“Should Anarchists Vote?” is the Wrong Question

Aug

09

2024

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by Wayne Price

As I write this, we are moving ever closer to U.S. Election Day November 2024. (Although if this is read after that election, the issues discussed should still be relevant.) The small number of people who regard themselves as anarchists are discussing whether to vote. From Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin in the late 19th century onward, revolutionary anarchists have rejected participation in elections.

In the words of Kropotkin, “The anarchists refuse to be a party to the present state organization and to support it by infusing fresh blood into it. They do not seek to constitute, and invite the workingmen not to to constitute, political parties in the parliaments….They have endeavored to promote their ideas directly among the labor organizations and to induce those unions to a direct struggle against capital….” (2002; p. 287)

This is based on the central insight that the state is not neutral. By its nature, it serves the rich and powerful in their exploitation and oppression of the people. This state machinery cannot be used to peacefully and “democratically” create a free socialist democracy. Anarchists believe that capitalism and its state must be overturned, abolished, and replaced with cooperative, self-managed, alternate institutions. They should not be strengthened by joining in sham rituals of limited democracy.

Yet here we have a presidential election in which one candidate (the Republican Donald Trump) is arguably much more evil than the other (the Democrat Kamala Harris). Should anarchists vote for the lesser evil for once?

Many Marxists are also in a pickle. From Karl Marx on, their strategy has been to create a workers’ party in opposition to all capitalist parties, from liberal to conservative. Many Marxists, at least those influenced by Trotskyism, have opposed ever voting for capitalist parties. Yet here they are facing two capitalist parties, one which is in the bourgeois center and the other is quasi-fascist. Should they vote for the moderate capitalist candidate? (Also, libertarian-autonomist Marxists generally reject voting and are in a similar bind as the anarchists.)

However, when discussing this (and previous) elections with friends, co-workers, and family, I do not try to persuade them not to vote for the lesser evil Democrats. I don’t much care. One or a few individual votes does not make much difference. The votes of a small number of radicals do not have much of an impact. This is especially true for most U.S. citizens, due to the archaic and undemocratic Electoral College system. Only a minority live in the six or so “battleground states.” For everyone else, their votes are irrelevant; the fix is in. (For example, I live in New York State, whose electoral college votes will certainly go to the Democrats.)

Instead, I try to get others to agree that the lesser evil is indeed evil. Since it is hard for people to admit to themselves that they are supporting an evil, there is a tendency for liberals, after a while, to persuade themselves that the lesser evil, while not perfect, is really pretty good.

Liberals claim that there are various positive programs for which the Biden-Harris administration can take credit. True or not, these must be put alongside the mass murder being carried out in Gaza by the Israeli government, paid for and armed by the U.S. state. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been indiscriminently killed. This is only one activity of the enormous US military-industrial complex, endorsed by both parties, including hundreds of overseas military bases and enough nuclear bombs to exterminate humanity. Not to mention the immigration policies of the Democratic administration. It worked out a “bipartisan” immigration bill which accepted the most repressive aspects of the Republican program. The bill only failed when Trump denounced it, being unwilling to let the Democrats get credit. The extent of economic inequality and regional stagnation has increased—major factors in pushing white workers toward Trumpism. And the Biden-Harris government has presided over a vast expansion of US gas and oil production, further attacking the biosphere. The Democrats talk a good game about ending global warming, but their policies are inadequate and will eventually lead to the destruction of industrial civilization. The lesser evil is still plenty evil.

The Real Question is Mass Strategy

The important question is not what a small number of isolated radicals should do on election day. It is what revolutionary anarchists should advocate for the large organizations, communities, and movements: the unions, the African-American community, Latinx people, immigrants, Arab-Americans, organized women, LGBTQ people, environmentalists, anti-war activists, etc., etc. Overwhelmingly such forces follow a strategy of organizing for the Democratic Party, providing it with money and personnel. They are the “base” of the Democrats, without whom the party would collapse. (In the U.S. system, neither party has an actual membership.)

What anarchists and other radicals should advocate is that these groupings cease spending money and people on the Democrats and adopt an alternate, non-electoral, strategy of direct action.

Overall the liberal strategy (also carried out by democratic socialists and Communists) has not worked out very well. Since the end of World War II, conservative presidents and Congresses have been followed by more-or-less liberal/moderate presidents, to great rejoicing by progressives and reformists. But these have never resulted in stable progressive change. Time after time, these liberal/moderate administrations have been followed by ever-more reactionary governments.

Kennedy-Johnson was followed by Nixon. Carter was followed by Reagan and then the first Bush. Clinton was followed by the second Bush. Obama was followed by Trump, so far the worst of all. The election of Biden did not stop the growth of Trumpism and its complete takeover of the Republican Party. Even if Trump is defeated in November 2024, the far-right semi-fascist movement will continue to grow. It will threaten to come to power in the not-so-distant future. Over time, the greater evil cannot be defeated by a lesser evil. Only a radical alternative can do that.

The main policy of the “democratic socialists” (social democrats, reformist state socialists) has been to work in the Democratic Party. They hope to take it over, or at least to take over a section. This is the program of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and most of the Democratic Socialists of America. Instead, it is they who have been taken over, grumbling about the Biden-Harris genocide in Gaza but powerless to make real change in the government. They are stuck supporting a government of mass murder—as the lesser evil.

Some radicals criticize the Democratic Party, for good reasons. They wish to replace this party of capitalism, imperialism, racism, and ecological catastrophe with a new party. This might be called a labor party, or a progressive party, or a Green Party, or a people’s party. It might start from scratch or be broken off from the Democrats.

The implication is that the problem is the Democratic Party in itself, rather than the electoral system of the capitalist state. But building a new party in the U.S. would be extremely difficult—by no accident. The vast amount of money needed, the Electoral College, the gerrymandering of districts, the number of signatures to get on the ballot, the dirty tricks of the two established parties, the differing election cycles for different positions—all these and more make a successful new party virtually impossible. The last time it happened was the creation of the Republican Party over the slavery issue, as the country was on the verge of a civil war.

In any case, the various advocates of some kind of new party have rarely examined the history of socialist electoralism. There is a long history of independent socialist parties running in elections in Europe and elsewhere. As anarchists predicted, the elected socialist representatives invariably adapted to the political milieu of the government. They made deals and became chummy with their bourgeois counterparts, becoming bourgeois politicians themselves.

Whenever these parties came close to real power, the capitalists have squelched them. Businesses have gone on “capital strikes,” refusing to invest in the country and shutting down industry. They have spent large sums on conservative parties. They have subsidized fascist gangs. They have promoted military coups. Social democrats have been forced to capitulate or be overthrown. From the early social democrats to the rise of European fascism to the history of socialists in France, Chile, Greece (Syriza), Venezuela, and so on, electoral strategies have never worked to move toward a new society. Yet each time there is an upswing of the left, reformist socialists treat an electoral approach as a brand-new brilliant idea.

