Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

The Democratic Modernism of Svetozar Marković and Abdullah Öcalan

Written by Andrej Grubačić for the book Building Free Life: Dialogues with Öcalan (PM Press, 2020).

Svetozar Marković, the founder of Balkan socialism, was arrested in January 1874. He was immediately jailed in the Serbian town of Kragujevac. For the police records Marković gave his occupation as a writer; the local authorities recorded that he was “nothing but a tramp.” The damp, poorly heated cell of the Kragujevac jail was torture for the young socialist, who was suffering from tuberculosis. The trial against Marković, who stood accused of “press crimes,” attracted a large audience. The prosecutor described Marković as a “socialist Messiah” with a venomous pen, recklessly attacking the most important national institutions: the National Assembly, the constitutional laws of the founding fathers, even the king himself. In his speech before the Serbian court, Marković opposed the very essence of the utopia of capitalist modernity: the idea of the sovereign nation-state anchored to a bounded territory, as well as to a certain temporal (linear) and spatial (statist) order.

Marković spoke for the whole day. In a hoarse voice, he proclaimed that socialism is justice, and then collapsed into his chair. It was hard for the presiding judges to maintain order, for the courtroom was filled with peasants from the countryside, workers from the local factory, students, and townsmen, all coming to support the man who stood up against the bureaucrats who took their land and property, who taxed them and harassed them. Serbian peasants knew virtually nothing about socialism, but they knew Svetozar Marković, whom they regarded as a saint.

He was found guilty of all charges but due to enormous public support received a relatively lenient sentence of eighteen months in the state penitentiary in Požarevac. However, prison was a death sentence for Marković. He was dying of advanced tuberculosis, and the Požarevac prison was known in Serbia as the “house of the dead” or a “dry guillotine.” He continued to write in prison and in these last months of his life produced some of his most significant works, developing his theory of democratic communalism based on the institutions of zadruga (family commune) and opstina (village commune) and completing his thoughts on Balkan federalism, imagined as a stateless federation of all Balkan peoples.

He left the prison in November 1874, and immediately began publishing his last newspaper, Oslobođjenje (Liberation). In this phase of his work, his ideas were clearly elaborated as internal and social reorganization on the basis of direct democracy and communal self-government, as well as revolution in Turkey and federation in the Balkan Peninsula. His ideas about democratic communalism and stateless federalism unnerved the government, and the police confronted him with two specific charges: “treacherous undertaking” and “spreading hatred against the prince.” After giving most of his money to the first school for women in Serbia, he escaped to the Hungarian town of Baja, where he boarded a train to Trieste. It is there, on the morning of February 26, that he died. He was twenty-eight years old. When his body arrived to Serbia, it was greeted by thousands of peasants who came to bid farewell to their beloved Svetozar, some of them shouting at the police to remove their hats in the presence of the saint.

Most of his followers joined the long awaited revolt in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which erupted in July 1875. They played important roles in the so-called Balkan crisis of 1875–1878. The plight of the peasantry, coupled with anti-colonial struggle against the Ottomans, provided fertile ground for socialist agitation. Socialist demonstrations were held throughout Serbia, and on many occasions the red flag was prominently displayed. In 1878, in Kragujevac, five hundred people paraded through the streets, singing the “Marseillaise,” shouting

Long live the Republic!
Long live the Commune!
Long live communal autonomy!

and chanting a Serbian “Carmagnole”:

Against God and the ruler,
Against the priest and the altar,
Against the crown and the scepter,
And the merchant usurer,
For the worker, for the peasant,
We fight the good fight.

Svetozar Marković belonged to a specific tradition of left radicalism that was at the very center of the global radical culture of the nineteenth century. Indeed, after the magisterial works of the historians of this tradition, such as Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Sho Konishi, and Benedict Anderson, it is impossible to view the history of nineteenth-century radicalism as a history of North European Marxism.1 According to Khuri-Makdisi, European scholars relegated this fascinating radical tradition to a mere backstage within the global history of the left. One of the reasons for this oversight, she suggests, is that the politics of this period does not fit the usual description of the “left.” One would have been hard-pressed to find revolutionary left in the north of Europe, where social democracy and the Second International were dominant. The revolutionary left was strong in the south, and it was mostly anti-statist, without rigid ideology, notions of class-consciousness or the revolutionary party, or other traditional categories of the bureaucratic left. Before the Russian Revolution and the establishment of party/state-defined movements, the left consisted of a multiplicity of radicalisms, united in the opposition to capitalism and the state. This global movement promoted a political counter-imagination of a transnational shared space external to capitalist modernity: a democratic modernity of cooperation and mutual aid.2

