Hello, I propose a new thread about the “Rojava Revolution and its backers". I know that there are already a lot on this issue but I would like to publish comments and thoughts somewhat critical on the revolutionary nature of the process that takes place in Rojava, as well as on solidarity campaigns that seem to me to be unconditional.
There are some who will certainly say that I am “anti-Rojava” or that I only deny the existence of a “Rojava Revolution”. Far from it, I’m not more “anti-Rojava” than I am effectively anti-Britain or anti-USA or anti-any-other-nation-state. As for the “Rojava Revolution” I’m of course an eminent supporter of it as well as for the revolution in the Middle East and everywhere else in the world. I’m standing for a world social revolution, and therefore an anti-capitalist one, that will abolish private property, the state, social classes, religions, etc.
My only questioning is as follows: what some call the “Rojava Revolution”, is it really a social revolution or better said does it lie within a dynamics of destruction of the present social order (that is to say capitalist order)? Or on the contrary wouldn’t it be rather about a process of instrumentalization and containment by social-democrat institutions (and therefore bourgeois ones), under the pretext of “social liberation”, of an authentic movement of revolt against misery and state repression, in order to better justify their “struggles of national liberation”?
I always was naïve enough to believe “the anarchists” when they declare they merrily puke up work, justice and the army. But important sectors of “anarchism” (the official and even the less official ones) declare themselves to be the staunch partisans of the “Rojava Revolution”, that would be a “genuine revolution” according to the “eminent” intellectual David Graeber. This “revolution” is prompted and controlled by a set of institutions as for example “popular assemblies”, “cantons”, “communes”, “municipalities” that globally and fundamentally don’t prevent (and historically in themselves never prevented) the reproduction of the same social relations than those dominating on a planet scale.
Indeed, exploitation at work is effectively achieved in Rojava by means of “social economy” and its “cooperatives” where the proletarian is always so deeply tied to “his” (“her”) work tool, to “his” (“her”) machine, to “his” (“her”) workplace, to profitability requirements of “his” (“her”) local, cantonal and “libertarian” economy, in short to “his” (“her”) exploitation that through the magic of words would succeed in becoming more “humane”. It’s always in the name of “realism” and the refusal of critics, which are caricatured as being “ultra leftist”, that work rules supreme over the region; salaried work obviously, even though the supplying in paper money, in monetary excrements or in coins of the realm is not always fully assured because of war.
“The anarchists” always declared their hatred for the State and the Nation… And yet the Rojava has all of the features of a State, or at present of a “proto”-State, since there are courts of justice, a “Constitution” (called “Social Contract”), an army (as well as YPG/YPJ militias which are more and more militarized), a police (the Asayish) that imposes internal social order (also with its “antiterrorist special units” whose Rambo have no cause to be jealous of their murderous colleagues of equivalent corps as the “SWAT” in the United States of America, the “Spetsnaz” in Russia, the “GIPN” and “GIGN” in France, etc.). As for the nation, is it really necessary to recall the nationalistic foundation of the “Kurdish liberation movement”?
“The anarchists” always expressed their contempt towards the government, parliamentarianism and elections… But the Rojava is led by an infinite number of parliaments, whether they are called “popular assemblies”, “councils”, “communes” or “municipalities” is not important if their practical content always consists in managing (once again, at a “more human” level maybe) the social relation dominating world widely (i.e. capitalism, even though it is repainted in red or in red and black). All these structures get organized at a local level of a street, a district, a village, a town or a city, a region and partake all of them of the electoral principle. Finally, at the decision-making superior level, the “cantons” have their own governments as well as their ministries and related ministers among whom for example the “Prime Minister of the Cizere Canton” is nobody else than the wealthiest capitalist of Syria before the beginning of the struggle process in March 2011.
“The anarchists” pretend to be allergic to all concept of “party” that they reduce to the bourgeois political parties, whether they stand in the elections or not, or even to Bolshevik and Leninist parties. But suddenly, there are political parties that fill these same “anarchists” with joy: it’s about the PKK (“Kurdistan Workers Party”) in Turkey and the PYD (“Democratic Union Party”) in Syria. These parties, and even more the PYD than the PKK, develop a diplomatic politics that couldn’t be more classically bourgeois, going so far as to open “offices” (embassies in a way) in Moscow and Prague. The PYD even went, during a big European tour last year, so far as “to be on the game” at the Elysée Palace in February 2015, where some of its most famous representatives have been received by “Mr. President” François Hollande himself.
Well in short, I could write thus some whole pages on all these wild imaginings, what matters the most today, it’s that the mask of the impostors are dropped and that the hideous face of this “genuine revolution”, controlled and framed by a powerful machine of propaganda combining “libertarian communalism”, Marxism-Leninism and “national liberationism”, finally appears out in the open. I want to speak of course here about the endless and unavoidable tactical or strategic alliances that characterize all the bourgeois forces in history and in the world.