Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

Bookchin’s Influence on Öcalan and the PKK’s Evolution

Written by Hawzhin Azeez

Introduction

From the writings of a brilliant, but obscure scholar in Burlington, VT, to a lonely jail cell of a revolutionary struggling to reconcile years of revolutionary efforts that failed to produce tangible freedoms for the Kurds, emerged a revolution that was unlike anything previously seen. Through a synthesis between the work of Murray Bookchin and Öcalan, the Kurdish liberation movement dismantled its modus of operandi, moved away from Marxist-Leninist and pro-statist aspirations and adopted a radical new paradigm resulting in one of the most remarkable revolutions of the last century. Through Bookchin, Öcalan produced the theory of Democratic Confederalism, and came to the conclusion that the Kurd’s efforts to acquire a state of their own would not be the ultimate solution to their liberation. As a mark of deep respect for Bookchin’s work, Öcalan called himself a ‘student’ of the philosopher. No western political thinker, therefore, has been as influential on the Kurdish liberation movement than Bookchin.

Yet, the association between Bookchin and Öcalan is more than just a story of two revolutionaries whose primary concern lay with liberating the deeply oppressed out of their state of wretched existence. It also involves a profound re-invention on the personal and the political level; an unlearning, a willingness to change and evolve, discarding dogmatism and ideological purity that demonstrates deep commonalities between two thinkers who struggled with their separate senses of disillusionment, conflicted with the burden of finding a solution towards freedom.

Despite the profound combined legacy of Bookchin and Öcalan—encouraging us to dismantle internalized and institutionalized hierarchical oppressions including colonization, patriarchy, racism and ecological destruction—the prevailing analysis of the two by leftist scholars and activists has been one of primarily orientalist interpretations. The Left has seen the relationship between the two as one in which the influencer, the teacher, the knower, the signifier is a western thinker from the dominant colonizing culture and the influenced, the student, the receiver, the signified is from the colonized culture. The flow has been interpreted to be only one way: Top-down.

The result for many of us Kurds has been the uncomfortable task of witnessing the appropriation of the revolution in Rojava, essentially reducing our collective agency and reflective capacity. For many of us post-colonial scholars and thinkers from the third world, it is not possible to read the left’s interpretation of the relationship between the two without being made acutely aware of historical power dynamics, and structured flow of knowledge, ideas and ways of knowing which trickle principally down from the developed, western world towards the oppressed and the wretched of the earth in the global south. It is important to approach the connection between Bookchin and Öcalan on this basis, to note that Öcalan came to the discussion table with a wealth of experience in leading a revolutionary movement and who was already engaged in the difficult task of searching for an alternative paradigm that would lead the Kurds towards ultimate freedom before he discovered the works of Bookchin. Bookchin’s work helped to solidify Öcalan’s emerging ideas into a more coherent whole.

It is, therefore, paramount to note influences where they occur, along with commonalities between Bookchin’s Social Ecology and Öcalan’s Democratic Confederalism, just as much as it is paramount that we note the divergences, developments and innovations the Kurdish liberation movement has implemented as a result of geopolitical, historical and cultural realities. How deeply was Öcalan influenced, how much he innovated and transformed the theories proposed by Bookchin to fit the Kurd’s aspirations of freedom, is the central focus of this chapter.

This chapter will start with an overview of Bookchin’s theory of social ecology. The second part of the chapter will look at who Öcalan is, his history within the Kurdish liberation movement and his establishment of Democratic Confederalism based on the adoption of social ecology as a founding pillar of this paradigm. The chapter will then conclude by looking at the emerging women’s liberationist efforts as indication of Öcalan’s having already started the seeds of Democratic Confederalism.

