[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] a good article on Kurds in Syria by David Gareber

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jakob Rigi <rigij at ceu.hu>
Date: Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 3:55 AM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] a good article on Kurds in Syria by David Gareber
To: bbirkinbine at gmail.com, networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org



   - ent is free <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree>

Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria?
Amid the Syrian warzone a democratic experiment is being stamped into the
ground by Isis. That the wider world is unaware is a scandal

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   - [image: David Graeber]
   <http://www.theguardian.com/profile/david-graeber>
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      - David Graeber <http://www.theguardian.com/profile/david-graeber>
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      - theguardian.com <http://www.theguardian.com/>, Wednesday 8 October
      2014 09.04 BST
      - Jump to comments (392)
      <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/why-world-ignoring-revolutionary-kurds-syria-isis?CMP=fb_gu#start-of-comments>

[image: Demonstrators hold flags outside the United Nations European
headquarters in Geneva]Demonstrators hold flags of Kurdistan and a flag
with a portrait of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan outside the UN
headquarters in Geneva. Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters

In 1937, my father volunteered to fight in the International Brigades in
defence of the Spanish Republic. A would-be fascist coup had been
temporarily halted by a worker’s uprising, spearheaded by anarchists and
socialists, and in much of Spain a genuine social revolution ensued,
leading to whole cities under directly democratic management, industries
under worker control, and the radical empowerment of women.

Spanish revolutionaries hoped to create a vision of a free society that the
entire world might follow. Instead, world powers declared a policy of
“non-intervention” and maintained a rigorous blockade on the republic, even
after Hitler and Mussolini, ostensible signatories, began pouring in troops
and weapons to reinforce the fascist side
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_involvement_in_the_Spanish_Civil_War> .
The result was years of civil war that ended with the suppression of the
revolution and some of a bloody century’s bloodiest massacres.

I never thought I would, in my own lifetime, see the same thing happen
again. Obviously, no historical event ever really happens twice. There are
a thousand differences between what happened in Spain in 1936 and what is
happening in Rojava, the three largely Kurdish provinces of northern Syria,
today. But some of the similarities are so striking, and so distressing,
that I feel it’s incumbent on me, as someone who grew up in a family whose
politics were in many ways defined by the Spanish revolution, to say: we
cannot let it end the same way again.

The autonomous region of Rojava, as it exists today, is one of few bright
spots – albeit a very bright one – to emerge from the tragedy of the Syrian
revolution. Having driven out agents of the Assad regime in 2011, and
despite the hostility of almost all of its neighbours, Rojava has not only
maintained its independence, but is a remarkable democratic experiment.
Popular assemblies have been created as the ultimate decision-making
bodies, councils selected with careful ethnic balance (in each
municipality, for instance, the top three officers have to include one
Kurd, one Arab and one Assyrian or Armenian Christian, and at least one of
the three has to be a woman), there are women’s and youth councils, and, in
a remarkable echo of the armed Mujeres Libres (Free Women) of Spain, a
feminist army, the “YJA Star” militia (the “Union of Free Women”, the star
here referring to the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar), that has
carried out a large proportion of the combat operations against the forces
of Islamic State.

How can something like this happen and still be almost entirely ignored by
the international community, even, largely, by the International left?
Mainly, it seems, because the Rojavan revolutionary party, the PYD, works
in alliance with Turkey’s Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), a Marxist guerilla
movement that has since the 1970s been engaged in a long war against the
Turkish state. Nato, the US and EU officially classify them as a
“terrorist” organisation. Meanwhile, leftists largely write them off as
Stalinists.

But, in fact, the PKK itself is no longer anything remotely like the old,
top-down Leninist party it once was. Its own internal evolution, and the
intellectual conversion of its own founder, Abdullah Ocalan
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_%C3%96calan> , held in a Turkish
island prison since 1999, have led it to entirely change its aims and
tactics.

The PKK has declared that it no longer even seeks to create a Kurdish
state. Instead, inspired in part by the vision of social ecologist and
anarchist Murray Bookchin, it has adopted the vision of “libertarian
municipalism”, calling for Kurds to create free, self-governing
communities, based on principles of direct democracy, that would then come
together across national borders – that it is hoped would over time become
increasingly meaningless. In this way, they proposed, the Kurdish struggle
could become a model for a wordwide movement towards genuine democracy,
co-operative economy, and the gradual dissolution of the bureaucratic
nation-state.

Since 2005 the PKK, inspired by the strategy of the Zapatista rebels in
Chiapas
<http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/01/02/mexicos-zapatista-rebel-movement-marks-20-years/4284461/>
,
declared a unilateral ceasefire with the Turkish state and began
concentrating their efforts in developing democratic structures in the
territories they already controlled. Some have questioned how serious all
this really is. Clearly, authoritarian elements remain. But what has
happened in Rojava, where the Syrian revolution gave Kurdish radicals the
chance to carry out such experiments in a large, contiguous territory,
suggests this is anything but window dressing. Councils, assemblies and
popular militias have been formed, regime property has been turned over to
worker-managed co-operatives – and all despite continual attacks by the
extreme rightwing forces of Isis. The results meet any definition of a
social revolution. In the Middle East, at least, these efforts have been
noticed: particularly after PKK and Rojava forces intervened to
successfully fight their way through Isis territory in Iraq to rescue
thousands of Yezidi refugees trapped on Mount Sinjar after the local
peshmerga fled the field. These actions were widely celebrated in the
region, but remarkably received almost no notice in the European or North
American press.

Now, Isis has returned, with scores of US-made tanks and heavy artillery
taken from Iraqi forces, to take revenge against many of those same
revolutionary militias in Kobane, declaring their intention to massacre and
enslave – yes, literally enslave – the entire civilian population.
Meanwhile, the Turkish army stands at the border preventing reinforcements
or ammunition from reaching the defenders, and US planes buzz overhead
making occasional, symbolic, pinprick strikes – apparently, just to be able
to say that it did not do nothing as a group it claims to be at war with
crushes defenders of one of the world’s great democratic experiments.

If there is a parallel today to Franco’s 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?

>>> Ben Birkinbine <bbirkinbine at gmail.com> 10/08/14 7:10 PM >>>
The link that Jakob forwarded contained a minor error, which led to a dead
end.

This one should take you to the article on Hong Kong:

http://libcom.org/black-yellow-hk

On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 6:55 AM, Jakob Rigi <rigij at ceu.hu> wrote:

>
> A good article on Hong Kong:
>
> https:/libcom.org/blacl-yellow-hk
>
> _______________________________________________
> NetworkedLabour mailing list
> NetworkedLabour at lists.contrast.org
> http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
>
>

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