Japanese historian Sho Konishi points out the particular nature of organizing inherent to the politics of democratic modernity, which he refers to as the practice of translation.3 Instead of focusing exclusively and narrowly on the urban industrial working class as a presumed agent of revolutionary change, organizing was aimed at peasants, intellectuals, migrant and unskilled workers, artisans, and artists. Ideas of democratic modernity developed and spread not according to the logic of diffusionism but to that of translation. There was no unidirectional transfer of knowledge from Europe, whether in the form of direct influence, selfcolonization, indigenization, or reconfiguration. What we had instead was the multidirectional travel of ideas, with knowledge being altered and added to at each turn. Mutual translation was a practice of definition and redefinition, articulation and rearticulation, in which political concepts were negotiated between languages to produce new concepts. Constructed in this way, translation in practice failed to inspire cultural nationalism. It inspired a sense of transnational sympathy and common experience and a sense that an injury to one is an injury to all.

If the first part of democratic modernity in the long nineteenth century was the practice of translation, the second element was refusal of the state as an exclusive framework for the political organization of society. Democratic modernity was stateless modernity. This, in turn, implied two important revisions. The first one was a relationship to time. In place of the linear thinking common to both Marxist and liberal versions of capitalist modernity, democratic modernity suggested a newly imagined future where the present is a key moment in time and space in which people were to rectify history for the future. Socialism would ultimately be a product of tendencies that are apparent now in the society and that were always, in some sense, imminent in the present. In this restorative historicity, the past was narrated into the future, and the present became the backward past, as a product of capitalist modernity being perceived as barbaric, unmodern, and morally unjustifiable. As formulated in a popular Serbian proverb, you walk into the present with a past ahead of you and the future at your back. Moreover, the new democratic future was to be created as a detour by way of the past.4

The second revision concerns space, or an alternative form of a political organization. The alternative to the state form was seen as a decentralized federal organization. The first socialist federalist proposals, elaborated by Proudhon and Kropotkin, are well known; those of Svetozar Marković are less famous but no less original.5 In a dialogue with Marx and Bakunin, he sought a “balkanized” socialism, defined not as a new economic system but as a new way of life based on communal institutions and instincts rather than upon inexorable historical laws.6 His broad program outlined a system of local self-government based on the family commune, which he proposed to rehabilitate and improve, and the village commune.7 He refused to see economic equality as separate from political freedom and argued for communization and decentralization. The problem of bread, Marković concluded, is the problem of self-government. His democratic socialism was ethical and visionary, eclectic and humane. He believed that “female emancipation was one of the foremost tasks of revolutionary socialism.”8 “Far from being incoherent, his revolutionary program rested very firmly on two far-reaching proposals: democratic communalism and horizontal federalism. These proposals were based on the notion of the bureaucracy as a distinct social class.9

He valued Marx as the most profound critic of the social and economic development of the industrialized West, but he held Nikolay Chernishevsky and Mikhail Bakunin in the same esteem. His entire life as a revolutionary embodied a search for a method of translation between Western and Russian socialism, in the light of their possible application to the reality of rural Serbia. He never thought much of the Western industrial proletariat as the exclusive agent of social change. He thought Marx’s exposition of class struggle was incomplete and eschewed Marx’s historical determinism. It is the local conditions, Marković insisted, that will determine the nature of the new cooperative society that the working class will establish in respective regions. European socialism, like socialism in any other territory, would rest on industrial and agricultural associations shaped by local historical and economic patterns.

Our task is not to destroy capitalism, which in fact does not exist, but rather to transform small patriarchal property into collective property, in order to leap over an entire historical epoch of economic development—the epoch of capitalist economy. . . . In the whole Marxist theory of economic evolution there is only one error, but an extremely important one. The development of capitalist society is the history of Western European society; the laws cited as the laws of development of this society are indeed completely accurate. But they are not laws of human society in general. It is not necessary for every society to pass through all the same stages of economic development as industrial society (for example, England, which Karl Marx had predominantly in view). With this, we wish to say that absolutely no society has to go through the purgatory of capitalist production.10

In this sense, as he wrote in 1871, Marxist theory does not provide a “positive basis for the solution of social problems in Serbia.”11 Later, in 1873, he added:

