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Title: Rojava Author: CrimethInc. Date: May 19, 2016 Language: en Topics: Rojava, Direct Democracy, communes Source: https://crimethinc.com/2016/05/19/rojava-democracy-and-commune
Democracy: “a system of government in which all the people of a state or
polity… are involved in making decisions about its affairs, typically by
voting to elect representatives to a parliament or similar assembly,”
(a:) “government by the people; especially: rule of the majority” (b:)
“a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and
exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of
representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”
—Oxford English Dictionary
I hate democracy. And I hate organizations, especially communes. Yet, I
favor the organization of democratic communes.
Democracy is always about mediation. Whether it separates the subject
from decision-making, separates the subject from herself, or functions
as an excuse for graft and fraud. Democracy stands in the way of the
individual, blocks unmediated communication by imposing the requirement
of structure—an outcome, a decision. And when a decision is reached, it
is usually arrived at by the most banal and ruthless method ever
devised: the vote—the tyranny of the majority.
Anarchism has had a mixed history of criticism regarding democracy.
Étienne de La Boétie in his Discours lays out a first line of inquiry by
wondering why it is that people allow themselves to be governed at
all—and as he explores the problem, he points out that it seems not to
matter whether a tyrant is chosen by force of arms, by inheritance, or
by the vote. “For although the means of coming into power differ, still
the method of ruling is practically the same; those who are elected act
as if they were breaking in bullocks; those who are conquerors make the
people their prey; those who are heirs plan to treat them as if they
were their natural slaves.” [1] And it might be added that the subject
population submits to such abuse without question and little
contestation. La Boétie’s treatise is truly prescient; written in
(roughly) 1553—a full 250 years before the emergence of the modern
nation-state—it contemplates exactly the type of unbridled war,
oppression, and terror that democratically elected governments were to
unleash on subject populations, and each other.
Power cannot exist in stasis; it functions as a result of flows between
and among institutions and individuals. The monarchs of Europe learned
this lesson the hard way during the upheavals of 1848 as they watched
their respective regimes disintegrate one after the other. With
democracy came the calculation of exchange—one iota of power given to a
citizen via the vote—concentrating a vast quantity of power in
legislature, executive, and judiciary. It’s unsurprising that political
systems began to apply equations of power and exchange at the same time
that in the economic realm Capital was introducing similar equations in
order to usurp labor-time in trade for survival. Further, such an
exchange ties the population all that much closer to the rulers.
Vaneigem illustrates the mechanism thus: “Slaves are not willing slaves
for long if they are not compensated for their submission by a shred of
power: all subjection entails the right to a measure of power, and there
is no such thing as power that does not embody a degree of submission.”
[2]
It was Proudhon who had the most varied interaction with democracy, both
theoretically and practically. His career included writing and
publishing tomes of critical analysis denouncing democracy, running for
elected office, serving in the National Assembly during the 1848
Revolution, and finally returning to his original rejection of voting
and representation. He alternately urged his readers to abstain from
voting, then to vote, then to abstain from voting (again), and finally
to cast blank ballots to protest voting.
Proudhon unleashed a number of critiques on democracy. The critical
prisms he used vary from the purely psychological to the empirical, and
the targets of his barbs span the entire menagerie of democratic
platitudes from sovereignty to the myth of “The People” to the
realpolitik of how legislatures operate. Of interest is his critical
analysis of the democratic decision-making process itself. He
scrutinizes the mechanism of the vote and its outcome, specifically
majority rule: “Democracy is nothing but the tyranny of majorities, the
most execrable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a
religion, nor on a nobility of blood, nor on the prerogatives of
fortune: it has number as its base, and for a mask the name of the
People.” [3]
But Proudhon doesn’t finish there. He protests that those left in the
minority are forced by circumstance to follow the will of the majority—a
situation he finds untenable, not only for the explicit coercion, but
also because those in the minority are forced to abjure their ideas and
beliefs in favor of those who oppose them. This, he notes wryly, makes
sense only when political views are so loosely held by individuals so as
to hardly be worthy of the name. Analyzing the same scenario, William
Godwin declares, “nothing can more directly contribute to the
deprivation of the human understanding and character” than to require
people to act contrary to their own reason. A conclusion proven
empirically when one conducts even the most rudimentary survey of
representative government and its effects on humanity over the course of
the past 250 years.
