ypg

A Mutating Neoliberalism, Socialist Transitions, and Their Foreign Policies

By Fouâd Oveisy

Leftist politics often discounts the opposing camp’s strategy. In the leftist strategic imaginary, it is usually the case that a stagnating world is moved to progressive motion (or brought to a halt) by the left and its motors of history, a mindset reflected in the hegemony of the ‘establishment’ versus ‘radical left’ allegory of contemporary politics. Just as philosophy of praxis is the intellectual property of the left, or revolutionary transitions involve tasks to simply organize and accomplish by the left. When the political right is credited with an agency or a plan of its own, it is integrated into the iron laws of accumulation of capital or tied to the contradictions of the camp of capital. Mistakenly, the left tends to view components of a rightist grand strategy as manifestations of local or tactical aggressions and concessions. Often it is long after the event, decades into epochal transitions to a new era of capitalism such as neoliberalism, that the left catches up with the material and metaphysical ambitions of rightist projects.

Are we amid another such transition, now, and did and do the fronts represented by Bernie Sanders have a counterstrategy for it? Jeremy Corbyn and The Labour Party of England did not seem to have a Brexit strategy.

It will be immediately objected that bourgeois democracy “itself is the principal ideological lynchpin of Western capitalism, whose very existence deprives the working class of the idea of socialism as a different type of State.” And this is correct. It is absurd to argue that the left will simply take over a bourgeois party, because that is to forget the ultimate Marxist lesson that the Democratic Party is set up as a mode of production of rightwing power. Try to change the people in charge and the system produces the same old rightwing product (e.g. Hillary in 2016, likely Biden in 2020). All the same, I use the case of recent British and American elections as a foil to exhibit the limits of the objection. With or without a working class party, parliamentary elections and the political right’s reasons to win them remain of utmost strategic import to the global left, for the reasons that follow.

I recall an interview with Tony Blair in 2017 on some rightwing thinktank’s podcast. Blair’s unsolicited response to a question asked about potential threats to the United Kingdom’s security, with the interviewer listing adversaries ranging from China to global warming, was ‘Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders’. But the threat then and now was not as much that lefties such as Corbyn and Sanders might take power, but that they take it now that neoliberalism is mutating, capitalism is shifting to a multipolar world order, and the rest of the field are adjusting their transition plans to the emerging realities. State control by the left in this critical juncture, in respectively the oldest and biggest national territories of capitalism, was and is a nightmare scenario for capital. The rise of either of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn to supreme political relevance is of course a function of the latest crises of capitalism and liberalism; however, the camp of capital had and has plans of its own for steering this seismic shift to its own advantage. A sense of poise and urgency evidenced by the chiasmic contradictions of the pro Remain versus Leave capitalists in England, and the Hillary versus Trump contest in the United States.

In contrast, large factions of Labour’s metropolitan base were more or less sentimental about their Europeanness and lost sight of a historical mission and opportunity to fulfill: a leftist exit from a monopoly of capital on the way to perhaps, one day, a more decisive transition. After the left’s misadventure, no amount of promising the same old social democratic policy to the British masses (who proved more attuned to the event if not its articulation than their vanguard) compensated for lacking a clear and concrete strategy vis-à-vis a historical crisis and transition of capital that the Tories reengineered, campaigned on, and monopolized to win.

I will return to the Tories’ reasons. For now, it is more useful to resituate the contemporary left: not as the sole agent of transitions but as caught up in multiple counterrevolutionary transitions overseen by the political right at any point in time, anywhere in the world. Because the only thing that is clear at this point in history is that Marx did not live long enough to fully theorize, not outside The Eighteenth Brumaire, how capitalists might functionalize the contradictions of capital to their own advantage. And how they do this every time by re-functionalizing the crises of capital in transitions to new social orders, via fascism, neoliberalism or imperialism. What István Mészáros later called the “personification of capital” under different “forms of rule”.

True to Marx’s vision, capital self-expands despite and because of its immanent contradictions, but it is also true “there is no such thing as a process except in relations”. Economic and crucially political relations between the right and the left, capitalists and anti-capitalists. These dynamic relations lend themselves to visions and strategies devised to advantage the rule of one side over the other, in order to reproduce the metabolic asymmetry that is at the concrete core of Marx’s notion of class struggle. Perhaps then, after Benjamin’s formulation that the state of emergency has been made permanent, we must add that counterrevolutions are no longer the political right’s reactions to leftist events but rather the movement of the status quo made permanent.

Leftist organizing remains central to balancing this asymmetry and steering a world moved by the algorithms, machines, images and weapons of capitalists and their cronies. Masses are both force and lever in any socialist transition. But to continue to presume that we might ‘one day’ eclipse the enemy’s hegemony by simply growing popular leftist fronts is to reproduce, once more, a domesticated and “internalist” copy of Marx. A well-documented strategic fact that somehow continues to elude leftist organizing.

The consequences of the left’s internalist modus operandi are more severe in practice. First, the prevalent lack of a counter-counterrevolutionary strategy in both theory and practice, as in the war of position waged in England over Brexit, and the war of maneuver in Rojava over the future of the Middle East (I have written extensively about the latter dynamic). It is as if egalitarian mobilization will readily overcome wave after wave of counterrevolutionary force and cunning that either overwhelms or exploits the strengths and weaknesses of egalitarian mobilization. And when it takes generations to develop a revolutionary base and cadre, but only years of counterrevolution to lose them to corruption or crackdown. Indeed, by some accounts a founding text of the American Cold War era strategy, George Kennan’s The Sources of Soviet Conduct works with the premise that the Soviets organize and strategize around and through their historical mission to create a classless society –– that thing Lenin called fighting not against but for something. And insofar as the United States manages to drag the Soviets time and time again into difficult political situations where they are forced to make poor or immoral decisions, the collective Soviet faith in their collective mission will deteriorate and, over the long term, the USSR hegemony will collapse internally. Essentially, Kennan advises disarming, confusing and then finishing off the Soviets made hopeless, and he teaches that cunning may ultimately outmanoeuvre any egalitarian hypothesis. The rest is history, even if Kennan’s imperialist strategy is not the only reason that the late Soviet market socialist, state-capitalist machine came apart. Kennan’s intervention did however provide external impetus to the domination of hierarchical forms of capital over Soviet politics and economics.

The allegory about Kennan also leads to a second and cofounding consequence of the left’s internalist presumptions: the priority of the domestic and national conduct of politics and economics over the international, and to that extent the foreclosure of the imperialist foundations of the hegemonies of domestic capital and the international divisions of both labor and force. A criticism as old as Marx’s Capital but somehow sidelined ever since.