Marx’s program, which the International adopted, is, in the first place, one-sided and inapplicable to almost all nations except England. According to it the International will be in the minority in all countries and will never seize power. Accordingly, the Building Free L i f e International must put forward a broad program and not just the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, or it will disintegrate and come to ruin in its own bailiwick.12

A second area of disagreement with Marx was the history and nature of the state. The state is not inevitable, and it is certainly not desirable, not even in its temporary existence as a dictatorship of the proletariat: “Marx and his group within the International,” Marković argued, “concerned itself primarily with economic affairs, while the Russian revolutionary tradition struck deep at the social organization of the state.” It was not only capitalism but also the state organization that had a historical and transient character. Instead of the state, he envisioned a directly democratic form of self-government, organized as coordination between communes or local autonomous units whose “primary function would be the regulation of economic life and the organization of work in the interest of society as a whole, for the creation of wealth to be used by the whole society.”13

Marković provided the final outlines of his democratic communalism in a series of studies that he wrote in Pozarevac prison. The workers’ communes were to be the foundation of communalist society, a society where everyone works according to their ability and receives according to their needs. The state will disappear, and the society will become one large commune; this, Marković said, would be “complete communism.” Marković defined zadruga, or family commune, as an extended family living on common property, working and consuming jointly. The distinguishing feature of the zadruga was the communal ownership of property.

The second institution upon which Marković proposed to build his democratic communalism in the Balkan Peninsula was opstina. The village commune was an administrative, political, and fiscal entity. He was not blind to the shortcomings of both of these twin pillars of democratic communalism. He recognized that the zadruga was fast disappearing, and that both the zadruga and the opstina had a patriarchal character that was inconsistent with socialism. In his view, the zadruga was declining because of its treatment of women, who felt that this restrictive patriarchal environment was responsible in great measure for their misery. This is why Marković looked at the village commune as a germ, not as a model, of a future society, a communal institution awaiting a socialist reinvention.14

Perhaps his greatest contribution to Balkan socialism is his democratic federalist project: a feverish attempt to subdue the separate nationalisms of the Balkan peoples in favor of all-inclusive, directly democratic federalism.15 He argued for socialist movements that are not only anticolonial with respect to the West and the East but also revolutionary with respect to the Balkan past. Marković was an antiauthoritarian socialist who believed in a pluricultural Balkan Federation organized as a decentralized, directly democratic society based on local agricultural and industrial associations.16

World War I marked the end of the first phase of the democratic modernist project. Voices of cooperative/stateless modernity were erased, often killed, and ultimately defeated in the historical struggle between two traditions of the left. The anti-systemic movement of the day adopted a two-step strategy: to take state power, and then, from above, to create a socialist humanity. State-defined and party-defined movements had triumphed after the Russian Revolution in 1917.17 With immense cruelty, the twentieth century has shown that taking state power is not enough, and that the statist-evolutionist concept of progress, defined as an eschatological end of history, is a dangerous illusion. Hence it is crucial today, in our collective effort to reinvent social emancipation, to distance ourselves from the theoretical traditions that led us to the dead end we find ourselves in. One way to do this is to draw on the central legacy of Marković, which is “balkanization,” or regional delinking.

Balkanization, thus defined, implies an active dialectical relationship with the capitalist world-system, a process of selective cutting off and selective engagement, an active insertion capable of modifying the conditions of capitalist globalization. Refusing worldwide capitalist expansion does not necessitate isolation but, rather, the re-articulation of economic and political development in terms relevant to localized needs and concerns. I believe that balkanization—delinking on a regional level—offers an alternative project for the world left that should be further refined to fit new conditions. The place to start is the non-state space of Kurdish Rojava and the theory behind the Rojava revolution.

Like Svetozar Marković, Abdullah Öcalan believes that we live in the time when it is necessary to (re)invent a new kind of national liberation project. In Öcalan’s formulation, “[W]hen society and civilisation meet, the main contradiction is between the state and democracy.”18 In this collective effort to reinvent social emancipation, we need to recover, excavate, and reinvent the emancipatory energies and subjectivities of what he calls democratic modernity.19 Democratic modernity, a process and a project, is conceived not just as an alternative to capitalist accumulation but as an entirely diffe ent civilization. The trialectics of democratic modernity includes liberation of nature from capitalism, liberation of democracy from the state, and liberation of women from masculine domination. Another defining element of democratic modernity is the “democratic nation.” For Öcalan, the main problem of modernity is the coupling of power and the state with the nation, “the most tyrannical aspect of modernity.” Nationalism is not just an obstacle but a form of religious attachment imposed by the nation-state.20 The revolutionaries in Rojava speak of the democratic nation as an alternative to the statist nation. It is an “organization of life detached from the state,” as well as the “right of society to construct itself.”21 The democratic nation is a collective based on free agreement and plural identity. Instead of an ethno-statist nation, an inevitable product of a network of suppression and exploitation, we encounter an innovative conceptualization of a form of collective life

that is not bound by rigid political boundaries, one language, culture, religion and interpretation of history, that signifies plurality and communities as well as free and equal citizens existing together and in solidarity. The democratic nation allows the people to become a nation themselves, without resting on power and state.22

