Sweeping the world clean of capitalism: Samir Amin, Abdullah Ocalan and the world of autonomous regions

ABSTRACT

This paper will attempt to rethink Samir Amin's concept of delinking in terms of selective delinking and selective engagement. The notion of delinking is perhaps Samir Amin's most distinctive contribution to alternative development, as well as to a vision of a new kind of politics. Inspired by the ideas of Abdullah Ocalan, this talk will focus on stateless (con)federalism seen as an active dialectical engagement with the modern capitalist world-system, an active process of (dis)engagement capable of modifying the conditions of capitalist world-economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Delinking
• democratic modernity
• democratic confederalism
• Kurds
• Rojava

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There is no doubt that Ocalan's thinking follows, and further develops, the (con)federalist project of other theorists of democratic modernity, including Peter Kropotkin and Murray Bookchin. Ocalan was mainly familiar with Bookchin, whom he read, and actively corresponded with, during his incarceration.

2. 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’ (2016, p. 28). In opposition to nation-statism, democratic nation, "detaches" itself from the nation-state as a core institution of capitalist modernity (2011b). 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.

3. 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’ (2011b, p. 20). Ocalan's interpretation of history, just like Kropotkin'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, 2015).

4. For an in-depth conversation on de-linking as a strategy of democratic space-making see Grubacic and O’Hearn (2016).

5. Ocalan 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’ (2011b, p. 36). The name of this emerging entity is democratic confederalism, a project that ‘promises to advance the democratization of the Middle East in general’ (2011b, p. 20).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrej Grubacic

Andrej Grubacic is Professor and Chair of Anthropology and Social Change at California Institute of Integral Studies-San Francisco. He works with the social science departments at Rojava University and Mesopotamia Academy of Social Sciences. He is the author and co-author of several books, including Don't Mourn, Balkanize: Essays After Yugoslavia (2011), The Staughton Lynd Reader, and Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid.