http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/7316

Democratic autonomy or socialism?
A Marxist view of Abdullah Öcalan’s political theory

Claus Ludwig, Sozialistische Alternative (CWI Germany)

The Kurdish self-government in Rojava in Syria explicitly bases itself
on the ideas of PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan, also known as “Apo”, who
has been imprisoned in solitary confinement on the island of Imrali
since 1999. In recent years, Öcalan has comprehensively revised the
theory and practice of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). The PKK,
while not pro-Beijing, was founded around Maoist-influenced ideas in the
mid-1970s with the immediate goal of a ‘national-democratic’ revolution
leading to an ’independent and democratic Kurdistan’. Now he has moved
away from the idea of a Kurdish nation state and the classic model of
guerrilla warfare, and advocates “democratic autonomy” (also called
“democratic confederalism”) as a vision for the coexistence of the
peoples of the Middle East. Öcalan’s main work is the book “Bir Halkı
Savunmak” (published in German as: “Jenseits von Staat, Macht und
Gewalt” – “Beyond the state, power and violence”) which he wrote in
prison in 2004 as a political defence against the prosecution by the
Turkish state.

Öcalan does his work extensively. He deals not just with the practice of
the Kurdish movement, he begins with the interpretation of history. At
this point, he breaks with what he regards as the Marxist view of
history. He rejects historical materialism – the idea that the class
society in the various successive forms it took came about through the
development of the productive forces and the struggle over the growing
surplus product. He does not regard class rule as historically
inevitable: “The reason for the emergence of hierarchy and class rule
was not inevitability but force.”

Öcalan continues to describe himself as a socialist. But while Marxism
defines socialism as the phase after capitalism, based on an enormous
development of technology, science and production, Öcalan regards it as
an ideal, a human necessity without having a programme to achieve it.
Thus he ignores the material basis that socialism needs and argues that,
in his opinion, a society free from exploitation and repression could
have been created much earlier. This leads to Öcalan’s view that
history’s “detour” via the route of class societies was actually not
necessary.

Öcalan’s efforts to understand and describe the history of the Middle
East, starting with the Sumerian culture, probably the earliest
developed class society, are noteworthy and he develops some interesting
thoughts about the role of authorities and ideologies in the time
predating class society.

But there are startling gaps in his account. The economy seems simply
not to interest him, neither in ancient Sumer nor in the current times,
when he speaks about how “democratic autonomy” can develop in opposition
to the repressive state. This is no mere theoretical question, it has
consequences in practice. Öcalan says he wants to overcome capitalism,
but his sort of socialism does not seem to require the expropriation of
private capital owners and the taking into public ownership of the means
of production.

Questions such as how productivity is increased, where the surplus
product comes from, what effects the unjust appropriation of it have,
seem only of secondary importance to Öcalan. While he mentions the
effective irrigation system of the Sumerian priestly dictatorship and
the “enormous surplus” which it produced and which was the basis of the
systems claiming to be “divine”, he apparently remains of the opinion
that it would have been possible to maintain the old, free but less
productive system.

He claims that slavery was a hindrance for science and art, but he does
not pose the question of why there was no progress in these fields in
the long millennia of the ungoverned primitive societies, while there
was a veritable explosion of progress in them with the establishment of
class society, with a further acceleration accompanying the growing
intensity of exploitation of man and nature.

Öcalan describes how the “barbaric” Germanic peoples, whose society
retained strong egalitarian remnants, destroyed Roman slavery, but
missed the opportunity to build a democratic society on the foundations
of their own traditions and instead accepted a new feudal class society.
He claims that the Germanic people were deceived by their leaders and
that a democratic Europe would have been possible. It doesn’t seem to
occur to him that this “betrayal” came about because the society was
producing too much for an egalitarian subsistence society, but not
enough to be able to offer a good life to all.
Rejecting class struggle

It is no injustice to Öcalan to say that he is returning to pre-Marxist
utopian socialism – the likes of Babeuf, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen and
Lassalle, who saw socialism or a society free of a ruling elite as a
moral necessity, not as the result of class struggles.

He points to the destructive effects of “analytical intelligence”,
displays a scepticism towards science, emphasises “emotional
intelligence” and, to use a modern term, the traditions of grass-roots
democracy which in his opinion always existed in the “Fertile Crescent”,
the area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. He emphatically
rejects class struggle, claiming that there is a threat of dictatorship
when the interests of one class are put above those of another.