Thus defined, the democratic nation does not require dominant ethnicity or a dominant language. The organization of collective life is based not on a homeland or a market but on freedom and solidarity. Territory is important, and a sense of belonging to a place is only natural, but as a place-based (not place-bound) “tool for life.”

As Öcalan suggests:

[T]he democratic nation is the model of a nation that is the least exposed to such illnesses of being a state nation. It does not sacralize its government. Governance is a simple phenomenon that is at the service of daily life. Anyone who meets the requirements can become a public servant and govern. Leadership is valuable, but not sacred. Its understanding of national identity is open-ended, not fixed like being a believer or a member of a religion. Belonging to a nation is neither a privilege nor a flaw. One can belong to more than one nation. To be more precise, one can experience intertwined and different nationalities. . . . With all these characteristics, the democratic nation is once again taking its place in history as a robust alternative to capitalist modernity’s maddening instrument of war: nation-statism.23 

The political expression of democratic confederalism with democratic autonomy, which is a political expression of the democratic nation, is conceptualized as a pluricultural model of communal self-governance and democratic socialism.24 He provides an elegant definition of democracy as “a practice and process of self-governance in a non-state society. . . . Democracy is governance that is not state; it is the power of communities to govern themselves without the state.”25

There is nothing permanent or fixed about the process of direct democracy and democratic autonomy. Democracy abhors timelines. As Öcalan writes in one of his most moving passages, the democratic nation

represents a truth that requires devotion at the level of real love. Just as there is no room for false love in this voyage, there is also no room for uncommitted travelers. In this voyage, the question of when the construction of the democratic nation will be completed is a redundant one. This is a construction that will never be finished: it is an ongoing process. The construction of democratic nation has the freedom to re-create itself at every instant. In societal terms, there can be no utopia or reality that is more ambitious than this.26

Abdullah Öcalan has a keen interest in history. He rejects the liberal belief in “natural perversity of mankind.” State and capitalism were a radical departure from natural tendencies toward democracy and cooperation, and they developed by crushing cooperative solidarities.27 However, the state could never prevent people from relating differently to each other and to nature. Furthermore, history has demonstrated that capitalism and the state are inseparable facts and concepts that were developed to prevent direct association among people. In his view, democracy without a state is not a new order but a reconstitution of something that has always been present, that is always in existence, laid to waste alongside the rise of the state. Democracy as self-government was a constructive force that flourished when small parts of humanity broke down the power of their rulers and reassumed their freedoms in “vibrant interstices,” relatively autonomous from the intrusive power of
the nation-state.

This is why progress assumes a different meaning in the conceptual language of democratic modernity.28 In this view, capitalist modernity suggests an experience of time as inevitable and linear progress, with an attendant division between nature and culture and an imagined and imposed international spatial hierarchical model.

He calls for radical overturning of the social Darwinism widely promoted by liberal intellectuals and state-centered social sciences. Against the civilization fueled by rationality, possessive individualism, and nation-states, he advocates a democratic civilization created by acts of everyday communism, self-organization, mutual interdependence, and association. Against the utopian finality of a nation-state, he emphasizes actually existing cooperative practices of mutual aid and voluntary association as democratic practices retrieved from both past and present.29 In agreement with the ideas of Marxist geographer Henri Lefebvre, Öcalan speaks of the “power of everyday life.”30

It is in this space of everyday life that cooperative society must be reinvented and recovered, power socialized and evenly redistributed, as a democratic nation becomes “once again” a restorative and creative historical force that “re-democratizes those societal relations that have been shattered by nation statism.” Here, Öcalan’s thought discloses a curious affinity with the historical sociology of Reinhardt Kosselleck and his notion of the temporality of lived time, or the temporality of possible futures and futures past.31 Society without the state is not society without history, but it is antagonistic to the capitalist present, resisting what Öcalan terms “societycide.”32 Society becomes ecological society, predicated on the liberation of women, referred to as the “first colony” in the five-thousandyear history of domination.

