immanence

Eco-theorists may recognize the title of this post as a variation on the title of Murray Bookchin’s audacious and deeply influential (for many, including myself) 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (pdf here).

What’s little known to anyone following recent news about the war in Syria is that an 18,300 sq. km. region in the northwest of the country — the western Kurdish Rojava cantons, which include the ISIS-contested city of Kobane — has been the site of a social experiment grounded in eco-anarchist Bookchin’s ideas of revolutionary “social ecology” and “libertarian municipalism,” which Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan has rebranded “democratic confederalism.”

As Irish anarchist Andrew Flood describes it, the Rojavan revolutionaries aim for nothing less than

“the development of ‘democratic, ecological, gender liberated society’ in the shell of the existing society through co-operation between a political party taking power in elections (the BDP) and a parallel system of neighboorhood councils which would be really making the decisions.  All this as part of an overall body called the Democratic Society Congress bringing together political parties, councils and civil society.”

In Anarchists vs. ISIS: The Revolution in Syria Nobody is Talking About), Gareth Watkins compares the Rojava revolutionaries to the Mexican Zapatistas of the 1990s and Spanish anarchist federations of the 1930s.

Writing in ROARMag, Rafael Taylor details the connections between Bookchin’s thought and that of Öcalan, who co-founded the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) and began to read Bookchin while in a Turkish jail cell in the early 2000s. With his democratic confederalism, Öcalan explicitly aims to replace capitalist modernity’s “three basic elements: capitalism, the nation-state, and industrialism” with a “democratic nation, communal economy, and ecological industry.” In practice, this has included a bottom-up form of organization featuring local decision-making assemblies with a 40% gender (women’s) quota, popular “academies,” and “peace villages,” including the Van “ecological women’s village.”

In Happidrome: Hierarchy in the UK, Anarchism in Kurdistan, the BBC’s Adam Curtis contextualizes the Bookchin-Öcalan connection in the debate over Bookchin’s own eco-utopianism. The post features fascinating clips from a late 1960s documentary on utopia called Towards Tomorrow, which pits the technotopian thinkers Herman Kahn and B. F. Skinner against the eco-decentralist (and Bookchin inspiration) Lewis Mumford.

A recent statement of support by a group of western visitors to Rojava includes anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and social ecologist (and Bookchin’s widow) Janet Biehl as signatories. Writing on the Anarchist Writers blog, Andrew Flood provides a very thorough list of resources on the Rojala revolution, which includes commentaries — both supportive and critical — by Graeber, Biehl, and many others.