Öcalan’s notion of socialism has a strong similarity to the agrarian
socialist ideas of the Narodniks, the nineteenth century Russian
populists, who regarded the Russian village community as the starting
point for a just society. From quite early on in the book, Öcalan sounds
like a Narodnik; later on he even mentions himself that the PKK is most
comparable to this movement.

He does not consistently stick to his idea that the new class societies
were not better than the previous ones, but had rather merely
intensified the exploitation. There are some passages where he sees
positive aspects to the introduction of capitalism. According to Öcalan,
capitalism asserted itself first of all in Western Europe, because this
region was less dogmatic than the Middle East.

The real reason why the capitalist mode of production asserted itself
was not this mentality, but rather, above all, the class structure of
European feudalism, which aided the formation of a dynamic, aggressive
bourgeois class, while the Middle East (and Asia and Latin America) were
dominated by the so-called ‘Asiatic’ mode of production, and large
centralised empires hindered the development of effective class struggle
among the peasants as well as the development of a bourgeois class and
petit-bourgeois intermediate layers. The lack of intellectual
flexibility in the Middle East was a result of this rigid form of
feudalism, which did not bring forth an urban class.

It seems as though Öcalan wants to ignore at all cost the significance
of classes and class struggles, because they do not fit into his concept
of a “natural classless society”, which always existed as a
counterweight to class rule and to the state, and which should reassert
itself in a natural manner.

While Öcalan argues against “vulgar materialism”, upon which Marxism
allegedly bases itself, he himself has an extremely simplistic and
vulgar image of it. His woodcut-like idea of Marxism is probably an
expression of the Stalinist ideas that dominate in the Turkish and
Kurdish left, which turned Marxism from a living method into a
collection of simple articles of faith.

For example, he speaks of an alleged “inevitable development towards
communism” and accuses Marxism of being obsessed solely with questions
of economy and inevitability. Coming from a Stalinist background, Öcalan
does not seem to be familiar with Lenin’s work on the national question,
or Trotsky’s on culture or on the analysis of the bureaucratic
dictatorship in the Soviet Union, nor with the writings of Luxemburg or
Gramsci.
Abolish capitalism! Or not?

Öcalan gives a lively description of how capitalism destroys human
relationships and values and the natural basis of human existence. In
some passages of his book, he reaches a level of militant
anti-capitalism which we can only agree with.

He sees the capitalist system in crisis, in a “chaotic phase” since the
1970s. He points to the enormous aggressiveness of the system, to the
dangers of war and nationalism: “That the system has been in crisis for
a long time does not mean that it is becoming weaker. The crisis brings
with it the danger that it will abide even less by the rules, that it
will become even more aggressive.”

For him, the crisis of the system is coming to a head in the Middle
East, and it is there that it must be solved. His fixation on the Middle
East sounds somewhat mystical at times, but in view of the dramatic
situation in Iraq and Syria and the possibility of ethnic and religious
conflicts spreading even more, it is entirely justified to see the
alternative of “socialism or barbarism” coming to a head in this region.

His description, written in 2004, shortly after the US invasion of Iraq,
sounds very current. “Against the terror of those in power”, the “terror
of tribes and clans” is developing. This kind of resistance, on a narrow
ethnic and religious basis, makes the problems worse. The “American
empire of chaos” is causing states to break up, particularly in the
Middle East and the Balkans. The Middle East is the “main geopolitical
contradiction of the US-led system”.

According to Öcalan, the time of national despotisms is over, and at the
same time there is no perspective for a “liberation nationalism” which
strives to create new states. New solutions are necessary. He hints at
the coming “Arab Spring”, but at the same time fears a deepening of the
chaos if no new solutions can be found.

Moving away from the PKK’s original idea of a peasant based “people’s
war”, Öcalan deals with the question of armed struggle in a different
way. Instead of carrying out a war of conquest, he advocates
self-defence, defining the tasks of armed units as “creating guarantees
for democratic efforts” and foresees in quite a concrete fashion the
political and military practice of the YPG/YPJ in the defence of Rojava.
The establishment of self-defence units is something which he regards as
necessary due to the “increasing uncertainty”.

The PKK has until now managed to overcome crises and assert its position
as a strong force in the region. Öcalan and the entire Kurdish movement
may be miles from developing a socialist strategy, but the PKK sees many
of the dangers in the Middle East and has managed to effectively fight
IS, equipped with a certain amount of left and vaguely anti-capitalist
ideas. This is by no means a guarantee for the future. The cooperation
with US forces and with pro-imperialist Kurdish groups like Barzani’s
KDP, and the ambivalent attitude vis-à-vis Assad’s dictatorial regime,
are severe political errors. In addition, Öcalan gives the impression
that he is prepared to make too many political compromises in order to
achieve a successful conclusion of the peace negotiations with the
Erdoğan regime. These developments show that the PKK is in danger of not
being able to unify in action the region’s working people, poor and
youth while also being dragged, as a largely Kurdish based force, into
the region’s ethnic and religious civil wars.

