themselves with.
“Politics,” by
contrast, rather than a kind of inherently evil practice that so many
left-wing revolutionaries believe needs to be abolished, is in fact the
very glue that binds society together. It is something that needs to
be organized in such a way as to prevent any abuse of power. “Freedom
from authoritarianism can best be assured only by the clear, concise,
and detailed allocation of power, not by pretensions that power and
leadership are forms of ‘rule’ or by libertarian metaphors that conceal
their reality,” Bookchin writes in his essay
The Communalist Project.
The
Kurdish embrace of Bookchin’s idea of dual power is clear from the
DTK’s mode of organization at the different levels of society. The
general assembly of the DTK meets twice a year in Diyarbakir, the
de facto
capital of North Kurdistan. Of the 1,000 delegates, 40 percent are
elected officials who occupy different positions within government
institutions, whereas the remaining 60 percent come from civil society
and can be either members of one of the popular assemblies,
representatives of NGOs or unaffiliated individuals. Decisions made in
the assembly are promoted in the city council by those members who
occupy seats in both organizational bodies.
Confederalism
The confederal system is also clearly manifested in the organizational structure of the DTK. In
The Meaning of Confederalism,
Bookchin describes confederalism as “a network of administrative
councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular
face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages, towns, and
even neighborhoods of large cities.” This explanation is an almost
perfect fit with the situation on the ground in many places in the
Kurdish region — in Turkey as well as in northern Syria.
A clear example is the situation in Diyarbakir, where the council movement is particularly well established. In the book
Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan, the situation is explained by members of the Amed City Council (Amed being the Kurdish name for Diyarbakir):
Amed
has thirteen districts, and each one has a council with its own board.
Within the districts there are neighborhoods, which have neighborhood
councils. Some districts have as many as eight neighborhood councils.
And some places have councils even at the street level. In the nearby
villages, there are communes that are tied to the city council. So power
is articulated deeper and deeper into the base.
As Joost Jongerden and Ahmet Akkaya write in
Confederalism and autonomy in Turkey:
“the DTK is not simply another organization, but part of the attempt
to forge a new political paradigm, defined by the direct and continual
exercise of the people’s power through village, town and city
councils.”
It is worth noting that this new political paradigm is not only advocated by those initiatives that exist
outside
of the institutionalized political realm, but also by pro-Kurdish
political parties such as the Democratic Regions Party (DBP) and the
Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The ultimate goal is not to establish
Democratic Autonomy exclusively in the Kurdish regions, but at the
national level too, both in Turkey and Syria.
Social ecology
Bookchin’s
theory of social ecology is characterized by the belief that “we must
reorder social relations so that humanity can live in a protective
balance with the natural world.” A post-capitalist society cannot be
successful unless it is created in harmony with the ecological
environment.
Bookchin argues that “the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very
idea
of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.”
Social ecology moves beyond the traditional Marxist and anarchist view
of how to organize a non-hierarchical, egalitarian society in that it
places the need to avert an impending ecological catastrophe at the
heart of contemporary social struggles.
For the Kurds,
traditionally a rural people living on agriculture and animal
husbandry, maintaining the ecological environment is as crucial as
creating an egalitarian society. State-driven destruction of the
environment in their mountainous homelands and on the fertile
Mesopotamian plain is occurring on a daily basis.
The most
obvious example is the GAP project in Turkey, in which dozens of mega
dams have either already been built or are under construction. The
project is presented as bringing development to the region in the form
of employment opportunities at the construction sites, better irrigated
mega-farms producing cash crops for export, and providing day jobs for
the expropriated small farmers and an upgraded energy infrastructure
with the construction of several hydroelectric power plants.
What
is perceived as “development” by the agents of the state is experienced
in an entirely different way by the people who see their homes and
villages flooded, the free-flowing rivers turned into commodities, their
lands being expropriated and bought up by large corporations and used
for the industrial-scale production of goods that serve no purpose but
to enrich the farm-owners in their faraway villas. These large-scale,
highly destructive mega-projects expose the urgent need for local
control over local environments.
But whereas wresting the natural
environment away from the destructive claws of ever encroaching
capitalist forces entails a direct confrontation with the state, a
crucial first — and potentially even more revolutionary — step involves
the abolition of hierarchy at the interpersonal level. Since, as
Bookchin argued, the domination of humans over nature stems from the
domination of one human over another, the solution has to follow a
similar trajectory.
In this regard, the emancipation of women is
one of the most important aspects of social ecology. As long as the
domination of man over woman remains intact, the treatment of our
natural environment as an essential and integral part of human life —
rather than a commodity to be exploited for our benefit — is still far
away.
In this regard, the emancipatory projects currently
underway in Kurdish society are a hopeful sign. Although in many cases
social relations within Kurdish families and society are still guided
by age-old customs and traditions, radical changes can already be
observed. As one activist of the Amed Women’s Academy put it in an
interview with Tatort Kurdistan:
Kurdish
families still aren’t really open to the new system, Democratic
Autonomy. They haven’t yet internalized it. We, the activists, have very
much internalized it and it’s our responsibility to make change, to
impart the ideas of Democratic Autonomy to families, even if it’s only
in small steps. We can start talking about it at home the way we do
outside. When our families see how seriously we take it, that will
affect them. Of course, discussions are often very difficult. Doors get
slammed, people shout. But a lot of perseverance and discussion has
also begun to create change in families.
Listen, learn and follow
The
developments in Kurdistan — and especially in Rojava, the Kurdish
region in northern Syria — have tickled the radical imagination of
activists around the globe. The revolution in Rojava has been compared
to Barcelona in 1936 and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. The radical
left needs its own mythology as much as everybody else, and in this
sense Rojava, Barcelona and Chiapas serve as hopeful reminders that
there
is an alternative; that it
is possible to organize society in a different way.
However,
by merely placing these instances of radical organization on a
pedestal, as a beacon of hope to be revered when times get rough, our
support for these struggles is often not very different from the support
we display when we cheer on our favorite football team on TV. The
Zapatistas in the jungles of Chiapas and the Kurds on the Mesopotamian
plains have come a long way by relying on nothing but their own strength
and determination. Their relative isolation has allowed for the
development of their radical alternatives, but for these experiments to
survive in the long run they need more than supporters and
sympathizers. They need partners.
“Global capital, precisely because of its very hugeness, can only be eaten away at its roots,” Bookchin writes in
A Politics for the Twenty-First Century,
“specifically by means of a libertarian municipalist resistance at the
base of society. It must be eroded by the myriad millions who,
mobilized by a grassroots movement, challenge global capital’s
sovereignty over their lives and try to develop local and regional
economic alternatives to its industrial operations.”
Bookchin
believes that if our ideal is a Commune of Communes, the natural place
to start is at the local political level, with a movement and program as
the “uncompromising advocate of popular neighborhood and town
assemblies and the development of a municipalized economy.”
Ultimately,
the best way to support the struggles of the Kurds, the Zapatistas and
many other revolutionary movements and initiatives that have sprung up
across the globe in the past few years, is by listening to their
stories, learning from their experiences and following in their
footsteps.
A confederation of self-organized municipalities,
transcending national borders and ethnic and religious boundaries is
the best bulwark against the ever-encroaching imperialist powers and
capitalist forces. In the struggle to achieve this goal, there are
worse examples to follow than the ideas set out by Murray Bookchin and
the practice of libertarian municipalism.
Joris Leverink is an Istanbul-based freelance journalist, editor for ROAR Magazine and columnist for TeleSUR English.