In conclusion: for an anarchist, for myself, democracy—as a system of
self-governance, as a decision-making tool, as an ideal—is utterly
devoid of redeeming value. It functions as a mask for coercion, making
horror palatable while producing unbearable consequences for the
individual, for the species, and for the planet. A dead end.
It is at this point that most anarchists and critical theorists begin
backpedaling, some slowly (like Proudhon) and others rapidly (like
Bookchin). Historically, theorists have offered a scathing critique of
democracy and then immediately digressed, stating that the
representative form of democracy as conceived by bourgeois (or
socialist) society isn’t really democracy. That real democracy is
reflected in some other form—for Proudhon, delegated democracy, for
Bookchin, the Greek city-states or the Helvetican Confederation. The
argument then becomes that democracy can (and should) be recuperated [4]
by the Left as a workable form.
My own critique veers wildly off course at this point, having been
skewed by empirical observation of an alternate form of democratic
practice. I’ve recently returned from the Kurdish Autonomous Region in
Northern Syria, known as Rojava, where I had the opportunity to observe
a unique form of democracy implemented by a revolutionary libertarian
social movement.
Some theoretical context: in 1999, Abdullah Ă–calan, the head of the
Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party) was
captured by Turkish Security Forces, with assistance from the CIA and
Israel’s Mossad. Dodging a firing squad, he was eventually sentenced to
aggravated life imprisonment—and that’s where things get interesting.
Rather than making license plates or working in the laundry, Ă–calan
began the long slow intellectual journey out of Marxist-Leninist
gibberish into some pretty durable anarchist theory. He eventually
published his ideas in several works including Democratic Confederalism,
War and Peace in Kurdistan, and a multi-volume tome on civilization,
particularly the Middle East and Abrahamic religions. In his writing,
Ă–calan does what no one in the contemporary North American anarchist
milieu is even willing to think—he constructs, albeit vaguely, a
blueprint for a libertarian society. This simple exercise, content
aside, is incredible. His engagement resembles far more the utopian
socialist project of the early 19th Century than any of the ensuing
theoretics associated with social contestation, especially Marxism and
working class anarchism; indeed, his silence on class analysis, Marxist
teleology, historical materialism, and syndicalism is deafening. Ă–calan
is clear in his task when he states, in “The Principles of Democratic
Confederalism,” that “Democratic confederalism is a non-state social
paradigm. It is not controlled by a state. At the same time, democratic
confederalism is the cultural organizational blueprint of a democratic
nation. ” [emphasis mine] [5]
As implied in the name, there is a great reliance on democratic
processes in the system known as Democratic Confederalism. Yet Ă–calan is
silent about the definition of democracy—he never offers one—and it’s
implementation: he never discusses it with any specificity. In fact,
democracy is presented as a given, as a decision-making process, as an
approach to self-administration, and little else. There is no favoring
of voting versus consensus-based models, nor does he describe in any
detail or at any level (communal, cantonal, regional) the forms that he
foresees democracy taking. For example, “[Democratic Confederalism] can
be called a non-state political administration or a democracy without a
state. Democratic decision-making processes must not be confused with
the processes known from public administration. States only administrate
[sic] while democracies govern. States are founded on power; democracies
are based on collective consensus.” He expands on what he means by
“decision-making processes” in “The Principles of Democratic
Confederalism”: “Democratic Confederalism is based on grass-roots
participation. Its decision-making processes lie with the communities.”
Fair enough. So how does all this play out in Rojava? In other words,
how are Öcalan’s ideas being translated into revolutionary institutions?
I gained my first insight into democracy in Rojava over a plate of
hummus and pita in downtown KobanĂ®. I was sitting with Mr. Shaiko, a
TEV-DEM (Tevgera Civaka Demokratîk, Movement for a Democratic Society)
representative on a warm, dusty afternoon, some three days after we had
attended a commune meeting together. In that meeting, of the council of
Ĺžehid Kawa C commune, Mr. Shaiko had raised the issue of commune
boundaries and perhaps moving them to account for the number of people
returning to the rubbled, venerable hulk that is KobanĂ®. After some
discussion, Mr. Shaiko left the meeting, requesting a phone call to let
him know what they decided.
“So,” I asked Mr. Shaiko, “What happened with the commune? Did they
call?”
“No, no decision yet.”
“Oh, do they need to give one?”
“No, they’ll decide when they’re ready. That’s how it is,” Mr. Shaiko
looked at me over his glasses with a half-grin and then returned to the
plate of pita and hummus.
