“The military conflict is easy in comparison; what is much more difficult is transforming society, changing the way people relate to each other and to their own lives.” I am told this while waiting outside of an education session for Kurdish militants near Amûdê in Rojava’s Cizîrê Canton. But I have heard this sentiment many times from members of the Kurdish freedom movement. Nowhere is this truer than within the tremendous revolutionary project transpiring in Rojava.

The Kurds, separated by the borders of southeastern Turkey, northern Syria and Iraq, and western Iran, have been struggling for various levels of sovereignty and autonomy since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement which delineated the region as we know it today. The most effective and long-lasting resistance to assimilation, exploitation and for self-determination was launched by the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê: Kurdistan Workers Party) in the late 70s. The ideas of Abdullah Öcalan, the founder and leader of the PKK to this day, took hold across the region as he argued for a united Kurdistan while organizing an effective guerilla warfare campaign in Turkey that was run covertly from Syria in the 80s and 90s. Öcalan would ultimately be captured in 1999, and has been held since then in an island prison.1

As the encouraging tide of the Arab Spring swept across the region in 2011, the people of Syria also rose up to topple the Assad dictatorship. Rather than an end to the regime as had been the case in Tunisia and Egypt, the country was thrust into a brutal civil war eventually becoming a battlefield for numerous jihadist factions, and ultimately a fertile ground for the most brutal of them all – the Islamic State or ISIS. Amongst this unravelling of Syria, the Kurds in the North of the country – referred to as Rojava (“the west” in Kurdish, since it is Western Kurdistan) took control and emerged as the most effective self-defense force against ISIS. The military conflict has progressed at incredible speed and today Syria is a country where at least a dozen states are fighting a proxy war with each other.

The story above has been told and retold many times. But in addition to the upheaval resulting from a brutal war of numerous factions vying for control, there is also a social revolution taking place in Syria. Millions of people from multiple distinct ethnic and religious communities in Rojava are having to learn, teach and live a new way of life. Counterpoised to the 20th century hegemony of state-power rule is the ambitious idea of democratic autonomy also known as democratic confederalism, municipalism or self-governance.2 The central question, which has stirred a debate amongst certain revolutionaries and leftists both internationally and in the region, is to what extent the proposed ideas of democratic autonomy and confederalism are truly revolutionary and to what extent they are a shade of liberal capitalist democracies with undertones of nationalism.

The Kurdish movement takes every opportunity to espouse that they are not in the business of creating a new state for the Kurds, and a deep critique of the nation-state is quite prevalent in the recent writings of Öcalan. In his widely read 5th Defense “The Kurdish Problem and the Democratic Nation Solution”, he elaborates that “The greatest weapon which capitalism has to make itself the reigning system is to turn state power into a nation-state power. The nation-state is possible by spreading its power to the capillaries of society…. The national borders, the national army, the centralized civilian bureaucracy, central and local administration, the national market, monopoly economic domination, national currency, passport, national identity, national places of worship, primary schools, a single language, symbols of flags, all of these come together to operate capitalism’s maximum profit rule over society. This process, defined by modern sociologists as a way of overcoming traditional societies and presented as the formation of modern homogenous societies and the primary indicator of progress, in essence, represents a society locked in an iron cage.”3

This is the ideology at battle in a region where many nation-states are involved in a civil war and where the Kurds are having to make uncomfortable alliances for mere survival. Flowing from this proclaimed statelessness and emphasis of autonomy, many anarchists and libertarian communists have begun to identify with the revolution in Rojava. Various leftist factions have argued over the anti-capitalist and anti-state credentials of what is happening in Rojava, and in some ways Rojava can resemble more the latter than the former. Regardless, based on my own experiences and observations in Rojava, it is obvious that the sentiment captured by the quote at the onset of this article is real and that the challenges of a revolution lie beyond the trenches. This brief essay will attempt to contribute to this discussion.