Of course, as I write, the battlefield is enormous and the left is in retreat (despite what one might see or hear). Often we focus on local resistances just to remain relevant. But as witnessed in the Grexit and then the Brexit storylines, the problem and the problem makers are no longer local. Critically, no socialist transition will readily redistribute, at the domestic level, the global foundations of a local capitalist economy, and not when any major capitalist economy is first and foremost a war economy. A war machine not only for neocolonial loot, imposing structural advantages on markets, legitimizing the markets’ juridico-political organs (e.g. the UN or IMF), and ultimately reproducing the material advantages of metropolitan working classes in the West over their counterparts in the peripheries. But also, as W. E. B. Du Bois articulated the relation between the “poor white worker” and the “black slave” long ago, a metropolitan war machine privileges “the vanity” of its domestic working classes. The capitalist war economy forges hegemony domestically, and pauperizes working-class solidarity internationally.

If the American and British underclasses have been exhibiting signs of rebellion against their ‘establishment(s)’, in the first and crucial instance this is due to their deteriorating living conditions, and then it is because the empire and its prospects are waning. In 2018, I spoke to fishermen in Scotland who could not fish because Scandinavian fishing giants were cleansing the sea floor from the small fish and crustaceans that sustained the underwater ecosystem vital to fishing Cod or Halibut. And I spoke to farmers in northern England and they were angrier, but mainly about Corbyn’s refusal to see that England could not ‘punch above its weight in Europe anymore’. The empire no longer provides because it cannot. There is a humility in this admission that is lacking in the leftist vanguard’s hyped up visions of social democracy or autonomy.

Indeed, the general mood in the United States is and has been ‘fearful’ for a decade, and not only in the 2008 recession’s aftermath. The ‘efficient’ rise of Chinese state capitalism, and the imperialist ambitions that go with it and sustain it, are serving as an alternative model of capitalist development and hegemony for expansionist states contending for the markets, from Russia to Turkey and Iran, and also for the old national and liberal territories of capital. In this new economic and political climate, the American working and middle classes are feeling the tides of China’s rise and a global reversal of old fortunes. They are growing weary of the waning prospects of the United States and its liberal vision of the world markets, because everyone knows that the United States is not economically, militarily and ideologically hegemonic anymore.

In the first place, the asymmetric accumulations of industrial capital and military superiority, which once founded and propelled the advantages of Western capitalism at the expense of the peripheries, are no longer as lopsided or decisive (for many reasons that I cannot review here). Without this advantage, a multitude of peripheral states and multinational corporations chip away at the West’s monopoly over the markets, and further the erosion of old advantages. In the meantime, accumulating the old advantages came at the expense of making a mockery of the West’s cultural values, in the name of which colonialist and imperialist wars were waged in the peripheries. Now, the postcolonial capitalist states in charge of the peripheries harness this mockery to assert the rule of local and regional social imaginaries, from Modi’s Hindu vision of India to Putin’s Eurasianism. They do this because holistic visions of autochthonous organicity seamlessly supplement local and ‘natural’ transitions to the (Chinese) authoritarian capitalist mode of production.

In this critical conjuncture, Western capital, no longer capable of bankrolling its middle and working classes’ social welfare at the expense of the encroaching peripheries, risks losing State control to the likes of Corbyn and Sanders. Herein lies the political import of the recent English and American elections despite their bourgeois form, and also what they revealed about a proportionate leftist strategy or its lack thereof. I will return to this point after outlining the camp of capital’s own response to the crisis.

Western capital had two ways out of the mess. The first was Obama and Clinton’s vision of forming new economic blocs, the likes of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is a strategy of pulling the resources of Western and developing capitalist states together in order to create larger markets. Markets capable of competing in terms of size and diversity of the labour pool with the Chinese alternative. Raising the minimum wage, providing ‘Obamacare’, etc., would serve to ‘dampen’ the havoc these new markets would wreak on the lives of the domestic working classes of the new blocs. As for the foreign policy of this market strategy, the United States would continue to guarantee the military security of these blocs as it did for the post-WWII blocs of capital in Europe and the Pacific, nearly a century ago. In this way Obama foreign policy’s historic “pivot to China” followed in short order, requiring new deputies such as Iran along the way in critical geopolitical junctions, and securing the new alliances with the likes of the historic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement.

Then there is Brexit and Trump’s bolder vision: accept Anglo-America’s diminished role and place in the emerging new order, but with a safe and ‘graceful’ transition for US and English capital. As for the working classes, make American and British labour ‘more competitive’ by gutting its welfare and social protections even further, and so lower its price (wage) for capital and reverse the flow of jobs over the long-term. Then close the domestic labour markets to the foreign worker with a dash of fascism added to make it all organic and ‘democratic’. A strongman like Trump requires such a base if he is going to war against the neoliberal establishment and the working classes. On the foreign policy front, not needing to secure the frontiers and market access for other economies, the task is to reimagine the NATO and resurrect old allies such as the Saudis and Turkey who share the new vision (even find a ‘frenemy’ in Russia). Make ‘bilateral trade agreements’ the keyword here because China aside the United States has no one to fear in asymmetric two or three-way trade agreements. As for China, the need to restrain its imperial ambitions being unavoidable one way or another, start a trade war and transform Obama’s pivot into the “Indo-Pacific Partnership”. A logistical sphere of regional states fearful of China’s rise, from India to Australia, which surround China and its naval trade routes with US allies should push ever come to shove.

Here, neither the need for the anarchic force of “interstate politics” to steer the course of capital’s latest crisis (symptomatic of Italian, Dutch and British capital’s fall from hegemony in bygone eras), nor capital’s turn to statism to harness the crisis (found in Roosevelt’s post-Depression New Deal and Hitler’ Reich) is really new. It is really the same old neoliberalism but after a dialectical turn, mutated. The ‘free market’ still prevails because it never existed; austerity remains austerity. Only, the markets are discarding their ideological husks and what is perhaps different is the postcolonial additive of capital’s latest iteration. Neoliberalism is fulfilling its mission to ‘end history’ by fully coopting vernacular capital(s); a global capitalism with many indigenous and civilizational faces.

Indeed, the political right is writing openly about the new realities and their impending embrace by establishment Western liberal democracies. Obama’s friend, Emanuel Macron, dealing with his own revolting working class, Le Pen and Mélenchon, and catching up with the frivolous prospects of a TTP or TTIP bloc after Trump withdrew the United States from these treaties on his first day in the White House, has been gradually transforming France’s domestic and foreign policies into establishment copies of Trump and Brexit’s vision. It is almost safe to predict that if and when Sanders loses to Biden, no matter who wins the White House in November it will be Trump and Brexit’s vision that prevails in Washington for the foreseeable future.

This new climate casts the political right’s candidates in a favourable light. When Johnson promises harnessing the new realities with harsh but familiar measures, Corbyn promises revolutionizing it but seemingly without a grand vision or plan. Here, the political right’s candidates are viewed as capable because they are of the system and as ruthless as the leaders of contender states led by Putin, Macron or Erdogan. Just as what Trump and his base call ‘the establishment’ (e.g. the corruptors of capitalism) is not the same as Sanders’s referend of the same term (e.g. the corruption of capitalism), which should provide some commentary on populism as a sensible leftist strategy and on why Sanders has not done as well as hyped or hoped with working class constituencies that he promised to wrest away from Trump.

The Sanders campaign somehow misread the signs of the times, even if many on the left have been warning about the new manifestations of neoliberalism for some time, and Trump’s ways of harnessing them. Indeed, despite his promise to organize a revolution, Sanders offered the past, i.e. America now Scandinavia, when Scandinavia is sinking into crisis and fascism. The Sanders message might have been ‘new’ in the context of US politics, it is transformative and necessary, but it banked on a populism without a popular vision. He resorted to hackneyed syndicalist programs of organizing people around particular demands when he should have assumed the mantle of a strategist and ideologue who reimagines and reorganizes the chaos in broad and concrete strokes, as Lenin once did. If the masses of Detroit, Michigan shifted back to the centre and voted for Biden, it was because Sanders’s timid vision could never compete with the anarchy Trump is wreaking on the working class lives. Leftist politics has once again discounted the opposing camp’s strategy, and the ‘Sanders revolution’ was lacking a boldly revolutionary vision because of its provincial and internalist mindset and vanguard.

However, it is for all the reasons outlined above that the Sanders movement must pass the test of this critical political conjecture and win in November –– and hopefully it is not too late. But I will not offer a domestic version of such a winning strategy here. Bernie’s growing movement needs to envision, educate and articulate its domestic strategy at the grassroots. Just as we need to organize the working masses around epochal and concrete visions of mass transformations by educating and empowering a strategic mindset at the grassroots. Rather, I focus on Sanders’s foreign policy. First to demonstrate how the internalism and provincialism of his ‘revolution’ poses a threat to revolutionary politics elsewhere, especially in Iran. And then to relate the timidity of his revolutionary vision for Americans to the ambiguity and absurdity of his foreign policy plans. I make the point that transitioning to socialism will remain out of reach insofar as the left refuses a proactive and internationalist politics that steers the historical course of global capital against the grain of local capitalism. For this task we need the humility of accepting that we (and the working classes) are not the sole motor of history, and that we must use capital’s will-to-anarchy everywhere as a motor of developing anti-capitalism anywhere.

On the way to such a vision and strategy, we need to disavow internalist modes of leftism that find their epitome in Slavoj Žižek’s naive proclamations of four years ago, about an utter lack of distinction between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. An indistinctness that translated domestically into prisons for migrant children, and internationally as wars, ethnic cleansings and coups sponsored by Trump’s cronies in Yemen and Bolivia. Critically, the grand master’s pseudo-strategic prescription, i.e. the deteriorating state of life under Trump will ‘wake up’ the masses, was seemingly clueless about the mutating state of neoliberalism (to which the masses were already waking up at the time). Painfully, it reeked of the same romantic and humanist naivety that he ridicules elsewhere. Otherwise, he would and should have made a distinction between the establishment’s ‘liberal’ neoliberalism, and the coming establishment’s authoritarian neoliberalism. As Judith Butler remarked four years ago, under Hillary we would not lose so much ground to fascism on top of everything else –– and she was right.

It could be that we are finally headed for a world police state, and Žižek’s prescription did after all accelerate the dawn of a decisive global struggle! The trouble is that the left is awfully shorthanded in such military matters, when it delegates state control to the likes of Trump and with no alternative in store but ‘waking up’. The United States spends more than 20% of the proceeds of the largest war economy in the world on its military apparatuses. With close to 3.2 million active employees, the US military is also the largest employer in the world, with millions more affiliated as off-duty members, veterans, or families and dependents of members and veterans. And all this in a country where the wider population is marked, as Perry Anderson put it, “by the provincialism of an electorate with minimal knowledge of the outside world, and a political system that has increasingly given virtually untrammeled power to the executive in the conduct of foreign affairs, freeing presidencies, often baulked of domestic goals by fractious legislatures, to act without comparable cross-cutting pressures abroad.” It is simplistic to suggest that socializing domestic US economics and politics can happen without dismantling and replacing its largest and most powerful corporate conglomerate, the US military industrial complex and its political wings in the Pentagon and the State Department. It is just as absurd to suggest that accelerating this undemocratic juggernaut, toward a final confrontation or collision course with China, might somehow inspire the pauperized masses of the world to unite and revolt. Quite the contrary, and more so in a country with entrenched capitalist convictions and habits.

Žižek’s provincial politics ultimately forced the masses to the ‘safe’ centre. And so it is even more absurd when Sanders promises an unworkable vision of US foreign policy to guide and steer his revolution in today’s turbulent global waters. The US left must hold its “revolutionary” leaders to higher standards.

Sanders’ mediocre foreign policy record as a senator speaks for itself. His intention to continue to drone to the near and middle East will not age well either. On the question of Ukraine and Russia, “the framework put in place by the Obama Administration” seems to work for a hypothetical Sanders administration. It even foresee strengthening the sanctions on Russia, a strategy that has only strengthened the monopoly of oligarchic capital in Russia. His position on “Africa” (as a whole) is less ambiguous: “America must create room for Africa to play a greater role in setting the global agenda”, which is perhaps a good start, only it is “global institutions like the IMF, World Bank and UN Security Council” that should “take charge” here. I will return to Saudi Arabia later, because Sanders correctly recognizes that “relying on corrupt authoritarian regimes to deliver us security is a losing bet”, which is an improvement over his 2016 campaign mode of insisting that Saudi Arabia provide its fair share of the cost of global wars. As for what inspires Sanders, the greatest foreign policy accomplishment of the United States since WWII was the Marshall Plan, because “we helped rebuild their economies, spending the equivalent of $130 billion just to reconstruct Western Europe after World War II.” This is the same vision that in its Pacific counterpart put the Japanese Zaibatsu, the top criminal and capitalist class of Japan before and during the WWII, back in charge of Japan in order to quell the rising tide of postwar Japanese socialism. It is the same plan that set up the west German keystone of American imperialism against the spread of Soviet socialism to western Europe.

But Sanders is also vehemently anti-TPP and TTIP; he recognizes that the “authoritarian” mode of Chinese capitalism is an ever bigger global threat. He admirably remarks: “Right-wing authoritarians backed by a network of multi-billionaire oligarchs are forming a common front. We who believe in democracy must join together to build a progressive global order based on human solidarity.” To be fair he does identify the problem of the mutation of capital that I outlined above, even if this recognition is bereft of a vision or strategy to supplement it. However, putting his overall vision together, from bits and pieces gathered from other sources and interviews, adds up to a post-Trump Obama 2.0 foreign policy plan. For example, to quote the entirety of his response on Iran in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations:  

The agreement achieved by the US, Europe, Russia and China with Iran is one of the strongest anti-nuclear agreements ever negotiated. It prevented a war and blocked Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. I would re-enter the agreement on day one of my presidency and then work with the P5+1 and Iran to build upon it with additional measures to further block any path to a nuclear weapon, restrain Iran’s offensive actions in the region and forge a new strategic balance in the Middle East.

It is indeed a great idea to remove the sanctions on Iran, but beyond that the Sanders plan falls apart from its inner inconsistencies. And here the devil is once again in the fluid context. 

