Lessons from Rojava
Image credits: Rojava Information Center (2022) celebration of International Woman’s day in Qamishlo [instagram]
By Iacopo Nassigh
Global-North commies’ extinction
One thing us global-north left-wingers always tend to forget is that while in the last 50 years we have been sitting around and growing beards thinking that a revolution is impossible, it doesn’t mean that it has been the same in the rest of the world. Popular uprisings have been changing things up all around the world, showing that left-wing revolutions are not just a 20th century phenomenon. If one just looks at the last 15 years, several uprisings have dramatically challenged the status quo of world elites, from the Arab Spring all around the Middle East in the 2010s to the estadillo social in Chile (2019-2022).
Then, why, despite all of this, does revolutionary politics seem so far from the programs of the European Left, which is instead every day more prone to come down to compromises with the neoliberal establishment in the fear, often more supposed than real, to lose popular legitimacy? The question is extremely difficult, but my approximate answer would be that it comes down to a matter of what we have in mind when we think about democracy. I have the nerve to say that an anthropological viewpoint may suggest a way out of this situation. Indeed, as Graeber (2001) reminds us, what anthropology should be about is revealing that reality can be different from ours by looking at places in which it is. Anthropology should then give ‘power to the imagination’, as Graeber (ibid.) says, quoting a slogan from May 1968, roughly 50 years ago, roughly when in the Global North we stopped thinking left wing revolutions were possible.
Regarding our conceptions of democracy in the Global North, there is an elephant in the room. And the reason might be simpler than expected. As David Wengrow (2022) puts it, it may well be just a matter of racism. An embedded racism that, for example, blinds us when we celebrate Athenian democracy as the epitome of a functioning participatory democracy while it was probably no more than an imperialist state based on chattel slavery (ibid.). This same blindness prevents us from seeing how radical democracy is and has been successful in other places. Now, I will try and show that not only radical democracy is taking place, and probably originated as well1, outside of the Global North, but that by looking at its manifestations there, indefinite lessons can be understood about the State, the origin of inequality and ways to create a truly free society. In this sense, the Revolution in Rojava, officialy known as AANES (Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria), which has been developing amidst the Syrian Civil War since 2012 offers a fertile ground for thought.
Rojava Information Center (2022) celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Rojavan Revolution [instagram]
A first lesson: ‘give to women what belongs to them’
The first lesson we should learn from the Rojava revolution is that class doesn’t have to be the only discriminated identity that makes a revolution start. It can be gender as well. Even more, the Rojava revolution holds that the origin of inequality should be found in the latter and not in the former. This line of thought needs to be traced back to the thought of Abdullah Öcalan, the theoretical mind behind the revolution and co-founder of the PKK2 (Kurdistan workers’ party), who was put in jail by the Turkish regime in 1999 and has been incarcerated ever since. In his thought, the main reason for the unequal and unfair state of the current capitalist society, embodied in Syria by the Assad regime, is to be located in the oppression of women as, in his own historical metanarrative, ‘the decline of society (…) began with the fall of women’ (Knapp et al., 2016: 40).
However, this is no new argument at all. To say it better, it looks very similar to Engels’ (1884) famous argument3. Indeed, in what is probably Engels’ most well-known book he argues that in origins human society was regulated by a matriarchal and matrilineal principle that put women at the centre of society’s life and then all went wrong with the shift from nomadic to sedentary lifestyle which gave rise, in order, to private property, patriarchy and ultimately the State. One might say, and many actually do, that this argument is a bit simplistic and evolutionary; an example of 19th century anthropology that should be bypassed in order to pay attention to the uniqueness of every specific social arrangement.
Nonetheless, students of Engels who have refined the argument are still around us. One of them is Chris Knight, co-founder of the RAG (Radical Anthropology Group), still operating in London at the moment. For him, primitive communism’s origins lie in the evolutionary step that brought humans to distinguish themselves from primates as a species. In particular, the first act of the revolution that led to an egalitarian society is for him the uprising of female primates against dominant and immobile males in order to ‘force the leisured sex to help in childcare for the first time’ (1991: 25) (emphasis in original text), allying with outcast male primates. The core of this alliance was a sex-for-meat agreement by which the game hunted by males was exchanged with females for sex, thus taking away potential sexual partners from the alpha male primates.
Nonetheless, Knight does not only follow Engels, but add something to it. What Knight adds is the centrality of the menstrual cycle in this shift away from the domination of the alpha male in social arrangements. Indeed, the menstrual cycle was, according to Knight, the biological clock around which the times of the couples’ disjoining and conjoining would alternate, since men would leave in order to hunt when their partners were menstruating, and the end of the hunt would coincide with the end of the females’ cycles. Considering the biological proven fact of menstrual cycle synchronisation among females living in proximity, the final effect of all this arrangement was the splitting and reuniting of the males and females all at the same time, leading thus to a society with two centres of power, male and female, balancing one another through the overarching time-scheduling principle of the female menstrual cycle. As the theory goes, this revolution brought into existence egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies which turned into patriarchal and sedentary societies, scared of the power of women and thus terrified by their menstrual blood.
What is peculiar about these arguments resonating with Öcalan’s ones is that they are often discarded by classic Marxist theory for which “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle” (Marx et al., 2008). Instead, what the Rojava revolution has done is taking this seriously, stating in facts that there was a struggle before class struggle to solve: the one between genders. A ‘science of women’, Jineolojî 4 was thus created by the revolutionary forces in Rojava to address this core inequality. The main idea of Jineolojî is that ‘knowledge and science are disconnected from society (and from women especially) - they are a monopoly controlled by dominant groups, used as a foundation for their power’ (Knapp et al., 2016: 71). What it aims to do is thus giving ‘women and society access to science and knowledge and to strengthen the connections of science and knowledge to society’ (ibid.), to re-embed them to where they originally belonged as an anthropologist would put it.
What Jineolojî has meant on the ground, even for the most sceptical observers of the revolution5, is a dramatic repositioning of women in society through their direct political participation. In Rojava the principle of dual leadership, by which there should be two leaders (one of whom must be a woman) in any political assembly, applies at every level of political organisation. Moreover, every assembly must have at least 40% (in multiple instances they are actually more) women in it. But this is not all of it. At an extremely localised level, often the neighbourhood one, there is a ‘Women’s House (Mala Jinan), ‘an all-female house where women’s autonomy is discussed’ (Nordhag, 2021: 16), women’s peace committees that investigate cases of gender-based domestic violence, women’s education and research centres where ‘women bring their family and social dilemmas (…) and find solutions by talking with other women’ (Knapp et al., 2016: 70) while at the same time being taught about ‘computer use, language, sewing, first aid, and children’s health, and culture and art’ (ibid.). On top of all this, there is the YPJ (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin), the all-female women’s protection units, an armed body led by women in which they protect their lands and families, and now world famous for their fight against the IS.
Rojava Information Center (2022) meeting of a commune in the city of Qamishlo [website: https://rojavainformationcenter.com/2022/07/10-years-of-the-rojava-revolution-much-achieved-still-much-to-come/]
Thus, the Rojava revolution is showing the world a radical and successful feminism in which the key to women’s liberation is giving back to women the knowledge that has been taken away from them, creating female-only organs that can do this following the guideline concept of woman-to-woman solidarity as the basis of women’s (and thus everyone’s) liberation. However, as the shared metanarrative goes, women’s freedom and power are put in danger by the State, the ultimate masculinist construct. Thus, in order to protect women’s freedom the revolution had to replace the State with something else.
A second lesson: ‘The origins of the commune, cooperative and democratic confederalism’: Engels today
It is in its refusal of the State as we know it that the Rojavan revolution gives us a second lesson. Indeed, what Öcalan’s political theory, called democratic confederalism, the political ideology governing Rojava political life, wants to do is addressing the inherent oppressive nature of the Nation-State. The core idea behind democratic confederalism is one of total integration between political society and civil society in a bottom-up fashion. To put it in Öcalan’s words ‘confederalism proposes political self-administration in which all groups of the society and all cultural identities express themselves in local meetings, general conventions, and councils. Such a democracy opens political space for all social strata and allows diverse political groups to express themselves. In this way it advances the political integration of society as a whole. Politics becomes part of everyday life’ (Öcalan quoted in Knapp et al., 2016: 43). From the level of the commune to the one of the country thus the assembly has become in Rojava the main form of collective decision-making, trying to dismantle collective life as we know it in the Nation-State. But what is ultimately wrong about the State?
