Writer Mahir Ergun said that Abdullah Öcalan’s thesis on the state and the commune is in fact close to Engels.
One of the most widely debated aspects of Abdullah Öcalan’s manifesto has been his framing of history through the conflict between the state and the commune. This issue, frequently discussed particularly within socialist circles, was once again brought to the forefront during the recent attacks on Rojava, with persistent claims that “Öcalan’s paradigm has collapsed.”
Writer Mahir Ergun addressed the comparisons insistently made through The Communist Manifesto and said that Abdullah Öcalan’s understanding of the relationship between the state and the commune is not far from that of Friedrich Engels. He added that in the 1888 edition of The Communist Manifesto, Engels himself noted that the phrase “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” should be reconsidered as “written history.”
Mahir Ergun said that the commune represents a struggle for survival and constitutes the foundation of socialism. The first part of this interview can be read here.
Marxist socialism sees the state as an evil to be abolished
Is the state necessary for socialism? Or would the existence of a state inevitably lead to power struggles?
When answering this question, it is necessary to underline that there are many conceptions of socialism, often in contradiction with one another. This is the case today, and it was also the case in the 19th century.
However, if by socialism we mean, as is often done, the Marxist conception of socialism, then according to this understanding the state is not “necessary”; on the contrary, it is something that must be abolished, what Engels described as an “evil.”
In The Civil War in France, Marx states that the working class cannot simply take hold of the state machinery and run it for its own purposes. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he says that past political revolutions did nothing but perfect the state machinery instead of breaking it. In the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme, he criticizes the expression “free state” and emphasizes that real freedom is linked to limiting the freedom of a state that stands above society.
In the same year, Engels, in a letter to Bebel, also criticizes the expression “free state,” arguing that in its literal sense it amounts to nothing more than a despotic state. He states that, especially after the experience of the Paris Commune, which was not a state in the full sense, it is no longer meaningful to engage in idle talk about the state. At this point, he rejects the anarchistaccusation that Marxists are statist and underlines that both in Marx’s critiques of Proudhon and in The Communist Manifesto, it is stated that the state will dissolve in a socialist society. Instead of the term “state,” he proposes the use of the German word Gemeinwesen, meaning “community,” whose French equivalent is “commune.”
Therefore, if these statements are taken as a basis, Marxists have little to do with the state; they do not argue that the state is necessary under socialism. Instead, they defend the “community,” that is, the “commune.”
What, then, is the dictatorship of the proletariat? In Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx states that between capitalist society and communist society there lies a period of revolutionary transformation, and that the state of this period is the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” However, he also says that there is no need for the programme to address this issue or matters such as the “future state.” Engels, in the preface to The Civil War in France, states that anyone who wants to understand what the dictatorship of the proletariat is should look at the Paris Commune. Therefore, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is not a state in the conventional sense; as Engels puts it, it is “a commune.”
In socialist literature, the statist line is represented by Ferdinand Lassalle and his followers. Lassalle argues that socialism can only be built through state power. Marx, however, consistently criticizes Lassalle, describing him as a “realpolitiker”, that is, someone lacking principles and acting according to short-term practical outcomes, and states that he assumed the role of a “workers’ dictator.”
The concept of a workers’ dictatorship has no place in Marxist socialism
Turning to the real socialist practices of the last century, Lenin insisted in State and Revolution on the “withering away” of the state. Accordingly, the state would in fact consist only of the “soviets,” that is, councils of workers and soldiers, and would “wither away” with the abolition of classes. However, history showed the opposite. These practices, as Marx pointed out in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, did not break the state machinery but instead further perfected it. In this respect, some thinkers argue that these practices followed Lassalle rather than Marxist doctrine.
It should also be noted that Lassalleanism and its understanding of “state socialism” enjoyed a certain level of popularity among the founding cadres of the Republic of Turkey in its early years.
In conclusion, although some conceptions of socialism regard the state as necessary, statism and the notion of a “workers’ dictatorship” have no place in Marxist socialism. Marxist socialism tends to replace the state with the commune. Nevertheless, the core Marxist texts remain insufficient in fully grasping the nature of the state, and this is the main reason for the theoretical shortcomings that have emerged. For instance, while attempting to present the Marxist view of the state in State and Revolution, Lenin almost conducts an archaeological study. It is clear that, even in answering this question, one cannot go much further than referring to marginal notes in a programme, a sentence in a letter, or a few lines in a preface. This is because it is difficult to find a work in this literature that directly addresses the state. The few existing statements, in turn, take on different meanings in the hands of different interpreters, leading more to confusion than clarity.
Setting aside this criticism, as I have noted before, viewing the state merely as a “machine” or assuming that it can simply be broken apart is, in my view, a reductionist abstraction. The state must be understood within the web of social relations. Otherwise, it becomes impossible to determine where the commune ends and where the state begins.