The recent removal of fuel subsidies — which sparked the last round of Iran protests in November of 2019 — were part of a larger program of surgical austerity politics in Iran that prepares the country’s bourgeoning state capitalism for the deregulated free markets. Indeed, the Iranian Reformists who engineered and brokered the JCPOA agreement with Obama have been at the forefront of injecting neoliberal austerity measures into the Iranian economy, destroying working class movements and unions inside Iran, and the killing, incarcerating and harassing of Iranian labour leaders and activists. Such measures are taken to make Iran’s young labour market ‘appealing’ to global capital (a la Trump’s war on American labour) and with a view of a reconciliation deal between Iran and the US, which is a highly welcome prospect for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s imperilled political establishment. The IRI is suffering from the most severe crisis of democratic legitimacy inside Iran since the 1979 revolution (with only about 30% of the population voting at the last round of parliamentary elections in Iran). Here, the JCPOA’s unequivocal reinstatement would effectively amount to a legal and official sanction of the IRI establishment by its declared mortal enemy and the international state system. Critically, the recognition restores the IRI establishment to domestic legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian bourgeoisie who are unhappy with the economic pitfalls of IRI’s nuclear adventurism, and further sidelines the radical aspirations of the oppressed labour, women, democracy and student movements inside Iran.

It will be objected that with or without the JCPOA, Iran will stay the current oppressive course. This is correct. It will be objected that without the JCPOA, Iran might opt for a military nuclear program. This is also correct, even if it is true that Iran might well go nuclear sooner or later, without or without such an agreement. It will be objected that Sanders has promised to pair the JCPOA’s reinstatement with putting pressure on IRI’s human rights’ record. This too is correct; however, it is not altogether clear why Sanders will not negotiate another deal with Iran that empowers the various democracy and labour movements in Iran while addressing the stated concerns. And if Sanders refuses to ‘intervene’ altogether, it is a prospect all-the-more promising; all Middle Eastern people await such a day. The trouble, however, is that he intends to intervene in the name of the left and, seemingly, at the expense of the Middle Eastern left. Just as the Sanders plan is to work with the Turkish state “in a way that recognizes the rights of the Kurds”, when Sanders should be speaking of building an alliance with the pro-labour and pro-minority rights People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and the millions that back its grassroots movement in Turkey. What is more, under the banners of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Peoples’ and Women’s Protection Units (YPG/J), ‘the Kurds’ have been struggling against NATO’s second largest army in Turkey for more than four decades; the PKK has one of the largest active bodies of leftist and anti-capitalist membership anywhere and across the world. The Sanders foreign policy’s language is both statist and patronizing.

Critically, when it comes to intervening against IRI, it is not clear how a Sanders administration would “restrain IRI’s offensive actions in the region and forge a new strategic balance in the Middle East”. I have written extensively about the ways in which IRI’s genocidal games in Syria were instrumental simultaneously to giving the Iranian Reformists leverage in the JCPOA negotiations, and to holding down the labour and democracy movements inside Iran in the name of securing Iran against ‘external influence’ (that old redbaiting excuse). This was the same hybrid IRI strategy executed mercilessly by the same General Qassem Soleimani that some on the left were mourning earlier this year. Obama promised IRI the long-term prospect of entry to global markets and acting as the new US deputy in the Middle East (which drove the Saudis and Israelis completely mad), in return for improved behaviour in the region and especially in a Syrian conflict that was instrumental to his pivot to Asia –– I will return to this last point. Heavy US military presence in and around the region was the stick holding our the carrot to IRI.

Now, Sanders promises to reinstate the same old JCPOA, and contain IRI in the Middle East –– when the Syrian, Yemeni and Libyan civil war maps have entirely changed since Trump’s withdrawal from JCPOA –– and then to withdraw US troops from the Middle East in the meantime! It is not entirely clear what stops (in this plan) the IRI’s savvy and ruthless decision makers from exploiting the strategic loopholes of the Sanders logic. In this plan, they could transition the Iranian economy to the capitalist markets with a Sanders sanction, strangle the remainder of radical movements inside Iran and bury them under the neoliberal media’s forthcoming celebrations of ‘Iran’s return to normalcy’, and then add a military nuclear program in due and opportune time, for good measure.

What is however clear is the domestic logic of the Sanders foreign policy plans for Iran. Only weeks after the latest round of Iran Protests, during which the IRI regime killed between 500-1500 protestors, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met with the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the Iranian diaspora equivalent of the Israeli American Council (IAC) and AIPAC. As an unofficial IRI lobby tried in American courts for its explicit and implicit links to the Reformist establishment in Iran, NIAC’s executive body has been at the forefront of whitewashing, falsifying and defending the IRI’s bloody suppression of the latest round of Iran Protests. Opinion pieces by NIAC’s executives in The New York Times and The Independent even fooled Democracy Now into hosting a renowned IRI ideologue as an ‘expert’ on Iranian politics and Iran Protests. NIAC’s promise to Sanders or Warren could have been the millions of bourgeoise Iranian-Americans living in crucial election states such as California, over whom NIAC exerts massive and systematic influence as a demographic and donor base. After all, NIAC represents the largest network of Iranian–American capital and NIAC has been quite explicit about the harms of Trump’s Maximum Pressure campaign for the interests of Iranian capital represented by the IRI Reformists. And so NIAC members campaigned long and hard for Sanders. Even Noam Chomsky appeared in a NIAC forum to campaign for Sanders, in a panel alongside one of the writers of the infamous, vicious and ultimately withdrawn academic letter on condemning the Iran Protests and its incarcerated student leaders.

I cannot wager on whether Sanders was aware of NIAC’s machinations or not. Ultimately, his plans for effecting a socialist transition in the US were tied to effecting a transition to global capitalism in Iran under the auspices of IRI. This seems to also contradict his point on the Saudis and not ‘betting on corrupt authoritarian regimes’. Critically, and here we come full circle, the stretch of land jointly held by Iran in Syria (with Bashar al-Assad’s genocidal army) happens to coincide with the land map of China’s new Silk Road. The new silk road is one of the ways in which China plans to bypass the Indo-Pacific partnership arrayed against its trade routes, and so, following in Obama’s footsteps, a hypothetical Sanders administration would be ‘wise’ to flip the land and its expansionist and neocolonialist owners in Syria for a profit. Here it is not as much the geopolitics of the new silk road that is at stake but the imperialist intentions and claims to impose and reaffirm. It is no secret that Sanders has been outspokenly for containing China militarily with the help of the “international community”. But I cannot wager on whether this is all an unfortunate coincidence or not, because Sanders offers no concrete vision of his Chinese foreign policy either.

Regardless, it is altogether not clear how a Sanders administration would “build a progressive global order based on human solidarity”, when it seemingly plans to resurrect the Obama axis in the Middle East and utilize it toward maintaining imperialist American interests in the region, against the encroachments of Chinese neoliberalism. It is not clear how the Sanders vision of a socialist transition inside the US might benefit, in the long run, from destroying one of the oldest labour movements in the Middle East in Iran. It is not also clear what is revolutionary or even remotely innovative about the overall Sanders foreign policy vision. It is indeed misguided to claim that Sanders is “rethinking the fundamental position of the United States in the world.” In the best case scenario, what Sanders seems to offer the Middle East is not human solidarity but dumb solidarity.

