Building Free Life: Dialogues with Öcalan © 2020 PM Press
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Building Free Life In ancient Greek philosophy, kairos signifies the right time or the “moment of transition.” We believe that we live in such a transitional period. The most important task of social science in time of transformation is to trans- form itself into a force of liberation. Kairos, an editorial imprint of the Anthropology and Social Change department housed in the California Institute of Integral Studies, publishes groundbreaking works in critical social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, geography, theory of education, political ecology, political theory, and history. Series editor: Andrej Grubačić Recent and featured Kairos books: Practical Utopia: Strategies for a Desirable Society by Michael Albert In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism: The San Francisco Lectures by John Holloway Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore We Are the Crisis of Capital: A John Holloway Reader by John Holloway Archive That, Comrade! Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance by Phil Cohen Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language by Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava by Thomas Schmidinger Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism by Silvia Federici Beyond Crisis: After the Collapse of Institutional Hope in Greece, What? edited by John Holloway, Katerina Nasioka, and Panagiotis Doulos For more information visit www.pmpress.org/blog/kairos/ Building Free Life Dialogues with Öcalan Building Free Life: Dialogues with Öcalan © 2020 PM Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN: 978–1–62963–704–4 (paperback) ISBN: 978–1–62963–764–8 (hardcover) ISBN: 978–1–62963–768–6 (ebook) Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933010 Cover Image: Abdullah Öcalan by Jim Fitzpatrick Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com Interior design by briandesign 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org Printed in the USA. Published with International Initiative Edition International Initiative “Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan – Peace in Kurdistan” P.O. Box 100 511 D-50445 Cologne Germany www.freeocalan.org First Published in 2019 by Aram, Diyarbakir Translation where necessary by International Initiative Contents IntroductIon 1 International Initiative SECTION I INTRODUCTIONS, BACKGROUNDS, POSTSCRIPTS one Jumping on the Bus 9 John Holloway two Öcalan, European Law, and the Kurdish Question 11 Norman Paech three A Grand and Comprehensive Dialogue 19 Ekkehard Sauermann four Preface to The Road Map 36 Immanuel Wallerstein fIve Prologue to Abdullah Öcalan’s The Road Map to Negotiations 40 Arnaldo Otegi sIx From World System to Democratic Civilization 45 Barry K. Gills seven “A Prisoner Who Is Becoming Mythical” 49 Antonio Negri SECTION II THE ROOTS OF CIVILIZATION eIght Abdullah Öcalan 55 Peter Lamborn Wilson nIne Öcalan’s Manifesto and the Challenge of Transcending Centricity 67 Donald H. Matthews and Thomas Jeffrey Miley ten Historiography, Gender, and Resistance 85 Muriel González Athenas SECTION III WEAVING AND LINKING eleven Reading Öcalan as a South Asian Woman 103 Radha D’Souza twelve “There Can Be No Utopia or Reality That Is More Ambitious Than This”: The Democratic Modernism of Svetozar Marković and Abdullah Öcalan 119 Andrej Grubačić thIrteen Imaginary Dialogues with Öcalan: Updating Critical Thinking 134 Raúl Zibechi SECTION IV POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL ACTION fourteen Making Connections: Jineolojî, Women’s Liberation, and Building Peace 147 Mechthild Exo fIfteen Öcalan as Thinker: On the Unity of Theory and Practice as Form of Writing 167 David Graeber sIxteen Rojava or the Art of Transition in a Collapsing Civilization 191 Fabian Scheidler seventeen When Öcalan Met Bookchin: The Kurdish Freedom Movement and the Political Theory of Democratic Confederalism 199 Damian Gerber and Shannon Brincat eIghteen Re-enchantment of the Political: Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Confederalism, and the Politics of Reasonableness 216 Patrick Huff nIneteen The Theology of Democratic Modernity: Labor, Truth, and Freedom 235 Nazan Üstündağ twenty Power and Truth: Analytics of Power and Nomadic Thought as Fragments of a Philosophy of Liberation 261 Michael Panser Afterword 268 Abdullah Öcalan Index 271 PublIcAtIons by AbdullAh ÖcAlAn In englIsh 281 Introduction International Initiative Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but . life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. —Gabriel García Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera While most of us refer to our own birth as a certain date, the day of our physical birth, Abdullah Öcalan has frequently mentioned that he was born three times. The third birth—after his physical birth and the founding of the organization he is best known for, the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK: Kurdistan Workers’ Party)—is his paradigm shift toward his concept of “democratic civilization.” This book, published to mark his seventieth birthday, in a certain way, tells the story of this third birth. The massive transformation that Kurdish society has undergone in the last forty years did not primarily happen through books. In a culture that relies heavily on oral literature, songs, conversation, and word of mouth, speeches and personal dialogue have been very important. Öcalan—although he authored several books in the 1970s and 1980s, and a total of more than sixty to date, twelve of them in prison—is mainly a man of the spoken word and of dialogue. This makes his prison condi- tions since 1999, the total isolation and absence of dialogue, all the harder. Dialogue became monologue, and his only way to communicate with an audience was to write court submissions, his so-called defenses or prison writings. In the face of a possible genocide, he did not formulate 1 Building Free liFe an individual defense but acted as a spokesperson for his people—and eventually for all the oppressed peoples of the Middle East. But, still, it is not fair to speak of a monologue. Abdullah Öcalan’s writings, first addressed to various courts in Turkey and Europe and subsequently published, did initiate a form of dialogue. The essays com- municate with storytellers from mythological pasts as well as with living intellectuals, with companions who know him personally and unknown readers on other continents, with supporters and opponents alike—even with his long deceased mother. His writings are being translated—some of them into as many as twenty languages—and are read and discussed by people all over the world. The International Initiative and many others have taken up this dia- logue and discussed his ideas with people/s who are also weaving and building a free life. In many countries and places, we tried to further the dialogue with and between the young, women, anarchists, libertarian socialists, social ecologists, autonomists, Indigenous peoples, workers, and all those whose hearts, minds, and praxis are dedicated to furthering the quest for a free life. This book is our attempt to reflect those discus- sions and dialogues and the process of learning from one another. This book for the first time collects written reactions to Abdullah Öcalan’s prison writings. It brings together a number of academics, writers, and revolutionaries who are interested in and inspired by his thought. Since it is going to appear in various languages, it is an attempt to deepen and broaden the existing dialogue. Hopefully it will also pierce through prison walls, since the severe isolation conditions in the İmralı Island prison allow for very little of that dialogue to get back to the author. As writing has become the means for Öcalan to overcome his isolation and communicate with a wider audience, we hope that this book will be a way for that very audience to reach back to him and contribute to his relentless and resilient effort to create a better world. The essays span a period of twenty years, and you will be able to trace a certain development. The topics discussed broaden in scope as they move away from the confines of nationalism and security-related issues toward more far-reaching ideas about the history of civilization and the struggle between capitalist modernity and democratic modernity as the current expression of a conflict that stretches back eons. What is constant throughout the essays is the excitement about Öcalan’s attempt at writing a holistic history of all the oppressed and 2 INTRODUCTION linking their different struggles to become free or remain free. New con- cepts arise, such as democratic modernity, democratic nation, democratic confederalism, and especially jineolojî as a form of knowledge that could bring about the transformation needed for our quest to build free life. The book is divided into four sections. Section I, “Introductions, Backgrounds, Postscripts,” consists mainly of writings that have been published as forewords or afterwords to translations of Öcalan’s books. Some of these writings are by people who, already in 1999, the year of Öcalan’s abduction, were familiar with his thinking and the Kurdish situ- ation, among them Norman Paech and the late Ekkehard Sauermann, or