If Not Elections, Then What?

The liberals and democratic socialists asked: If not elections, then what? How will the people assert power against the ruling elites? Or are you waiting for the Great Day, the Final Revolution, which will solve all our problems? What do we do in the meantime?

Anarchists too are for improvements in the lives of ordinary people. Anarchists are not for waiting for the revolution, which is not around the corner. The fight for reforms may cause people to have better lives in the here and now. Even if such fights were to fail, at times, working people may learn lessons about who their real enemies are and how to fight them. But revolutionary anarchists do not advocate attempts to use elections and party politics to gain improvements. What then?

Errico Malatesta argued that “what little good…is done by elected bodies…is really the effect of popular pressure, to which the rulers concede what little they think is necessary to calm the people….[Electionists] compare what is done in the electoral struggle with what would happen if nothing were done; while instead they should compare the results obtained from…the ballot box with those obtained when other methods are followed, and with what might be achieved if all effort used to send representatives to power…were [instead] employed in the fight to directly achieve what is desired.” (Malatesta 2019; p. 179)

To repeat the previous quotation from Kropotkin, anarchists “have endeavored to promote their ideas directly among the labor organizations and to induce those unions to a direct struggle against capital.”

Consider major movements in U.S. history: In the thirties and afterward, workers won union recognition in major industries. They did this through huge strikes, occupations of factories, and fighting with scabs, vigilantes, police, and the national guard. The New Deal instituted social security and other welfare benefits due to this mass pressure from below.

In the fifties and sixties, African-Americans won the end of legal Jim Crow and racist terror. They engaged in boycotts, mass “civil disobedience” (law breaking), demonstrations, and urban rebellions (“riots”). The right to vote, desegregation, anti-discrimination laws, and anti-poverty programs were achieved through these struggles from below.

The movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam included huge demonstrations, draft resistance, civil disobedience, university occupations and strikes, and a virtual mutiny in the military. (And, of course, the military fight of the Vietnamese people.)

Meanwhile there was an upsurge in labor, including organizing unions and strikes in health care and for public employees, as well as wildcat strikes in key industries (such as the post office).

The LGBTQ movement exploded with the Christopher Street rebellion. It included the later ACT-UP civil disobedience to fight against public inaction on AIDS. The women’s liberation movement developed in the context of these popular struggles and radicalization.

Periods of radicalization have died down. The unions became integrated into the system, heavily reliant on the Democratic Party. Legal segregation was ended—although African-Americans were still on the bottom of U.S. society. The U.S. state withdrew from Vietnam—although imperialism and war continue. The Black movement became co-opted by the Democrats and so were the remnants of the anti-war movement. The Democratic party served as the “graveyard of movements.”

However, the lessons remain, that real victories can be won through popular mass movements and direct action, outside of the electoral trap. The growth of union militancy in recent years and the pro-Palestinian movement on and off university campuses, give hope for the future. One general strike in a big city could change national politics. There is no road to anti-state socialism except through the mass action of the people.

Is It Fascism Yet?

Every election cycle, liberals are prone to shout that “fascism is coming!” unless the Republicans are defeated. Are they right this time? There is widespread fear, spread by liberals, and even not-so-liberal Democrats, that the election of Trump would be the replacement of U.S. democracy by a fascist-like dictatorship. On the other hand, among the far-left, there are those who argue that there really is no significant difference between the two capitalist parties. However there are other alternatives between overt fascism and there being no important differences.

In my opinion, there is little likelihood that a Trump victory would quickly install a regime on the model of classical European fascism. That would require declaring Trump president-for-life, cancelling all further elections, outlawing all other parties including the Democrats, suspending the Constitution, and arming a uniformed vigilante movement similar to Hitler’s Storm Troopers or Mussolini’s Black Shirts.

Business people do not want this; after all they are making a lot of money under the current arrangement. (Most of business—now called “the donor class”—backs the Democrats in recent elections.) There is widespread unrest but not enough to make the bosses feel threatened in their wealth. The rest of the establishment, in and out of government, does not want overt fascism—including the “intelligence community” (national police forces) and the top military brass. It is impossible to make a successful coup without the support of the people with money and the people with guns. And at least half of the population does not want this.
More likely is a creeping authoritarianism, keeping the forms of political democracy while emptying them of content. It will tend toward Victor Orban’s Hungary rather than Hitler’s Third Reich.

“What we are likely to see is a lingering fascism of less murderous intensity, which, when in power, does not necessarily do away with all the forms of bourgeois democracy, does not necessarily physically annihilate the opposition, and may even allow itself to get voted out of power occasionally. [As recently happened in Poland—WP] But since its successor government…will also be incapable of alleviating the crisis, the fascist elements are likely to return to power as well.” (Patnaik & Patnaik 2019; p. 29)

Some say that there is no cause for worry, since the U.S. has gone through periods of right-wing repression and came out okay. For example, in the ‘fifties, after World War II, the U.S. was swept by anti-communist hysteria. This was led by Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, the House Un-American Committee, and many more. The Democrats, from President Truman to the liberals, participated in it, instituting loyalty programs and political purges of government employees (including J. Robert Oppenheimer). People lost jobs in the civil service, schools, universities, unions, the entertainment industry, and elsewhere. Meanwhile the Southern states had legal racial segregation, violently enforced by the police and by the Ku Klux Klan. But eventually this repressive politics was cracked by the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement.

However, the fifties and sixties were the period of the “post-war boom,” a big upswing of prosperity, at least for many white people in the U.S. The improvement in living standards made it unnecessary for the rulers to give up the advantages of political democracy (advantages for them), despite the upheavals of “the sixties.”

Today the system confronts deeper crises. On a world scale capitalism is brittle and conflicted. There are wars raging in various places. The U.S. economy, while relatively stronger than the rest of the world for the moment, is in decline. Inequality is worse than ever, there is stagnation in large parts of the system, and it maintains profits by pumping out vast amounts of oil and gas—thus dooming industrial society. The unhappiness and discontent of large sections of the lower middle class and white working class has reached dangerous proportions. People are looking for solutions. Without a significant radical movement, these layers of the population look to the far-right. They are open to blaming Latinx and Muslim immigrants for their problems. They become willing to listen to demagogues such as Trump, who promise to lead them to a mythical land of white supremacy, Christian dominance, and patriotic greatness.

How a few radicals, of various persuasions, vote or do not vote in November is not the important issue. The question is whether it is possible to develop an independent movement of movements, of the working class and all those oppressed and threatened by this disastrous system, to oppose the capitalists, their establishment, their state, and all their systems of oppression. It is whether a revolutionary anti-authoritarian wing of these movements can be organized to fight for a free society.