This is clearly a divergent view of democratic decision-making, in which
no conclusive result is as valid a response as a “yes” or a “no.” While
I only saw this adjustment to democratic decision-making in operation a
few times it seems to be fairly common, especially with the TEV-DEM
folks whose charge is implementing democratic confederalism. It is also
an interesting “fix” applied to the issue of decision-making processes.
In a sense, it negates the democratic process in favor of discourse,
argument, and engagement, without the concomitant requirement of an
outcome.
The response of the revolutionaries to the tyranny of majority rule has
been structural rather than directive. Here, Ă–calan describes his views
on a plural society and outlines how he plans to weaken or subsume
majority rule: “In contrast to a centralist and bureaucratic
understanding of administration and exercise of power confederalism
poses a type of political self-administration where all groups of the
society and all cultural identities can express themselves in local
meetings, general conventions and councils… We do not need big theories
here, what we need is the will to lend expression to… social needs by
strengthening the autonomy of the social actors structurally and by
creating the conditions for the organization of the society as a whole.
The creation of an operational level where all kinds of social and
political groups, religious communities, or intellectual tendencies can
express themselves directly in all local decision-making processes can
also be called participative democracy.”
So for the revolutionaries the formation, growth and proliferation of
all types of “social actors”—communes, councils, consultative bodies,
organizations and even militias—is to be welcomed, and encouraged.
This plays out in Rojava in a patchwork quilt of organizations,
interests, local collectives, religious affiliates, and… flags. For
example, TEV-DEM, the umbrella organization charged with implementing
democratic self-administration, is actually an agglomeration of several
smaller organizations and representatives from political parties. These
various organizations include groups centering around sport, culture,
religion, women’s issues, and more. For example, in December of 2015, a
new organization under the TEV-DEM system was born—TEV-ÇAND Jihn, which
focuses on women and cultural production. This new organization is in
addition to the generic TEV-ÇAND, which focuses on society, generally,
and cultural production. To sidestep the problems with majority rule,
the revolutionaries have introduced a structural caveat that allows
individuals to find an organization that suits their needs, and through
which their voice can be heard in society. Note that TEV-DEM and others
have not sought to tinker with the actual mechanics of how a commune or
organization operates or decides. Rather, they have changed the social
order such that if an individual refuses to uphold a decision by a
group, commune or council, she always has the ability to opt out and
find a more amenable assembly.
These innovations seem like good first steps towards turning democracy
from a worthless antiquity into a workable principle within anarchist
theory. As such, they should be encouraged and studied.
My essay regarding the organizational form and its various moments of
domination, “The Organization’s New Clothes,” was first published in
February of 1989 (and republished in 2015), and I see no reason to
retract any portion thereof. [6] That critique, therefore, resonates
throughout the following discussion, though time and space prohibit
using it in any way other than as a critical prism.
The commune is a scrambled term. Its origins lie in the smallest
administrative entity in France, the commune—corresponding roughly to a
municipality. The word itself is derived from the twelfth-century
Medieval Latin communia, meaning a group of people living a common or
shared life. This is an interesting point of departure in that, even
then, the concept implied some degree of autonomy, both political and
economic. It was, however, the Paris Commune during the French
Revolution (1789-1795) that wrote the term in large red letters in the
book of revolution. In that first great explosion, the Communards
distinguished themselves by their intransigence and demands for the
abolition of private property and social classes, eventually earning
themselves the nickname les enrages (“the enraged ones”).
The revolutionary commune, then, has a subversive nature. It is
dangerous. It is always dangerous when humans interact beyond the
terrain of Capital and state, or in opposition to them.
Throughout the 19th century, outside the administrative network of
France, the term commune came to be associated with socialist and
communist experiments and, in a looser sense, with all manner of utopian
projects and communities—Owen, Fourier, Oneida, Amana, Modern Times.
There was a slump for a few decades through the first part of the 20th
century, and then, to confuse things further, the 1960s happened. The
definition of the word “commune” ends for many North Americans somewhere
in 1972, in a tangerine swirl of bad acid, free love, and the Manson
Family.
