Thanks for sharing, Amir. It does look like a genuine revolution.
Tomer

https://www.onename.io/iamsatoshi

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 6:46 PM, Amir Taaki <genjix@???> wrote:

> (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.
>
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