Degrowth Communism or Democratic Confederalism?

Kurdish philosopher Abdullah Öcolan and Japanese thinker Kohei Saito take on "Post-Capitalism"

Today I want to begin a comparison of two approaches to “post-Capitalism”, two radical efforts to envision a transfigured social, political and economic world. I am currently exploring the work of two compelling radical thinkers: Abdullah Öcalan and Kohei Saito. Both have very particular perspectives as well as significant followings. I find it particularly important to bring more attention to Öcalan, as most people in the Anglo-European world still have no idea who he is, and should know about him. 

By the way, you are still welcome to join our seminar, Building Our Regenerative Future. We have our third session tomorrow with a number of fascinating speakers including Douglas Rushkoff, Stephen Reid, and Margaret Klein Salamon. Here is a “later bird” offer for 15% off. The first two sessions are available for replay, and we are holding discussion groups each week to go deeper with participants, where we can explore these kinds of ideas in more depth.

Democratic Confederalism

Abdullah Öcalan

A former Marxist and founder of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) in Turkey, Öcalan as been imprisoned on an island off Turkey for more than twenty years. Öcalan’s political, ecological and Feminist theories provided the basis for the formation of Rojava, a breakaway Kurdish republic of five million people in North-Eastern Syria (The New York Times Magazine covered Rojova in this 2015 feature). Saito is a philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo who wrote a surprise bestseller, Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), that reframes Karl Marx as an environmental thinker and forerunner to today’s degrowth movement. Surprisingly, Capital in the Anthropocene sold 500,000 copies in Japan and was just published in the US, as The NY Times wrote about here. 

Born in 1948 to a poor Kurdish family, Öcalan comes from the village of Ömerli, Turkey. He first got involved in leftist politics as a student at the University of Ankara. In 1978, he co-founded the PKK, which sought to establish an independent Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey. The Kurds are a stateless, Iranic ethnic group who have their own language. His movement eventually launched a guerrilla war against Turkey, causing the deaths of thousands of people. Öcalan was forced to flee Turkey in 1988. He spent the next decade living in exile in Syria and Lebanon. 

In 1999, he was captured by Turkish forces. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison in 2002. For twenty years, Öcalan has been confined to a high-security prison on İmralı Island in the Sea of Marmara. There he has written a number of books, developing his theories, despite having little access to a library or the Internet. 

Öcalan's ideology evolved over time. Initially, he was a Marxist-Leninist who believed in armed struggle as the only way for the Kurds to achieve independence. After his imprisonment, Öcalan became convinced that the PKK could not achieve its goals through violence alone. He started questioning Marxist orthodoxy. He began to advocate for a more peaceful approach to Kurdish liberation. 

Öcalan, in his writings from prison, articulates a vision of a future society beyond the nation-state model. In Democratic Confederalism, he writes, “The nation-state is not the solution, but the problem itself.” His ideas have been implemented in the governance of Rojava, where diverse ethnic and religious groups coexist within a decentralized, participatory system. His approach is radical in its inclusion and empowerment of women, as he famously stated, “A society can never be free without women’s liberation.” 

One of his followers introduced him to the work of Murray Bookchin, an American anarchist, professor, and “social ecologist” whose books include The Ecology of Freedom. Bookchin’s radical approach also influenced my ideas in How Soon Is Now. Bookchin wrote: “The private ownership of the planet by elite strata must be brought to an end if we are to survive the afflictions it has imposed on the biotic world, particularly as a result of a society structured around limitless growth.” 

Bookchin proposed a model of a “mutualist” society where hierarchy was dissolved along with private property: We can return to the Medieval concept of “usufruct,” in which people have the right to continue using a resource as long as they are using it productively, but cannot own that resource. Ocalan incorporated Bookchin’s ideas into his vision of “Democratic confederalism,” local and bioregional organizations that replace the nation-state with a completely participatory model. This is how Rojava is organized today, although their attempts to establish a legitimate alternative have been hampered by the ongoing war, which keeps the breakaway republic under constant threat. (Here is a NY Times feature on Ocolan and Rojova from 2015.) 