Which is not to say that there weren’t some important projects. Among
the more interesting were the West Berlin-based Kommune 1(1967-1969) and
Wisconsin’s contribution to utopia, Dreamtime Village. There have been
thousands (likely tens of thousands) of communes over the past two
centuries: intentional communities, collectives, cooperatives, each with
its own “glue”—the stuff that brought people together and “stuck” them
to one another. In most cases, this glue has been a mix of politics,
anarchism, communism, utopianism, religious sentiment (usually wacky),
livelihood, necessity, drugs, sexuality, or just plain detesting the
dominant culture.
So what, exactly, is a commune? Who the hell knows? The problem is not
the vagueness with which the commune is understood; rather, it’s the
lack of theory (and experience) that would provide nuance to this
vagueness. The idea of the commune has been lost or diluted as a result
of its own jangled historical context and the easily recuperable forms
that it has recently taken. Ultimately, very much like democracy, the
commune seems a quaint and faded relic in the cabinet of anarchist
theory, filed under “V” for vestigial.
As above, so below. My own relation with the Commune spans several
articles on the Paris events of 1871, and includes my ongoing engagement
with the conundrum of anarchist organization. All of my interactions
with the concept of organizations operating in a revolutionary context
had been on paper—in theory—until I crossed into the Kurdish Autonomous
Region. Then things changed.
The commune and council meetings I attended varied widely, ranging from
an ad hoc encounter of a team of YPG militiamen near the Turkish border
in KobanĂ® Canton to a council of the Ĺžehid Kawa C commune, to a ceremony
and meeting between TEV-DEM representatives of Kobanî and Cizîrê Canton.
In each instance, I recall a series of similar impressions. First, each
encounter was characterized by a sense of purpose, of meaning. The
attendees seemed clear that what they were engaged in, the simple task
of meeting together—as a commune, as a team of YPG fighters—carried
within it a seed, a possible future, for Northern Syria, perhaps for the
planet. Many people commented on this when I asked their thoughts
regarding these political forms. A woman I met in Paris at an HDP rally
put it best: “We are here reinventing politics, in fact, the world.”
This perception, which could easily foster arrogance, seemed instead to
produce a mindset of quiet determination in these attendees. These folks
were not wealthy, they worked hard in an area where there was little
work. The men’s faces were lined and etched with long hours spent under
the harsh Middle East sun. The hands of the women were simultaneously
delicate and rough: while they bore callouses and cuts, they also
carried the scent of lotion and perfume. The voices, gestures, and faces
of the revolutionaries during the meetings were intent, searching,
serious. There was kindness, hugs for a developmentally disabled young
adult, a moment spent with a mother who had lost a son in the siege of
Kobanî, and respect—as each person spoke to the accompaniment of silent
nods from their peers.
There was also hope, a quantity that history has so long denied to
anarchists, and which some of us have reclaimed—not as an eventuality,
but as a birthright. These folks believed that they could change their
lives, their community; many believed they could change (and were
changing) the world.
Finally, and most importantly, in each of these meetings there was an
overwhelming sense of the ordinary. When they mentioned the cantonal
authority at all, these folks referred to it laconically as the
anti-government, or the anti-regime. They had seen and participated in
sweeping social changes and experimentation, and in the process it had
become commonplace, like lunch. This is not to say that there was no joy
in the proceedings, far from it. Rather, what was really missing was
fear, and in this sense the social revolution in Rojava may truly be
said to have passed into a phase of maturity and permanence. The sole
condition in the short-term being the defeat of Daesh.
Some theorists have been advancing on the idea of the commune, but from
strange directions, post-left directions. Peter Lamborn Wilson in The
Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) and Pirate Utopias forces the issues of
time and failure/success in reference to the commune. He rejects
utterly, as we must, the technological reasoning that the longer a
commune exists the better or more successful it must be. In TAZ, he
specifically provides a formula for a new idea of a commune, a temporary
encounter—perhaps hours, perhaps minutes—characterized by conviviality,
joy. This encounter is autonomous in that it is as independent and free
of the fetters of Capital and state as possible. This is essential to
understand. The commune is combative, not subservient. That is the basis
of its autonomy.
Rather than bounding the definition of the commune or trying to refine
it, I believe that defocusing the concept seems a sound strategy. I
would argue that whether it is a phalanstère with all the Fourierist
fauna intact, or a meeting between friends to relive old times or create
new ones, it doesn’t matter—it is a commune. Why bound something, why
hem something in when it presents itself as a viable model for
organization? Rather, without a definition, we can move with tiny baby
steps towards an understanding of what works and what is useless in the
commune model. That strikes me as one promising, potential direction
towards both engaged social experimentation and ruthless social
contestation.
