Thanks for your responses, @achronon and @Michael_Stumpf. It’s been fascinating to learn more about the Rojava cooperative movement and the Kurdish people in general, who are so beautiful and interesting.
How amazing it is that an actual feminist-anarchist radical democratic movement has taken shape in the most unlikely of places…making it perhaps exactly the sort of place (or the kind of conditions) where we should be looking—in a liminal zone between people and statehood, under intense, violent pressure from all sides, finding a new balance and social forms that could transcend the very conditions that gave it rise.
I am reminded of W Heiner Mühlmann’s theory of “Maximal Stress Cooperation,” which was discussed in the “Generations” series of Cafés:
Are the Rojava not an example of a generative reality?
We have also broached this notion of a postnational/stateless society here: The end of a world of nation-states may be upon us – Jamie Bartlett | Aeon Magazine
And we’ve discussed municipal/democratic confederalism and the writings of Murray Bookchin (a major inspiration for Abdullah Ocalan) here: A new model for the left?
More background on the Kurds:
And here is an interesting commentary (propaganda—but still…) from a Westerner who’s joined the cause for the ideals—echos of Republican Spain…
Another ideological (in the neutral sense of that term) explanation:
And finally, David Graeber, who had the opportunity to visit Rojava:
As Trump said (in his Trumpian, amoral way): the Kurds are not angels. (Or are they?) My interest is not in the violent part of the Kurds’ necessary struggle—I still enjoy the privilege of living in the shell of American empire—but rather in how such a radical movement could undo the power dynamics that perpetuate political violence in the first place.
If the Kurds can at least attempt it (assuming they survive the latest incursions by Turkey, which I assume they will, by whatever means), why can’t we, who have it so much easier?