In both the Manifesto of Democratic Civilization and the Manifesto for Peace and Democratic Society, the communes that Abdullah Öcalan defines as humanity’s salvation have existed throughout history as the most essential and smallest organisational spaces where people share collectively and live collectively. What distinguishes communes from other forms of organisation is that they are spaces in which everyone can express themselves and articulate their views within daily life.
The communal structure, which has been attempted many times throughout history and formed the basic pillars of socialist organisation, stands before us as a model that continuously developed through processes, renewed itself by learning from its mistakes, and continued evolving. The main reason for this is that communes are, in fact, the very essence of life itself, the most fundamental and most accurate organisational form.
Today, communes, which have returned to the agenda through the statements of the Kurdish Freedom Movement and Öcalan stand before us as the only path of salvation for peoples within the evolving world system, since they offer an alternative to the capitalist system in which we live and to the liberal understanding of democracy.
Communes, when correctly organised, build socialism
Correctly organised communes that find life within the right system become an important phase in the struggle to build socialism. This is linked to knowing the past well, understanding the communal structure correctly, and defining it correctly. If today one acts upon the conditions and principles stated by Abdullah Öcalan in his new paradigm and in the Manifesto for Peace and Democratic Society, a communal organisation will be an important step in enabling peoples to encounter socialism.
Öcalan, whose thoughts carry a certain continuity and who always creates a process of renewal that advances his thinking further, had long been experimenting with communal structures within the Kurdish Freedom Movement, and with practices of applying these communal structures to every aspect of life. Especially in the 1990s, when war and struggle were at their most intense in the communal experiments carried out in the areas where the cadres were located, he always attached importance to communes not merely as an economic structure, but as a style that would open the way for the organisation of every aspect of life.
The Kurdish Freedom Movement always avoided the greatest error of the classic left understanding and of structures insisting on Real Socialist ideology, that is, viewing the commune merely as a model of economic organisation. With the communalisation processes that began especially in prisons during the 1990s, it demonstrated how daily life in the prisons should be organised, how the cadres and patriots present there should live and through these experiments it succeeded in forming the correct style.
What a commune is, and what it is not?
Throughout history, the phenomenon of the state has always stood in a place that attacks what belongs to human beings, alters it for its own life, and assimilates it. Abdullah Öcalan’s act of beginning history with communes is itself a response to these efforts of assimilation and destruction. Because the doctrine that presents history as the history of class war and the history of classes seizing the state actually comes from the approach that sees the phenomenon of the state as absolute and limits history to its own beginning.
For this reason, pre-state society was labelled “primitive”; it was belittled, and that period was presented as “a period in which civilisation did not exist.” This definition found its place not only among those who ruled the state but also within socialist understandings that defined themselves as alternatives. The fundamental reason for this is that each system of thought set the goal of ruling the state for itself.
Putting the phenomenon of the state at the centre of the struggle and viewing the seizure of power as an achievement may have seemed like the correct approach in the beginning, but what was understood from lived practice was only this: whoever seized power shaped society according to their own mental framework and entered into the effort of creating a single-type society.
Whichever force holds power, whichever force holds the state, it is their mentality and ideology that is imposed on society. This imposition and homogenisation effort, which is inherent in the nature of the state apparatus, cannot be prevented from turning every ideological approach into a totalitarian system in the end, even if it begins with the claim of liberating society.
The commune has been discredited because it is an alternative to the state
States always seek either to destroy or to absorb within themselves every solution and every approach that stands as an alternative to their own sovereignty. At the top of the definitions belonging to the periods that were assimilated or belittled as “primitive” stands the concept of the commune. The main reason for insistently associating the commune with the so-called primitive period lies in the desire to eliminate a space in which every segment of society could organise itself.
The commune was defined by the system as “a form of organisation of a closed group,” and examples of communal organisation were shown as communities who “turned their backs on developments in the world” and sought to live “as early humanity lived.” Elsewhere, it was defined as “collective life, the sharing of those who have the same ideas.”
