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YPG International released a statement calling for global resistance against Turkish fascism on 27 and 28 January. In response AWSM issue their statement in support of the Rojava revolution.
The revolution in Rojava is one of the few positive developments to emerge from the civil war in Syria. For the past several years, the Syrian Kurds have been creating self-governing communities that involve the democratic participation of their residents, including women and ethnic minorities. Committed to the principles of feminism, environmentalism, and democratic confederalism, the Syrian Kurds have united these communities in an autonomous democratic federation across northern Syria.
What the Syrian Kurds have created in the territory known as Rojava is a political system based on neighbourhood communes and an economic system based on cooperatives. The inspiration for their system is Murray Bookchin’s concept of a federation of independent communities known as “libertarian municipalism” or “communalism.”
Political organisation in Rojava consists of two parallel structures. The older and more established is the system of communes and councils, which are direct-participation bodies. The other structure, resembling a traditional government, is the Democratic-Autonomous Administration, which is more of a representative body, although one that includes seats for all parties and multiple social organisations.
The commune is the basic unit of self-government, the base of the council system. A commune comprises the households of a few streets within a city or village, usually 30 to 400 households. Above the commune level are community people’s councils comprising a city neighbourhood or a village. The next level up are the district councils, consisting of a city and surrounding villages. The top of the four levels is the People’s Council of West Kurdistan, which elects an executive body on which about three dozen people sit. The top level theoretically coordinates decisions for all of Rojava.
Integrated within the four-level council system are seven commissions — defence, economics, politics, civil society, free society, justice and ideology — and a women’s council. These committees and women’s councils exist at all four levels. In turn commissions at local levels coordinate their work with commissions in adjacent areas. There is also an additional commission, health, responsible for coordinating access to health care (regardless of ability to pay) and maintaining hospitals, in which medical professionals fully participate. Except for the women’s councils, all bodies have male and female co-leaders.
At least 40 percent of the attendees must be women in order for a commune decision to be binding. That quota reflects that women’s liberation is central to the Rojava project on the basis that the oppression of women at the hands of men has to be completely eliminated for any egalitarian society to be born.
A system of women’s houses provides spaces for women to discuss their issues. These centres also offer courses on computers, language, sewing, first aid, culture and art, as well as providing assistance against social sexism. As with peace committees that seek to find a solution rather than mete out punishments in adjudicating conflicts, the first approach when dealing with violence or other issues of sexism is to affect a change in behaviour. One manifestation of putting these beliefs into action is the creation of women’s militias, which have played leading roles in battlefield victories over Islamic State.
The basis of Rojava’s economy are cooperatives. The long-term goal is to establish an economy based on human need, environmentalism and equality, distinctly different from capitalism. Such an economy can hardly be established overnight, so although assistance is provided to cooperatives, which are rapidly increasing in number, private capital and markets do still exist.
The practitioners of democratic confederalism say they reject both capitalism and the Soviet model of state ownership. They say they represent a third way, embodied in the idea that self-management in the workplace goes with self-management in politics and administration.
Cooperative enterprises are not intended to be competitive against one another. Cooperatives are required to be connected to the council system; independence is not allowed. Cooperatives work through the economics commissions to meet social need and in many cases their leadership is elected by the communes. The intention is to form cooperatives in all sectors of the economy. But basic necessities such as water, land and energy are intended to be fully socialised, with some arguing that these should be made available free of charge. Because the economy will retain some capitalist elements for some time, safeguards are seen as necessary to ensure that cooperatives don’t become too large and begin to behave like private enterprises.
As revolutionaries, we are actively engaged in looking for ways to struggle against forms of power and build towards new forms of organization. Rojava offers much for our learning process. From communal relationships to the councils and self-defence units, we can assess numerous potential routes by which we can create liberated communities at home, while learning from their possibilities and pitfalls.
As anarchists a large part of our discourse is convincing others that self-governance works. Often during the course of a project, people new to our politics have been skeptical of the practicality of anarchism, decentralised decision making, and anti-state organising. We can explain how these attributes function in Rojava, which, in turn, makes our organising goals more attainable in their eyes. Rojava’s decentralised model exemplifies what is possible today, and how people can begin establishing these revolutionary processes in their own communities.
Early last year, the Turkish government invaded Afrin, one of the three cantons of Rojava. Some 200,000 residents fled the area and an estimated 500 civilians were killed. More than 800 Kurdish fighters and international volunteers died trying to defend the area, and the resistance still carries on to day
With the withdrawal of the USA from the area the Turkish government is threatening another incursion into northern Syria which would be disastrous for the Syrian Kurds and the revolution in Rojava.
Two international global days of action on the 27 and 28 January has been called for, and in solidarity with this we are issuing this statement to demonstrate our support, and would encourage all of Aotearoa’s anarchists to join us.
#riseup4rojava
Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement