How Syrian Kurds dropped Marx and adopted communalism

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2016 at 08:50:38PM -0700, Rayzer wrote:
> The Kurds are Exceptional...
> 
> The US keeps screwing them over and over and over again and they seem to
> like it.

I think they are exceptionally pragmatic. So US offers some guns to fight
some undesirable (to US) rebels over yonder, who the Kurds also happen to
dislike, so they take the guns, get the job done, then the US drops them
publicly or reneges on further support - of course they are going to
continue to fight to protect their lands, homes and people.

Then the US comes along again, offers a bit more since there is again some
political alignment, so of course there is some cooperation. Seems
entirely rational to me...


> Did you know a hundred years ago they were animists who believed in magic?
> 
> If you drew a circle around one they couldn't escape.
> 
> George Gurdjieff recounted one such incident in his autobiography
> Meetings with Remarkable Men.

Wow. That's really amazing. The 'power' of magic eh..


> On 06/11/2016 08:04 PM, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> > By Retaking Raqqa Syrian Army May Upset 'Federalization' Plan
> > http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160610/1041140173/syria-raqqa-kurds-federalization.html


Here's another one which may interest those on this topic:

How Syrian Kurds dropped Marx and adopted communalism
http://thesaker.is/how-syrian-kurds-dropped-marx-and-adopted-communalism/

by Claudio Gallo

Debbie is not only the daughter of Murray Bookchin (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin ), the theorist of
Communalism. She is a journalist and writer: in 2004, she wrote, together
with Jim Schumacher, “The Virus and the Vaccine: Contaminated Vaccine,
Deadly Cancers, and Government Neglect” about the polio vaccine scandal.
She served as presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ press secretary from
1991-1994. But, yes, she is also her father’s daughter, spreading the
legacy of the American philosopher born from Jewish Russian parents
emigrated to the United States.

>From Abdullah Öcalan to the  Kurds who were recently fighting ISIS in
Kobane, all threw Marxism over their shoulders  to embrace your father’s
philosophy: Communalism. What is Communalism?

Communalism is the idea that democracy works best when citizens make
decisions together on the local level, in assemblies. They meet
face-to-face with their neighbors and discuss issues of importance to
their communities. They send recallable delegates to councils to make
regional decisions; but power always resides at the local level, rather
than with the nation-state. My father believed that these local assemblies
would transform, and be transformed by, an increasingly enlightened
citizenry. People could reclaim and redefine politics as something we do
for ourselves rather than just voting for someone and hoping for the best.
Communalism also envisions what my father called a “moral economy” in
which people make collective decisions about how to use natural resources
for economic production, with the ecological impact in mind.

In this vision there is no money, no market: how is it possible?

Today we take capitalism for granted. But God didn’t ordain capitalism. In
much of human history societies functioned without it. As my father first
pointed out in the early 1960s, capitalism is on a collision course with
nature that threatens our survival as a species. Capitalism’s “grow or
die” ethos demands the ceaseless exploitation of natural resources. The
rapacious growth and individualism that it has fostered has led to global
warming, that is on the verge of making our planet uninhabitable for our
grandchildren. Is capitalism so sacred that we are willing to destroy the
planet for future generations? There are many examples in history of
people working cooperatively to make decisions for the benefit of a
community without using money – from primitive societies to large Israeli
kibbutzim. Communalism assumes that in a free society, people with
different skills, interests, and desires, will contribute their labor to
the well being of society. And given the advanced technology of the modern
age, it means that we would all have to work less and have more leisure
time than we do today.

What do you think is so remarkable about Rojava (the Kurdish area of
Syria)?

The Kurds have created a society that fully empowers women and people of
every ethnic and religious plurality to work together in charting the
future of their communities. Their economic planning is ecologically
sensitive and they are practicing the most democratic form of government
there is on the planet, all under conditions of war. It is truly
inspiring.

How did Communalism make its way to the Kurdish land?

When Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan was sentenced to life imprisonment, he
was brought many books by his lawyers, including some of books by my
father like The Ecology of Freedom and From Urbanization to Cities, which
had been translated into Turkish. Öcalan had become increasingly
disillusioned with a Marxist-Leninist approach that had led to three
decades of warfare with the Turkish state; he believed that by employing
my father’s ideas Kurds could achieve self-rule and true democracy even
while remaining within the borders of Turkey. But while Öcalan’s concept
of Democratic Confederalism incorporates my father’s thinking, Öcalan, has
contributed many original ideas, for example, particularly emphasizing the
role of women.

Which is the strongest criticism that you father had against Marx?
Murray_Bookchin

Murray Bookchin

My father had enormous respect for Marx, but he felt that modern day
Marxists were living in the past and that we had to go beyond “class
analysis,” and the tactics employed by revolutionaries in the 1930s, and
examine why workers had not, in fact, made a revolution. He rejected the
idea of workers or the proletariat as the “hegemonic class,” and argued
that social change today will only come about if we appeal to people as
citizens of their communities who share a common desire not just for
income equality but for clean air and water, safe food, and an end to all
forms of hierarchy and oppression, be it of race, ethnicity, gender, etc.
He also saw that socialism hadn’t led to freedom in the Eastern European
countries and felt that power had to be decentralized and located at the
municipal level, not in a centralized party apparatus.

Despite the ideal of Communalism, the Syrian Kurds were accused by Amnesty
International in 2015 of destroying Arab households: you wrote an article
in which you questioned those charges.

I think that as exciting as it is to see the remarkable social project
unfolding in Rojava, under conditions of war mistakes will be made; they
must be acknowledged and corrected. But there were a number of questions
raised about the evidence they cited, including the veracity of those they
interviewed and the failure to corroborate some anecdotes. Many people
felt it lessened the credibility of that report.

Communalist Kurds and Washington together against the IS: a strange
coalition, isn’t it?

It should be a natural coalition because the USA and EU promote themselves
as champions of democracy. However, while the West recognizes that the
Kurds are their best ally in fighting Isis, the USA and EU are also
fearful that Turkey will open its doors and allow migrants to enter
Europe. So they bowed to Turkey and have excluded Rojava representatives
from the Geneva talks about the future of Syria. They have turned a blind
eye to the ways Turkey assists ISIS and to the Turkish military
bombardment of the Kurdish towns of the southeast — in which the military
has killed hundreds of innocent civilians, including children, under the
pretense of searching for PKK terrorists. If they really believe the
democratic values they claim, the US and EU should invite Rojava
representatives to the Geneva talks and encourage the expansion of the
Rojava model throughout Syria so that a peaceful, democratic solution can
be reached which will allow people to stay in their homes instead of
having to flee.

The idea of an autonomous Kurdish region has to come to terms with Turkish
hostility: there will be another war in the near future?

I am a journalist, not a Middle East analyst, so it’s hard for me to
predict if there will be an all-out war. My personal feeling is that
people are very justified in worrying that President Erdogan is heading
down the path of dictatorship. An authoritarian regime will only spark
more unrest and instability, which is bad for the people in the region and
harms our efforts to defeat ISIS. It is my deepest hope that Western
leaders will use the substantial leverage they have to demand an end to
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s violence against the Kurdish people and insist on a
return to peace negotiations. It is clear that the “Kurdish Question”
cannot be solved militarily and that the sooner Erdogan resumes
negotiations the better it will be for all of Turkish society and the rest
of the world.

(Original interview
http://www.lastampa.it/2016/04/22/cultura/cos-i-curdi-siriani-hanno-abbandonato-marx-per-mio-padre-WOVS5lxc8XH7Iyt75hx9DN/pagina.html
appeared in Italian in Turin-based newspaper “La Stampa”)


---
For those still reading, some lighter viewing:
The US army against the army of Russia (Russian humor)
http://thesaker.is/the-us-army-against-the-army-of-russia-russian-humor/