OP-ED: A Glimmer of Hope: The extraordinary story of a revolution within the Syrian civil war By Shawn Hattingh
In the north and eastern parts of Syria, an attempt to create an alternative system to hierarchical states, capitalism and patriarchy is underway and should it fully succeed it holds the potential to inspire the struggle for a better, more egalitarian Middle East, Africa, South Africa and indeed world.
In the early 2000s, Ocalan nonetheless began a process of reflecting on what went wrong with past revolutionary struggles, most notably the Russian Revolution and the communist party’s rise to power as head of the Chinese state. During these revolutions, the energy of millions of people was released, a hope of a better future grew, only to flounder on the rise of the totalitarian states that emerged.
He also argued states were inherently patriarchal and first arose in societies where a minority became an elite ruling class, but also importantly, in ones in which men began oppressing women and exploiting their labour. He concluded, due to their very structures — which centralised power — states could not escape or be altered to fundamentally shift away from their original purpose: Enabling an elite to hold power and rule over society.
By the mid-2000s most people involved in the Kurdish national liberation struggle in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran had come to adopt Democratic Confederalism. With this, they began to attempt to forge a new world in the shell of the old by building a mass movement of community-based councils and assemblies across southern Turkey, northeastern Syria, northern Iraq and northwestern Iran.
The communes, in fact, have full autonomy and are where true power resides. Through mass meetings, they are the sole decision-making bodies regarding the economy, services, development, education and defence in the areas they cover. No structure or institution has any right or ability to override decisions made by the communes.
Ultimately it does seem to be the case that the communes do hold real power, although introducing elements of representative democracy in the Syrian Democratic Council holds the real danger of introducing new hierarchies. An important development, though, is that women play a central role in this system of Democratic Confederalism. Each assembly or council — including the Syrian Democratic Council — have to ensure gender parity among delegates.
In January 2019, the Turkish state in fact began to make plans for the invasion of northern Syria to end the revolution. The Turkish state fears the revolution will spread into Turkey itself and it does not want an experiment in direct democracy, feminism, ecology, anti-statism, and anti-capitalism to succeed.
Democratic Confederalism, as is shown in Syria, offers another way to run society. Its direct democracy can temper corruption and create greater equality as power cannot be centralised in such a system and wealth cannot be accumulated individually.
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