From State Power to Democratic Autonomy During the reign of the Assad regime in Syria, a centralized state in all of its glory of planning and programming ruled with close to absolute authority. In true fashion, the nation was conceived as dependent on and under the paternalism of Damascus. The Ba’athist national project deemed certain political regions appropriate for certain economic activities under the central coordination of the state. For example, although eastern Rojava, mostly around the city of Derik, has most of the petroleum deposits in Syria (about half of all the wells), it has no large-scale refineries. Prior to the Syrian war, the petroleum was transported to Baniyas and Homs (these pipelines are now cut off as they traverse regions under ISIS control). A similar situation concerns the agricultural system of the region. Far from being self-sufficient, well balanced and ecologically sensible, Rojava was conceived of as Syria’s breadbasket with a heavy emphasis on solely growing wheat, especially in the eastern canton of Cizîrê.4 This centralized division of the economy where monocultures undercut self-sufficiency is one of the ways which state patronage was facilitated during the Assad regime. Today, primarily under the initiative of Kurdish political actors such as the PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat: Democratic Union Party) and the PKK, the north of the country is attempting to become more self-sufficient while at the same time fighting off its enemies and maneuvering the geopolitical landscape. All this is not just for mere survival, but rather as part and parcel of the democratic autonomy ideology. In Serekaniye, a project is underway attempting to tackle the monocultures of Rojava by building demonstration greenhouses which will be run by women’s cooperatives with an emphasis on growing fruits and vegetables. Before the revolution, fruits and vegetables were primarily brought from the Mediterranean coastal regions of the country, near Latakia. The person running the current project, whose ideological journey brought her from Marxism and Leninism to Apocu (follower of Abdullah Öcalan), explained to me in a conversation in late September 2015 that she sees this move as providing agricultural diversity while staying true to the Jineolojist5 underpinnings of the revolution. Diversity is important on all levels, and of utmost importance in this primarily Kurdish region is the multi-ethnic nature of the revolution. Öcalan’s newly formulated ideology presents this as key and this is also the case in the North, within the borders of Turkey, where the HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi: Peoples’ Democratic Party) is particularly keen on its rainbow politics welcoming all ethnicities, genders and other identities. In Rojava, the proper representation of the self-governance structure is determined by the distribution of different ethnic groups. In Cizîrê Canton, where the Arab population is the highest in Rojava, Arabs are elected to some of the highest levels of representation from heading communes, to co-chairing the Canton itself. Tribes of influence are also acknowledged as such. Christian Syriacs head the communes of the neighborhoods which they primarily reside in, including, for example, the co-chair6 of the Martyr Zerdeşt Commune, Syriac Matruf Beşir. When I interviewed him, his son, a Christian volunteer in the YPG (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel: People’s Protection Units), was at home impatiently recovering from a battle wound so he could go back to the front. Matruf Beşir explained that “After we saw the commune we realized unity, fraternity, that our differences are not deficiencies and that no one is better than another and this is why we joined this movement.”7 Until recently, prior to the crescendo of refugees into fortress Europe and even further back when Angela Merkel deemed that “multiculturalism has failed”, multiculturalism seemed like a central tenet and perhaps lubricant of liberal democracies. In no way has it proved incompatible with capitalist modernity, which as defined by Öcalan is the root of all social ills, and is to be transformed by democratic modernity. What is the difference between the failed multiculturalism of Merkel and the championed polyculturalism of Öcalan? Is it that in post-colonial European nation-states multiculturalism acts as the governmentality of difference, but in Rojava polyculturalism could rescue a region riven by ethnic sectarianism? The key difference between European multiculturalism and the polyculturalism observed in Rojava is that, in the Kurdish proposition, collective autonomy plays a central role. It is not the individual expression of this or that identity which is encouraged (liberalism) but the collective power of members of such a group to organize and give direction to their lives. This is in opposition to liberal multiculturalism which is based upon representation through political hierarchies and as such reifies ethnic and religious identities, reducing subjects to these identities. The situation in Rojava has the potential to go beyond this liberal multiculturalism as long as it doesn’t fall into its pitfalls. But beyond the political theory of ethnic autonomy, the mere fact that Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Syriacs, Chaldeans, Armenians, Chechens and Turkmens; Christians, Shia, Sunni and Alevite Muslims are sharing governance in one of the most sectarian regions of the world, often aggravated by imperialist meddling, might be revolutionary in and of itself. This on the ground reality of ethnic and religious diversity flies in the face of the claims made by organizations such as Amnesty International who say that the Kurds are committing ethnic cleansing of Arabs in regions they capture. Fehim Taştekin, probably the most knowledgeable journalist on the Syrian situation in Turkey, has painstakingly carried out a point-by-point rebuttal of these claims (although acknowledging that certain isolated problematic situations might be present), identifying such reports as an effort to pave the way for some kind of “humanitarian intervention” looking to neutralize Rojava in the future.8