Murray Bookchin and Social Ecology

Like many organic intellectuals, Murray Bookchin’s ideology was defined by his praxis—a wealth of activism and involvement in a range of movements and organizations that continuously challenged him to evolve ideologically. As a result of his work on the streets, unionism in factories, membership of organizations, anti-war protests, and the crucial Institute for Social Ecology, Bookchin produced one of the most revolutionary theories of the last century. Having never attended college, Bookchin was a prolific writer and published many books and essays on the concept of social ecology over the years, fine-tuning and expanding on his theory.¹ As a result, Bookchin wrote a number of important texts including Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Post Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982) and Urbanization without Cities (1992). The Ecology of Freedom is widely cited as his magnum opus.

Bookchin perceptively assessed modern society in the western world, and hypothesized a shift away from Marx’s vision of liberation coming from the masses of oppressed workers, and instead towards a liberation based on ecology. Marxism, for Bookchin, had essentially failed to address the inherent, cyclical and growing range of oppressive hierarchies that capitalism is so proficient at producing. Bookchin did not believe that the working class would rise up because Marxist revolution does not result in the withering away of the State, but the “very consciousness of domination.” Likewise, in Post Scarcity Capitalism, Bookchin condemns socialism because “hierarchy, sexism and renunciation do not appear in “a ‘revolutionary leadership,’ a ‘worker’s state,’ and a ‘planned economy.” In his essay The Communalist Project, Bookchin argues that older ideologies such as Marxism and Anarchism are ‘no longer capable of addressing the new and highly generalized problems posed by the modern world, from global warming to postindustrialization.”

Industrial capitalism has contributed to a system of hyper individualism, desolation, privatization, and greed, resulting in a distinct lack of community and mutual cooperation. Man, science and technology has increasingly subordinated nature, causing a range of disconnections and flow on effects within society. The idea that science and technology would end human suffering and garner a new era of peace, health and stability has largely failed through the proliferation of nuclear weapons, mass hunger in the third world, and widespread poverty in the developed world. Instead, we must turn towards a science of ecology, which, according to Bookchin, is essentially about “the balance of nature.” Moreover, it is “inasmuch as nature includes man, the science basically deals with the harmonization of nature and men.” Bookchin reasons that there is a huge implication of this science of ecology because it is a “critical science” in its own right; but just as importantly, it is unlike any systems and theories of political economies as it is an “integrative and reconstructive science.” For precisely this exact reason, “it is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment.”²

Even before industrial capitalism began to oppress the workers, it established its hierarchies of oppression through its domination of the environment and ecological destruction. If the masses are made numb from the processed food they consume, disconnected from nature and the ecology in large, over populated, concrete metropolis then they encounter an additional problem created by capitalism’s ever self-reinventing evolution: that of the mass destruction of the ecology. If natural ecology is social ecology, then the destruction of the ecology causes not only a reverberating devastation in society but the unfettered continuation of violence towards the ecology would become eventually catastrophic. Bookchin was deeply concerned with the “tensions” between “actuality and potentiality, between present and future,” which can attain “apocalyptic proportions in the ecological crises of our time.” The resulting theory produced in response to this imminent catastrophe drew on the best of existing theories such as Marxism, anarchism with socialism, but developed beyond them forming a unique synthesis and a new “political philosophy of freedom and cooperation.”

The driving idea behind Bookchin’s theory of social ecology is the necessity of the elimination of all forms of hierarchies. According to Bookchin, hierarchies tend to stunt and limit the body-politic, depoliticizing and depersonalizing the political process under the authoritarian grasp of the State, which is not only ‘inorganic’ but at the same time is a monstrous over growth of a society “that has no real roots,” no grounding, and no connection. The hierarchies of power and oppression caused by the coercive capacity of the State causes an unnatural system of coexistence exacerbated by technology, pesticides, ‘resources of abundance,’ oppression, violence, sexism, and capitalism. These tools serve as the ‘weaponry’ of the State, allowing it to recreate and systematically entrench the ‘monopolistic, centralistic and bureaucratic tendencies.” The three pronged, mutually reinforcing systems of hierarchy, class and states combine to diminish the ‘creative’ capacity of humanity; as a result, human creative energy is misdirected from servicing life towards servicing systems and institutions of ‘power and privilege’ resulting in systems of sexism, racism, ecological destruction, and worse. The solution is bottom up forms of activism, participation, resistance, and democracy.