For all these reasons, the Western left must hold its leaders as well as its popular base to higher standards. By virtue of its monopoly over radical and academic media in the West, the Western left is prone to amplifying its own ideological blind spots vis-à-vis dilemmas of domestic and foreign policy elsewhere. To that extent, entities such as NIAC and IRI, and the neoliberal media anywhere, might functionalize the Western left’s false and unsuspecting narratives in order to burry dissenting voices from the subaltern left in places like Iran and the Middle East and to monstrous ends. It is high time that we on the left practice meaningful and strategic international solidarity against the mutating state of neoliberalism and late capitalism.

Which Red Flag is Flying?: Communist and Anarchist Solidarity in Afrin

By Marcel Cartier

As aspiring Sultan Erdogan's assault on the radical democratic experiment in Afrin is repelled by Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen and other nationalities who comprise a diverse, multi-ethnic region, two red flags are now flying at the front lines. One of these is of course of the occupying, fascist Turkish Republic that is fighting alongside Salafist Free Syrian Army (FSA) units, as NATO's second largest army has made common cause with some of the most regressive figures imaginable. The other flag represents a diametrically opposed tendency, that of the international movement of the working-class. This blood-soaked banner of revolution and the sacrifice of the proletarian struggle is held up with pride by the communist internationalists fighting alongside the People's and Women's Protection Units (YPG and YPJ) to defend the sovereignty of Afrin, of Syria, and the revolutionary ideals of the Rojava Revolution.


The Left and Syria's Proxy War

The complexities of Syria's war - now entering into the eighth year of bloodshed and unrelenting agony for the people of this land so connected with the genesis of civilization - have often been extremely challenging to navigate for an outside observer. For those on the radical left, this has been a conflict that has often exposed key differences between tendencies in terms of how to assess not only the region, but the world situation and character of international actors in what has been far more than simply a civil war.

In the initial days of the so-called Syrian 'uprising' in the Spring of 2011, the western left largely assessed events through the lens of optimism in light of the mass protests that had already swept Tunisia and Egypt. The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, who had seemed untouchable for three decades, galvanized revolutionary forces in the west who were often far too accustomed to the idea that 'doing the impossible' was precisely that - impossible. History seemed to now be proving differently, showing that sometimes decades can be captured in mere days or weeks.

While some Trotskyist groups in the west had initially thrown their weight behind the mainstream 'Syrian Arab' opposition that was grouped around what became the 'Free Syrian Army', communists from more 'orthodox' parties (those who supported or at least defended the Soviet Union and socialist bloc until its final demise in 1991) tended to support the Syrian government and leadership on the basis of the country being a target of regime change attempts by the western imperialist powers, particularly the United States. (An illuminating example of this enduring fixation by Washington on establishing a client regime in Damascus can be seen in aa 1986 article by conservative commentator Daniel Pipes, who referred to Syria as the 'Cuba of the Middle East' due to its support for national liberation movements such as the Palestinian struggle -- what the U.S. would argue was support for 'terrorism').

Although the often bitter arguments that engulfed the western left in light of Syria's descent into war - occurring almost simultaneously with the NATO bombing of Libya and overthrow of the nationalist government of Muammar Gaddafi - led to an even more pronounced fragmentation of an already divided radical movement, it would be inaccurate to say that the dividing line was simply between 'pro Assad' and 'anti-Assad' forces.

At the time, this is how I assessed the situation myself - I refused to see the possibility of any 'third way' that went beyond the limitations of a very narrow dichotomy. This was itself evidence of the western left often having such an obsession with losing that we refuse to see beyond the bounds of what appears to be possible at the present juncture, no matter how limited and oppressive it may be. Daring to imagine has become something so abstract and remote that we cannot even begin to take it seriously.

The possibility of a 'third way' in Syria only became visible to most forces in the western metropoles after the declaration of autonomy in the northern areas of the country by Kurdish revolutionary forces of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in the Spring of 2012. Unlike the 'Arab opposition' that declared Assad the primary enemy of their cause and turned their guns toward Damascus, the so-called self-administration that was formed in the areas known by Kurds as 'Rojava' (for 'west' Kurdistan) declared that it wasn't interested in 'regime change', although it did seek the democratization of the country along federal lines that would give recognition to Syria's multi-ethnic and diverse character. This led to a degree of cooperation with the Syrian state in agreeing de-facto lines of demarcation, with Syrian Arab Army forces pulling back from the areas that fell under the control of the People's and Women's Protection Units (YPG and YPJ) in Aleppo, for instance. In other circumstances, Assad repositioned his forces away from Northern Syria to fight rebels preoccupied with overthrowing his Government. Upon this vacuum left by Assad forces, Kurds announced their own administration body, built on the principles of radical democracy, gender equality and multi-ethnic harmony. Even with the declaration of self-administration, however, it wasn't really until the battle of Kobane in late 2014 that the Kurdish question in Syria emerged on the world stage.


Communists and The Rojava Revolution

During this heroic resistance to the fascism of the so-called Islamic State, a considerably higher degree of attention began to be given to the Kurdish question in Syria by not only the mainstream media, but understandably so by the western left. After all, it was the forces of the YPG and YPJ who espoused the most progressive, leftist politics of all of the military formations operating in the theatre of Syria's war.

Due to the ideology of the Rojava Revolution being linked with the theoretical points espoused by Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan in his 'new paradigm' - among them that the Leninist conception of revolution was outdated and that a 'non-state' system showed the path to a free, dignified and socialist society in the 21st century - this movement was deemed by many Marxist critics to be 'anarchist'. A considerable amount of support began to be given to the Rojava project by western 'libertarian socialists', many hostile to 20 th century socialist revolutions, and even the PKK's original orientation as a Leninist national liberation movement. This often put revolutionary Marxists and Leninists in a knee-jerk position of opposing the Rojava experiment, and often refusing to look into it in any considerable degree of detail.

However, a substantial number of Turkish communist organisations didn't take such a simplistic approach to the 'democratic confederalism' being offered by the PYD as an alternative to capitalist modernity in Syria and the region. For many of these Turkey-based formations and parties, Rojava was part national liberation movement, part radical, feminist, democratic experiment. Perhaps they didn't see it as explicitly 'socialist', but it was important to engage with and to participate in.

From 2012, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP), until then operating primarily within Turkey's borders, began sending cadres to Rojava to defend the revolution. Among the MLKP fighters who joined the ranks of the YPJ was Ivana Hoffmann, a 19-year old German woman who had joined the party abroad and joined the Kurdish movement's caravan of martyrs when she was killed in March 2015. Ivana's example would serve as the basis for other internationalists to join not only the MLKP, but for the Party to push for the creation of an internationalist organization that would aim to build on the legacy of communists who had flocked to Spain to defend the Republic against Franco's fascism in the late 1930s.