All Power to the Communes The most basic unit of society in Rojava is defined as the commune. Communes are found in different sections of society, on both the local neighborhood level, as well as in workplaces and in accordance with other groups, such as women or youth. They are meant to be the vehicle of self-governance. Visiting some of the neighborhood-based communes (in Qamishlo City, for example, there are around 100), as well as their higher level organizational structure the Mala Gel (People’s houses –of which there are 7 in the same city)9, illustrates the challenges captured in the opening quote of this article. While attempting to provide the foundation for a self-managed society, there are still remnants of the prior regime that threaten to return the Rojava revolution to what it replaced. Many people still treat these structures as if they were a typical government agency; they knock on the door of these new political forms asking for bureaucratic signatures, permissions, and requests, as opposed to utilizing them as a means and resource for self-organization. Even some commune co-chairs lament their role as providing a service from an office. I was told by Latfillah Ibrahim, co-chair of the Martyr Levend Commune, that “The people come to find solutions to their problems. And we try to solve them but when it takes a while, they can get upset or resentful but it usually doesn’t become a huge issue.”10 Despite this, the communes provide a space where its members can come together to solve their problems, and often they serve as a venue for mediation of disputes. Again, according to Matruf Beşir from the Martyr Zerdeşt Commune “Problems are first solved by the communes with meetings where the commune chairs act as mediators between those with the disagreement. If they aren’t solved this way, they are sent to the Peace Assemblies. But most of the problems are taken care of at the commune level and of course this is because of the trust the people feel in the communes.”11 The functioning of the commune is specific to its context. In one meeting of a commune in a rural part of Kobanê Canton, the topics discussed were pertinent to their village reality, including questions of the paving of roads, distribution of seeds for the upcoming season, constructing a school for the children as well as distributing food for the less well to do families. All co-chairs of communes are recallable by the commune members and in fact in this particular meeting the co-chair was recalled because he had abandoned his responsibilities and gone to Northern Kurdistan for too long. A further topic of great importance in this commune meeting was organizing self-defense forces. The stress on self-defense is not just exemplified in the creation of the People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG) and the Women’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin, YPJ) but extends to the communes as well. Following suicide attacks by ISIS who routinely infiltrate urban centers in Rojava, a new self-defense formation called the HPC (Hêzên Parastina Civakî: Civilian Defense Forces) was initiated so the communes could assume some of the self-defense functions in addition to those performed by the Asayiş (security) and the YPG and YPJ. True to the ideas of democratic autonomy, different ethnic groups have their own self-defense formations, such as the Suturo, comprised of Syriac Christians. This massive rethinking of social organization is not happening without assistance and direction; the PKK has sent many members of its cadre to Rojava. Referred to simply as “the cadre”, these militants are there in addition to those fighting as part of the YPG or YPJ. The cadre are professional revolutionaries; a lot of them have come here from the main PKK camp in the Qandil mountains between Iraq and Iran, a location that was recently under a heavy bombing campaign by the Turkish State. Or they arrive from the North, from within the borders of Turkey, or even as far away as from Europe. They are mostly ex-guerillas; either injured or too old or imprisoned for long periods, they have done their time on the frontlines of the battlefield. So they find themselves in the social battlefield of Rojava, in the municipalities, universities and committees, both participating as well as advising. The Komîteya Aboriyê (Economics Committee) of Tev-Dem, which is the parliamentary superstructure where the various people’s assemblies are represented alongside different political factions, has been redistributing the idle lands of the regime to families in the cantons. The land is first given to poor families and families of martyrs. Those who had “fled the revolution” (i.e., war) and then returned do not get a share of the redistribution. On September 22, 2015, in Qamishlo, at a meeting of the representatives of 105 communes, a vote was held on whether to use these lands to form a cooperative or not. A representative from the Komîteya Aboriyê, who was in charge of running the meeting, explained to me that they had distributed more than 35,000 acres of land previously belonging to the Syrian regime and they were continuing with this process. During the first year, about a third of this land was cultivated under wartime conditions, with a considerable amount of the revenue also contributing to that effort. The following year, land was distributed to 2,020 families. That year Tev-Dem took 30 percent of the revenue and the following year reduced it to 20 percent. At the meeting I attended, the vote was in favor of starting a cooperative and therefore using the profits for the collective needs of the communes. Upon making this decision, Tev-Dem’s share was reduced to 10 percent. Listening to all this, I’m left wondering if this is Tev-Dem trying to abolish itself and wither away the state, or if it just represents another form of progressive taxation?