This new philosophy of freedom was seen in Communalism, which combined “the best of” these political theories, while addressing and expanding on where they only experienced limitations. Communalism is defined as a “new type of community”, which would be deliberately decentralized so as to reduce its impact on the ecology. Moreover, Communalism attempts to “recapture the meaning of politics in its broadest, most emancipatory sense”, more importantly to “fulfill the historic potential of the municipality as the developmental arena of mind and discourse.” The municipality then becomes a profound site of “transformative development,” and the reclamation of power of the individual within the community and the political process away from the State.

Bookchin’s approach was also heavily opposed to ‘ossified’ representative democracy because the capitalist system’s establishment of neo-liberalism ensured the hierarchy of privatization and market ethics. The parties, across the political spectrum adopted ‘unquestioning obeisance to global market capitalism.” This set of ethics ensured “policies as products, voters as passive consumers, politicians as producers, elections as markets.” Bookchin argues that as opposed to the homogenizing, atomizing, privatizing urbanism there is still a powerful tendency towards ‘community,’ which needs to be fostered and nurtured. Liberation under social ecology can only evolve out of the deeply personal and local sites of the village, in the neighborhoods of the city and the towns. In his revision of the history of the ‘city,’ Bookchin advocated for the essentiality of some form of a ‘Hellenic model,’ which could be implemented through municipal assemblies, and hence bypassing the need for the State to provide basic rights. The municipalities of course are the fundamental sites of community, gathering, politics, progress and democracy. As a result, ‘social ecology brings all of these threads together in its opposition to hierarchy and domination as a critical theory as a reconstructive theory.” Bookchin then wants to bring these various modes of representations together in what he calls ‘community of communities’ or a ‘confederation.”

As he neared the end of his life, Bookchin grew bitter and ever weary of the possibility of profound and lasting change based on his ideas, largely because of his disenchantment with the international left. Bookchin had seen many movements come and go, initially retaining their revolutionary, radical inertia, but soon after losing it amongst the complexities of leftist contradistinctions and dogmatism. Some of his essays, such as the now famous Listen, Marxists and Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism dismayed many Marxists and anarchists. He criticized the left for tendencies ranging from “primitivism, lifestyle politics, and an aversion to organization” or affinities towards elitism.³ Bookchin was always concerned with dogmatism with a dislike of ‘ossification’ of any form. This explains why he moved his ideological position from Stalinism to Trotskyism in the 1930s, to anarchism in the 1950s until late 1990s, and then finally produced his notion of Communalism or libertarian socialism that more clearly defined his collective experiences and views for close to a century. These shifts were essential in developing a comprehensive theory and allowed Bookchin to experience and reflect on the potentials and limitations of each theoretical framework. Yet, it also made him, according to his own words, fail to gain many followers resigning him to disillusionment and obscurity.

Öcalan and Democratic Confederalism

Born in the 1940s in a small village in Eastern Turkey, Abdullah Öcalan’s identity and political orientation was shaped in the formative periods of the Turkish state. The new Turkish political leadership, under its first leader Mustafa Kamal, emerged on the backs of mass expulsions, ethnic cleansing and genocide of minorities such as the Armenians, Christians, Greeks, and Kurds. The initial democratic and pluralistic promises of the Republic had soon given away to oppressive and authoritarian policies in the name of national unity, progress and modernization. These mass oppressions and expulsions killed 1.5 million Armenians and expelled over one million Greeks. Oppression of Kurds likewise escalated due to the escalation of Kurdish nationalism and the fateful outcome of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. By the time Öcalan arrived in Ankara University in the 1960s, he had been deeply politicized against this backdrop of violence, ethnic cleaning, displacement and denial of identity of the Kurds.