In the summer of 2015, the International Freedom Battalion (IFB) was officially declared at a ceremony in Serekaniye. The show of leftist unity at the announcement of the IFB's formation is an important lesson for revolutionaries across the globe. Groups that had previously been at odds with each other in Turkey now joined hands in struggle. The United Freedom Forces (BOG), itself a coalition of leftist fighters from Turkey that had been declared the previous year, now joined the IFB on the initiative of the MLKP. There wasn't time nor the luxury of ideological squabbles preventing the unity of forces in the face of barbarism. Other groups that joined the IFB included the Turkish Communist Party/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML) and its armed wing TiKKO (Workers' and Peasants' Army of Turkey). Beyond the region, communists from Spain played a key role in the IFB's consolidation, with the Reconstruction Comunista (RC) sending cadres to fight in the spirit of solidarity their ancestors in the Spanish Republic knew all too well. This historical link also inspired Marxists from Britain to join the IFB under the banner of the Bob Crow Brigade, paying homage to a major figure in their country's trade union movement.


The Hammer and Sickle on the Frontlines at Afrin

Of course, the level of solidarity expressed with the Rojava Revolution by communists across the world - both in terms of events organized at home, as well as in those actually coming to Syria to be willing to give the ultimate sacrifice - isn't comparable in scope to the tens of thousands who volunteered to fight Francoism. Syria has been a far more complex and divisive war to grasp, on the one hand. On the other, the intervention of major foreign powers into the conflict, especially Russia and the United States, shifted the dynamics of solidarity with the Kurdish-led forces who were spearheading a women's revolution rooted in direct democracy. For many Marxists, military cooperation with the U.S. - 'tactical' or not - meant that at least explicit solidarity with the Rojava experiment was off the table.

However, the Turkish communist groups operating in Rojava seem to have navigated this relationship with great nuance and a spirit of critical solidarity. For sure, the presence of the United States within the borders of Syria is a nuisance at best for the fighters of groups such as the MLKP and TKP/ML. Based on my experiences on the ground in northern Syria, it is fair to say that for many fighters of the YPG and YPJ, that relationship is perceived the same way. However, the communist groups generally take a more critical line toward this cooperation than the Apoists (supporters of Abdullah Ocalan in the PYD and PKK and their umbrella organization, the Union of Kurdish Communities [KCK]).

Almost two weeks into Erdogan's misadventure in Syria, the hollowness of U.S. 'support' for the YPG and YPJ has been made blatantly obvious. This hasn't surprised the Kurdish movement in the least bit, as the writing already appeared on the wall for the U.S. to 'drop' the Kurdish forces after the liberation of Raqqa. Although still cooperating in Deir ez-Zor with the YPG, the tacit approval of Washington for Erdogan's bloody, genocidal incursion into Afrin has spelled out that although the U.S. and YPG may have had mutual, overlapping interests in Syria for the short-term, there was no more of a potential long-term unity that existed as there had been between the Soviet Union and western imperialists who united against Hitler's fascist aggression during the Second World War.

This should reveal to communists around the world that the fight to defend Afrin is a struggle to safeguard the basic principles of the oppressed, and their efforts in establishing an ecological, grassroots, feminist democracy. Marxists should support such a fight and vision of society, even if having some ideological critiques of the model of 'democratic confederalism'.

Fighters from the International Freedom Battalion are now flying the deep crimson flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle at the frontlines in Afrin. Daring to defy Erdogan's neo-Ottoman aspirations in Rojava as they defied his government's fascistic and assimilationist policies in Turkey and Bakur (northern Kurdistan), Turkey's red militants fight shoulder to shoulder with their YPG, YPG, Syriac Military Council, and other progressive anti-fascist forces.

In an interview with ETHA News Agency, MLKP commander Viyan İsyan described why his Party is taking part in the resistance in Afrin, saying "This revolution is an example to the peoples of the Middle East. Our fundamental duty is to defend the Rojava revolution by any means necessary. The defence of the revolution and its gains will also carry the revolution to the peoples of the Middle East…Defending Afrin is defending honour. Defending Afrin is defending the future. Defending Afrin opens the way for other revolutions…We want them to not surrender to Erdoğan's fascism, we want them to set the streets on fire. We call them to press against the borders of Rojava. Because these borders are unnatural. We call our peoples to action. The resistance of Afrin is a historical resistance. We call on our peoples to uphold this historical resistance…We want it to be known that we will not abandon Afrin. The YPG/YPJ and the people of Afrin will not abandon Afrin. As communists, we will not abandon it. We are here until the end, no matter the cost. Victory will be ours."

Echoing the sentiment expressed by the MLKP, the TKP/ML vowed to crush Turkey's occupation and attempted stifling of the revolution by calling all oppressed people to the ranks of the resistance. In a video message, the Party's military formation TiKKO declared its role in fight against Erdogan, saying "In its attempt to occupy Afrin, the fascist and genocidal Turkish state has shown itself to be the enemy of the oppressed Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen peoples, and the working people as a whole. After being subjected to occupation and massacres by the ISIS fascists, the peoples of Rojava are now undergoing occupation and massacres at hands of the fascist Turkish state with the invading Turkish troops bombing villages and murdering innocent children and civilian workers."


The Critical Need for Internationalist Solidarity

At this moment in which the imperialist powers have made clear that they have no genuine regard for 'democracy', in which their support for NATO's second largest army has trumped any possible semblance of half-hearted support for a Kurdish radical movement that aims to sweep aside capitalism, the left needs to reassess its relationship to the Rojava Revolution.

Communists are taking part in the heroic resistance in Afrin, aiming to protect a society being reshaped along egalitarian lines. The spirit of internationalism which is present in this struggle isn't necessarily one of full ideological unity - there is plenty of struggle taking place within the Rojava Revolution between Apoists, communists, anarchists, and other leftist forces. Where the revolution is headed is being fiercely debated, but in an atmosphere of mutual solidarity and respect, not the hostility and narrow-mindedness that often permeates the leftist environments and movements in Europe and North America. This revolution's vibrancy and richness of diversity is being defended at the frontlines. This result of this struggle will have major ramifications for the future of the international communist movement, and for humanity more generally.


This was originally published at The Region .

From Chiapas to Rojava: The Rise of a New Revolutionary Paradigm

By CIC

" Power to the people" can only be put into practice when the power
exercised by social elites is dissolved into the people.


- Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism



The largely unknown until recently Kurdish city of Kobane managed to attract the attention of the world with its fierce resistance [i] against the invasion of the Islamic State and became an international symbol, compared to the defence of Madrid and Stalingrad. The bravery and heroism of the People's Defence Units and the Women's Defence Units (YPG and YPJ) were praised by a large spectrum of groups and individuals - anarchists, leftists, liberals and even right-wingers expressed sympathy and admiration for the men and women of Kobane in their historical battle against what was often seen as IS "fascism." The mainstream media was forced to break the silence over the Kurdish autonomy and soon numerous articles and news stories were broadcasted and published, often depicting the "toughness" and determination of the Kurdish fighters with a certain dose of exotisation, of course. However, this attention was very often selective and partial - the very essence of the political project in Rojava (Western Kurdistan) was left aside and the media preferred to present the resistance in Kobane as some weird exception to the supposed barbarism of the Middle East. Without surprise, the red star, shining on the victorious flags of the YPG/J was not a pleasing image in the eyes of the Western powers and their media. The autonomous cantons of Rojava represent a home-grown solution to the conflicts in the Middle East, encompassing grassroots democracy, ethnic, social and gender rights and all this in rejection both of IS terror but also of liberal democracy and capitalist economy . Although the West preferred to stay silent on this issue, this ideological foundation is the key for understanding the spirit that wrote the Kobane epopee and fascinated the world, as the Kurdish activist and academic, Dilar Dirik, claimed recently[ii].