Progress is spontaneous and free experimentation with new social forms. He opposes the idea of progress and temporality that defines the imagined territorial utopia of liberal modernity. The resistance comes from the places and peoples least exposed to the violence of the modern capitalist world-system. It points to the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, as a way to encourage radical new forms of selfgovernment that would return decision-making to local communities in democratic federal institutions.33 Decentralization, for Öcalan, is a form of social organization; it does not involve geographical isolation but a particular sociological use of geography. For Öcalan, democracy without a state presumes an interwoven network composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees. Federalism is seen as a basic principle of human organization. Defined as such, democratic confederalism is not a program for political change but an act of social self-determination.

This form of balkanization from the world of capitalist modernity is effected through the production of alternative and oppositional conceptions of a non-state space, a recovery/invention of the new/old world that would consist of multiple autonomous micro-societies bound together within mutually agreed upon federal structures.34 More ambitiously than Svetozar Marković, Öcalan suggests a world federation as a successor to the hierarchical interstate organization of the capitalist world-system.35 The statist nation would be replaced by a geographical confederation of confederations, in which all affairs would be settled by mutual agreement, contract, and arbitration.

Öcalan maintains that the conditions “are ripe in the twenty-first century to avoid the fate of confederal structures which were eliminated by the nation-states in the mid-nineteenth century, and to achieve the victory of democratic confederalism.”36 If the Kurds are today at the forefront of the struggle for theglobal democratization of society, that is because the liberation of Kurds is inextricably linked to the liberation of life, to the emancipation of humanity and nature:

In accordance with their historical and societal reality, the Kurds have vigorously turned towards the construction of a democratic nation. As a matter of fact, they have lost nothing by ridding themselves of a nation-state god in which they never believed; they are rid of a very heavy burden, a burden that brought them to the brink of annihilation. Instead, they have gained the opportunity to become a democratic nation.37

Indeed, who could be better poised to pave the way to a state-free modernity than stateless people engaged in a bitter anti-fascist struggle for dignity and life? The stateless socialism of Syrian Rojava becomes, in his words, a model for another Middle East and another possible world of autonomous regions.

Weaving all these different threads together, he arrives at a definition of democratic modernity as an integral organization of democratic nation, communality, and ecology. This “system of liberated life” stands in stark opposition to the capitalist trinity of nation-state, capitalism, and industrialism.38

Taken together, the utopian vision promoted by Abdullah Öcalan, a vision of planetary balkanization and planetary confederation, of nature in humanity and humanity in nature, of liberation of women, colonies, and nature, of democratic socialism without a state, of a democratic nation without nationalism, constitutes an insurgent and integral ecology of hope that should be placed in dialogue with the ideas of Svetozar Marković. The left needs to recover a part of its history that was suppressed by various forms of Leninist internationalism. As Edward Thompson was fond of saying, history is forever unresolved: it is a field of unfinished possibilities. We reach back to refuse some possibilities, and we reach back to select and develop others. That is what we need to do today. We need to refuse some historical possibilities. By this I refer to liberal vision of civilization and progress. But I would also emphasize refusing Lenin’s vision of party-centered and state-centered internationalism and socialism. National liberation should be understood as democratic liberation from the statist-nation. Socialism should reinterpreted as movement against the state/party form. We should select and develop other unfinished possibilities. We should, as one Japanese exile has said, wake the people from utopian dreams of nation-states and sweep the world clean of capitalism by reviving and inventing the project of democratic modernity.