The biggest trap in this definition is the expression “those who have the same ideas and views.” Because such a definition creates, within society, a new division and a new othering. Today some institutions that exist within the system (for example, associations of bosses, associations of workers, etc.) are clear examples of this.
A communal structure that is divided into classes and segments, even if it is within a socialist system does nothing but create division and othering; indeed, it brings along the “formation of castes,” which Abdullah Öcalan has long criticised. As lived practice has clearly shown, socialist practices that adopted such an approach have today come to the point of disappearance.
The word “commune,” etymologically, derives from the Latin communis and from the Aryan languages ‘kom’, and has been used with the meaning of “community.” Commune and communality express a communal life. What is essential here is a system free from statism, free from castes and ruling classes, in which society includes itself in life according to its own needs and according to each person’s ability.
However, as stated above the phenomenon of the state began discrediting this system, which stood as an alternative to itself and which had practical reality in life, starting from the level of words and definitions.
A collectivisation that does not include every segment is not a commune
If collectivisation does not include every segment of society or if it is built upon structures based on separation, the result will bring destruction. Because one of the greatest problems of communal organisations built upon separation is that it stands in direct contradiction to one of the fundamental principles of the “Negotiating Democracy” approach, which Abdullah Öcalan defines as the transition system to socialism namely: “not being bound to the majority, but bound to social consensus.”
Within the Kurdish Freedom Movement, the communal structure is not only among those who share the same ideas; it is a structure where everyone can express themselves, can voice their views without pressure, and can debate. For this reason, unlike Real Socialist structures, communes are not organised and implemented by orders coming from above or by appointing certain people as “managers”; they are organised, structured, and realised by the essential components of the area that is being formed.
In 2010, during a meeting held with him, Öcalan made the following assessment regarding communal organisation:
“Organising the people from the lowest to the highest level in the form of communes must be our fundamental paradigm. This should, in practice, be in the form of finding practical solutions to daily problems. We can only realise socialism in this way. Paris Commune was a good beginning, but it was not well understood. Had it succeeded, the socialism that Marx wanted could have emerged. But later, a socialist understanding emerged which argued that socialism could be built only with the help of the state. But the state cannot be socialist; only society can be socialist.”
Communal structures throughout history
In his latest manifesto, Öcalan stated that human history should be understood not through class war, but through the conflict between the state and the commune and that communal organisations reach back to the earliest periods of human history. This definition and determination has been frequently debated in the public sphere and continues to be debated today.
To not view history as class war and to approach it instead as a form of life and struggle, means that the concepts of human history that have been accepted as fundamental in the struggle for socialism until today must also change and be rewritten. Saying something different from the historical narrative taught for decades by Marxist and capitalist historians meant the breaking of many taboos. In particular, it meant the tearing down of the definition “primitive communal society”, which formed the basis of socialist historiography and the linear narrative that followed it: “primitive communal society, slave society, feudal society, capitalist society, communist society.”
Human history is also the history of communes and of the power struggles waged against communes. As a result of these struggle processes, humanity also came to know the state apparatus, the ruling class, and the apparatus of force of that class. Those who ruled societies through coercion for their own interests also sought to reshape human history according to themselves. However, despite the persistent destruction, assimilation, and defamation efforts of those who governed the state apparatus communal experiences continued, in every period of history, to carry the claim of being a hope for societies, and regardless of their outcomes, they showed that an alternative existed for humanity.
Although efforts are made today to erase them from societies, the Middle East is full of significant examples in terms of communal movements and communalist uprisings. At the forefront of these stands the Mazdak Uprising and the tradition it created. The philosophical perspective developed by Mazdak later formed a fundamental basis for communalist structures and still preserves its relevance. In addition to this, many religious and cultural structures in the Middle East contrary to the ruling elites sought to maintain their existence through their own self-organisation and resistance; and those standing against them have always resorted to force to destroy these experiences. Just like the Mazdak Uprising, the Hurufi Movement is one of the most prominent examples of this and its effects still trace their presence in Kurdistan, Turkey, and across the entire Middle East.
