{"id":37355,"date":"2015-01-05T18:03:13","date_gmt":"2015-01-05T08:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=37355"},"modified":"2015-01-06T12:43:36","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T02:43:36","slug":"graeber-et-al-on-the-rojava-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=37355","title":{"rendered":"Graeber et al on the ‘Rojava Revolution’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Below I’ve republished David Graeber’s recent interview with Pinar \u00d6\u011f\u00fcn\u00e7 about his recent (December) trip to Rojava as part of a small international delegation<\/a> to the area. I’ve also included links to several articles of relevance. A good collection of links on the ‘Rojava Revolution’ is available by way of libcom<\/a>; there’s also a disco thread on the libcom forum inre Graeber’ views here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

See also<\/em> :<\/p>\n

\u2022 Syria: Abuses in Kurdish-run Enclaves<\/a>: Arbitrary Arrests, Unfair Trials; Use of Child Soldiers, Human Rights Watch, June 19, 2014 | International Crisis Group: Flight of Icarus? The PYD\u2019s Precarious Rise in Syria<\/a>, May 2014 | Syria\u2019s Kurds: A Struggle Within a Struggle<\/a>, January 2013.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u201cA revolution in daily life\u201d<\/a>, Peace in Kurdistan, December 22, 2014 (an account by Becky of the delegation to Rojava which ‘discusses how power is being dispersed among the people in Cizire Canton’).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Impressions of Rojava: a report from the revolution<\/a>, Janet Biehl, ROAR, December 16, 2014 | Ecology or Catastrophe: Visit to the YPJ, December 7, Amuda<\/a> (December 22, 2014) \/ \u201cPoor in means but rich in spirit\u201d<\/a> (December 30, 2014) \/ The Revolutionary Days of July 2012<\/a> (January 4, 2015).<\/p>\n

\u2022 MACG withdraws from Australians for Kurdistan<\/a>, Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group, December 7, 2014 | Australians for Kurdistan<\/a> (Facebook) | Anarchist Federation [UK] Statement on Rojava – December 2014<\/a>, December 1, 2014 | In Rojava: People\u2019s War is not Class War<\/a>, International Communist Tendency, October 30, 2014.<\/p>\n

\u2022 VICE News on Kobane<\/a> | The Rojava Report<\/a> (News from the Revolution in Rojava and Wider Kurdistan) | TAHRIR International Collective Network on Kurdistan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Whose side is Turkey on?<\/a>, Patrick Cockburn, London Review of Books<\/em>, Vol.36 No.21 (November 6, 2014) | An Interview with Revolutionary Anarchist Action on Koban\u00ea: \u201cWe are Kawa against Dehaks\u201d<\/a>, October 27, 2014 | In Defence Of Anarchism: Tearing Down The Links To The Butchers Of ISIL<\/a>, Andy Fleming, New Matilda, October 21, 2014.<\/p>\n

KNK : Kurdistan National Congress
\nKRG : Kurdistan Regional Government
\nPeshmerga : KRG-aligned military units
\nPKK : Kurdistan Workers’ Party
\nPYD : Kurdish Democratic Union Party
\nPYG : People’s Protection Units
\nPYJ : Women’s Protection Units
\nRojava : self-declared autonomous Kurdish republic in northern Syria, consisting of three non-contiguous cantons, Afrin\/Efr\u00een in the west, Kobani\/Koban\u00ea in the centre and Jazira\/Ciz\u00eer\u00ea in the east<\/p>\n

\"rojavamap\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cNo. This is a Genuine Revolution\u201d
\nDavid Graeber and Pinar \u00d6\u011f\u00fcn\u00e7
\nZ
\nDecember 26, 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, activist, anarchist David Graeber wrote an article for the Guardian in October, in the first weeks of the ISIS attacks on Kobane (North Syria), and asked why the world was ignoring the revolutionary Syrian Kurds.<\/p>\n