As the battles for every street and corner of the city were intensifying, Kobane managed to captivate the imagination of the left and specifically of the libertarian left as a symbol of resistance and struggle and soon it was placed on the pantheon of some of the most emblematic battles for humanity, such as the defence of Madrid against the fascists in the 1930s. It was not by accident that the Turkish Marxist-Leninist group MLKP, which joined the YPG/J in/on the battlefield, raised the flag of the Spanish republic over the ruins of the city in the day of its liberation and called for the formation of International Brigades[iii], following the example of the Spanish revolution. It was not the battle for Kobane itself, but the libertarian essence of the cantons of Rojava, the implementation of grassroots direct democracy, the participation of women and different ethnic groups into the autonomous government that gave ground to the comparisons with the Spanish revolution. Another association was mentioned briefly in several articles - the revolution in Rojava and its autonomous government were compared to the Zapatistas and their autonomy in the south of Mexico. The importance of this comparison might be crucial in order to understand the paradigm of the revolutionary struggle in Kurdistan and what it means for those who believe another world is possible.

The Zapatista movement is probably one of the most symbolic and influential elements of the revolutionary imaginary in the world after the fall of the state-socialist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the morning of January 1, 1994, an unknown guerrilla force, composed of indigenous Mayas, took over the main towns of the southern-most Mexican state - Chiapas. The military operation was carried out with strategic brilliance and combined with the innovative back then use of the internet to spread the message of the revolutionaries, it echoed around the globe to inspire international solidarity and the emergence of the Alter-Globalisation movement. The Zapatistas rebelled against neoliberal capitalism and the social and cultural genocide of the indigenous population in Mexico. Ya Basta, Enough is enough, was their war cry that emerged from the night of "500 years of oppression", as the First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle stated. The Zapatistas rose up in arms when global capital was celebrating the "end of history" and the idea of social revolution seemed to be a romantic anachronism that belonged to the past. The Zapatista Army for National Liberation was forced out of the cities in twelve days of intense battles with the federal army but it turned out that the deep horizontal organisation in the indigenous communities could not be eradicated by any military intervention or terror. The masked spokesperson of the rebel army, Subcomandante Marcos, challenged the notion of historical vanguard as opposed to revolution from below, which does not aim to take power but to abolish it and this concept became central to the most mass anti-capitalist movements since - from Seattle and Genoa to the Syntagma and Puerta del Sol occupations and even the Occupy Movement.

Where are the similarities with the Rojavan revolution?


From Marxism-Leninism to Autonomy - a shared historical trajectory

The roots of the democratic autonomy in Rojava can be understood only through the history of the Workers' Party of Kurdistan (PKK), the organisation, which has been central to the Kurdish liberation movement since its creation in 1978. The PKK was established as a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organisation in Northern Kurdistan, part of the Turkish state, combining the ideologies of national and social liberation. It grew to a substantial guerrilla force under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan and managed to challenge the second biggest army in NATO in a conflict that claimed the lives of more than forty thousand people. The Turkish state displaced hundreds of thousands and reportedly used torture, assassination and rape against the civilian population but did not manage to break the backbone of the Kurdish resistance. Since its inception, PKK has expanded its influence both in Turkey and in the other parts of Kurdistan. The leading political force in the Rojavan revolution - the Democratic Union Party (PYD) is affiliated with it through the Kurdistan Communities' Union, KCK, the umbrella organisation that encompasses various revolutionary and political groups sharing the ideas of the PKK. The ideology, which unites the different civil and revolutionary groups in the KCK is called democratic confederalism and is based on the ideas of the US anarchist Murray Bookchin, who argued in favour of a non-hierarchal society based on social-ecology, libertarian municipalism, and direct democracy.

Although the Zapatistas are famous for their autonomous government and rejection of the notion of historical vanguard, the roots of the organisation were also related to Marxism-Leninism and just like in the case of the PKK, the idea of self-governance and revolution from below were a product of a long historical evolution. The EZLN was founded in 1983 by a group of urban guerrillas, predominantly Marxist-Leninists, who decided to start a revolutionary cell among the indigenous population in Chiapas, organise a guerrilla force and take power through guerrilla warfare. Soon they realised that their ideological dogma was not applicable to the indigenous realities and started learning from the communal traditions of governance of the indigenous people. Thus, Zapatismo was born as a fusion between Marxism and the experience and knowledge of the native population that has been resisting both against the Spanish and later the Mexican state.

This shared ideological trajectory demonstrates a historical turn in the understanding of revolutionary process. The Zapatista uprising and establishment of the autonomy in Chiapas marked a break with traditional guerrilla strategies, inspired predominantly by the Cuban revolution, this was made more than clear in the letter EZLN spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, wrote to the Basque liberation organisation ETA:

"I shit on all revolutionary vanguards on this planet. [iv]"

It was not the vanguard to lead the people now; it was the people themselves to build the revolution from below and sustain it as such. This is the logic PKK has been shifting towards in the last decade under the influence of Murray Bookchin and this shift demonstrates an evolution of the organisation from movement for the people to a movement of the people.


Cantons and Caracoles - freedom here and now

Probably the most important similarity between the revolution in Rojava and the one in Chiapas is the social and political reorganisation that is taking place in both places that is based on the libertarian ideology of the two organisations.

The Zapatista autonomy in its current form originates from the failure of the peace negotiations with the Mexican government after the uprising in 1994. During the peace negotiations the rebels demanded the government to adhere to the accords of San Andres, which give the indigenous people the right to autonomy, self-determination, education, justice and political organisation, based on their tradition as well as communal control over the land and the resources of the areas that belong to them. These accords were never implemented by the government and in 2001 president Fox backed an edited version that was voted for in congress but did not meet the demands of the Zapatistas and the other groups in resistance. This event was labelled as "treason" and it provoked the EZLN to declare two years later the creation of the five rebel zones, centred in five Caracoles (or snails in English) that serve as administrative centres. The name Caracoles came to show the revolutionary concept of the Zapatistas - we are doing it ourselves, we learn in the process and we advance, slowly, but we advance. The Caracoles[v] include three levels of autonomous government - community, municipality and Council of the Good Government. The first two are based on grassroots assemblies whereas the Councils of the Good Government are elected but with the intention to get as many people as possible to participate in the Government over the years through a principle of rotation. The autonomy has its own educational system, healthcare and justice, as well as cooperatives, producing coffee, cattle, handcrafts etc.