Öcalan is not far from Engels in his manifesto
What does Abdullah Öcalan’s definition, “the history of humanity is the history of the conflict between the state and the commune”, mean, as stated in his Manifesto for Peace and a Democratic Society?
The first chapter of The Communist Manifesto begins with the sentence: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is nothing but the history of class struggles.” Over time, this sentence became the dominant understanding of history within Marxist socialism. In this form, however, it is actually quite reductive, as if there were nothing in history other than class struggle. In reality, this is a manifesto statement, and manifestos are not expected to present the results of social-historical research; rather, they are expected to be striking. Such a sentence is indeed striking, but it is not entirely accurate. The problem lies in isolating this sentence and using it as if it were a key to understanding history. The manifesto was published in 1848, and since then, a large number of Marxist socialists have made similar mistakes, extracting certain sentences from foundational texts and turning them into articles of faith. As a result, their understanding remains incomplete, becomes distorted, and leads to further errors.
Even Engels seems to have recognized this. In the 1888 English edition of the manifesto, he added a footnote suggesting that it would be more accurate to say “written history.” In this note, he refers to the importance of communes in unwritten history. In other words, according to Engels, the “history of humanity” is not limited to class struggle; rather, it is written history that is characterized by class struggle. Before that, there are communes.
The idea that history consists solely of class struggle becomes rigid when treated as an article of faith, and such rigid formulas are not particularly useful either for political theory or for practical political struggles. For this reason, the statement has been widely criticized from both the right and the left. For example, Pierre Clastres, in his 1974 book Society Against the State, argues that the history of “stateless peoples” is a history of resistance against the state.
In his Manifesto for Peace and a Democratic Society, Abdullah Öcalan also points out that reducing history to class struggle is highly inadequate. He argues that this definition may explain capitalist modernity to some extent, but it cannot account for the entirety of human history. In this sense, he is not far from Engels, who suggested that “written history” should be distinguished and that class struggle does not explain all of human history. According to Öcalan, history is not fundamentally the struggle between classes, but rather the struggle between communality and state-based civilization. To frame history through this duality, and to show how it has operated throughout time, is a more realistic approach.
Explaining history as a conflict between the state and the commune, or, in Öcalan’s terms, as a “struggle between communality and state civilization”, or, as Clastres suggests, as a history of struggle between “stateless peoples” and the state, is certainly more comprehensive than the definition based solely on class struggle. However, this perspective also needs to be further developed.
The commune–state formulation in the manifesto is striking and functional
We have stated that the definition of class struggle is a manifesto statement. The aim of that manifesto was to draw attention to the existence of classes and class conflict; therefore, such a “striking expression,” even if it is simplifying, is functional. The Manifesto for Peace and a Democratic Society is also a manifesto, and just as The Communist Manifesto placed classes at the center under the conditions of 1848, which, in my view, was necessary for that period, the Manifesto for Peace and a Democratic Society places communes at the center; therefore, instead of class versus class, it speaks of commune versus state. This, too, is a “striking expression”; it is functional, more comprehensive, but it is also a postulate.
From a scientific perspective, it is difficult to make such a broad generalization as “the history of humanity.” Moreover, dualities are not always reliable. A simplistic interpretation of dialectics places the “principle of contradiction” at the center. Accordingly, any phenomenon is explained through the contradiction between two opposing elements. Placing class contradiction at the center is also a method belonging to this philosophical approach. Where it proves insufficient, propositions such as “principal contradiction” and “secondary contradiction” emerge. This is politically necessary, because politics must offer explanations and provide answers to questions. Science, on the other hand, asks questions and seeks to understand. For instance, when we say commune–state, we ask: which commune, which state?
The nature and history of communal structures in Mesopotamia, and their struggle against the state, are not the same as those in Western Europe or North America. The state structures in these regions are also very different. The ways in which these communes encountered the state have taken very different forms. For example, in Mesopotamia this process can be traced back to the Neolithic period, whereas in North America we are speaking of only a few centuries. For tens of thousands of years, communities there preserved communal relations, and no state emerged from within them. These communities encountered the state only after the conquests of European colonizers.
As I noted in my response to the previous question, I argue that the state is not an apparatus but a process, and that this process operates through conquest. The state does not emerge from the commune; it comes upon it. Therefore, the state process constantly seeks to absorb and assimilate the commune within itself.
When we understand the state as the process through which relations of power organize themselves, we can say that all contradictions, including class contradictions, are organized within the state process. In this way, we are not making a sweeping generalization; rather, we broaden the definition of the state, make it more comprehensive, and propose a framework capable of addressing different questions. If we also define the commune as an egalitarian, solidaristic, and democratic society, it becomes more possible to grasp the position of communal structures in North America and Mesopotamia within the state process and the contradictions they embody.
