The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan is a collection of four key texts extracted by his translator and editors from the prison writings, a massive collection of manuscripts and books written by Öcalan since his incarceration in the Imrali Prison Island in 1999. The first text, “War and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution to the Kurdish Question” gives a brief outline of the history of Kurdistan. It evaluates the creation of a modern nation- state system in the region as the most destructive event in the history of the Kurds. This text also introduces the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, the political organisation Öcalan helped to establish in the 1970s and which he led until his abduction from Kenya in February 1999. Here, he provides a general critique on politics and the way politics was pursued by the PKK.
Declaring the nation-state and nationalism as a polity and ideology of social aggression, “War and Peace in Kurdistan” provides a general framework for another form of politics. Analytically, Öcalan makes a distinction between the idea of the state and the idea of government. While the first, in the form of the nation-state, comes with oppression and homogenisation, the second is thought from the idea of self-organisation and self-government. Within this context, democratisation emerges as the advancement of the capacity for self-organisation and self-government. This idea of self-organisation is the subject of further interrogation in the second text, named “Democratic Confederalism”, in which Öcalan embeds a discussion on self-organisation and self-government in a broad historical perspective, which is characteristic of his approach.
“Democratic Confederalism” starts with a discussion of the emergence of the nation-state, which Öcalan analyses as an institution that monopolises political, cultural and economic processes. It then goes on to explain the contradiction between the nation-state and society, arguing that historically a strengthening of the nation-state went hand-in-hand with a weakening of the self-organising and self-governing capacities of people. This treaty on democratic confederalism as a method of and structure for the organisation of government takes the enhancement of society against the state as a key starting point.
The third text, named “Liberating Life: Woman’s Revolution”, discusses the development of the state system and capitalist modernity in relation to the “woman question”. Öcalan argues that the nation-state and capitalism represent the institutionalisation of the dominant male. He discusses this institutionalisation of the dominant male from the perspective of what he refers to as two, historically situated “sexual ruptures”. The first rupture that occurred in dual-voiced society was that of “religionisation” around the idea of the strong man in the Neolithic era, dated at some 4,000 years ago. A masculine single voiced social culture developed, which came together with a process of silencing and “housewification” of women. The second “sexual rupture” is referred to as the intensification of patriarchy through monotheistic religions. In the previous world of multiple gods, women were attributed creative powers, but in the narrative of the monotheistic religions, the position of women shifted from the creator to the created, symbolised in the claim that woman was created from a man’s rib. In this rupture, the female body becomes the locus of man’s sexuality, and his honour. Öcalan argues that when analysed from this perspective, it is clear that the abolition of this form of masculinity has to be the objective of emancipatory movements, which he refers to as the “killing of the dominant male”.
The fourth and final text is named “Democratic Nation”. Here, Öcalan argues that socialism cannot be realised by mimicking the capitalist form, that is, through the establishment of the nation-state. Instead, a progressive politics should be based on the idea of a democratic nation, which he defines not in terms of a shared language or ethnicity, but as a community sharing the same mind-set. This allows him to think of the nation not in terms of linguistic, ethnic or cultural homogeneity, but in terms of common values established through deliberation. Öcalan relates this idea of a democratic nation to the politics of democratic confederalism, but also to the need to sustain oneself through control over the means of production, which he defines as “economic autonomy”, and to self-defence, which is not solely or even principally defined in terms of the use of force, but rather in terms of the ability to develop one’s values and ideas.
These selected texts provide a good introduction to Abdullah Öcalan’s thoughts on society, history, religion and politics. Öcalan is a remarkable political thinker, and the extent and depth of his writings are noteworthy given the extraordinary conditions under which they have been written. He has written his books in almost solitary confinement, without being able to discuss his thoughts with others, and after the manuscripts left prison, he has never been able to read or correct them. Nevertheless, in these texts, Öcalan relates and enters debate with several contemporary political theorists.
His analysis of capitalist modernity as a world system is clearly influenced by the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein; his writings on the historical development of the state and capitalist modernity recall the historian Ferdinand Braudel, who coined the term the “longue durée” to identify and understand the long-term historical structures underlying contemporary form; and in his analysis of patriarchy and gender and the development of social hierarchies as part of such a longue durée, Öcalan turns to Maria Mies and her thesis of women as the last colony on its head, defining them as the first colony. In his references to the (pre)Neolithic as “primitive communism”, we recognise the work of Lewis Henry Morgan along with, of course, Marx and Engel. Comparisons of his work with that of Bookchin are obvious, yet Öcalan’s writings on democratic confederalism have many resemblances also to the work of Hannah Arendt on assemblies. In his belief in consensus and deliberation as a basis for politics, meanwhile, Öcalan comes close to the definition of politics by Habermas. And when he defines the struggle of the PKK as one involved in making the Kurdish issue visible, a theme from recent work by Judith Butler on politics and visibility comes to mind.
Without being exhaustive, this brief overview indicates the actuality and importance of Öcalan and his work in the context of political theory and debates today. My recommendation for a second edition would be to elaborate the introduction to the book with a brief discussion in which Öcalan and his work is placed in this wider context, showing the relevance of his thinking and the issues with which he is engaging. What is beyond the scope of this book, but equally needed, is a critical conversation on the thought of Öcalan, such as discussed in the introduction by Nadje Al Ali when she questions the idea in Öcalan’s work of sex and jineology. A deepening of this conversation as an extension towards Öcalan’s conceptualisation of state, nation and politics would be more than welcome