Finally, at a macro-level, the concept of federalism may make a
theoretical comeback. If the commune model makes any sense at all, then
federalism isn’t very far behind. This returns anarchism to its
philosophical roots—Proudhon especially, but also Pi i Margall and
Bakunin. The insurrectionary potential for federalism seems vastly
underestimated. The movement to divide society into smaller and smaller
units, the federation of these units by mutual agreement, and the
potential for economic cooperation and shared self-defense make
federalism a potentially daunting, though rather blunt, instrument. Note
here that the current usage of federalism—the nation-state’s
accumulation of power, wealth, and knowledge in order to control and
dominate subject populations—is precisely the opposite of the concept’s
standard historical definition. It is Pi i Margall, the non-anarchist
grandfather of Spanish anarchism, in his 1855 work La ReacciĂłn y la
RevoluciĂłn, who offers the final word on the potential of federalism:
“The constitution of a society without power is the ultimate of my
revolutionary aspirations,” stating he would, “divide and subdivide
power,” in order to “destroy it.” [7]
The formation of communes also seems a viable real world strategy in
that it fulfills two immediate functions. First, they can act as
support, a backbone for the movement of militants quickly to areas where
their services might be required. In this way, they may function very
much as the bookstores, infoshops, and alternative spaces did in the
anarchist milieu of the past several decades in the US, or as the
communes did in KobanĂ® during the siege. Their resources can assist in
the provision of shelter, food, medical aid, and comfort for fighters.
The communes can also provide valuable intelligence on local conditions,
law enforcement, and assist in identifying those specific targets most
noxious to the community. Put in contemporary military parlance, one
type of commune may not be a weapon, but it can function as a weapons
platform for the mobile anarchist fighters.
Secondly, the communes provide for the sedentary members of the milieu a
laboratory, a setting in which to experiment with new ideas, new forms,
coalescing, in protoplasmic form, the seeds of revolutionary
institutions yet to be. Communes are nurseries where budding
insurrections are reared. Ancillary to this effect, yet no less
important, is the possibility that communes will help to offset the
attrition that has plagued anarchism since its inception as a political
movement. A life dedicated to liberty is difficult to sustain, and most
anarchists [who can] eventually succumb to the Cthulhu call of new cars,
big houses, and squandered lives. At the age of 55, I have seen
thousands of anarchists come and go; only those too stubborn or
anti-social, like my friends and myself, seem to remain. Communes may
stem this drift by producing a social milieu that is amenable to the
various vagaries of the anarchist personality type, and by distributing
resources for assistance with the real world issues of food, shelter,
childbirth and rearing, loneliness, illness, old age and death.
The commune is a verb. The commune is a question.
Anarchism has been adrift since the end of the Second World War. With
little understanding of its roots, history, and struggles, most of us
did the best we could with what we could find. There were no
organizations to criticize or join; it was difficult enough just to find
anarchists in NYC in 1984. We were orphans. The situation has changed:
there are more anarchists, they are more easily contacted and the
explosion of information has given us our story back. As a confluence,
the news out of Greece, Rojava, Europe, in fact just about everywhere
seems to be turning in our direction. Those in the milieu, therefore,
have some choices to make about where to place energy, where to invest
time and effort, in a word—what to do? There are at least as many
possible answers to this question as there are anarchists now alive. As
my response, I suggest the following:
Form democratic communes.
Federate.
Be ready.
[1] La Boetie, Etienne (1975) The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse
of Voluntary Servitude. Montreal; Black Rose Books.
[2] Vaneigem, Raoul. (1994) The Revolution of Everyday Life (Donald
Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). London: Rebel Press.
[3] Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. (1867-1870) Oeuvres completes de P-J.
Proudhon. Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie.
[4] Recuperation is a concept developed by the Situationists to describe
the process in which ideas and strategies that originally served a
revolutionary agenda, are appropriated by Capital and the state to
preserve the status quo.
[5] Ocalan, Abdullah (2011). Democratic Confederalism (transl.
International Initiative). Transmedia Publishing Ltd. London, Cologne
[6] Simons, Paul Z. (2015). “The Organization’s New Clothes,” Black Eye:
Pathogenic and Perverse. Ardent Press, Berkeley CA.
[7] Pi y Margall, Francisco. “Reaction and Revolution,” in Anarchism, A
Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One