What is the revolution in Rojava anyway? 11 reasons to care
Posted by anarcholatina on 2022-05-31
1. Communalist democracy
Since 2012, an area in northeastern Syria is self-managed without a State or centralised government, with a novel form of bottom-up coordination called ‘democratic confederalism’.
People there reorganised society into communes of 100~250 families each (the medium-term goal is even smaller communes). Most decisions that directly affect a commune are done locally by assemblies and committees, via discussion and voting and consensus.
2. Federation for scale
Larger-scale decisions are done through elected officials, representing the interests of the commune in similar assemblies with other representatives (the cantons), small enough that everybody can participate in discussion. The system could be further scaled up more levels; but it’s weighted to favour the bottom-level, informal, everyday community consensus.
Theoretically at least, representatives have no coercive power, and can’t order their commune to do something they don’t want to.
3. Transformative values
Because so much is decided through discussion, a shared ethical commitment is as important as political formalism/laws. The core values advanced in this revolution are: democracy, ecology and feminism.
This isn’t just lip service, but woven at all levels of organisation, e.g. by giving women and ethnic/religious minorities guaranteed representation in every decision. (Also rifles.) There’s been cases, for example, of men who wanted to have patriarchal forms of polygamy, and eventually left the communes, because no one would enable that.
4. White leftists theorise; these folk went and did it
In political theory terms, democratic confederalism is mainly a development of Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, which in turn is based on horizontal forms of popular self-rule, including the Paris Commune and anarchist theory.
It also draws from local indigenous experience of communal life without and around the State, mainly from the Kurdish, who started the revolution. (Compare the role of Mayan communal values in the Zapatista revolution.)
5. How to stop the ecological catastrophe
Bookchin’s social ecology informs the revolution’s take on environmentalism:
The force that destroy the world isn’t just capitalism materially, but the culture of domination that started with the patriarchal State, leading to the objectification of humans as well as other natural beings.
Sustainable living needs therefore a social revolution, in the material economy via communal resources, yes, but also in a culture of strong community as the basis of (effective, not just nominal) freedom and dignity for all.
6. Against genocide, for multiculturalism
The initiators of this revolution are the Kurds, an ethnic group related to Persians. Like other minorities in the area, they have been targeted for assimilation, cultural genocide, linguistic genocide, and like literal murderous genocide by the States that control their homelands: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria—States propped up by European colonisers. Grievously violent assimilation, erasure and mass murder projects were met by fierce resistance and refusal to submit. Faced with assimilation as ‘mountain Turks’, having their language forbidden and villages bombed, the Kurdish folk took to arms rather than disappearing.
Nonetheless, when it manage to secure its own territory, the Kurdish revolution has made of itself a safe haven for all sorts of minority groups in the area, including the Assyrians, Armenians and Yazidi, as well as Arabic and Turkish allies, and goes at great lengths to validate their languages, cultures and traditions, plus get them involved in the decision process while avoiding tyranny-of-majority pitfalls. The community doesn’t even actually call itself ‘Rojava’ anymore, but the AANES (Autonomous Administration of Northeastern Syria), specifically to avoid centring the Kurdish language.
7. Beyond Marxism-Leninism, beyond the State
In Turkey, the sheer scale of the genocide led to the Kurdish resistance coalescing in the 80s as a Marxist-nationalist guerrilla insurrection, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), seeking the liberation of Kurdistan, the State that was promised then withdrew by the colonisers. However, despite the legitimacy of a struggle against ethnic oppression, the PKK as well as the wider Kurdish movement have since grown to reject all of Marxism-Leninism, nation-states, and ethnic separatism. And the revolution in Rojava has proved that this ideological shift isn’t just theoretical. The revolution in Rojava is not the PKK, but both movements, plus various other Kurdish/Yazidi groups and allies, are united in advancing post-State democratic confederalism, as proposed by the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan. (In essence, a Marxist leader read Bookchin and got better.)
8. A case study in real-world difficulties
Despite his theory and praxis of decentralising power, the figure of Öcalan is still very much that of the Marxist People’s Leader, and will strike many as a personality cult. Even though Öcalan himself has denounced the nation-state, much of the Kurdish side of the revolution maintains nationalist feelings around the ideal of Kurdistan (understandably, as a reaction to the specifically ethnic genocide they face, but a point of contradiction). There have been countless struggles in implementing federated democracy: Old clan leaders expect to be respected as authorities; men raised in patriarchy can get resentful of women’s empowerment; cultural conservatism is slow to dismantle; rich people try to keep their riches. Participation in the assemblies isn’t always high; their autonomy can be less than ideal.
9. Nonetheless, already successful
Even acknowledging all contradictions, reports from independent observers (and like talking to ppl) reveals experiences of autonomy, participation and freedom far above civic life in rich liberal-capitalist States. Rather than trending towards central autocracy like ML, the revolutionary process has maintained a positive direction; there’s no purges of dissidents or executions against the wall, no secret police, surveillance or torture apparatuses. Before the AKP invasion, participation rate in the assemblies was consistently increasing and reaching close to 100% involvement in some cantons. That they came this far in conditions of extreme embargos, poverty, international isolation, and constant bombardment from 4 simultaneous fascist forces is downright heroic.
Also this people’s insurrection is the one who defeated ISIS—at a huge cost in revolutionary lives; and even after facing the worst that humanity has to offer, the revolution still doesn’t do executions, not even of captured ISIS militants.
10. The one weird system that mainstream media doesn’t want you to know!
Western media refuses to acknowledge the revolutionary project of democratic confederalism. They will happily showcase beautiful photos of the feminist warrior ladies fighting ISIS, and not even mention that they’re fighting for a political system of communalist democracy. The genocidal invasion led by the AKP, when mentioned at all, is presented as a Turkish vs. Kurdish ethnic conflict, not as theocratic racial-supremacist fascism vs. bottom-up multicultural democracy. The PKK is still classed as ‘terrorist’ in most of Europe (except in places that bothered to actually look it up). Leftist movements are being repressed throughout Europe, but none nearly as intensely as Kurdish activists and their allies. (see previous post)
11. Not just for Syria, yo
Yes Erdoǧan bad, but this isn’t about white-saviouring the poor oppressed Kurds. If the public knew more about the revolution—about the real, existing, positive experiences of dual power structures, confederated decision-making, communal autonomy—about how, even with limited implementation, in extreme war and poverty conditions—how it has already given people a better, more meaningful, fair and free life right now, a life sustainable and desirable in the 21s century, with no State or capitalist powers controlling us,
maybe people would start having ideas.
Filed under Rojava
The Violence in Me is Holy: A speech/performance for the Trans Day of Revenge 2022
Germany & EU political repression of Kurdish and leftist movements