By the early 1970s, as a result of membership of various political groups, Öcalan’s activism led him to stints in jail where he became progressively disillusioned with the Turkish left’s failure to address inherent racism, and hence, capacity to formulate a response to the oppression experienced by ethno-religious minorities such as the Kurds. He became increasingly convinced that any sort of a response to addressing the specific plight of the Kurds had to come from an alternative route. By 1978, Öcalan founded the PKK, containing a fusion of Kurdish nationalism and Marxist-Leninism, which launched an insurgency against the Turkish state with the hope of acquiring Kurdish independence and statehood. By this stage the very words “Kurds” and “Kurdistan”, and all representations of Kurdish culture were made illegal in a systematic policy of linguicide (Hassanpour 1992) and cultural genocide. Öcalan was to spend the next twenty years in Syria promoting and directing the liberationist efforts of the PKK. When the tide of politics shifted the Syrian government expelled Öcalan leading to his eventual capture and incarceration in 1999 on the island of Imrali.

It is often stated that, while in prison, facing the possibility of having failed to liberate the long-oppressed Kurds, Öcalan began a close reading of Marx, Freud, Foucault, Bookchin, Wallerstein, Braudel, and Nietzsche, among others. However, it is important to note that Öcalan was already deeply familiar with many such works and had long questioned the failures and limitations of real socialism well before his incarceration. This period was marked by Öcalan’s systematic effort to formulate and pen his thoughts. Öcalan identified himself as “someone searching for practical ways out of the crisis the Middle East” for the Kurds, when he came across the work of Bookchin.⁴

Öcalan devoted much time to re-analyzing the PKK and its mistakes in their liberationist attempts. The PKK had not only re-formulated itself repeatedly as a result of internal strife and ongoing external pressures, but it had also encountered its own authoritarian tendencies. Öcalan’s reading of Bookchin’s “The Ecology of Freedom,” helped to crystalize the inherent inconsistencies and contradictions that the PKK, as a revolutionary, liberationist movement had repeatedly encouraged. The response was, as was argued in “The Ecology of Freedom,” the elimination of hierarchies that was central to a truly liberationist ideology⁵ starting from within.

Bookchin’s “Urbanization Without Cities” also had a deep impact on Öcalan’s revisionist attempt, as it outlined a new social-contract in which the State was decentralized, and in where society regains power over the organizational and institutional capacities and structures of governance. The ‘Hellenic model,’ removed of its exclusionary, elitist, patriarchal and class propensities, was seen as the ideal format of face-to-face democracy and governance by Bookchin. This approach fit the nature of Kurdish culture and existence in the four parts of the Kurdistan. Bookchin’s resolution of the hierarchical, capitalist and ecological problem within society was the elimination of the State or at least a heavily decentralized version.⁶ Öcalan consequently transformed fundamentally and profoundly away from aspirations of liberation being tied to statehood for the Kurds, and towards a perspective that entailed the idea that the State is the antithesis of a true, lasting, organic type of liberation required for the oppressed and the dispossessed. Öcalan firmly stated that “fascist exercise of power is the nature of the nation-state. Fascism is the purest form of the nation-state.” Öcalan built on Bookchin’s theory and merged it with the liberationist needs of the Kurds and other oppressed and stateless communities in the region.

Öcalan’s shift away from a nationalist position marked a radical shift in the revolutionary trajectory of the Kurdish movement. If hierarchies are oppressive and an integral part of the nation-state model, if they breed racism and fascist tendencies resulting in mass incarceration of minorities and the oppressed, then surely nationalism with its unwavering focus on uniformity of identity, would also be a source of criticism. Nationalism therefore tends to reinforce and reproduce the same hierarchies of power often to the detriment of minority groups. Õcalan states that bourgeois nationalism had bred “mass destruction and genocide”, and only served as a tool of oppression for elites and a colonial instrument of “divide-and-rule strategy.” This approach can no longer be part of the liberation of the Kurds.