References

Kropotkin, Peter (2002). “Anarchism” [from the Encyclopedia Britannica]. Anarchism; A Collection of Revolutionary Writings. (Roger Baldwin, ed.) Mineola NY: Dover Publications. Pp. 284—300.
Malatesta, Errico (2019). “Towards Anarchy” Malatesta in America 1899—1900. The Complete Works of Malatesta. Vol. IV. (Davide Turcato, ed.). Chico CA: AK Press.
Paitnaik, Utsa, & Paitnaik, Prabhat (2019). “Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End.” Monthly Review, vol. 71, no. 3. Pp. 20—31.

Palestine Has Mobilized a Global Movement. For It to Last We Must Get Organized.

By James Kilgore

August 12, 2024

Source: Truthout

Image by Wolfgang Berger



In the weeks after October 7, abolitionist and civil rights activist Angela Davis offered some pointed advice to people on the left during an Al Jazeera interview: “If we are not prepared to think critically about what’s happening in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem … we will not only be unprepared to understand and address the issues emanating from the current crisis; we won’t be able to understand the world around us [and] the many struggles for justice and freedom all over the globe.” She went on to add that, “Our relation to Palestine says a great deal about our capacity to respond to complex, contemporary issues, whether we’re talking about imperialism, settler colonialism, transphobia, homophobia, the climate crisis.”

For Palestine solidarity activists in the United States, it could be useful to look more deeply at the history of international solidarity in U.S. movements, particularly in the last three decades. At various points mass mobilizations on global issues have gained a high profile: the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and beyond in 1999-2000, participation in the semi-annual World Social Forums beginning in 2001, the anti-Iraq war movement in the early 2000s, the support for the pro-democracy Arab Spring of 2010, and a series of international responses to austerity budgets and increasing inequality that eventually exploded into Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

Subsequently, the 2010s erupted in reaction to the police-perpetrated killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Samuel DuBose, and dozens of other Black people. Mobilizations in response to these murderous police actions precipitated the formation of Black Lives Matter and culminated in the global reaction to the murder of George Floyd, where 40 countries on every continent except Antarctica took to the streets.

All of this built networks of personal relationships at the grassroots level and left permanent marks in the consciousness of millions, in some cases impacting the agendas of elected officials like “The Squad.” Still, it left a remarkably small residue of organizational infrastructure on which to grow a movement informed by internationalism. Instead, without an organizational center, we face the rise of far right and fascist formations across the globe coupled with the spiritual withering of center-left parties in France, Germany, Britain and of course the Democratic Party in the U.S.

Even more disorienting has been the fall from grace of national liberation movements. The degeneration of the organized global majority countries, in particular the decline of the Non-Aligned Movement with its New International Economic Order, has left an enormous void. National movements and states that people on the left revered in the past, such as the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa have either descended into webs of corruption, eschewed progressive policies for neoliberal and repressive paradigms, or both.

But the present actions in support of Palestinian liberation have reestablished hope in the possibilities of global solidarity. The hundreds of thousands of people coming onto the streets and social media are a clearcut indicator of belief in the power of collective action and imagination to make change regardless of how overwhelming the odds. While college campuses have been on the forefront of these actions, they have also included a considerable nonstudent cohort, including many Black and Brown people. Moreover, unlike in most U.S.-based campaigns of international solidarity, those directly impacted, namely Palestinians living in the U.S., have played an important leadership role in crafting this movement.

As the struggle continues, we need to contemplate the obvious: “What next?” In doing so, several key questions emerge. The most urgent, of course, is how to bring a halt to the mass murder and, once there is a permanent ceasefire, how to rebuild Gaza, East Jerusalem, and other areas devastated by murderous Zionist offensives. But there is also a need to ask more strategic questions: What have we learned from this situation that can steer us down a liberatory path rather than simply resting until the next eruption? We need a strategy to avoid the decline of activism that has ensued after each of the previous mobilizations.

Over the past few months, I have interviewed several activists who have been involved in prior campaigns of international solidarity. The cohort was intergenerational, though the majority were involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement or the Black liberation struggle during the ‘60s and ‘70s. I asked them to focus on their own experiences and, in particular, offer explanations for the decline of international solidarity within left movements and the failure of more recent mobilizations to gain a permanent foothold.

In our discussions, organizers mentioned five main factors that affected the capacity to sustain internationalism in left movements. Perhaps most frequently noted were the organizational forms that emerged during these protests. These comments fell into two categories: the professionalization of political struggle and the lack of structure and leadership.

The movements of the 1960s and 1970s largely relied on building a grassroots political base. In some cases, members paid dues, while leaders typically received modest pay or none at all. Puerto Rican independence fighter Alfredo Lopez contended that foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, McArthur, Soros — entered the movement space, relabeled it “social justice” and put forward a more moderate agenda. In the words of Chicago activist leader and historian Barbara Ransby, “Social justice becomes a job … where people are under the surveillance of philanthropy.” According to Lopez, these foundations “steered us away from international consciousness.”

Illinois youth development practitioner Posey described this process to Truthout as a “movement capture” which stresses “navigating the 501(c)(3) bureaucracy, not looking at how we connect with others people’s battles against U.S. imperialism.”

Cory Greene is co-founder and healing justice/NTA organizer of H.O.L.L.A., a New York-based community specific and healing justice focused “grassroots youth/community” program. He professes that his organization “stands on the legacy of the Black liberation movement.” He stressed the need for “institutional memory, to know how to pull on your lineages to heal.” He argues that the state and the nonprofit industrial complex has colonized these precious legacies or seriously diluted them.

By the same token, several organizers also believed that the absence of a clear-cut structure often undermined the potential continuity of these movements. Vincent Bevins, in his overview of mass protests in the 2010s, If We Burn, argues that the model adopted by most organizations, based on nonhierarchy, consensus decision-making, spontaneity, and large meetings in public spaces such as Tahrir Square or Zuccotti Park, obstructed the pathway to creating the type of structures, relationship-building and planning required to sustain a movement. Historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz summed it up for Truthout like this: “For the last 30 years I get my hopes up that something is going to happen, and the only thing happening is a sort of anarchism but they didn’t have a program. [They] just talked about getting rid of the state.”

A second, frequently forgotten factor in the decline of international solidarity was the demise of the Soviet Union and the “communist bloc.” While the class nature and political practice of the Soviet Union were often controversial within the left, the existence of a counter pole to Western imperialism was a constant reminder that building a global political power with an anti-capitalist agenda was possible. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union and its allies included the building of a global solidarity network of nations, funding and political support for left-wing national liberation movements in southern Africa and Central America as well as backing for liberation support work in the U.S. and Europe.

