The freedom march that began in Ankara in the 1970s under the leadership of Abdullah Öcalan has turned into a march that today has become the hope of millions. The PKK, which held its first congress in 1978 in a house in the village of Fis in Amed, after 47 years reminded not only the Kurdish people or the peoples of the Middle East but also the peoples of the world that salvation lies in socialism, at a time when faith in socialism worldwide had sunk to almost nothing. It became a source of hope with a new understanding of socialism.
The PKK’s understanding of socialism is one that has varied across times and periods, never fixed in one place. Since its inception, it has always evaluated socialism with a critical perspective. This understanding, known by some as “Apocu Socialism”, was shaped within the struggle.
It all began in the chaotic atmosphere of the 1970s, in a house in Ankara. From the day Abdullah Öcalan openly voiced the sentence he had long carried in his mind without telling anyone, “Kurdistan is a colony”, nearly 50 years have passed. Despite being described from the outside in very different ways, the Apocu movement, in its most embraced and widely used definition, after 50 years of struggle, by 2025 put itself on the agenda of the world socialist movement by fully articulating a new definition of socialism at a time when disbelief in socialism has spread worldwide and pessimism has seeped into daily life.
A life that began in the village of Amara in Urfa (Riha) has now openly declared to the whole world that it leads the global socialist movement.
So, did the PKK and Öcalan just now meet socialism? Are their definitions of socialism new? What are their criticisms of real socialism and scientific socialism? Most importantly, what does “Democratic Nation Socialism” mean, and why was such a definition needed?
When Abdullah Öcalan’s historic call on February 27 was discussed word by word, his emphasis on socialism, followed by the PKK’s statements about socialism, and his written text introducing “Democratic Nation Socialism” while criticizing real socialist understandings, stirred major debates. Yet the debates always appeared incomplete in the public sphere.
In the PKK, socialism has always been filtered through critique, and a new understanding of socialism has appeared in every period. During the early group stage of the Freedom Movement, its search for socialism bore the clear features of real socialism. The group, especially shaped by a statist socialist ideal, adopted a Marxist-Leninist approach, rejecting the bourgeois system through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Although the Apocu group also included criticisms of real socialism and its practices, it essentially adopted the goal of building a real socialist state. In real socialism, after all, a socialist state meant the rule of a single party.
Writer Nasrullah Kuran, imprisoned for 33 years and who spent nine months of his detention on İmralı alongside Abdullah Öcalan, spoke to ANF about the development of socialism in the Kurdish Freedom Movement and the definition of “Democratic Nation Socialism,” which has drawn interest worldwide as a new socialist understanding.
I want to ask about a topic that has been especially debated recently. Did the PKK truly “return to socialism,” as some claim, or has it always consistently upheld socialism?
It depends on how one understands and interprets real socialism. If socialism is considered a science of humanity and society, that is, the science of keeping people and communities consistently hopeful, motivated, organized, and never leaving them without struggle, then the question becomes: who has actually succeeded in achieving this?
From the first meeting of the founding cadres in Ankara-Çubuk to the first manifesto, and throughout all stages from the PKK’s founding to the present, the PKK has realized itself as a socialist formation.
At a time when real socialism had collapsed, capitalist aggression and colonialism were at their peak, many organizations had abandoned struggle and integrated with the system, and humanity was left powerless, hopeless, and unorganized, the PKK was the organization that spoke and acted in the name of socialism. Under the slogan, “Persistence in socialism is persistence in being human,” it organized societal struggle and ensured continuity. Through its ideology, it awakened people to the consciousness of freedom, revealed its organizational structure through political construction, and kept socialist hope and belief alive through its actions.
How did it achieve this?
This was made possible by reproducing socialist theory and practice ideologically in parallel with societal realities and giving them a political and organizational form. The effort to create a new socialist individual and society constitutes, one could say, 95% of its struggle. The presence of thousands of militants today who live without limits in struggle, dedicating themselves to sacrifice and loyalty, and the reality of a populace resisting under all conditions, is a testament to this. Socialism is the act of society gaining consciousness and spirit, organizing itself, and constantly reconstructing itself. Socialist organizations and militants exist for this purpose, their duty is to keep societal belief, hope, and morale alive and organized. Has the PKK achieved this? Yes.
Its ideology of freedom, and the truth of the militant individuals and society it produced, created a unique difference and elevated it to a holistic 21st-century socialism. In our view, socialism and socialist identity are realized through this original and democratic existence concretely in human society, through the manifestation of freedom consciousness and belief.
Ultimately, the social phenomenon we call socialism is not the property of anyone; nor does it rely on a clerical or authoritative structure, and as far as we know, socialist organization has never created a caliphate issuing decrees on word and action. One is socialist to the degree one can socialize and awaken the spirit and consciousness of society into organized action according to the ideology of freedom. The more your consciousness and action are realized and generate societal impact, the more socialist you are. This is what we have learned from social life and the reality of struggle. Everything else, as the ancients would say, is idle talk. As the thinker says: “If you turn your back on those who shed light for you, the only thing you will see is your own darkness.”