Likewise, armed conflict was no longer the solution to the liberation of the oppressed and dispossessed communities.⁷ An alternative solution had to be envisioned in which a democratic society is actively, consciously created from the ashes of history’s fascism and violence. For the Kurds, divided between four oppressive states the solution was no longer the removal of the colonial borders in order to unify. Rather, the alternative was to completely let go of the need to remove the borders, and to move towards a stateless ideology in which physical borders were surpassed by collective, democratic attitude of mutual coexistence and respect between the various nations and cultures.

In 2005, Öcalan released the manifesto the “Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan,” calling for a significant change in approach and policy in relation to the past. Democratic Confederalism is founded on three key concepts: Grassroots democracy, gender liberation and ecological sustainability. The Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) was established in 2007 and spearheaded the implementation of the social blueprint that Öcalan was producing. This new blueprint involved an anti-statist perspective that involved promotion of an anti-hierarchical, multiculturalist, and consensus-orientated praxis. In line with this ideology, a general approach of stateless democratic confederal system was announced by the KCK to unite the Kurds. Rojava, in 2012, became the laboratory that started to implement this model on a wide scale across its cantons. This process involved the establishment of communes, cooperatives, assemblies, civil society groups among others that would eradicate traditional exercises of power and interest along ethno-religious cleavages.⁸ Academies were set up across Kurdistan to promote civic education, or perwarda. This process requires a deep dedication away from ‘fossilized thinking and behaviors’ by the people, and the essentiality of liberating one from ‘thinking in hierarchical structures.’

Many scholars and experts have noted the commonalities and linkages between Bookchin’s thoughts and that of Öcalan, particularly in the application of communalism, feminism, and ecology. This process has tended to erase the agency and subjectivity of the Kurdish movement as well as Öcalan’s own efforts because it understands Democratic Confederalism to be synonymous, or at best to mirror Bookchin’s Social Ecology. Many scholars, for instance, have noted that Ocalan began a “profound process of ideological re-evaluation, transforming its agency and aims,” implying that Öcalan and the movement turned away from Marxist-Leninist and nationalism towards social ecology suddenly and had not been influenced by decades of revolutionary struggle. Yet, the reality and the truth around the Kurd’s liberation efforts was always dialectical and in motion, containing synthesis, evolution, progress, and revision. The influence of Bookchin on Öcalan needs to be viewed in this light. In fact, Öcalan, was beginning to question Leninism as early as 1994, but his critique lacked systemization and method. By the time Bookchin was discovered, Öcalan was already transcending orthodox Marxism, as he had with patriarchal nationalism. A better approach is to see the connection between the two as reflecting a continuity of progress and innovative change from Marxism to anarchism to social ecology to democratic confederalism. The final outcome is a combination of the best of the previous theories and frameworks, as Bookchin had initially done, and as Öcalan had continued.

For many experts the emergence of the theory of Democratic Confederalism’s central criticisms is often seen as a reflection of Bookchin’s direct influence on Öcalan. After all, Öcalan had discovered Bookchin while in jail after his incarceration from 1999 onwards. However, the trajectory of Öcalan’s own ideological growth and evolution is often ignored in this analysis. Before discovering Bookchin, for instance, Õcalan’s vision of Kurdish liberation had always contained a feminist framework of liberation of women from its very beginning. Kurdish women were indeed involved from the very conception of the PKK.⁹ Women such as Sakina Cansiz were founding members and were not only quintessential in formulating the party’s view towards women’s liberation, but also an indicator of the types of change the movement wished to institute. Sakina Cansiz’s memoire “My whole Life was a Struggle” outlines years of recruitment and education of women with society into the liberation efforts and resisting patriarchal nationalism. Sakina’s renowned resistance against inhumane torture and gender based violence¹⁰ imposed on her during her twelve years of incarceration in the 1980s set a new precedent for the way women’s resistance, capacity, and influence were observed within the Kurdish movement. Waves of women joined the party, causing the patriarchal and traditional cultural values within the cadres of the movement to be systematically challenged.