Mentioning his father who volunteered to fight in the International Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic in 1937, he asked: \u201cIf there is a parallel today to Franco\u2019s superficially devout, murderous Falangists, who would it be but ISIS? If there is a parallel to the Mujeres Libres of Spain, who could it be but the courageous women defending the barricades in Kobane? Is the world -and this time most scandalously of all, the international left- really going to be complicit in letting history repeat itself?\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Graeber, the autonomous region of Rojava declared with a \u201csocial contract\u201d in 2011 as three anti-state, anti-capitalist cantons, was also a remarkable democratic experiment of this era.<\/p>\n

In early December, with a group of eight people, students, activists, academics from different parts of Europe and the US, he spent ten days in Cizire -one of the three cantons of Rojava. He had the chance to observe the practice of \u201cdemocratic autonomy\u201d on the spot, and to ask dozens of questions.<\/p>\n

Now he tells his impressions of this trip with bigger questions and answers why this \u201cexperiment\u201d of the Syrian Kurds is ignored by the whole world.<\/p>\n

In your article for the Guardian you had asked why the whole world was ignoring the \u201cdemocratic experiment\u201d of the Syrian Kurds. After experiencing it for ten days, do you have a new question or maybe an answer to this?<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, if anyone had any doubt in their minds about whether this was really a revolution, or just some kind of window-dressing, I\u2019d say the visit put that permanently to rest. There are still people talking like that: This is just a PKK (Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party) front, they\u2019re really a Stalinist authoritarian organisation that\u2019s just pretending to have adopted radical democracy. No. They\u2019re totally for real. This is a genuine revolution. But in a way that\u2019s exactly the problem. The major powers have [committed] themselves to an ideology that say[s] real revolutions can no longer happen. Meanwhile, many on the left, even the radical left, seem to have tacitly adopted a politics which assumes the same, even though they still make superficially revolutionary noises. They take a kind of puritanical \u201canti-imperialist\u201d framework that assumes the significant players are governments and capitalists and that\u2019s the only game worth talking about. The game where you wage war, create mythical villains, seize oil and other resources, set up patronage networks; that\u2019s the only game in town. The people in Rojava are saying: We don\u2019t want to play that game. We want to create a new game. A lot of people find that confusing and disturbing so they choose to believe it isn\u2019t really happening, or such people are deluded or dishonest or naive.<\/p>\n

Since October we see a rising solidarity from different political movements from all over the world. There has been a huge and some quite enthusiastic coverage of Kobane resistance by the mainstream medias of the world. Political stance regarding Rojava has changed in the West to some degree. These are all significant signs but still do you think democratic autonomy and what\u2019s been experimented in the cantons of Rojava are discussed enough? How much does the general perception of \u201cSome brave people fighting against the evil of this era, ISIS\u201d dominate this approval and the fascination?<\/em><\/p>\n

I find it remarkable how so many people in [the] West see these armed feminist cadres, for example, and don\u2019t even think on the ideas that must lie behind them. They just figured it happened somehow. \u201cI guess it\u2019s a Kurdish tradition.\u201d To some degree it\u2019s [O]rientalism of course, or to put simpl[y] racism. It never occurs to them that people in Kurdistan might be reading Judith Butler too. At best they think \u201cOh, they\u2019re trying to come up to Western standards of democracy and women\u2019s rights. I wonder if it\u2019s for real or just for foreign consumption.\u201d It just doesn\u2019t seem to occur to them they might be taking these things way further than \u201cWestern standards\u201d ever have; that they might genuinely believe in the principles that Western states only profess.<\/p>\n

You mentioned the approach of the left towards Rojava. How is it received in the international anarchist communities?<\/em><\/p>\n