Perhaps the most high-profile example of this was the continued Soviet backing of a Cuban Revolution that faced an intensive embargo by the U.S. Support from the USSR included $1.7 billion to retool Cuban industrial infrastructure from 1976-80 and military assistance of $4 billion in the mid-1980s. The Cubans themselves, with Soviet support, initiated their own solidarity efforts in southern Africa in the 1970s, sending thousands of troops to Angola to help successfully repel a major offensive of the South African military against Angolan freedom fighters.

Dunbar-Ortiz told Truthout she recalled that the fall of the Soviet Union “scared me to death.” She said some of her leftist friends were overjoyed, but she had worked in international structures like the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization where she saw the concrete assistance the Soviet Union was giving to freedom fighters in the global majority countries. In hindsight she added, “I think it had a bigger impact than any of us ever analyzed.”

Thirdly, the U.S. state restructured its domestic and international strategy. Through counterinsurgency programs like COINTELPRO, the government targeted key activists who advanced a radical internationalist agenda with a variety of tactics: assassinations such as the 1969 murder of Chicago Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, infiltration of movement organizations such as the American Indian Movement, Students for a Democratic Society and the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the “legal” framing of political activists like Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal.

They also shifted their strategy for imperialist intervention. As former political prisoner David Gilbert highlighted to Truthout, the U.S. opted for a “hybrid” model in which the U.S. supplied weapons and other hardware, but the bulk of the troops in places like Gaza or Iraq come from partner countries in the region. This reduced the extent to which the U.S. population felt the pain of war and quelled desires to protest its continuation. A byproduct of this was a shifting of the international political attention of the left away from the military-industrial complex and the quest for peace. The fall of the Soviet Union instilled false confidence among many activists that the threat of world war would disappear with the weakening of the U.S.’s main enemy.

The fourth issue mentioned was the ideological triumph of a technology driven culture of neoliberalism and individualism. We live in the age of the new robber barons — Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and private equity funds that control much of global society with capital flows, surveillance and consumerist technology. This is reinforced by narratives that encourage the worship of wealth and increased power for internationalized capitalist firms. The media and often our cultural icons promote the narratives of the rich and superrich. Collective and cooperative efforts are seen as unrealistic or futile.

Migrant rights activist Maru Mora-Villalpando stressed to Truthout that the development of free trade agreements and their institutionalization in global bodies like the World Trade Organization promoted and advanced this ideology. In Mexico, for example, the installation of a free market in land ownership via the North American Free Trade Agreement has opened up ownership of Mexican agribusiness to U.S. transnational corporations, undermining local power.

Intimately linked to the advance of the neoliberal model has been the demobilization of organized labor. While we are seeing a resurgence in quarters such as with Amazon, Starbucks and the United Auto Workers, the percent of the U.S. private sector labor force that is unionized plummeted from 20 percent in 1983 to just over 11 percent in 2023. Unions can become important vehicles of internationalism. Most belong to global federations, which in key industries can create structural links that facilitate solidarity actions around boycotts, sanctions and labor issues.

Though certainly all unions do not take such stances, these international ties were highly active during the anti-apartheid movement, with workers often refusing to unload goods coming from or going to South Africa. They also played an important role during Occupy and the general strike in Oakland, California, and even today we see the longshore unions refusing to load and unload ships connected to Israel.

Lastly, interviewees stressed the complexity of solidarity. Ransby noted the importance of asking what “a liberation movement is for, not just what it is against” as well as avoiding the liberal view that “it is their struggle.”

New York attorney and organizer Jindu Obiofuma noted the importance for activists in the U.S. to recognize their positionality. She stressed that solidarity “begins with humility.” For her, in the U.S. this means “decentering what it means to be in the belly of the beast.” She noted a tendency for folks in the West to act as if they are “telling people fighting for liberation in other countries how best to fight for their lives based on principles rooted in their own analyses and experiences.” She stressed that for Western activists, especially white people, solidarity requires setting aside notions of white supremacy and American exceptionalism and “stepping back from yourself, doing what it is that the people you’re in solidarity with tell you to do and understanding that might come with some risks.”

Ultimately, witnessing the genocide in Palestine has forced many on the left to view the global political economy through another set of lenses. Activists are connecting dots of the military-industrial and prison-industrial complex, white supremacy, U.S. imperialism, settler colonialism, patriarchy and toxic masculinity — connections that had often disappeared behind the pressure of the system to isolate struggles and sectors of the oppressed population into silos.

The powers that be strive to push all left history, including that of international solidarity, off the map and replace it with the triumphalist narrative of the “Google world.” Poet June Jordan once said that how we respond to the Palestinian struggle is a “litmus test for morality.” Learning from the past is key to passing that test.

 

Focus on Rojava

Jul

18

2024

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From Class War

The devastating effects of the lesser evil and anti-imperialism in anarchist circles (II)

May 2024 / waragainstwar@subvertising.org

Why a focus on Rojava in 2024? Both because of random discussions, but also because the most widespread form of military-revolutionary mythology about Rojava has reappeared as an ideological support for an “anarchist” commitment to the war in Ukraine, going as far as to valorize the career paths of people who have gone from one war to another. On this occasion, a military commitment in Rojava is “naturally” presented as an authoritative justification for joining the Ukrainian troops “in any case”, the case being understood as a leftist or “anarchist” cause.

Beyond this actuality, the range of issues raised by the “support for revolutionary Rojava” touches on all the essential aspects of this society with which revolutionary aspiration is confronted more than ever, such as the capitalist social relation, the nature of the State, the general course towards war.

The crux of the Rojava question and all its developments lies in its origins, hence the importance of reading again analyses from ten years ago. The presupposition of many supporters of “the Rojava revolution” is to conflate the contagion of the “Arab Spring” revolts in Syria in 2011 with its all-out burial, particularly within the Kurdish national framework. No, the “Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria” – as “Rojava” has been officially called on the international diplomatic scene since 2018 – is not the emanation of an emancipatory, revolutionary struggle, with its strengths and limitations; on the contrary, it is what has been organized politically to get control of this situation, within the State and capitalist framework. As Gilles Dauvé and Tristan Leoni pointed out in 2015:

“The so-called Revolution of July 2012 corresponds in fact to the withdrawal of Assad’s troops from Kurdistan. Having disappeared the previous administrative and security power was replaced, and a self-government called revolutionary has taken things in hand. But for what “self” is it acting? [And] of what revolution?”1

By 2005, the KCK2 had abandoned its goal of establishing a separate Kurdish State and argued instead for the famous democratic confederalism advocated in the writings of the founder of the PKK Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned for life by Turkey in 1999. This project came to fruition in 2012, when the PYD took control of a large part of northern Syria and signed an agreement with the Syrian government. The sleight of hand consists in presenting this transfer of political and military power as the founding event of a revolution, while in fact it was all about ensuring the continuity of the State, against any revolutionary inclination. Left-wing romanticism notwithstanding, all the progressive, liberal, environmentalist and feminist ingredients that adorned this transfer of State power are more a sign of a first-class funeral than an expression of the struggle that preceded it.