Öcalan does not maintain his militant anti-capitalist stance throughout
the whole book. At times, his arguments somersault at breakneck speed.
For example, he states that capitalism is “not to be rejected outright”
and that the system can repair itself.

Regarding the perspectives for the Middle East, there are also
statements which stand in stark contrast to the clear words quoted
above. At one point, he leaves the question open whether the situation
in the region has become better or worse through the US-led invasion of
Iraq. He speaks of the possibility of a “second Marshall Plan” for the
region.

While at one point he emphasises the dangers of war and nationalism that
are inherent to capitalism, he claims elsewhere that the USA wants to
“overcome” the nation-state. The danger of war in Europe has, in his
view, been banished by an EU which is allegedly peaceful and conducive
to creating understanding between peoples.

Öcalan seems to counterpoise capitalism to an alternative inspired by
humanism and socialism, but he does not define how capitalism can be
overcome and how a socialist society would differ from it. In this
respect he is not too far away from the classical social reformist
interpretation, which sees socialism as a guiding idea and thinks that
its realisation can be recognised in each reform within the confines of
capitalism.
State vs. Democracy

The central slogan of the left Kurdish movement in Turkey as well as
Rojava is “democratic autonomy”. Öcalan places the terms “State” and
“Democracy” at the centre of his thoughts. In his opinion, the state is
“probably the most dangerous instrument in history”. Revolutionaries who
aim to create a different, better state – a workers’ state, do not, in
his opinion, break with the logic of repression and exploitation; they
merely add new aspects to it. Not using the analysis of the Trotskyist
movement, Öcalan lumps together Marxism with Social Democracy, “Real
Socialism” (his term for Stalinism,) and national liberation movements
which, in his opinion, all went this way and in doing so actually
prolonged the lifetime of the capitalist system.

As he has no programme for workers’ democracy, this sounds as if Öcalan
had become an anarchist, regarding the smashing of the state and the
immediate introduction of the free association of production as central
tasks of the revolution. But he clearly distances himself from this
idea, saying that the capitalist state should not be smashed, instead it
should die off slowly.

Not applying a class analysis the vague idea that “the alternative to
the state is democracy”, is one of Öcalan’s central tenets. “The people”
forms the antipode to the “state-supporting layers”. In his historical
descriptions, state and democracy, oligarchs and the people sound like
pairs of irreconcilable opposites. But the more concrete things become,
the clearly it emerges that this is not his view at all. The state and
democracy may be opposites, but they can coexist according to Öcalan,
stating that it is “not about confrontation”, but rather about “acting
in parallel”. An extension of democracy would limit the state, there may
be “compromises” between the two, in a manner which is “true to
principles”, although he does not state which principles he means. This
would “increase the possibilities for freedom and equality”.

Öcalan assumes that a dangerous, destructive capitalist system with its
repressive state will continue to exist, but that its violent and
repressive character will increasingly fade away due to the extension of
“democracy”, before being finally overcome completely. He calls for
“equilibrium” between the collective and the individual, between “public
and private economy”.

In the end, the peoples are supposed in this way to overcome nationalism
without fundamentally restructuring the system, which is merely “reduced
in size”. Therefore it is alleged to be possible to make the transition
from what Öcalan himself describes as a highly destructive capitalist
class rule to a “global democratic civilisation” without any kind of
revolutionary break. In a democracy, there would be no repression, no
“unjust exploitation” and no “extreme greed for profits”.

“In place of deadly rivalry we have competition. Democracy reduces to a
minimum the main causes of crises such as the imbalance of supply and
demand, prices, inflation and similar financial playthings”, says Öcalan
of his vision of capitalism tamed by democracy.

According to Öcalan, “Democracy” should organise the fields of
education, health, art and sport. In addition, political-social
organisational forms of “houses of the people” all the way to a
“people’s congress” of all sectors, would play important roles. Even in
these very concrete passages of the book, there is no talk of planning
the economy for society as a whole.

