Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

Sociology of Freedom: a world where many worlds fit

Written by Vittorio Sergi

Abbesmuseum in Eindhoven is a small structure in post-modern architecture in the midst of a residential neighborhood of modern colonial Dutch-style cottages just across the canal that surrounds the historic center. The museum houses a diverse, and unusual by Italian standards, collection of critical post-colonial artworks and information installations. Henry Von Abbe, from whose donations the facility was born was in fact an industrialist from the town who fed his production of Karel 1 cigars from colonial plantations in the Dutch East Indies, at Deli, Sumatra Island. The museum was founded in 1933 with money that came from this industry of colonial capitalism. The walls of the exhibit commemorating this memory display images of enslaved men and women workers on the plantations, pingy white men in colonial uniforms, tall Indian soldiers with turbans and long rifles. I reflect on how colonial violence is hidden but present in our social origins, invisibilized, concealed or removed yet active, as much in the effects of capital accumulated and re-invested in today’s financial and technological capitalism. Racism against people of other colors than white, institutional violence against migrants, barbed wires, wire nets, biometric control, are industrial evolutions of a chain of exploitation that is many centuries old. And still justice has not been done, still we are in a long historical unfolding of which we cannot glimpse a positive outcome, only flashes of light like travelers’ flashlights in the dark night.

When I enter the museum’s bright garden, next to a pond that partially cools the torrid atmosphere of the hottest summer day ever recorded in modern age, impossible to avoid my climate change anxiety for a couple of breaths. Then I am greeted by a blue banner that along with other quotes of the same tenor reads “A world where many worlds fit, Zapatistas.” Significant coincidence since I meet there John Holloway and his wife Eloina Pelaez in the company of Ogmundur Jonasson, an Icelandic minority rights and human rights activist, formerly a politician in that country but above all a former student of the very young John at the University of Edinburgh in the between ’68 and early ’70s. I sit between a diverse circle of Kurdish activists and militants from different generations, they give me a warmth welcome even if I miss the sense of the conversation in their language a part from few keywords learnt in my last trip in Rojava. This corner of Holland today is truly a world where in time and space, many worlds have come together for a shared desire for a better understanding of the social reality, for the need of a mutual learning process, and the need for an active, popular and liberatory pedagogy.

The project of the Academy of Social Science from its beginning shows the will to overcome the boundaries between disciplines, academic and social spaces and to keep its roots in the living fabric of actual struggles against war, capitalism and patriarchy. The attendance today is very diverse, from background to identity and age and reflects the deep and multiple relationships that the revolutionary Kurdish movement has developed in decades in Europe, USA, Latin America and beyond. The theoretical point of reference is the book from Abdullah Ocalan “The Sociology of Freedom: Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization, Volume III” published in 2020 and that since then has sparked an intense and articulated intellectual and political debate worldwide. Since the ancient times an academy is a place of mutual learning, before becoming in the capitalist society a place for reproduction of the dominant and certified knowledge, those spaces have been also laboratories for new ideas and for social change. That is the challenge that this project today wants to face.

The opening ceremony will include an afternoon of short talks by some guests and musical interludes in the beautiful setting of a small circular auditorium, called the “People’s Parliament of Rojava” by the artist Jonas Staal decorated with the main symbols and words of the lexicon of Rojava’s democratic confederalism that shows the influence and the importance on the Kurdish diaspora in Eindhoven.

First, however, an informal lunch awaits us; I have been invited to this event by Havin Guneser, the animator of a broad international network of Kurdish revolutionary activists, researchers and sympathizers that also gives body to this meeting. I sit next to the guests that inspire me most sympathy: a young professor of Brazilian anthropology, a Basque author of theatre plays who laments the coldness of human relations and the harshness of police repression in New York, an historian of the prisons that loves freedom with whom I discuss the vicissitudes of the Italian editions of Ocalan and a young cosmopolitan English and Cypriot professor with whom I shared an hazardous cigarette in the unusual summer heat of the Dutch afternoon.

The presentations takes place shortly after in a concentrated and intimate atmosphere; we are about fifty men and women of different ages, from young people in their early twenties to older professors and professors now at the end of their careers. The opening interventions are from two key figures in the project, both proceeding from the California Institute for Integral Studies in Los Angeles, Andrej Grubacic and Targol Mesbah. Grubacic outlines an interesting and useful analysis of the important epistemological changes that have swept through the humanities and social sciences in recent centuries. From the awareness of the historicity of these paradigms precisely, Grubacic argues the possibility and necessity of working for change in a critical sense and in closer relation to political efforts to defeat capitalism, imperialism and the logic of genocide that unfortunately with the war in Gaza is characterizing our time. Then it is the turn of the musicians, father and son Sonny and Quincy Saul, Americans from Vermont, who offer a jazz suite dedicated to Abdullah Ocalan, the absent-present inspirer and mentor of the entire event.

This is followed by Targol Mesbah’s impassioned speech that raises an important issue related to the institutional violence and internal warfare that the Trump administration has recently brought to the streets of America and specifically to Los Angeles. Behind her hangs a colorful banner with the “Jin, Jian, Azadi” slogan that sounds louder in this weeks of renewed war and social struggle in Iran. Then it is John Holloway’s turn to intervene with one of his evergreen topics, the vindication of the cry, of antagonism, and when he mimes a cry into the microphone he jolts a curious child who until just before was standing behind him playing with two spiderman puppets. That is the punk side of John, almost the 99% of the time kind and delicate but capable of heated rages when it comes to the critique of capitalism and fascism. His references to the Mexican revolutionary movement of the Zapatistas is rooted in a deep and personal knowledge of this movement and of his cultural and political roots. In the last decade between the Kurdish and Zapatista revolutionary movements there have been many contacts and exchanges because of the common will to find new political practices beyond the established political identities and tactics. His voice was followed by a very moving performance of violin and piano by Nure Dlovani and Zelal who played three Kurdish  songs rising up the spirits of the room moving the Kurds that sang all the songs by heart.

Then Ogmundur Jonasson took the stage with a firm and optimist position. From the calm standing of his Icelandic mood and coming from a long institutional experience he advocates for the change from below: creating a free society is not as if you were building a box and then putting freedom into that box. “The changes you are advocating or fighting for must be seen in the process of constructing the box. And this is no mere theory. It is also practice.”  He positioned himself in my same position, in the elementary class of this new academy, listening and learning from one of the most radical and creative movements of our time. Lastly, Havin Guneser’s speech closed or as she put it further opened the    initiative of the Academy. Her intervention raises the need for joint revolutionary action in the field of research and culture: the objective of the Academy of Social Science. She and Reimar Heider have been the constant energy and intelligence pushing for the need for an international intellectual initiative since the publishing of her book “The art of freedom” in 2021. As also Abdullah Ocalan puts it in his last interventions, this is the time for hope, but hope based on collective discussion and action based on the most advanced historical and social knowledges.

The day is too short to host all the ideas and thoughts that this event has sparked in my mind. As the day fades is time for me to come back to my job as a secondary school teacher in Italy. There a fascist shadow is growing over the youth and culture can be as it has always been, a tool of defense and liberation. I am in the final exams session, the young men and woman try to sum up their school careers. I can get from their words the hope for a better future but also the struggle to understand the reality with tools that the governmental school can no longer give to them, also teaching needs to be revolutionized.

Absolutely high stakes appear from whose who could look from elsewhere the project of the Academy that showed up this hot weekend in Holland, but what else we could imagine in the middle of an unfolding historical and ecological disaster than our rise up and transformation in every field of human knowledge?