Debbie Bookchin, daughter of Murray Bookchin, wrote a great piece on her father’s influence on Ocalan and Rojava in The New York Review of Books. She compared their work: 

Like Bookchin years earlier, Öcalan had also become disillusioned with state socialism. “Do not look at the Soviet Union as the God of Socialism and the last God at that,” he told an interviewer in 1991. “The dream of a socialist utopia is not just Marxist-Leninist. It is as old as humanity.” Increasingly persuaded that the state itself was the problem, he began to reframe his movement’s goal not as a Kurdish nation but as an autonomous, self-ruled democratic entity within a federation that gave similar autonomy to all its subject groups—a type of political system very different from any that now exists in the Middle East or almost anywhere.

“The nation-state makes us less than human,” Bookchin wrote in his 1985 essay “Rethinking Ethics, Nature and Society.” “It towers over us, cajoles us, disempowers us, bilks us of our substance, humiliates us—and often kills us in its imperialist adventures… We are the nation-state’s victims, not its constituents—not only physically and psychologically but also ideologically.”

Öcalan came to share this view; in 2005, he issued a “Declaration” that “the political root of the democratic nation solution is the democratic confederalism of civil society, which is not state.” Rather, it must be based on the “communal unit,” an ecological, social, and economic construction that does not “aim to make profit” but rather meet the collectively determined needs of the people living there. The document served as a vision that he hoped would be embraced by all of Kurdistan—including the 6 million Kurds in Iran and a similar number in Iraq.

Here, Öcalan echoed my father’s program in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (later titled Urbanization Without Cities), which Öcalan had read in prison and recommended to the mayors of Bakur in southeast Turkey. In this volume, my father traced the history of the urban megalopolis, from Athens to the Paris Commune and beyond, in an effort to “redeem the city, to visualize it not as a threat to the environment but as a uniquely human, ethical, and ecological community” that could be reclaimed as the locus of a new politics of assembly democracy—an “art in which every citizen is fully aware of the fact that his or her community entrusts its destiny to his or her moral probity and rationality.” “The city,” he wrote, must be “conceived as a new kind of ethical union, a humanly-scaled form of personal empowerment, a participatory, even ecological system of decision-making, and a distinctive source of civic culture.” And he argued that by practicing a radical municipal-based politics, people can, in effect, create a new democratic society within the shell of the old, wresting back control from the central state.

These “Communalist” ideas have been put into practice in the cities and towns of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. An elaborate system of council democracy starts at the “commune” level (settlements of between thirty and four hundred families). The commune sends delegates to the neighborhood or village council, which in turn sends delegates to the district (or city) level and ultimately to the region-wide assemblies. Citizens serve on committees for health, the environment, defense, women, the economy, politics, justice, and ideology. Everyone is entitled to a say. And in keeping with Öcalan’s ideas on matters relating to women, the women’s councils have the power to override decisions made by other councils when the matter specifically concerns a women’s interests.

According to Öcalan, the framework of democratic confederalism  is "open towards other political groups and factions. It is flexible, multi-cultural, anti-monopolistic, and consensus-oriented.” David Graeber, an American anthropologist and anarchist, studied the practical application of Öcalan's theories in Rojava. He was thrilled by Rojova’s radicalism, including its approach to complete gender equality and grassroots democracy. Graeber noted, "The experiment in Rojava is one of the most innovative and progressive in the world today."

Degrowth Communism

Kohei Saito

Kohei Saito, born in 1987 in Japan, is a new, popular voice advocating for an ecological Marxism. His academic journey began in Japan but he also studied in the US, at Wesleyan University, and in Germany, diving deep into Marxist and Post-Marxist theory. In Marx in the Anthropocene, he notes, “As environmentalists learn to unequivocally problematize the irrationality of the current economic system, Marxism now has a chance of revival if it can contribute to enriching debates and social movements by providing not only a thorough critique of the capitalist mode of production but also a concrete vision of post-capitalist society.” This is his ambitious project.