Abdullah Öcalan’s most recent manifesto underlines that municipalities hold a pivotal position in building organisation and creating communal structures. With the right planning, he argues, the Kurdistan Freedom Movement can embed the practice of communal life directly among the people through local government.
The fact that municipalities across Kurdistan have been won by the Kurdish political movement represents a profound milestone in the freedom struggle. What began from below zero, from a point where existence itself was denied, has moved into a phase beyond eradication. The very institutions where state power once exercised its most forceful hegemonic and annihilationist policies against the Kurdish people, the municipalities, came under the administration of the Kurdish political movement.
It is, in essence, a revolution. The Kurdish people, who Abdullah Öcalan once described as “a people whose very name they were afraid to speak”, succeeded in taking hold of their own self-administration without building a state and without borders, and thereby took the most fundamental step toward freedom.
Within the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, revolution does not mean capturing state power; it means becoming a people and enabling society to govern itself. For this reason, the trajectory that began in the late 1990s stands as living proof of the movement’s slogan from that period becoming concrete reality.
The Kurdistan Freedom Movement made this point very clearly in the mid-1990s when it said, “The resurrection is complete, now comes liberation.”
Even when mayors failed to adopt the right approach, and even when some of the gains and values achieved in local government were pushed backwards through mistakes, the Kurdish people’s confidence in the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and the critical mindset the Movement helped cultivate among society, played a decisive role in correcting those errors.
Through the Freedom Movement, Kurdish society became a community that questions, develops, and transforms. It rebuilt itself from below zero. That alone reveals the accuracy of the Movement’s communal approach.
Today, the Kurdish people, who now criticise even those they themselves elected and who are able to voice wrong decisions openly, stand at a point where genuine communalisation is within reach, provided that those who serve in local government adopt the right stance.
Local governments and the commune
Communes are structures through which daily life is organised, and every sphere of existence is reshaped according to a new logic of living. In a communal system, states and power centres have no meaningful place. The aim is to prevent power or the state from directing society for its own interests, and to open space for people to organise themselves and govern themselves.
Contrary to the capitalist order and to the real and scientific socialist approaches that cling to the nation-state, communes do not produce a ruling class or caste. Instead, the local organises itself according to its own specificities and builds a healthy and balanced relationship with the wider whole.
Abdullah Öcalan describes communes as an essential element of the socialist struggle, saying: “Just as it is possible to bring communes into every sphere of life, educational, cultural, artistic, scientific, it is also possible to communalise and democratise social and political life. The free individual-citizen can only emerge within this democratic communal life.”
For this reason, he sees municipalities as a crucial achievement and believes that through local government, large-scale communal organisation can be built. But one point deserves emphasis: calling something a “commune” does not make it a commune. Without fulfilling the practical requirements of communal life, the label has no meaning. The issue is not the name; the issue is whether the rules and principles of communal organisation actually function in practice.
Öcalan repeatedly stresses that communal organisation must become a lived, practical reality. One of the gravest mistakes of real socialist structures was to create institutions everywhere, to the point of turning struggle into a graveyard of platforms, while leaving those institutions hollow and detached from the people.
For the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, every institution must have practical meaning, it must connect with society, or it has no reason to exist.
In Öcalan’s ideology, the commune is a horizontal structure, the opposite of caste systems. In a horizontal model, the formation of a caste is nearly impossible. There is no chain of command, no hierarchy of ranks. Everyone participates at the same level, under equal conditions.
This horizontal approach was shaped by recognising the deficiencies of real socialist organisational forms and the Leninist party model. The aim here is to reorganise socialism, again and correctly.
The importance of horizontal organisation in the commune
Horizontal organisation rests on a core principle: deliberative democracy. And in deliberative democracy, the condition of “every segment of society participating equally and without restriction” is not optional, it is the foundation of horizontal organisation.
The premise of deliberative democracy, that voice, authority and decision-making power belong to society as a whole, also defines the basic requirement for coexistence. A society can only live together if it can converge and build a shared common ground. This is not the logic of “whatever the majority wants happens.” It is the logic of collective agreement. And that is precisely where the horizontal model becomes indispensable, because no other organisational model allows that to happen.
Abdullah Öcalan’s understanding of the commune rests exactly on these two dynamics. In the communal system he defines as a form of horizontal organisation grounded in deliberative democracy, every individual and every constituency can express itself.