According to Mazdak’s philosophical perspective, “Property and wealth must be shared collectively, there must be equality between women and men, and no power should be established over people.”
Meanwhile, the Hurufi community based their approach on nature, seeing not only human beings but the entirety of nature as their siblings.
The Hurufi tradition, which gave birth to the philosophy of “one bite, one cloak” was also suppressed violently like the Mazdak Uprising; the Hurufis were forced to disperse and hide across the geography of the Middle East.
The uprisings of Sheikh Bedreddin, Oğlan Sheikh Ismail Maşuki, and the Kalenderis that developed afterwards must also be evaluated with the same communalist perspective. Because in this region, every movement launched against the power authority and the ruling classes always contains a communalist way of seeing.
Sheikh Bedreddin’s thought, “Collectivisation everywhere, except for one’s beloved’s cheek”, parallels Ismail Maşuki’s words: “If we came from the earth and return to the earth, then why are you richer than us?” Both uprisings stood against the privileges of the elite.
Not only the Middle East in every part of the world, in different periods, workers and the oppressed have experienced communal practices; and through those experiences attempted to organise themselves and build a shared life.
However, the greatest deficiency of communal experiences, wherever they took place, was that alongside the ideal of building a shared life, they underestimated the state apparatus they faced. Instead of building a new system that was an alternative to power and to the system itself, working through a communal practice based on the very borders and definitions imposed by it ultimately led to defeat.
The fact that the Paris Commune, the Soviet experiences, and the communal experiments in regions and countries such as Mexico, Latin America, and Africa ended in defeat shows the problem of not fully grasping the idea of building a stateless life, one of the fundamental cornerstones of the communal movement. The perception of “state against state” became one of the greatest obstacles before the development of the commune.
One of the reasons why communal movements, which began as objections to ruling classes and their privileged lives, later transformed into a struggle for power is precisely this. Beyond that in many of the communal movements (with some exceptions) a proper self-defence mechanism was not fully developed, and effective methods of defence against the attacks of the power they faced could not be implemented.
Since the main focus of our discussion is not the entire history of communes, we will not go deeper into communal experiences. Communal experiences frequently seen among Islamic communities in the Middle East and in other societies were persistently discredited, they were not even allowed to be shown as a utopia for humanity. The most striking example of this is the definition of communities outside the dominant authority in Islamic societies as “zındık” (heretic), “mülhid” (atheistic / god-denying), or “kafir” (infidel / unbeliever).
Communal experiences in history that emerged and ended
-The Qarmatians – Middle East
-The Hurufis – Iran – Mesopotamia
-The Sheikh Bedreddin Movement
-The Oğlan Sheikh Ismail Maşuki Movement
-The Paris Commune
-The Canton Experience – Spain
-The Istranca Republic – Ottoman Empire
-The Magonista Uprising – Mexico
-The Morelos Commune – Mexico
-The Naissaar Soviet Republic – Estonia
-The Odessa Soviet Republic – Ukraine
-The Makhnovshchina – Ukraine
-The Bremen Soviet Republic – Germany
-The Bavarian Soviet Republic – Germany
-The Limerick Soviet Republic – Ireland
-Patagonia Rebelde – Argentina
-The Tambov Uprising – Russia
-The Kronstadt Uprising – Russia
-The Guangzhou City Commune – China
-The Shinmin Prefecture – China
-The Catalonia Revolution – Spain
-The Sovereign Council of Asturias and Leon – Spain
-The National Confederation of Labour – Spain
-The Korean People’s Republic – North Korea
-The Saigon Commune – Vietnam
-The Shanghai People’s Commune – China
-Argentinian Horizontalidad – Argentina
-Oaxaca City – Mexico
-Symphony Way – South Africa
-The Gezi Park Commune – Turkey
-The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone – United States
To be continued…