Notes
1 Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso Books, 2007). There is no scholarly consensus when it comes to naming this period in the history of the left. Khuri-Makdisi suggested an interesting but somewhat clunky expression, “global radical culture”; Konishi proposed “anarchist modernity” and “cooperative modernity.” I prefer to use the term introduced by Abdullah Öcalan, “democratic modernity”; Prison Writings, Volume 3: The Road Map to Negotiations (Cologne: International Initiative, 2012); Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization: Civilization, Volume 1: The Age of Masked Gods and Disguised Kings (Porsgrun, NO: New Compass Press, 2015); 2nd revised edition will be published by PM Press in 2021; Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume 2:Capitalism: The Age of Unmasked Gods and Naked Kings (Porsgrunn, NO: New Compass Press, 2017) ; 2nd revised edition will be published by PM Press in 2020.
2 Konishi, Anarchist Modernity.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Regional and federalist thinking constitutes one of the key aspects of anarchist political thought. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, Murray Bookchin, and Colin Ward recognized region as the basis for the total reconstruction of social and political life. It is the region not the nation that is the motor force of human development, suppressed, attacked, and eroded by the centralized nation-state and by capitalist industry. Anarchist thinkers opted for an alternative organization of socialist society, neither capitalist nor bureaucratic. Rather, they envisaged a society based on voluntary cooperation among men and women working and living in small self-governing communities. A century later, the economist Leopold Kohr published The Breakdown of Nations (Cambridge, UK: UIT Cambridge, 2017 [1957]), arguing, once again, that most of the world’s problems arise from the existence of the nation-state. For an overview of anarchist federalist and regionalist concepts, see Andrej Grubačić, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize: Essays after Yugoslavia (Oakland: PM Press, 2011); Andrej Grubačić, foreword to What Is Anarchism? An Introduction, ed. Vernon Richards and Donald Rooum (Oakland: PM Press, 2016).
6 There are several collections of Marković’s work. In this essay I use the most recent edition of the monumental collection Svetozar Marković, Celokupna Dela (Belgrade, RS: Zavod za Udzbenike Beograd, 1995).
7 Ibid.
8 Woodford McClellan, Svetozar Marković and the Origins of Balkan Socialism (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 1964), 65.
9 The concept of bureaucracy as a separate class, between labor and capital, is widely considered a major contribution to historical sociology. For more information on the recent history of this concept, see Grubačić, Don’t Mourn Balkanize.
10 Marković, Celokupna Dela, 200.
11 Ibid., 86.
12 Ibid., 145.
13 Ibid., 234.
14 McClellan, Svetozar Marković and the Origins of Balkan Socialism; Grubačić, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize.
15 Grubačić, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize.
16 Ibid.
17 Grubačić, foreword to What Is Anarchism?
18 Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Nation (Cologne: International Initiative Edition, 2016), 63.
19 Öcalan, The Road Map to Negotiations; Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Conederalism (Cologne: International Initiative, 2011); Abdullah Öcalan, Liberating Life: Women’s Revolution (Cologne: International Initiative, 2013); Öcalan, Democratic Nation; Öcalan, Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume 1; Öcalan, Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume 2.
20 Öcalan, Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume 2.
21 Öcalan, Democratic Nation, 21.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 27.
24 Öcalan, Liberating Life; there is no doubt that Öcalan’s thinking follows and further develops the (con)federalist project of other theorists of democratic modernity, including Marković, Peter Kropotkin, and Murray Bookchin. Öcalan was mainly familiar with Bookchin, whom he read and actively corresponded with during his incarceration.
25 Öcalan, Democratic Nation, 62.
26 Ibid., 60. The alternative to capitalist modernity is democratic modernity, with the democratic nation at its core, and “the economic, ecological and peaceful society it has woven within and outside of the democratic nation”; ibid., 28. In opposition to nation-statism, the democratic nation “detaches” itself from the nation-state as a core institution of capitalist modernity; Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Confederalism (Cologne: International Initiative, 2011). This would imply a deliberate fragmentation of the nation-state into non-state communities and townships linked together in complex new federal structures, wherein the mutual relations of its members would be regulated by mutual agreement and social custom.
27 Ibid.; Andrej Grubačić and Denis O’Hearn, Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
28 This is the real meaning of the curious formulation according to which “the solution to the Kurdish question, therefore, needs to be found in an approach that weakens capitalist modernity or pushes it back”; Öcalan, Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume 2, 20. Öcalan’s interpretation of history, just like Marković’s, is modern in a very peculiar sense: it is nonlinear and restoratively historical. History is projected into the future, and the present is seen as a product of backward capitalist modernity; Konishi, Anarchist Modernity.
29 Öcalan, Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume 2; Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity.
30 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2014), also see Konishi, Anarchist Modernity.
31 Reinhardt Kosselleck, Futures Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
32 Öcalan, Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume 2.
33 For an in-depth conversation on balkanization as a strategy of democratic space-making see Grubacic and O’Hearn, Living at the Edges of Capitalism.
34 Grubačić, Don’t Mourn, Balkanize.
35 Öcalan is quite clear that he sees Kurdish democratic autonomy as a model for the Middle East and the world, as “an emerging entity” that “expands dynamically into neighboring countries”; Democratic Confederalism, 36. The name of this emerging entity is democratic confederalism, a project that “promises to advance the democratization of the Middle East in general”; ibid., 20.
36 Ibid., 61.
37 Ibid., 60.
38 Öcalan, Liberating Life.