We learn as we make things, we did not know about autonomy and that we were going to build something like it. But we learn and improve things and learn from the struggle - told me my Zapatista guardian Armando, when I visited the autonomous territory at the end of 2013. Freedom could only be practiced here and now and revolution was a process of constantly challenging the status-quo and building alternatives to it.

The Rojavan cantons indeed resemble the autonomy in Chiapas. They were proclaimed by the dominant PYD in 2013 and function through the established popular assemblies and democratic councils. Women participate equally in the decision-making and are represented in all elected positions, which are always shared by a man and a woman. All ethnic groups are represented in the government and its institutions. Healthcare and education are also guaranteed by the system of democratic confederalism and recently the first Rojavan university, the Masepotamia Academy, opened it's doors with plans to challenge the hierarchical structure of education, and to provide a different approach to learning.

Just as it is in the case with the Zapatistas, the Revolution in Rojava envisions itself as a solution to the problems in the whole country, not as an expression of separatist tendencies. This genuine democratic system, as claimed by the delegation of academics from Europe and North America [vi], that visited Rojava recently, points to a different future of the Middle East, based on direct participation, women's emancipation and ethnic peace.


Women's revolution

Gender has always been central to the Zapatista revolution. The situation of women before the spread of the organization and the adoption of women's liberation as central to the struggle, was marked by exploitation, marginalization, forced marriages, physical violence and discrimination. This is why Marcos claims that the first uprising was not the one in 1994 but the adoption of the Womens' Revolutionary Law in 1993, setting the framework for gender equality and justice and guaranteeing the rights of the women in the rebel territory to personal autonomy, emancipation and dignity. Today women participate in all levels of government and have their own cooperatives and economic structures to guarantee their economic independence. Women were and still form a large part of the ranks of the Zapatista guerilla force and take high positions in its commandment. The takeover of San Cristobal de las Casas, the most important city the Zapatista troops captured during the uprising in 1994, was also commanded by women, headed by comandanta Ramona, who was also the first Zapatista to be sent to Mexico city to represent the movement.

It is not difficult to compare the mass involvement of indigenous women in Chiapas in the Zapatista ranks to the participation of women in the defense of Kobane and in the YPJ - the Women's Protection Units, both depicted in a sensationalist manner[vii] by the Western media in the last months. However, their bravery and determination in the war against ISIS is a product of a long tradition of women participation in the armed struggle for social liberation in Kurdistan. Women have played a central role in the PKK and this is undoubtedly connected with the importance of gender in the Kurdish struggle. The Rojava revolution has a strong emphasis on women's liberation as indispensable for the true liberation of society. The theoretical framework that puts the dismantling of patriarchy at the heart of the struggle is called "jineology", a concept developed by Abdullah Ocalan. The application of this concept has resulted in an unseen empowerment of women not only in the context of the Middle East but also in the context of western liberal feminism. The women's assemblies, cooperative structures and women's militias are the heart of the revolution, which is considered incomplete if it does not destroy the patriarchal structure of society, which is one of the fundamentals of capitalism. Janet Biehl, an independent writer and artist, wrote after her recent visit to Rojava that women in the Kurdish revolution have the ideological role of the proletariat in the XXth century revolutions.


The ecology of freedom

The Ecology of Freedom is probably the most important among Bookchin's works and his concept of social ecology has been adopted by the revolutionaries in Rojava. His idea that "the very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human" links patriarchy, environmental destruction and capitalism and points at their abolition as the only way to a just society. Such a holistic approach has been advocated and implemented by the Zapatistas as well. Sustainability has also been an important point of emphasis, especially after the creation of the caracoles in 2003. The autonomous government has been trying to recuperate ancestral knowledge, related to the sustainable use of the land and combine it with other agro-ecological practices. This logic is not only a matter of improving the living conditions in the communities and avoiding the use of agrochemicals, it is a rejection of the whole notion that large-scale industrial agriculture is superior to the 'primitive' way the indigenous people work the land and as such it is a powerful defiance of the logic of neoliberalism.


The road to Autonomy - the new revolutionary paradigm

The similarities between the system of democratic confederalism that is being developed in Western Kurdistan and the Autonomy in Chiapas go far beyond the few points I have stressed in this article. From slogans such as Ya Basta, adapted in Kurdish as êdî bes e to the grassroots democracy, communal economic structures and participation of women, the similar path the Kurdish movement and the Zapatistas have taken demonstrates a decisive break with the vanguardist notion of Marxism-Leninism and a new approach to revolution, which comes from below and aims at the creation of a free and non-hierarchal society.

Although both movements have received some bitter criticism[viii] from sectarian elements on the left, the very fact that the only major and successful experiments in radical social change originate from non-western, marginalised and colonised groups, comes as a slap in the face to the white and privileged dogmatic "revolutionaries" of the global north who have hardly been successful on challenging oppression in their own countries but tend to believe it is their judgement what is and what is not a real revolution.

The revolutions in Rojava and Chiapas are a powerful example for the world, demonstrating the enormous capacity of grassroots organisation and the importance of communal links as opposed to capitalist social atomisation. Last but not least, Chiapas and Rojava should make many on the left, including some anarchists, trash their colonial mindset and ideological dogmatism.

A world without hierarchy, domination, capitalism and environmental destruction or as the Zapatistas say, the world where many worlds fit, has often been depicted as "utopian" and "unrealistic" by the mainstream media, education and political structures. However, this world is not some future mirage that comes from the books - it is happening here and now and the examples of Zapatistas and Kurds are a powerful weapon to reignite our capacity to imagine a real radical change in society as well as a model we can learn from in our struggles. The red stars that shine over Chiapas and Rojava shed light on the way to liberation and if we need to summarize in one word what brings these two struggles together, it would definitely be Autonomy.​


Originally published by the Cooperativa Integral Catalana.



Notes

[i] Dicle, Amed (2015) Kobane Victory, How it Unfolded

http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/insight-research/analysis/kobane-victory-how-it-unfolded.html

[ii] Dirik, Dilar (2015) Whi Kobane Did Not Fall
http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/kurdistan/west-kurdistan/why-kobani-did-not-fall.html

[iii] International Brigades Form in Rojava (2014)
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2015/01/international-brigades-form-in-rojava-no-pasaran-video-3100250.html

[iv] Marcos (2003) I Shit on All Revolutionary Vanguards on This Planethttp://roarmag.org/2011/02/i-shit-on-all-the-revolutionary-vanguards-of-this-planet/

[v] Oikonomakis, Leonidas (2013) Zapatistas Celebrate 10 Years of Autonomy With Escuelitahttp://roarmag.org/2013/08/escuelita-zapatista-10-year-autonomy/

[vi] Joint Statement of the Academic Delagation to Rojava
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/joint-statement-of-the-academic-delegation-to-rojava/

[vii] Dirik, Dilar (2014) Western Fascination With "Badass" Kurdish Women
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/10/western-fascination-with-badas-2014102112410527736.html

[viii]

Anarchist Federation Statement on Rojava (2014)
http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/international/435-anarchist-federation-statement-on-rojava-december-2014.html