“We hear of a popular dynamic, admittedly paralyzed by war, but nevertheless one that could reappear again, later. We are told that it is necessary to remain hopeful and above all to believe that humanity (or the proletariat) will emancipate itself by making war first and only afterwards the revolution. This seems crazy to us. This is the choice allegedly made by the PYD, and which corresponds to the old ‘revolutionary’ schema (the classical transition phase that is limited to a ‘political revolution’). (…) In Rojava it is war that dominates — a popular war if you want — but war all the same.”3

Of course, we must always bear in mind, then and now, that this takeover, this crackdown, this national reconfiguration, did not eradicate all desire for struggle, for emancipation beyond the imposed frameworks. Keeping this in mind means first and foremost refusing to pass off the reconstitution of the State as a continuation of the struggle, or, in other words, that there are common interests or any possible convergence between both.

Maintaining the confusion between the struggle and its burial, under the pretext of a “duty of solidarity”, is in fact the worst thing we can do with regard to any attempt of struggle that might be maintained or re-emerge against the current. This ideological matrix is as old as our defeats – particularly since the advent of social democracy, our gravedigger-in-chief – and it has always needed homelands to embody itself, from Bolshevik Russia to Maoist China or Castro’s Cuba, including national liberation struggles under various banners.

The struggle in Chiapas since the 90s was– and to some extent remains – a banner for this matrix, although this does not coincide with its complex and contradictory reality, a serious analysis of which would take up too much space here. Anyway, a superficial and left-wing vision of Chiapas is often provided by the zealots of “Revolutionary Rojava” in support of their theses, notably on these issues: autonomy, territory, civil society, democracy without a State, participative governance, armed struggle, gender. All these elements need to be critically examined, but the very nature of the ideological matrix is to make them unchallengeable, in a fearsome machine that has seen considerable expansion about Rojava. Instead of talking about the fate of the insurrectional struggle of 2011 and beyond, instead of seeing the Kurdish national movement as antagonistic to that struggle, we are being fooled with the people, militarism-feminism, collaborative economy and the glorification of “civil society”, as if the latter were not the space par excellence of class collaboration, the other face of the State, its guarantor and pillar.

International polemics on these questions, on the revolutionary or non-revolutionary nature of what’s happening in Rojava, on the meaning of solidarity to be activated with whom and what, against what, began in the first years after 2011, notably in anarchist circles (and beyond) and are still going strong today, when the issue is revisited.

We would sum up the important issues that are at stake as follows:

* What happened to the wave of struggle in the early 2010s against the constitution of the Rojava State (the “autonomous administration”), behind what they have been foisting up on us internationally?

* Similarly, how did this wave of struggle survive its militarization under international aegis, in a context of crushing the struggles and transforming them into a deep inter-imperialist mess, from the repression of the 2011 struggles in Syria to the international military reconfiguration “against Daesh”, at the cost of alliances with international oppressors?

* What is the social, political and emancipatory content and perspective of this “autonomy”, if it was anything else than a restoration of the State in a new form (popular democracy, community democracy…) and the arrival of new managers?

* In other words, what is the beginning of an attack – or even a critique – of the capitalist social relation and the State in the process we have been told about in Rojava since so many years?

The answers to these questions have been documented over the past decade, and unfortunately do not go in the direction advocated by the defenders of the “Rojava Revolution”. From a theoretical point of view, the reference to Murray Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism” generally serves as a guarantee for anarchists, as if it was obvious that this self-management doctrine was revolutionary and that we could sign a blank cheque to the founder of the PKK, Abdullah Öçalan, who converted to it in prison thanks to a correspondence with the author and drew from it his own doctrine, the democratic confederalism. This ideological turnaround would ensure that what is being done in Rojava under the aegis of the PKK and its broader offshoot – the KCK – would no longer be part of the continuity of the classic conquest of the State by a Marxist-Leninist party, but would meet, even embody, the emancipatory aspirations of the 2011 movement. Here’s what Gilles Dauvé and Tristan Leoni analyzed in 2015 behind this seductive veneer:

“The PKK has not given up the usual goal of national liberation movements. Even if it now avoids a word that sounds too authoritarian, the aim of the PKK is still today as it was yesterday, the creation of a central apparatus of management and of political rule over a territory — and there is no better word than State to describe this thing. The difference, apart from its administrative designation, is that it would be so very democratic, so much more in the hands of its citizens that it would no longer deserve the name of State. Here is ideology.

In Syria, the Kurdish national movement (under the influence of PKK) has replaced the demand for a state of law by a more modest and more “basic” [basiste — from the base, lit. ‘base-ist’] program: autonomy, democratic federalism, the rights of men and women, etc. What is put forward, instead of the ideology of socialism led by a single workers and peasants party developing heavy industry, or references to “class” and “Marxists”, is self-management, the cooperative, the commune, ecology, anti-productivism and, as a bonus, gender.”4

Abdullah Öçalan’s democratic confederalism, implemented by the PKK and its avatars, found its first political transcription in January 2014 in the Charter of the Social Contract5, a veritable constitution defining the principles and overall architecture of the social and political organization of the territory, in other words of the State in Rojava. As any constitution, it is a democratic bulwark against any emancipation organized outside of the State and capitalist framework, and therefore against revolution. In its eloquent preamble, the text “recognizes Syria’s territorial integrity and aspires to maintain domestic and international peace”.

About this Charter of the Social Contract, let’s quote the text “Rojava: Fantasies and Realities” by Zafer Onat (2014)6:

“On this point, it is helpful to examine the KCK Contract that defines the democratic confederalism that forms the basis of the political system in Rojava. A few points in the introduction written by Ocalan deserve our attention:

“This system is one that takes into account ethnic, religious and class differences on a social basis.” (…) “Three systems of law will apply in Kurdistan: EU law, unitary state law, democratic confederal law.”

In summary, it is stated that class society will remain and there will be a federal political system compatible with the global system and the nation state. In concert with this, article 8 of the Contract, titled “Personal, Political Rights and Freedoms” defends private property and section C of article 10 titled “Basic Responsibilities” defines the constitutional basis of mandatory military service as it states “In the case of a war of legitimate defense, as a requirement of patriotism, there is the responsibility to actively join the defense of the homeland and basic rights and freedoms.” While the Contract states that the aim is not political power, we also understand that the destruction of the state apparatus is also not aimed, meaning the goal is autonomy within existing nation states. When the Contract is viewed in its entirety, the goal that is presented is seen not to be beyond a bourgeois democratic system that is called democratic confederalism. To summarize, while the photos of two women bearing rifles that are frequently spread on social media, one taken in the Spanish Civil War, the other taken in Rojava do correspond to a similarity in the sense of women fighting for their freedoms, it is clear that the persons fighting ISIS in Rojava do not at this point have the same goals and ideals as the workers and poor peasants that fought within the CNT-FAI in order to remove the state and private property altogether.”