What Öcalan describes as “democracy” is not a new form of society, nor
even the seed of such a society within the old, nor a form of dual
power. Rather it is a mixture of the formation of a political, social
and civil society and the grassroots organisation of social services
-which in Turkey are organised only in a very repressive form, if at
all. With a view on the practice of Kurdish self-determination in
south-eastern Turkey and in Rojava, it should be added that in these
regions there is a democratisation of local administration, a
comprehensive programme for the advancement of women and a strengthening
of small cooperatives and small businesses, in what would probably be
most accurately described as a locally based or solidarity wartime
economy, while attempting to apply ecological criteria, within capitalism.

These are by no means unimportant questions. These are reforms for which
many people in Kurdistan are prepared to fight. But without a radical
change of society, including the economic structures, it will not be
possible to secure these reforms. Such an alternative society to
capitalism is not even described in Öcalan’s writings. The council
democratic elements merely consist of the statement that elected office
holders should put themselves up for re-election after one year. This is
not even foreseen in the constitution of Rojava.
Between the lines

Öcalan gives a radical impression – almost an anarchist one, condemning
the social democratic and Stalinist adaption to capitalism and rule,
creating the impression of a new and revolutionary idea – only for its
political practice to boil down to merely wanting to fight for more
democratic rights within capitalist states.

Öcalan has correctly abandoned the idea of using classic guerrilla
warfare to create a viable Kurdish nation-state. He is right to place no
more faith in regional despots such as Assad, and to recognise their
destructive role – even though some of his co-thinkers in Syria do not
seem to fully share this view. But on the other hand, in an attempt to
reach agreement with the Turkish ruling class, he has also pushed aside
any claim to pursue an alternative revolutionary course. He advocates
the self-organisation of the oppressed to build a kind of civil society
counterweight, and in this way create pressure in order to achieve
compromises with the rulers. He puts his faith in this coexistence
bringing forth reforms which will lead to capitalism being tamed in a
social and ecological manner.

Looking at his description of democracy as an antipode to the state, it
becomes clear that his written defence is not first and foremost a
reappraisal of the philosophical and political principles of the PKK,
aimed at activists. The book is aimed also, perhaps even first and
foremost, at the rulers of Turkey and the imperialist states of the
West. In his book, Öcalan states his conditions for the integration of
the Kurdish movement into the existing system.

He did not write the book in freedom, but rather as a prisoner of the
Turkish state. His written defence is not just a peace offer in a
military sense, but also in a political sense. Öcalan seeks to argue –
sometimes overtly, sometimes between the lines – that he neither wants
to topple the existing social order nor chance national borders, and
that those in power therefore need to fear the PKK.

His message between the lines is: “Give us democratic rights and
possibilities of participation at local level. Stop persecuting us. Then
we will no longer threaten your rule. We neither want a war, nor do we
lay claim to a nation-state of our own.”

His warnings regarding the dangers of nationalism and violence in Middle
East and the destructive effects of the state and class rule are of
burning importance and relevance in these times, but their main purpose
is to hold up the mirror to those in powers and to show them scenarios
of horror, effectively saying: “If you do not change, things will end
badly, so reform your system and you will avoid these terrors”. He also
appeals to the USA to tolerate Kurdish self-rule and to look for
reliable allies in the region.

The message of this book raises the question of whether Abdullah Öcalan
arrived at his reform-oriented views due to his distancing himself from
Marxist influenced positions in terms of economy and philosophy, or
whether his historical discourses are the consequence of a tactical
adaptation to a reform within the confines of capitalism. This question
cannot be definitively answered, but it is of secondary importance in
terms of politically assessing his ideas.

However, we do advocate taking Öcalan and the political debates within
the Kurdish movement seriously and taking part in them.

The opening of the PKK which he has pushed forward has been an opening
to the “right”, in the direction of a reformist accommodation of
capitalism, but at the same time this opening has allowed room for
manoeuvre for the unity of working people and the poor across ethnic and
religious lines. The rejection of national oppression and the
strengthening of democratic rights, particularly women’s rights, are
central messages of the Kurdish movement.

The heroic defenders of Rojava, the hundreds of thousands of supporters
of the movement in Turkey, Iraq and Iran are important sources of
potential for the building of a multi-ethnic, multi-faith movement of
the oppressed and exploited. Marxists argue that such movements should
adopt a strategy which bases itself on the mobilisation of the masses,
democratic discussions and decision-making structures, the perspective
of overthrowing capitalism and the creation of a voluntary socialist
federation of states in the Middle East.

In the end, capitalism in Kurdistan will not be brought down by a
Narodnik-like organisation, but rather by a socialist workers’ movement,
through a still-to-be-built working class based revolutionary
organisation in the region.