The reaction in the international anarchist communities has been decidedly mixed. I find it somewhat difficult to understand. There\u2019s a very substantial group of anarchists -usually the more sectarian elements -who insist that the PKK is still a \u201cStalinist\u201d authoritarian nationalist group which has adopted Bookchin and other left libertarian ideas to court the anti-authoritarian left in Europe and America. It\u2019s always struck me that this is one of the silliest and most narcissistic ideas I\u2019ve ever heard. Even if the premise were correct, and a Marxist-Leninist group decided to fake an ideology to win foreign support, why on earth would they choose anarchist ideas developed by Murray Bookchin? That would be the stupidest gambit ever. Obviously they\u2019d pretend to be Islamists or [l]iberals, those are the guys who get the guns and material support. Anyway I think a lot of people on the international left, and the anarchist left included, basically don\u2019t really want to win. They can\u2019t imagine a revolution would really happen and secretly they don\u2019t even want it, since it would mean sharing their cool club with ordinary people; they wouldn\u2019t be special any more. So in that way it\u2019s rather useful in culling the real revolutionaries from the poseurs. But the real revolutionaries have been solid.<\/p>\n

What was the most impressi[ve] thing you witnessed in Rojava in terms of this democratic autonomy practice?<\/em><\/p>\n

There were so many [impressive] things. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever heard of anywhere else in the world where there\u2019s been a dual power situation where the same political forces created both sides. There\u2019s the \u201cdemocratic self-administration,\u201d which has all the form and trappings of a state -Parliament, Ministries, and so on -but it was created to be carefully separated from the means of coercive power. Then you have the TEV-DEM (The Democratic Society Movement), driven bottom-up directly-democratic institutions. Ultimately -and this is key -the security forces are answerable to the bottom-up structures and not to the top-down ones. One of the first places we visited was a police academy (Asayi\u015f). Everyone had to take courses in non-violent conflict resolution and feminist theory before they were allowed to touch a gun. The co-directors explained to us their ultimate aim was to give everyone in the country six weeks of police training, so that ultimately, they could eliminate police.<\/p>\n

What would you say to various criticisms regarding Rojava? For example: \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t have done this in peace. It is because of the state of war\u201d …<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, I think most movements, faced with dire war conditions, would not nonetheless immediately abolish capital punishment, dissolve the secret police and democratise the army. Military units for instance elect their officers.<\/p>\n

And there is another criticism, which is quite popular in pro-government circles here in Turkey: \u201cThe model the Kurds -in the line of PKK and PYD (The Kurdish Democratic Union Party) -are trying to promote is not actually embraced by all the peoples living there. That multi-[?] structure is only on the surface as symbols\u201d … <\/em><\/p>\n

Well, the President of Cizire canton is an Arab, head of a major local tribe in fact. I suppose you could argue he was just a figurehead. In a sense the entire government is. But even if you look at the bottom-up structures, it\u2019s certainly not just the Kurds who are participating. I was told the only real problem is with some of the \u201cArab belt\u201d settlements, people who were brought in by the Baathists in the \u201850s and \u201860s from other parts of Syria as part of an intentional policy of marginalising and assimilating Kurds. Some of those communities they said are pretty unfriendly to the revolution. But Arabs whose families had been there for generations, or the Assyrians, Khirgizians, Armenians, Chechens, and so on, are quite enthusiastic. The Assyrians we talked to said, after a long difficult relation with the regime, they felt they finally were being allowed free religious and cultural autonomy. Probably the most [intractable] problem might be women\u2019s liberation. The PYD and TEV-DEM see it as absolutely central to their idea of revolution, but they also have the problem of dealing [with] larger alliances with Arab communities who feel this violates basic religious principles. For instance, while the Syriac-speakers have their own women\u2019s union, the Arabs don\u2019t, and Arab girls interested in organising around gender issues or even taking feminist seminars have to hitch on with the Assyrians or even the Kurds.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t have to be trapped in that \u201cpuritanical \u2018anti-imperialist\u2019 framework\u201d you mentioned before, but what would you say to the comment that the West\/imperialism will one day ask Syrian Kurds to pay for their support[?] What does the West think exactly about this anti-state, anti-capitalist model? Is it just an experiment that can be ignored during the state of war while the Kurds voluntarily accept to fight an enemy that is by the way actually created by the West?<\/em><\/p>\n