To say that the CNT, from 1936 onwards, was fighting to “remove the state and private property”, is a step that’s historically unacceptable, given its abandonment of libertarian communism, its compromise with the Republic and its submission to the logic of war as opposed to that of revolution. In the case of Rojava, as now in the case of Ukraine, as soon as “the society”, “the country”, “the people” and its variants such as tribes, ethnic groups, etc. become subjects in their own right in the discourse, this means that they have already agreed to give up the essentials, namely the class demarcation and the demarcation with the State. “The society” and “the people” are abstractions from the underlying capitalist social relation, from the class struggle and the oppressive nature of the State, but they take shape and materialize as concrete ideological forces through social peace, citizen servitude, national union…

If we analyze the propaganda in favor of war under the anarchist flag, we get the impression that war is not at all understood for what it is, a paroxysm of our defeat, but as a social circumstance like any other in which it is possible to participate “as an anarchist” or even as an extension of the struggle by another means, bringing emancipation, at the price of sacrificing our lives but not our principles. Consequently, the crucial issue of insubordination, refusal of conscription and revolutionary defeatism is removed, since in this view it doesn’t even arise, in a kind of total inversion of any subversive point of view. Once “some comrades” have decided “to go in as anarchists”, we should respect their “free will” and support them, otherwise we could be accused of “lack of solidarity” and “lack of internationalism”! Faced with the real antagonism between class war and imperialist war, between fighting against the State and borders, and fighting on the borders for the State, any evasion or wavering opens the way for the bourgeois-democratic horizon and its non-choices between war and peace, between military engagement and pacifism, between misguided, incantatory solidarity and resignation.

To succeed in this monstrosity of justifying war and national defense in the name of struggle and anarchism, it’s necessary, at the cost of remarkable contortions, to evade both the State and what would really be a class-based anti-war struggle, namely revolutionary defeatism, class war against the exploiters, against the war machine, on all sides. The fact that this struggle does not automatically erupt is no justification for joining the front. In Rojava, as in the Ukraine, we are assured that no comrade is fighting for the State, either because the State is virtually non-existent, as in Rojava, or because we are acting “alongside” the State and not “beside” it, as in the Ukraine, where the government and NATO are coping with the actions of black-flag armed groups who do not take orders from any General Staff! Both is supposed to be a vast movement of “resistance” and “self-defense”. The word “self” tends to indicate that comrades are fighting directly for their own collective interests, without the mediation of the State. However, the State is indeed at work, because by fighting against the onslaught of surrounding armies or Daesh under this or that flag, the proletarians enlisted are actually fighting for a new local management of Capital. We were talking about tactical flexibility, and a lot is needed to match the inter-imperialist mess, when “self-defense” has to go hand in hand with military alliances with local and international imperialist powers.

Thus, talking about “the struggle in such-and-such a region”, “such-and-such a region in struggle” or, in a more exalted way, “the revolution in such-and-such a region” is totally equivocal until the above is clarified. In October 2014, at the time of the attack on Kobane, the left-wing American economist David Graeber declared in an interview with “The Guardian” that it was indeed a revolution, as in Spain in 1936, and he urged international solidarity, reviving the model of the “international brigades” (in which his father volunteered in 1937), while obscuring in passing that they were organized by the Stalinist counter-insurgency, in parallel with the fatal militarization of revolutionary militias. Nothing new under the veiled sun of Capital, between communication and parallel diplomacy:

“In December 2014, while lesser Rojavan officials were meeting with US activists Janet Biehl and David Graeber, the top PKK/PYD official, Salih Muslim, was discussing military collaboration with the US ‘neocon’ Zalmay Khalilzad.”7

On this point, let’s take the following from “A Letter to ‘Rojavist’ Friends”:8

“With regards to their diplomatic agenda, the representatives (sic) of the YPG are regularly sent to Western countries with the goal of establishing new contacts. The days in which they were represented as totally isolated, as victims of their revolutionary position (despite their commander being received at the Élysée Palace) have passed. Their presence at the negotiations in Geneva was prevented by the efforts of Turkey, whilst Russia’s presence there was favourable. Since then the government of Rojava opened a diplomatic representation in Moscow in February [2016], which was the occasion of a lovely little celebration (ditto in Prague in April).

From a political, diplomatic and military point of view the leadership of the PYD /YPG (wooed as much by the United-States as by Russia) has known how to opportunistically play its cards right, that is to say, reinforce its political weight by obtaining military support and quasi-international recognition.

With respect to media support, it is very widespread and particularly positive. In France, the combatants of the YPG (and above all those of the YPJ) are presented as models of courage, of feminism, and of democracy and tolerance. Such is the case with ‘Arte’ to ‘France 2’, passing by ‘LCP’. Likewise with the Radio, where from ‘Radio Libertaire’ to ‘Radio Courtoisie’ and ‘France Culture’ one hears the praises of the combatants of freedom.”

While the PKK itself is still considered a “terrorist organization” by the so-called “great powers” (and which are indeed terrorist organizations), its Kurdish avatar the PYD and its armed branches the YPG & YPJ do exist on the international diplomatic and military scene. The reason is simple: beyond the rhetoric, the powers seek allies not on the basis of their capacities to implement liberal democracy (let alone “local” or “popular” democracy), but on their ability to control their region and to discipline the proletariat who lives in it. And yet, despite the clichés we hear, it’s not the neighborhood assemblies or the production cooperatives that represent the political force in Kurdistan (at most, they serve as an ideological smoke and mirrors), it’s the PYD and its armed branches. In the words of Gilles Dauvé and Tristan Leoni, “we have never yet seen a State dissolve itself in local democracy”.

This is what the partisans of the “Rojava Revolution” claim, particularly under the anarchist banner, echoing what the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öçalan summed up in 2005:

“Democratic confederalism of Kurdistan is not a state system, but a democratic system of the people without a state. […] It derives its power from the people and in all areas including its economy it will seek self-sufficiency.”9

Talking that way about “democracy without a state” (a subtle oxymoron) or a “society without a state” in Rojava frankly doesn’t make much sense politically, institutionally or militarily.

Rojava does have a State “with a government led by the “single party” PYD, ministries, a multitude of mini parliaments, courts of justice, a “Constitution” (called “Social Contract”), an army (the YPG/YPJ militias increasingly militarized), a police force (the Asayish) which imposes internal social order.”10

More generally, as the other text in the same brochure reminds us:

“The State is also – mainly – the result of specific social relations. This means that it is based on the dynamics of the relation between social classes and their relation to property. Thus, where classes and private property are preserved, there is a State.”11

It also denounces the fact of “giving up the vision of a social revolution as a global process and clinging to the idea of the revolution in one country”. The fact that Rojava’s democracy is “popular”, assemblyist, councilist… in no way detracts from its bourgeois character, which is quite simply conservative of existing social relations. This is where the question of radicality takes on its full meaning, neither as a self-assumed title nor as a value judgement. If we consider that the cause of our misery stems from a lack of equality, from a democratic deficit in the business management, from a problem of governance, then any progressive bourgeois project can pass as a revolution. If, on the other hand, we consider that the cause of our misery is the capitalist social relation itself, not how it is managed, and that the State and politics are merely its appendages and not a neutral tool to be seized… then it will become more difficult to recruit us under these flags.