At first hearing, it might sound utopian or unworkable. But even a brief look at the history of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Freedom Movement shows that this kind of organisation is not only possible, it has precedents, and it has worked in very concrete terms. The clearest example is the National Liberation Front of Kurdistan (ERNK).
In both his “Democratic Civilization Manifesto” and, most recently, his “Peace and Democratic Society Manifesto,” Abdullah Öcalan repeatedly stresses the importance of building commune structures, particularly through local government. He explains that municipalities, using the tools they have, can organise through communes without developing a relationship of loyalty or dependency towards the state; they can involve society directly in decision-making and operate side-by-side with the public. For this reason, he notes, the municipalities won by the Kurdish political movement are of enormous significance.
Within the system he defines as democratic self-government, the horizontal organisational model, described as an inverted pyramid, can produce major gains. And these communes, Öcalan says, are not limited to the province or district level; they can be built all the way down to the household.
Communes are a response to state-appointed trustees and repression
In the Kurdistan Freedom Movement’s understanding, every house, every street and every neighbourhood is an organisational space, a channel for spreading socialism.
In fact, this logic is an expanded and refined form of what Turkish communist leader İbrahim Kaypakkaya once described as “building the revolution house by house, village by village, town by town, district by district.” The ideological framework Kaypakkaya systematised for Turkey’s conditions has evolved into the model the Kurdistan Freedom Movement uses and develops today, and it has produced tangible organisation on the ground.
The late commander Atakan Mahir expressed this clearly when he said: “The people are ours, the land is ours. We did not fight to become mayors. If I can teach a child to read and write, if I can take land for that, that is enough.” That principle should also guide local government.
Local administration must not be shaped by the hunger for office. It must be turned into a field of struggle, built on the right foundations, and that requires organisation down to the household level. People must be able to reach those they elect, speak to them directly, present their problems and take part in solving them. That is what commune organisation makes possible.
Communes must extend into homes and embrace every part of society. If they do not, local government becomes dependent on state power, becomes forced to operate only as far as the state allows, and becomes vulnerable: when the state appoints a trustee, it dismantles the entire mechanism. That is the core function of trusteeships: to block the localisation of power, to stop local government from becoming rooted in society.
Yet when municipalities have a strong communal structure beneath them, and are free of bureaucratic interference, the picture changes entirely. Even if trustees are imposed, the communes can sustain and expand the struggle. Dependency means annihilation when the trustee arrives. Turning municipal work into dependency and then saying “we can’t work because they block us”, only allows the state-appointed trustee to erase the gains.
By contrast, if communes are built starting from households and local communities solve their own problems, the seizure of municipalities becomes meaningless. The state’s pressure tactics fall flat.
One of the biggest mistakes to date has been building communal structures inside municipalities, subordinate to municipal administration. That is why, every time trustees were imposed, the first thing they did was terminate these communal networks.
Every structure built in dependency on the municipality, cooperatives, associations, and so on, has disappeared for that reason. Limiting municipal work to road-building or organising concerts has repeatedly led to the destruction of hard-won gains.
In the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, strength does not come from communes dependent on local government, it comes from independent communes. Without an independent economic sphere or institution, every initiative is exposed to state attack and obstruction.
In Abdullah Öcalan’s ideological framework, communes are not dependent structures, they are spaces where people organise directly and build with their own will. In that independence, when society solves its own problems, the pressure of power on those lands loses effect and collapses.
Final analysis
Abdullah Öcalan describes the “free citizen” in the following way: “Neither servitude to sultans nor servitude to nation-statist ideologies. That is not citizenship. The West’s individualist approach is also not the right way. Individualism at the expense of society is wrong, and society at the expense of the individual is wrong. The free citizen stands in the middle, in balance. The free citizen is rooted in culture. The free citizen is the citizen of democratic confederalism.”
Communes, which are central to building that free citizen, cannot be dependent on any authority or attached to any structure.
In the Kurdistan Freedom Movement’s understanding of socialism, every commune constructed on the right foundation becomes a pathway toward building socialism. Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdistan Freedom Movement reject any model of socialism shaped by state power, the hunger to rule, or a managerial class. Instead, they anchor themselves in commune organisation, a system in which society participates fully and freely.
What is required now is to move forward without the hunger for power, without constructing castes, and without destroying what has already been built, but to advance on a correct line. Every communal structure established on solid ground in Kurdistan and in Turkey will also stand as evidence that socialism can once again become a source of hope for the world.
And in Abdullah Öcalan’s own words: “Hope is more valuable than victory.”