Through the leadership of Öcalan, and women like Cansiz, women began to form their own separate and autonomous practices and tactics. The first women’s congress in the PKK was held in 1995 promoting the idea of women’s involvement but also independence in the liberation movement ideologically and militarily. In 1998, Öcalan declared the organization a “women’s group,” to the dismay of many male cadres. Öcalan had long noticed that women were subjected to “patriarchal nationalism” both within the nation-state model as well as within the Kurdish liberation movement. This resulted in concrete steps taken towards forming autonomy for women’s liberation efforts within the greater liberation struggle. One such outcome is that of ‘Jineology,’¹¹ which involves the subversion of hierarchies of power involved within the family, the tribe, the religious order, and the social ‘honour’ based system as well as within capitalism, science and history. When the Kurdish women formed the YPJ in Rojava, they had over three decades of women’s struggles to draw on.¹² Öcalan and the Kurdish movement had long understood the centrality and non-negotiability of women’s liberation long before Öcalan’s incarceration and his discovery of Bookchin’s writings.

Philosophers and intellectuals have continually prophesized about the ideal utopian society. However, it took a visionary like Öcalan to implement that idea into an organizational plan. Öcalan’s charisma and authority are often used against him as evidence of his dictatorial capacity. Yet, Öcalan’s power to direct a radical social revolution while in heavy incarceration on Imrali Island as its sole prisoner for well over a decade speaks, instead for his profound political and cultural influence. The Kurds did not have to implement Öcalan’s vision, nor adopt the painful process of letting go of the dream of a state-based liberation for the Kurds. Öcalan’s incarceration for over 21 years for the crime of demanding Kurdish cultural, political, and linguistic rights gave him the cultural authority to bring about one of the most profound revolutions of the twenty-first century. Had it not been for Öcalan’s visionary status and cultural clout it remains doubtful if Bookchin’s work would have ever been read widely or recognized to the level it has been.

Conclusion

It has been the aim of this chapter to note that the Kurdish movement contained anti-statist, anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal sentiments to varying degrees of formation in the party. Öcalan’s incarceration allowed him the time and the capacity to formulate his idea, essentially creating a blueprint for starting a radical new society. Bookchin’s writings around social ecology helped greatly to solidify, foment and bring together many of the questions Öcalan had been grappling with for years. For decades Bookchin struggled to convince leftists of the importance of social ecology and for the large part this process largely failed until the Kurdish movement adopted the theory as its main approach towards its liberation.

Like Bookchin’s many shifts in the trajectory of formulating his theory of social ecology, Öcalan too turned away from Marxist-Leninism and Nationalism and aspired towards a different ideology that would address the complex nature of the Kurdish struggle. By the time Öcalan came across Bookchin’s writings, he had already begun a revisionist process and had reached the realization that the PKK’s revolutionary socialism and nationalist agenda was not adequate in formulating an effective liberation ideology. Being intensely aware of the failures of these ideologies and rejecting ‘fossilized’ thinking, Öcalan’s ideological views reflected strongly with Bookchin’s dislike of ‘ossification,’ and being aware of the necessity to evolve and change. These parallel views indicated similarities between two equals with comparable views towards progress and change.

Thus far the question has centered on how Bookchin has influenced and shaped Öcalan and by extension the liberation struggles of the Kurds. This chapter attempted to address this question but in the process, it also aimed to remind the international left of its inherent orientalist and internalized hierarchies of thought around the flow of ideas, ways of knowing, knowledge, and theory. In contrast, a bottoms-up way of looking and reviewing history of liberationist movements show how the Kurdish liberation movement—indeed how Öcalan—popularized the obscure work of a disillusioned philosopher such as Bookchin. Had it not been for the decades of revolutionary struggle and activism, decades of torture and death in the jails of the oppressive states, years of self-reflection and revisions and decades of learning and unlearning within the Kurdish liberation movement that brought obscurity into light, and ensured that the courage and dedication existed to bring theory into reality—something that the international left largely failed to do. The question we should be left with now is what lessons can the international left learn from the collective legacy of the life and work of Murray Bookchin, from the charisma and innovations of Öcalan, and from the courage and determination of the Kurdish liberation movement.

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