“Some anarchist texts only evoke Rojava in terms of local achievements and neighbourhood assemblies, almost never speaking of the PYD and the PKK, etc., as if they were only spontaneous actions. It would be a little like if, in order to analyse a general strike, we only spoke of the self-management of strikers and of strike pickets, without considering the local unions, or the manoeuvring of the union management, or their negotiations with the State and the bosses…

The revolution is increasingly seen as a question of behaviour: self-organization, interest in gender, ecology, creating links, discussion, affects. If we add here disinterest or carelessness regarding State and political power, it is logical to see well and truly a revolution — and why not “a revolution of women” in Rojava. Since we speak less and less of classes, of class struggle, does it matter that this is also absent from the discourse of the PKK-PYD?”12

This is a very interesting point, which deserves to be developed further. The crucial question of affirming our community of struggle against all the false capitalist communities (political, social, cultural, religious, “ethnic”…) fully includes the dimension of emotions and behaviors (which are far from being collectively accepted), and to affirm this is to highlight what we have to reappropriate on this devastated terrain, by reinforcing ourselves and struggling together against individual and relational alienation, against the collective reproduction of all forms of alienation whose matrixes are racism, sexism and ableism.

The violent diversion of this vital need consists, on the other hand, in making the no less crucial question of the content of the struggle disappear by using that of emotions, behaviors and formal signs as a substitute, an artifice, a cover-up. That is the case with Rojava, with a profusion of highly emotional testimonies contributing to this ideological offensive. Not that these testimonies are necessarily false, but they are isolated from their general dynamic to make us forget that the true – the beginnings of liberation from certain social shackles – can be a moment of the false, in this case of the so-called “Rojava Revolution”. As a moment of the false, the true is then realized in the egalitarian performance of patriotic sacrifice. You can’t assault the sky with national lead in your wing.

This is the starting point for our analysis of the phenomenon of jineology, the “science of women” advocated as a component of democratic confederalism in Rojava, as the other side of the widely promoted “martial feminism”.

As Gilles Dauvé and Tristan Leoni rightly remind us:

“The subversive nature of a movement or organization cannot be measured by the number of armed women — nor its feminist character either. Since the 1960s, across all continents, most guerrillas have included or include numerous female combatants — for example in Colombia. This is even truer amongst Maoist-inspired guerrillas (Nepal, Peru, Philippines, etc.) using the strategy of “People’s War”: male/female equality should contribute to the tearing down of traditional structures, feudal or tribal (always patriarchal). It is in the Maoist origins of the PKK-PYD that one finds the source of what specialists call “martial feminism”.”13

It should be added that this confederalism is not at all about an overcoming of false capitalist communities (particularly “ethnic” ones), but as their reasoned arrangement, in an organized and systematic denial of class contradiction. By way of comparison, in Iran in 1979, even the Muslim leaders in opposition to the Shah’s regime spoke of class struggle, obviously in order to better bury the movement that was beginning to take an insurrectionary turn.

In the broad spectrum of “support for Rojava”, Marxist-Leninist organizations such as the Parti Socialiste de Lutte and Secours Rouge play an active role. The latter is supported in Brussels by quite complacent “libertarian” allies used as non-dogmatic, anti-authoritarian stooges, and it campaigns for “Support for the revolutionary struggle of the peoples of Rojava and elsewhere, against the Islamists, the USA, NATO and reactionary states!” and implicitly invites us to turn a blind eye – a tried and tested Marxist-Leninist habit – to all the military and geostrategic alliances that have belied this rallying banner. The “old disagreements” are thrown away, they are raising money for plasters and they spread their propaganda. Less naïve than the “anarchist” supporters, these organizations are perfectly aware (and even feel secure in knowing) that there is indeed a State in Rojava, a fortiori with their local counterparts at the helm. The strategic opportunism of these Marxist-Leninist organizations naturally mirrors that of the PKK, which, along with the PYD, they also consider to be “progressive”, in opposition to neighboring “reactionary States”, an old anti-imperialist platitude, while endorsing the eco-feminist-libertarian facelift as an ideological paradigm shift. If refusing the very foundations of such a support front is being purist, as we often hear, then yes, let’s be resolutely purist, more than ever and right to the end!

The question, as always, is not to be fooled while confusing social democracy with revolution, not to be recruited in a campaign of support for any kind of State, economic or even social restructuring under the guise of revolutionary internationalism. In the case of Rojava, as in the Ukraine, the argument that what is being done locally – including by “comrades” under “our” banner (the poverty of family!) – is more valuable than what we can think about it here, or the assertion that over there we act while here we theorize, is the very negation of the internationalist solidarity, its dissolution in the myth of free will and confinement in national camps. Any entry into the war has the potential to make social contradictions burst out, but there is no determinism, and what prevails, at least initially, is the obliteration of struggle and ideological subjugation. Being exposed to shrapnel doesn’t offer any extra clairvoyance.

These attempts at hierarchization, separation and atomization in the name of the status of “being concerned” actually have a very trivial origin. Whenever anarchism gives up being revolutionary, it loses its substance and degenerates into a zealous variant of leftism, while ignoring itself as such and rushing headlong into its most hackneyed clichés: self-determination of peoples, anti-imperialism, national liberation, separate armed struggle, minimum (“realistic”) and maximum (revolutionary rhetoric) programs, worldwide support for all class-collaborationist fronts.

Yet, to assert that the revolutionary movement is internationalist is to assert that “comrade criticism must flow in all directions in order to be a constructive part of the process of creating a common theory and practice.”14

It’s one thing to analyze and understand the social dynamics that lead to demand or defend a “more cooperative” (market) management style against one more directly dictated by the imperatives of the global market, in other words, production that allows for a certain margin of subsistence against an economy that totally uproots us and chains us to industry… It’s another thing to accept it as a “revolutionary” program or a “step towards revolution”. Yet another thing is to promote the political transposition of this illusion, by defending a more “participatory” politics, and more concerned with social peace, against a more vertical and frontal politics. And finally, another thing is to defend a national union more accomplished as a “revolutionary self-defense”, without seeing how the State, and therefore capital, remain master of the situation. Because it is precisely in this way that we are repeatedly led back into the same catastrophic quagmire, back into the fold of politics; it is also in this way that the authoritarian character of the commodity and value reigning over our lives is fundamentally denied, as is any prospect of radical and definitive emancipation from them. This is what the “Rojava revolution” is all about, this is the lie we are supposed to swallow, either by political opportunism or by the need for exoticism as a palliative to a total loss of revolutionary meaning.