Oh it is absolutely true that the US and European powers will do what they can to subvert the revolution. That goes without saying. The people I talked to were all well aware of it. But they didn\u2019t make a strong differentiation between the leadership of regional powers like Turkey or Iran or Saudi Arabia, and Euro-American powers like, say, France or the US. They assumed they were all capitalist and statist and thus anti-revolutionary, who might at best be convinced to put up with them but were not ultimately on their side. Then there\u2019s the even more complicated question of the structure of what\u2019s called \u201cthe international community,\u201d the global system of institutions like the UN or IMF, corporations, NGOs, human rights organisations for that matter, which all presume a statist organisation, a government that can pass laws and has a monopoly of coercive enforcement over those laws. There\u2019s only one airport in Cizire and it\u2019s still under Syrian government control. They could take it over easily, any time, they say. One reason they don\u2019t is because: How would a non-state run an airport anyway? Everything you do in an airport is subject to international regulations which presume a state.<\/p>\n

Do you have an answer to why ISIS is so obsessed with Kobane?<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, they can\u2019t be seen to lose. Their entire recruiting strategy is based on the idea that they are an unstoppable juggernaut, and their continual victory is proof that they represent the will of God. To be defeated by a bunch of feminists would be the ultimate humiliation. As long as they\u2019re still fighting in Kobane, they can claim that media claims are lies and they are really advancing. Who can prove otherwise? If they pull out they will have admitted defeat.<\/p>\n

Well, do you have an answer to what Tayyip Erdogan and his party is trying to do in Syria and the Middle East generally?<\/em><\/p>\n

I can only guess. It seems he has shifted from an anti-Kurdish, anti-Assad policy to an almost purely anti-Kurdish strategy. Again and again he has been willing to ally with pseudo-religious fascists to attack any PKK-inspired experiments in radical democracy. Clearly, like Daesh (ISIS) themselves, he sees what they are doing as an ideological threat, perhaps the only real viable ideological alternative to right-wing Islamism on the horizon, and he will do anything to stamp it out.<\/p>\n

On the one hand there is Iraqi Kurdistan standing on quite a different ideological ground in terms of capitalism and the notion of independence. On the other hand, there is this alternative example of Rojava. And there are the Kurds of Turkey who try to sustain a peace process with the government. How do you personally see the future of Kurdistan in short and long terms?<\/em><\/p>\n

Who can say? At the moment things look surprisingly good for he revolutionary forces. The [KRG: Kurdistan Regional Government] even gave up the giant ditch they were building across the Rojava border after the PKK intervened to effectively save Erbil and other cities from IS back in August. One KNK [Kurdistan National Congress] person told me it had a major effect on popular consciousness there; that one month had done 20 years worth of consciousness-raising. Young people were particularly struck by the way their own Peshmerga fled the field but PKK women soldiers didn\u2019t. But it\u2019s hard to imagine how the KRG territory […] will be revolutionised any time soon. Neither would the international powers allow it.<\/p>\n

Although democratic autonomy doesn\u2019t seem to be clearly on the table of negotiation in Turkey, the Kurdish Political Movement [?] has been working on it, especially on the social level. They try to find solutions in legal and economic terms for possible models. When we compare let\u2019s say the class structure and the level of capitalism in West Kurdistan (Rojava) and North Kurdistan (Turkey), what would you think about the differences of these two struggles for an anti-capitalist society -or for a minimised capitalism as they describe?<\/em><\/p>\n

I think the Kurdish struggle is quite explicitly anti-capitalist in both countries. It\u2019s their starting point. They\u2019ve managed to come up with a kind of formula: One can\u2019t get rid of capitalism without eliminating the state, one can\u2019t get rid of the state without getting rid of patriarchy. However, the Rojavans have it quite easy in class terms because the real bourgeoisie, such as it was in a mostly very agricultural region, took off with the collapse of the Baath regime. They will have a long-term problem if they don\u2019t work on the educational system to ensure a developmentalist technocrat stratum doesn\u2019t eventually try to take power, but in the meantime, it\u2019s understandable they are focusing more immediately on gender issues. In Turkey, well, I don\u2019t know nearly as much, but I do have the sense things are much more complicated.<\/p>\n

