>     (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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