It’s also important to see that these programs of “popular democracy”, direct and participatory democracy or community of “good governance” play much more of a role of ideological mobilization, of propaganda, as a pseudo-revolutionary model to be defended to keep the ideological matrix of socialism in one country under perfusion (updated with ecologic, feminist, inclusive, anti-authoritarian tints…), than they would represent a significant real alternative for capitalism in terms of maintaining social peace around the world.

At the end of this brief update, we’d like to return to an issue that’s as much mistreated as it is vital: the solidarity. However valid our arguments may be, haven’t we put them up like a wall between ourselves and those towards whom we were called to show solidarity? Do we have the right to call to turn away from an “experiment” which, despite its weaknesses and ideological misleadingness, needs our support in the face of its enemies who will show no mercy? Wouldn’t it be better to endorse a solidarity front that’s a little too broad than to risk that we will miss, as David Graeber urged, a historic rendezvous with a need for revolutionary solidarity? However sincere the intention, these remarks nonetheless reflect a truncated, distorted vision of what our class solidarity should be.

Let’s embrace the fact that we have a rendezvous with History, even in the smallest events, but it all depends on which current – or counter-current – of History we intend to follow. From a revolutionary point of view, the alternative to which this question of solidarity confronts us is the following: either we resign ourselves to the seduction of “fronts of struggle”, by tarnishing our principles, or we start afresh from the content of the struggle and its perspectives, by affirming not only with what ruptures we are in solidarity – whether these are embodied in sporadic actions or are carried by a broader movement – but also against what. Contrary to what is spread by the prevailing relativism and cynicism, principles, from a subversive point of view, are not what dispenses from thinking; on the contrary, they are the way in which we think our own struggle in the historical thread of its antagonism to all the parties of Order that have succeeded one another in the course of History throughout the world, since the beginning of class societies, these societies of appropriation, exploitation, domination and alienation.

We spoke earlier of the shift of a certain impoverished and disoriented anarchism towards the most caricatured leftism; the question of solidarity is no exception. From an internationalist point of view, solidarity with any radicalizing rupture anywhere in the world is embodied above all in the struggle wherever you are, against “your own” exploiters, against “your own” State, against any sacrifice. In Rojava, as in the rest of the world, the supreme stage of leftist conception and practice of solidarity boils down to proxy recruitment and support: serving at its best “the cause” (here, or even there) and garnering “support” (fund raising and propaganda outlets) after having first accepted the frontism, the flags and the blurring of essential demarcations (class, State).

A quotation whose scope can be extended to the rest of the world will help us to conclude:

“(…) in order for the events in Rojava to become truly revolutionary, it is necessary to move beyond the existing content, which represents self-defense of lives, culture, language, ethnicity, territory, local economy, jobs, civic and religious rights. Events would have to move on. To the content that represents the offensive phase. It will not be about civic activism and mere democratic administration, but about proletarian class struggle.”

“Events would have to move on”, but above all in a completely different direction to that taken in Rojava.

“In practice, this presupposes expressions of struggle subverting the pillars of Capital, such as classes, property, exchange, labor, money, the market, the State – and at the same time the creation of not only different organizational forms, but above all of a different social content. This is not yet happening in Rojava. (…) The point is not to turn away from Rojava, but also not to accept the uncritical support of everything that is happening there. Neither rejection nor romanticism. Just keep a sober, non-propaganda view.”15

Reconnecting with class, struggle and internationalist solidarity starts with refusing the ideological injunctions and non-choices that are presented to us as inescapable, and breaking with complacency towards catch-all support fronts in order to confront the crucial, delicate questions that are often also “the questions that make people angry”, especially when criticism of content, positions and practices is experienced or reversed as an “attack” or as a “betrayal”. It’s part of the struggle to highlight and try to help to resolve the deviations and contradictions experienced within our community of struggle. The targets of criticism, behind all this, remain those who knowingly use us in their “militant” political calculations and, beyond that, the State and the social order to which these calculations ultimately benefit.

English translation: The Friends of the Class War

1 Gilles Dauvé & Tristan Leoni, “Kurdistan?”, DDT21, 2015, https://ddt21.noblogs.org/?page_id=324English translation made by Notes from the Sinister Quarter: https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/kurdistan/

2 The acronym KCK stands for “Kurdistan Communities Union”, a political structure emanating from the PKK, and serving as an umbrella group for Turkey’s PKK, Syria’s PYD, Iran’s PJAK and Iraq’s PÇDK, as well as a number of social organizations more or less linked to these sister parties. The KCK is led by a kind of parliament called Kongra Gelê or “Kurdistan People’s Congress”.

3 Excerpt from “A Letter to ‘Rojavist’ Friends”, signed TKGV, from the initials of its authors, in 2016, https://paris-luttes.info/lettre-a-des-amis-rojavistes-5649English translation by Pete Dunn with help from Anthony Hayes, August 2016: https://libcom.org/article/letter-rojavist-friends/

4 Gilles Dauvé & Tristan Leoni, “Kurdistan?”, op. cit.

5 The Contract can be read in English here: https://civiroglu.net/the-constitution-of-the-rojava-cantons/

6 This English-language critical text is taken from the now-defunct Turkish-language blog Servet Düşmani (“Enemy of Wealth”): https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/zafer-onat-rojava-fantasies-and-realities/

7 “‘I have seen the future and it works.’ – Critical questions for supporters of the Rojava revolution”: https://libcom.org/article/i-have-seen-future-and-it-works-critical-questions-supporters-rojava-revolution

8 “A Letter to ‘Rojavist’ Friends”, op. cit.

9 https://web.archive.org/web/20160929163726/http://www.freemedialibrary.com/index.php/Declaration_of_Democratic_Confederalism_in_Kurdistan

10 “‘Rojava Revolution’? ‘Anti-State’? ‘Anti-Capitalist’? Or a new mystification?”, in Class War 13/2021, https://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/class-war-13-2021-rojava-revolution-anti-state-anti-capitalist-or-a-new-mystification/

11 “A View of Rojava or Criticism as an Opportunity for Growth and Development”, English translation in Class War 13/2021, op. cit.

12 Gilles Dauvé & Tristan Leoni, “Kurdistan?”, op. cit.

13 Gilles Dauvé & Tristan Leoni, “Kurdistan?”, op. cit.

14 “A View of Rojava or Criticism as an Opportunity for Growth and Development”, English translation in Class War 13/2021, op. cit.

15 “A View of Rojava or Criticism as an Opportunity for Growth and Development”, English translation in Class War 13/2021, op. cit.