There has always been critique within the PKK’s understanding of socialism. From the first manifesto to today, the PKK has pursued a struggle to apply socialism specifically in the Kurdistan region. Why did the PKK not simply adopt a particular form of socialism as its target?
Because the PKK dialectic, more precisely, Öcalan’s dialectic, did not make that correct and applicable. This does not mean that influences of real socialism were entirely absent. As you know, the PKK’s founding congress defined itself as a Marxist-Leninist organization. Yet its political realization and theoretical construction evolved on a trajectory surpassing that type of organization. Similar patterns appear in other struggles, but in the case of the PKK, Öcalan addressed it in a deeper, more flexible manner.
For example, as Che Guevara recounts in his memoirs, the Cuban Revolution prepared a broad agricultural program but had to rewrite it entirely after engaging directly with villagers. In terms of strategy, he notes: “A commander who enters the battlefield with a ready-made plan is a dead commander.” The essence is that every revolution and struggle is tied to a unique geography and culture; a model successful in one context cannot simply be transplanted elsewhere, and one cannot rely on rote formulas.
The PKK’s pre-foundation expeditions across Kurdistan and Öcalan’s meetings and travels enabled an early understanding of this principle. The decision to organize separately from the Turkish left is not unrelated to this experience. Sterile imitation cannot produce the same effect or results as originality. Öcalan recognized that opting for such shortcuts would result in failure, and therefore chose to adhere to the principle of “concrete analysis of concrete conditions.” The extremely difficult nature of Kurdistan and the Kurdish reality demanded a heavy and painful struggle. However, it was also clear that a struggle proven under such conditions would not easily be defeated.
Öcalan initiated this process himself; as he developed the capacity for difficult leadership, he reflected his analyses to the cadres and militants and conveyed them to society. Today, the socialist militant typology and Kurdish societal existence embodied in the PKK are the result of this effort. This represents the overcoming of deadlock in socialism and socialist militancy in the context of Kurdish uniqueness, and the emergence of a universal understanding of socialism with renewed hope and consciousness for humanity.
Despite numerous regional and global extermination operations, the PKK’s survival and its development and growth in response to every attempt stem from this unique socialist dialectic, the Öcalan’s dialectic. Within the framework of the Democratic Modernity paradigm, Democratic Society Socialism, as both the sum and the technical and practical universal deduction of this unique experience, has been presented to humanity and has enabled the revival of socialism. This is the result of the PKK and Öcalan insisting on a socialist formation based on their own practical experience rather than imitation.
What are the PKK’s criticisms of real socialism?
We begin our fundamental critique of real socialism with the primary source, the Communist Manifesto, and its three pillars: German ideology, British political economy, and the social science led by French utopian socialism. These three foundations informed all real socialist experiences. When the fundamental is wrong, the rest inevitably manifests in destruction.
First, German ideology is Hegelian. Thus, what Marx and Engels did is ideologically left Hegelian. Hegel sacralized the state, especially the nation-state, and treated war as a primary tool for the absolute exercise of power. According to Hegel, being a state means being perpetually at war internally and externally. An ideology that absolutizes state and war at this level cannot produce democracy or socialism.
Indeed, history shows that state formation, particularly the nation-state, resulted in the destruction of social existence and the reduction of citizens to modern slavery. Real socialism, rather than confronting this, adopted it, leading revolutions and national liberation struggles to quickly resemble and oppose their own enemies. China and Vietnam are contemporary examples.
The British political economy arose with the industrial revolution. In reality, it involved capital and power monopolies imposing themselves, exploiting society for maximum profit, and creating what was not truly an economy. Consequently, economic reductionism gained strength, and industrialism became the absolute measure of national development and growth.
For Marx and Engels, capitalism and the industrial stage were seen as a necessary phase, while communal production and life, under the label of the “Asiatic mode of production,” were condemned as primitive and backward. In contrast, The British political economy, based on Smith and Ricardo, was realized practically through the expropriation of surplus value by capital and power monopolies, the army of unemployed, and the apparatus of the nation-state. Narrow analyses of employer-worker, profit-wage, and value-surplus value masked the fundamental contradictions rather than revealing them.
Additionally, French social science, in adopting positivism’s crude materialism as scientific methodology, created another major problem for real socialism. Applying Newtonian physics and Durkheimian determinism to society fragmented social reality under the guise of science, separating it from its whole.
This justified constant opposition in a binary “either-or” framework and perpetuated it through class and gender. In a context where humanity’s metaphysical dimension was denied in the name of science, human beings were excessively mechanized, and human-human and human-nature relations were reduced to subject-object relations defined by power.
Yet humans, as historical and social beings, are equally universal. Positivist interpretations in science, philosophy, and ideology contributed to distortions in human-nature and social relations.
Developing our critique of real socialism through these three foundational sources, I believe, provides sufficient insight into our critical logic. For those seeking details, Öcalan’s Manifesto of Democratic Civilization is a sufficient reference.