PKK
Historical Blockages of the Left and the Radical Rupture of Öcalan
To understand the historical blockage of the Left, one must first expose its internal contradictions. The Left claims to criticize the state but fails to interrogate the state’s ontology. It asserts a rejection of power, yet fails to realize that its own visions of authority reproduce the same hierarchical patterns.
While the Left emphasizes its opposition to exploitation, it remains reluctant to grasp that exploitation operates not only through economic means but through cultural, gender-based, ethnic, spatial, and even affective dimensions. In this respect, the crisis of the Left is not merely a crisis of strategy; it is a crisis of ontology, a crisis of being, of the subject, of knowledge, and most crucially, a crisis of meaning.
At this juncture, the thought of Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Öcalan is either ignored or categorically rejected by modern leftist theories. The reason for this is not merely a matter of political positioning. The true reason is that this body of thought has shattered the conceptual ground upon which the Left feels comfortable.
The Left has become a movement that produces thousands of pages of theoretical texts but remains incapable of producing its own self-criticism. Öcalan’s approach carries an inherent power of critique against the Left’s historical dogmas; it touches the Left at its weakest point: the loss of its capacity for self-explanation.
The Left’s current inability to explain the world does not stem from the disintegration of capitalism, but rather from the fact that capitalism has reconstructed the entire social fabric in its own image. Capitalism is no longer a system to be criticized from the outside; it is an ontological framework lived from within.
It is a fundamental regime of existence that shapes human imagination, desires, fears, modes of relation, memories, perceptions of time, and ties to space. The Left continues to attempt to analyze this regime using categories from the era in which Marx wrote; however, capitalism has long since expanded beyond Marx’s conceptual universe.
Consequently, the narratives the Left develops about itself no longer possess definitive or explanatory power. As the Left attempts to grasp social reality, it finds itself facing a world that slips through its fingers like water.
This is because today’s social struggle is not merely about the control of the means of production; it is about the reconstruction of the network of relationships that produce life itself. And the factor that most blinds this field is the Left’s historical and subconscious attachment to the idea of the state.
The state is the structure that the Left overtly criticizes but subconsciously sanctifies. Throughout history, nearly all revolutionary movements have claimed to view the state merely as a tool, yet as they approached power, they could not avoid internalizing the state’s ontological logic.
This is because the state is not a neutral organization of power; it is an apparatus that captures social energy, institutionalizes hierarchy, and subordinates the subjectivity of society to its own existence. Here lies the deepest impasse of the Left: the belief that one can transform power without first deciphering its ontology.
The most incisive impact of Öcalan’s thought within the Left stems from his treatment of the state not merely as an apparatus of oppression, but as the foundational axis of the historical system of civilization. In his definition, the state is not an accidental institution of the modern age; it is the crystallized form of the historical evolution of male-dominated civilization, hierarchical societies, and property relations.
This radically breaks the Left’s understanding of the state. For the Left, the state is often viewed as a “mismanaged tool,” a “power that is dangerous in the wrong hands,” or a “temporary apparatus of coercion.” Conversely, Öcalan’s perspective posits that the state is the primary cause of the failure to achieve liberation, rather than its instrument. This is a theoretical upheaval that the Left finds difficult to accept.
Precisely for this reason, the idea of “stateless democracy” emerges within the Left as a proposition that is both radical and unsettling. The Left’s century-old strategic vision has ultimately been anchored to the seizure of the state.
To suggest that the passion for seizing the state is futile or that it even paralyzes the struggle for freedom is to target the foundational narrative of the Left. The Left’s defensive reflex against this proposition points to a fear it has failed to resolve within itself: the inability to conceive of a revolution without power.
However, freedom cannot be established by reproducing the mechanics of power. Every form of centralism, even when emerging with the most revolutionary intentions, eventually turns into a machine that extinguishes social creativity and subjectivity. Therefore, criticizing the state is insufficient.
The state must be removed as a category of “solution.” The Left’s inability to accept this idea is not just a theoretical resistance but a psychological one. The Left has built its historical legitimacy through a struggle aimed at the state.
The reason Öcalan’s thought creates such friction within the Left is his assertion that a politics beyond the state is possible.
This politics centers not on seizing power, but on its dispersal. Not on centralization, but on social self-governance. Not on representation, but on direct social participation. Not on hierarchy, but on horizontal organization. When moving outside the paradigm familiar to the Left, politics ceases to be a struggle for power and becomes the process of society creating itself.
In this context, the centralization of women’s liberation is not just a promise of social transformation; it is a shift in the ontological ground of political theory.
Women’s liberation signifies the destruction of the historical continuity of patriarchy, and without dismantling patriarchy, the dismantling of the state and capitalism is impossible. This is the rupture that reveals the male-dominant structure hidden within leftist theory. The discomfort the Left feels in the face of this critique demonstrates that patriarchy remains the deepest subconscious of the Left.
Placing women’s liberation at the heart of the revolution means redefining revolution itself. This implies a change in the subject of the revolution, its objective, its method, and its epistemology.
The reason the Left cannot internalize this transformation is that it has always viewed revolution as a power dynamic, a struggle for dominance, and a moment of violence. Yet, when freedom is situated outside of violence, moved beyond power, and transcends the state, revolution attains its true meaning.
This perspective mandates that the Left transcend the boundaries of its own historical universe. The Left can no longer exist solely by criticizing capitalism. Capitalism has become a system that feeds on critique; it absorbs every criticism directed at it and reproduces itself through them. Therefore, critique alone is not revolutionary. What is radical is to move beyond critique and construct an alternative ontology.
Öcalan’s thought is a radical rupture for this very reason: it does not settle for critique; it proposes a new social ontology, a new sociology of freedom, a new vision of democracy, a new understanding of the subject, and a new political practice. The conventional conceptual universe of the Left is insufficient to meet any of these proposals. The Left will either accept this paradigm shift and reconstruct itself, or it will continue to exist as a nostalgic movement on the margins of history.
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