In short, if we define the state–commune contradiction not merely as a contradiction between a ruling stratum and the rest of society, but as a contradiction between the process through which power relations organize themselves and democratic relations, we can acknowledge the determining role of this contradiction without falling into reductionism.
As long as the state process operates, it concentrates power relations at the center
What do you think about Abdullah Öcalan’s critique of the nation-state and his thesis that communalization is fundamental to the organization of socialism?
As long as the state process operates, it concentrates power relations within central apparatuses. Nation-building is part of this process. The nation absorbs the commune, or in other words, the demos. What is taking place here is not the transformation of the commune or the demos into a nation. Rather, the nation absorbs these solidaristic community structures and, in fact, is anti-democratic from the very moment it emerges. This can be seen in the statements of the “founding fathers” of the French and American revolutions. For example, Abbé Sieyès, one of the key figures of the French Revolution, stated in a parliamentary speech on September 7, 1789, shortly after the storming of the Bastille, that France could not be a democracy. According to Sieyès, democracy is based on demoi, that is, communes, whereas “France is, and must be, a single entity subject to a common legislation and administration across all its regions.”
This shows that it is first necessary to understand what a nation is and where the concept derives its basis. Does it stem from a unity of language or culture? No. When we speak of the French nation, for instance, whom do we mean? We mean the totality of those whom the French state legally recognizes as citizens. Some of them are Breton, some Corsican, some Basque, and so on; their languages and cultures differ. These differences are eliminated by the nation-state and, as Sieyès put it, they are turned into “a single entity.”
For example, in the 1970s, posters in state schools in the Brittany region of France read: “Spitting on the ground and speaking Breton are forbidden.” In other words, spitting on the ground and a child speaking their mother tongue were treated as the same. One could say that at least Breton was recognized as a language, its existence was not denied or labeled as an “unknown language”, yet it was still being eradicated. This is how the nation is constructed: through the destruction of communes and communities by the state and their transformation into “a single entity.” To achieve this, every method is employed, including genocide and cultural destruction.
The commune is the foundation of the socialist understanding
If we look at the approach of North American states toward Indigenous peoples living in communal systems, the policy in the United States was essentially “kill the Indian,” because what they represented was not the nation but the commune. Canada, on the other hand, pursued a policy of “kill the Indian in the child.” Young children were forcibly taken into boarding schools and subjected to abuse so that they would not speak their languages. If assimilation failed, meaning if “the Indian in the child” did not die, then the child themselves was left to die. Today, mass graves of children continue to be uncovered around these schools.
These are not events from some distant past. In Canada, the last residential school officially closed only in the 1990s, yet in reality the process continues in different forms. The state process is still at work. Democratic relations are being conquered, communes are absorbed into the nation, tied to central power, and turned into a “single entity.”
Of course, there is also a struggle for survival on the part of the commune. In order to survive, it is necessary to eliminate relations of power and to democratize life.
In this sense, the commune is fundamental to the organization of socialism. In fact, there was never a theoretical position arguing otherwise. Until at least the first quarter of the 20th century, anyone who called themselves a communist defended the commune. Otherwise, why would they call themselves a communist? Throughout the 20th century, the experiences of real socialism appeared as anomalies. Nevertheless, they did not eliminate the debate on the commune. Council communists, communizers, and libertarian communists continued to exist, to struggle as much as possible, and to sustain these discussions.
However, this accumulated body of thought unfortunately did not fully reflect in Turkey. During the years when the socialist movement was most influential, the Turkish left learned about socialism from very limited sources and in a rather crude manner. Although it was divided into many factions, this reality applied to almost all of them. For example, without even discussing what communism, that is, the commune, actually is, it adopted an anti-Narodnik position, because Lenin criticized the Narodniks. However, the Turkish left did not truly know the Narodniks and was unaware of their agrarian communal ideologies. Its knowledge was limited to references found in Lenin’s pamphlets. And since Lenin was read in order to be “Leninist,” Narodnism came to be coded in the Turkish left as something negative.
At one point, the word Narodnik was even used as an insult in internal leftist debates. There are certain entrenched patterns within the Turkish left. For instance, when stateless solutions or communalism are mentioned, they are often treated as if they have nothing to do with socialism. This is not accurate. Such ideas are labeled as “anarchist,” pushed aside, and not seriously discussed. There is a clear lack of knowledge on these issues. In the past, this was largely due to a lack of sources; today, that gap is increasingly being addressed. However, since leftist culture has developed within certain boundaries, it has difficulty breaking out of this framework.
In contrast, in many other parts of the world, the view that the commune is fundamental to the organization of socialism is not rejected but widely accepted. Direct democracy is considered indispensable for socialist organization in many contexts. It is widely argued that a socialism that does not take the commune and democracy as its foundation cannot truly be called socialism, and that this critique, developed over the past one hundred and fifty years, has been confirmed especially by the negative outcomes of real socialist experiences.