For simplicity, let’s just take the definition of State by Encyclopaedia Britannica “a territorially bounded sovereign polity—i.e., a state—that is ruled in the name of a community of citizens who identify themselves as a nation”. Thus, the nation-state is a ‘territorial bounded’ unity. What does this imply? It implies the drawing of neat borders that mark off a specific area, making it ‘bounded’. However, who are these neat borders for? Nobody needs a neat delineation of a geographical space if the relationship they have with that territory is not one of possession, or to say it better, of capitalist exploitation. The people who want boundaries are colonisers, rulers or landlords, not subsistence peasants. Borders have historically emerged as a way to assert domination over land within the typically western and moreover, historically typically masculine, binary between nature and culture. State’s borders are just taken-for-granted manifestations of this logic. In this vein, Nation-States have been successfully represented in propaganda in the form of a wedding (a non-consensual one I’d say), between ‘Father State and Motherland’ (Delaney, 1995: 187), the male ‘cultural’ dominator and the female ‘natural’ territorial victim of this domination.
The Rojava revolution dramatically challenges this ‘territorial boundedness’. What instead leads the way is Bookchin’s theory of social ecology (2006), the idea that links ‘the fate of ecological society to that of a revolutionary political project of local direct democracy’ (Hammy and Miley, 2022), stemming from Bookchin’s conviction that ‘our present-day ecological dislocations have their basic sources in social dislocations’ (Bookchin quoted in ibid.). Thus, human-nature co-dependence has informed the practice of the revolution. Cooperatives established in Rojava have ever since the beginning of the revolution tried to paradigmatically change the ‘territorial bounded’ nature of North-eastern Syrian landscape, transforming wheat and olives monocultures in fields hosting a wide range of vegetables (Rojava information Center, 2020) By crushing the boundaries of monocultures and those of strict individual possession and boundedness, the very basic principle of ‘boundedness’ that underpins capitalist exploitation and the Nation-State is at danger.
Rojava Information Center (2020) workers of the Umceren cooperative (Heseke countryside) are drying up bricks to construct a school for the local community [website: https://rojavainformationcenter.com/2020/11/explainer-cooperatives-in-north-and-east-syria-developing-a-new-economy/]
Going back to our definition, a nation-state is also a ‘sovereign polity (…) ruled in the name of a community of citizens’, but here as well the question of boundaries is a central one. Who is included in the ‘sovereign polity’? From Agamben (1998) we know that the ultimate characteristic of sovereignty is to distinguish between ‘bare life’ and ‘political life’, and isn’t this distinction historically and ideologically in the western polity, a distinction between men and women, ethnic majority and minorities? Indeed, historically women didn’t get only citizenship rights later, but their exclusion was part of the process by which men acquired citizenship as representatives of the entire family (Vogel in Yuval-Davis, 1998: 24). At the same time, are not the members of the nation’s ethnic majority often distinguished ethnically from the rest of the population, as bearers of some sort of ‘ethnic genius’ (Appadurai, 2006: 3)?
Rojava challenges these, one might say, ‘original exclusions’ at the base of the State project. I have talked about the centrality of women in the revolution, empowered in being protagonists of the holistic revolutionary project. However, in the many camps that occupy the Rojavan territory, ethnic boundaries (often neatly stressed across the region) are blurred. Arabs, Turkmens and Kurds have learnt to live side by side, revealing how the camp, instead of what predicted by Agamben (1998), can be a space for political participatory and inclusive activity (Bishara2017), where people have to collaborate to create a liveable future also through economic cooperatives, such as the one south of Tel Abyad (Broomfield 2023).
Thus, what Rojava is attempting to do is dismantling of the State and its inherent oppression stemming from its intrinsic boundedness and exclusion. This is not just revolutionary, this is even beyond Marx’s whole economic determinism. Indeed, the Rojavan revolution does not just say that gender comes before class but that the political comes before the economic. Turning their back to the dictatorship of the proletariat, Rojavans take seriously Clastres’ (1974) genius intuition that the original source of oppression does not come from economic division but from the existence of the State without which even class society would not be possible. As the argument goes, it is the centralisation of both power and wealth brought by the State that prevents people from just producing for subsistence and thus being in egalitarian relationships to one another. Thus, abolishing the State as overarching structure means abolishing, or considerably reducing, the risk of patriarchal authoritarianism within the revolutionary government. There is no Lenin or Mao in the Rojava revolution that can take over and transform a popular revolution in an oppressive, party-led, chauvinist regime. Instead, at the moment there are two co-presidents leading the revolution, Îlham Ehmed, female and Kurd, and Mansur Selum, male and Arab.
However, this statelessness nature of the revolution should not be confused with a return to some sort of Engels’ ‘primitive communism’. Instead, what the Rojava revolution does is creating a stateless contemporaneity, embedded in the long history of entanglements of the Kurdsish people, and the Middle-East at large with the global capitalist, colonialist, world. Indeed, the Rojava revolution is a late capitalist one, a revolution at the margins of the capitalist Empire, in an area oppressed and torn by conflicts caused by political interests of European superpowers, most notably from WWI mandates’ system and the Syrian and Turkish dictatorships now. From the destruction of war, a revolutionary life has emerged trying to pursue ‘collaborative survival’ (Tsing, 2015: 2) at the margins of the State and capitalist modernity.