During the days that the peoples of the world can\u2019t breathe for obvious reasons, did your trip to Rojava inspire you about the future? What do you think is the \u201cmedicine\u201d for the people to breathe?<\/em><\/p>\n

It was remarkable. I\u2019ve spent my life thinking about how we might be able to do things like this in some remote time in the future and most people think I\u2019m crazy to imagine it will ever be. These people are doing it now. If they prove that it can be done, that a genuinely egalitarian and democratic society is possible, it will completely transform people\u2019s sense of human possibility. Myself, I feel ten years younger just having spent 10 days there.<\/p>\n

With which scene are you going to remember your trip to Cizire?<\/em><\/p>\n

There were so many striking images, so many ideas. I really liked the disparity between the way people looked, often, and the things they said. You meet some guy, a doctor, he looks like a slightly scary Syrian military type in a leather jacket and stern austere expression. Then you talk to him and he explains: \u201cWell, we feel the best approach to public health is preventative, most disease is made possible by stress. We feel if we reduce stress, levels of heart disease, diabetes, even cancer will decline. So our ultimate plan is to reorganise the cities to be 70% green space.\u201d There are all these mad, brilliant schemes. But then you go to the next doctor and they explain how because of the Turkish embargo, they can\u2019t even get basic medicine or equipment, all the dialysis patients they couldn\u2019t smuggle out have died. That disjuncture between their ambitions and their incredibly straightened circumstances. And … The woman who was effectively our guide was a deputy foreign minister named Amina. At one point, we apologised [that] we weren\u2019t able to bring better gifts and help to the Rojavans, who were suffering so under the embargo. And she said: \u201cIn the end, that isn\u2019t very important. We have the one thing no one can ever give you. We have our freedom. You don\u2019t. We only wish there was some way we could give that to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

You are sometimes criticised for being too optimistic and enthusiastic about what\u2019s happening in Rojava. Are you? Or do [your critics] miss something?<\/em><\/p>\n

I am by temperament an optimist, I seek out situations which bear some promise. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any guarantee this one will work out in the end, that it won\u2019t be crushed, but it certainly won\u2019t if everyone decides in advance that no revolution is possible and refuse to give active support, or even, devote their efforts to attacking it or increasing its isolation, which many do. If there\u2019s something I\u2019m aware of, that others aren\u2019t, perhaps it\u2019s the fact that history isn\u2019t over. Capitalists have made a mighty effort these past 30 or 40 years to convince people that current economic arrangements \u2013not even capitalism, but the peculiar, financialised, semi-feudal form of capitalism we happen to have today -is the only possible economic system. They\u2019ve put more effort into that than they have into actually creating a viable global capitalist system. As a result the system is breaking down all around us at just the moment everyone has lost the ability to imagine anything else. Well, I think it\u2019s pretty obvious that in 50 years, capitalism in any form we\u2019d recognise, and probably in any form at all, will be gone. Something else will have replaced it. That something might not be better. It might be even worse. It seems to me for that very reason it\u2019s our responsibility, as intellectuals, or just as thoughtful human beings, to try to at least think about what something better might look like. And if there are people actually trying to create that better thing, it\u2019s our responsibility to help them out.<\/p>\n

(This interview has been published by the daily Evrensel<\/em> in Turkish.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Below I’ve republished David Graeber’s recent interview with Pinar \u00d6\u011f\u00fcn\u00e7 about his recent (December) trip to Rojava as part of a small international delegation to the area. I’ve also included links to several articles of relevance. A good collection of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18,2,4,29,28,6,16,9,893,15],"tags":[2178,1962,1965,1964,1927,1933,1963,983,1966,1934],"class_list":["post-37355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-natas","category-anarchism","category-anti-fascism","category-broken-windows","category-death","category-history","category-media","category-state","category-thats-capitalism","category-war-on-terror","tag-anarchism","tag-david-graeber","tag-isil","tag-isis","tag-islamic-state","tag-kobane","tag-pinar-ogunc","tag-pkk","tag-pyg","tag-rojava"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6AyE-9Iv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37355"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37376,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37355\/revisions\/37376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}