(written by david graeber)

* the economy of Rojava in general and Cizire especially was of an
artificially dependent agrarian economy which suppled wheat, cotton, but
also petroleum to be processed elsewhere in the country (there were no
mills or refineries in Cizire itself.) Roughly half of land and other
resources were state owned but run effectively as private fiefdoms by
various government officials or members of their family; otherwise there
was a bazaar economy supplying basic needs, much of it made up of black
market or smuggled goods. After the revolution the bourgeoisie almost
universally fled, and Baathist-owned land and buildings were taken under
public control and distributed either to local communes, which exist on
each neighbourhood level, and are organised on directly democratic
lines, or to municipalities governed by delegates chosen by the
communes. These are allocated to various projects, ranging from
Academies for popular education, to cooperatives. There have also been
efforts to create publicly run mills, refineries, dairy processing
plants, and the like to process raw materials that had previously had to
be sent off to facilities in other parts of Syria.

* the academy system is a key part of the economic strategy, offering 6
week intensive courses in various forms of expertise that had previously
been monopolised by the Baathist, which was very much a rule-by-experts
style of administration. There is a conscious strategy of
deprofessionalization of knowledge to prevent the emergence of new
technocratic classes. Economic academies not only train in technical
knowledge but emphasise cooperative management and aim to disseminate
such skills to as much of the population as possible.

* The aim is to connect cooperatives directly to one another so as to
ultimately eliminate the use of money entirely in the cooperative sector.

* in addition to the collectives and cooperative sector there's an "open
economy" sector which includes the existing bazaar economy, which,
however, now falls under the ultimate authority of the local communes
which intervene to enforce price ceilings on anything considered an
essential commodity. Since there is a strict economic embargo on Rojava,
most of the goods available in the bazaars are actually smuggled in from
elsewhere, so it's not surprising it remains largely in private hands.
Key necessities (mainly wheat and petrol that are produced locally) are
distributed free to local communes and collectives, by a central board.

* We asked about trade unions but were told that since the "open
economy" section is basically commercial, consisting of small shops, or
even people selling things in front of their houses, and almost all
production is in the hands of worker-owned collectives, this wasn't a
priority. There was, however, a women's union which aggressively
organised for the rights of caring labor, paid and otherwise.

* a few indigenous capitalists do exist and have not been expropriated
though; some are even part of the formal (largely Potemkin)
"self-administration" government; the language used to justify this was
that the revolution aimed to "change the ground under which they
operated" by shifting the way the economy as a whole functioned, and to
change the structure of political power so as to make it impossible for
them to translate economic advantage into political influence, and thus
ultimately, to continue to operate as capitalists in the long run.

* the unusual aspect of the class discourse was the idea that women
themselves constitute the original proletariat (arguing here from the
German Ideology, etc), and that class differences between men are less
applicable between women. This goes along with the formula that
capitalism depends on the existence of the state and the state depends
on the existence of patriarchy. The elimination of what was often
referred to as "capitalist modernity" was seen as having to involve an
attack on all three simultaneously. For instance, the family was seen as
the primary place of production, production being primarily of people,
and only secondarily of material wealth (reversing the idea of
production and social reproduction), and women as the primary exploited
class within that system; the solution they are trying to put into
practice is to undermine both the possibility of a reimposition of state
authority and of patriarchy simultaneously by devolving the means of
coercive power into the local directly-democratically organised communes
(security forces are answerable to the "peace and consensus" working
groups of each commune, and not to the formal "government") and ensuring
that both the security forces themselves and the communes are composed
of women. The emphasis on giving women military and weapons training is
not a matter of war-time expedience; people actually insist it is a key
part of how they conceive a broader anti-capitalist project for the
transformation of social production which would make it impossible to
restore a top-down capitalist economic system.