Camps people are forced to live in, not academics theorise about: Agamben in the real world
Thus far what I have depicted may look like a socialist utopia but the reality is of course much more complex. As I have already mentioned, a lot of people in Rojava live in camps due to the displacement caused by the numerous military invasions, by the Turkish forces and the IS in particular. On the economic side, the general material conditions are often extreme. Indeed, as it has been the case of Cuba for more than 60 years, Rojava has been subjected to a heavy blockade by Turkey which renders many essential goods scarce and often, non-existent. Thus, often smugglers that follow an entrepreneurial logic are tolerated to keep the population using some essential goods, inaccessible in any other way (Broomfield, 2023). As many observers suggest, fossil fuel revenues are still the ones which provide the basic income of most of the population, as cooperatives are not as widespread as the revolutionaries would like them to be (Broomfield, 2023; Hammy and Miley, 2022).
On the political side, the shortcomings are multiple. People document how the discussion in the communes are often not as participatory and radical as auspicated as people sometimes go there to collect their rations rather than engaging in political action (Broomfield, 2023). Or even more worryingly, people sometimes are scared to express their opinion or feel that they do not count if they are not close to YPD members, the branch of the PKK with a leading role in the revolution (Hammy and Miley 2022). On the other hand, the revolution, being under a constant military siege on multiple sides, deeply depends on top-down military units, hindering the autonomy of the communes.
On another more theoretical level the Rojava revolution has worried left-wingers for one specific reason that I already mentioned: it is not mainly about class. As Graeber puts it ‘economic capital had been partly expropriated, social capital had been somewhat rearranged, but cultural capital – and particularly class habitus – had barely been affected’, concluding that ‘unless these structures are directly addressed, they will always tend to reassert themselves’ (2016: xix). However, one could say, what is cross-class solidarity there for if we do not accept that ingrained cultural capital is not strictly co-related with social antagonism to someone with a different class habitus? Could social and political class-solidarity be stronger than cultural differences between classes? Isn’t the idea of class homogenisation on a cultural level one that has had a controversial history in past, self-proclaimed ‘communist’, revolutions? The matter is complex, and I do not have an answer to these questions, but dismissing the revolution as doomed to fail because of this seems too simplistic to me.
At the end of the day, as everything human-made, the Rojavan revolution is highly imperfect. However, what seems saving it from its own self-destruction is one amazing detail: the awareness of this imperfection. Indeed, Öcalan himself sees self-critique as an essential part of the revolutionary process and this is widespread among the revolutionaries’ discussions at every level, to the point in which the revolution has been called a ‘self-critical’ one (Aslan, 2021: 333). As long as the revolution stays this way, it has the potential to improve. As dogmas and States go hand in hand, Rojava will remain the best example of an Anti-State holistic revolution, which makes of the intersectionality of its battles its point of strength. It may be the best model we currently have to give ‘power to the imagination’, to start the ‘war of imagination’ as Graeber also used to say, changing our imagination about possible futures and changing what we think about when we think of democracy. Maybe the first step in this way could be, when we hear the word democracy, to think before anything else about the words said by a revolutionary woman to David Graeber when leaving Rojava. While he was apologising about not having brought more goods with him, she said “Don’t worry about that too much (…) I have something that no one can give me. I have my freedom. In a day or two you have to go back to a place where you don’t have that. I only wish there was some way I could give what I have to you’ (Graeber, 2016: xxii).
Notes
1. Uncountable authors have shown how it is very likely that the birth of democracy took place outside of what we consider the Global North. Interesting for this article is Öcalan’s Prison Writings. The roots of Civilisation (2007).
2. The PKK has been active since the 80s in the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. In 2003 The PYD (Democratic Union Party has been founded) as a Syrian branch of the PKK. To this day, the PYD is the party leading the revolution in Rojava.
3. The argument can be found in ‘The origins of the family, private property, and the State’ (1884)
4. The Kurdish word jin means ‘woman’, olojî derives from the Greek for ‘knowledge’ the word Jin is also related to the Kurdish concept jiyan, which means ‘life’.
5. As in everything, also the Rojava revolution has its detractors. However, even Schmidinger (2018) documents how people’s opinions over women’s liberation in Rojava is highly positive.
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