An unsuitable theorist? Murray Bookchin and the PKK

ABSTRACT

Over the course of the last decade and a half the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has transformed its ideological orientation in accord with the changing outlook of its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan. It has discarded its erstwhile Marxist-Leninist ideology for the anarchist-inspired thought of the American political theorist Murray Bookchin. Yet, the PKK’s new theorist of choice may not be an entirely suitable one. Bookchin was a rabid anti-nationalist, and this paper argues that, even after having appropriated Bookchin, the PKK has been unable to chart a non-nationalist course. Scholars of the Kurdish question have so far let Bookchin’s seeming unsuitability go unnoticed. This is likely because Bookchin’s thought is not well known. This paper offers an overview of Bookchin’s thought, and in doing so, hopefully contributes to making Bookchin better understood.

KEYWORDS:

• Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)
• Murray Bookchin
• Abdullah Öcalan
• Kurdish nationalism
• democratic confederalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Umair Muhammad is a PhD student in Political Science at York University, where his research focuses on nationalism. He is the author of Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism (2013), a book that challenges us to move beyond individualist and lifestyle-centric forms of activism.

Notes

1. The tribute was forwarded to Janet Biehl, Bookchin’s partner. The full text is available at PKK Assembly, “2006: PKK’s salute to Bookchin.”

2. The original edition of the book was published under the pseudonym Lewis Herber. The revised 1974 edition appeared under Bookchin’s name. Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment.

3. Bookchin, The Third Revolution, 18.

4. De Jong, “Stalinist Caterpillar.”

5. Gunter, Out of Nowhere, 122–4.

6. White, The PKK.

7. White, “Murray Bookchin’s New Life.”

8. Biehl, “Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy.”

9. Ibid.

10. Biehl, “Thoughts on Rojava.”

11. Bookchin, Post-scarcity Anarchism, 208.

12. Bookchin, The Next Revolution, 31.

13. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 110.

14. Bookchin was adamant that the development of gerontocracy preceded the development of patriarchy – the old came to dominate the young before men dominated women. For our purposes, whichever form of hierarchy Bookchin believed developed first is not important. (I am actually not sure if the order is all that important even for Bookchin’s purposes.)

15. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, 165.

16. Ibid., 215.

17. Ibid.

18. Bookchin, The Next Revolution, 47–8.

19. Ibid., 171.

20. Ibid., 136.

21. Ibid., 117.

22. Ibid., 134.

23. Ibid., 136.

24. Ibid., 133.

25. Ibid., 133–4.

26. Bookchin, Post-scarcity Anarchism, 206.

27. Bookchin, The Next Revolution, 129.

28. Ibid., 128–9.

29. Bookchin, Post-scarcity Anarchism, 257.

30. Ibid., 261.

31. Bookchin, The Next Revolution, 135.

32. Ibid., 136.

33. Akkaya and Jongerden, for instance, offer that the PKK has opted for ‘a radical conception of democracy aiming at the dissociation of democracy from nationalism.’ Üstündağ similarly maintains that the organization is beholden to ‘“democratic autonomy” against nationalism.’ Indeed, according to Üstündağ, Öcalan had been ‘contemplating’ a non-nationalist position ‘since 1993.’ Bozarslan goes further still: in light of Öcalan’s apparent turn away from nationalism, he seems to have made the discovery that nationalism has not ever had a secure place in the Kurdish movement. Bozarslan’s, especially, is a rather bold effort in reading history backwards. It exemplifies rather well the ‘anachronistic fallacy’ that Stephen Jay Gould warned against: ‘No error of historical inquiry can match the anachronistic fallacy of using a known present to misread a past circumstance that could not possibly have been defined or influenced by events yet to happen.’ In our case, in fact, scholars have rushed to misread the past before they have even come to terms with the ‘known present’ – that is, they have failed to critically assess Öcalan’s claims about being a non-nationalist. I offer a tentative critical assessment of Öcalan’s claims in the concluding paragraphs of the present essay. Akkaya and Jongerden, “Reassembling the Political”; Üstündağ, “Self-defense”; Bozarslan, “‘Being in Time’,” 65–6; Gould, The Richness of Life, 179.

34. McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 430.

35. In response to my decision to point to only the demographic issue as the source of the PKK’s abandonment of separatism, a reviewer has noted that a number of other reasons could also be seen as contributing factors, including military attrition and the altered horizons of the post-Cold War era. The reviewer is completely correct, and has saved me some embarrassment by forcing me to add some nuance to this paragraph. I have, nonetheless, chosen to highlight the demographic issue because I think it, even absent all other reasons, makes the demand for a separate Kurdish homeland no longer a sensible one.

36. I think there are reasons to be sceptical about the PKK’s earnestness in taking up libertarian municipalism, though the present essay is not the place to deal with this issue. I also happen to think there are reasons to be sceptical about the effectiveness of libertarian municipalism even if the earnestness with which it was taken up was not in question.

37. ANF, “Bayık”; “Karayılan.”

38. As Vijay Prashad points out in his history of ‘the darker nations,’ post-war nationalist movements across the Global South – ‘from Indonesia to Guatemala’ – have tended to be inclusionary (or, as he terms it, ‘multinational’) in character. Prashad, The Darker Nations, 84–5.

39. Bookchin, The Next Revolution, 133. My emphasis.

40. Turse, Kill Anything That Moves.

41. Moynahan, “Our Ally,” 49.

42. Bookchin, Post-scarcity Anarchism, 211.

43. Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism.

44. Bookchin, The Next Revolution, 24.

45. Ibid., 132.

46. Ibid.

47. Bookchin would no doubt have finessed this question by highlighting his respective definitions of the state and government:

While the state is the instrument by which an oppressive and exploitative class regulates and coercively controls the behavior of an exploited class by a ruling class, a government – or better still, a polity – is an ensemble of institutions designed to deal with the problems of consociational life in an orderly and hopefully fair manner.

According to Bookchin, then, a libertarian federation of municipalities would be a government and not a state. Bookchin’s is not, however, a widely accepted definition of the state. If we are to regard the state as the holder of the monopoly on violence – Weber’s widely accepted definition – a Bookchinian federation of municipalities would indeed be a state. Bookchin, The Next Revolution, 13.

48. Bookchin, The Third Revolution, 17.

49. White, “Murray Bookchin’s New Life.”

50. Biehl, Ecology or Catastrophe.

51. The intellectual expression of the global trend I am referring to is, of course, post-modernism. Its political expression includes a retreat from the state and the spread of particularist forms of identity politics. It should not surprise us that Bookchin believed the increasingly common politics of identity represented ‘a decivilization of humanity.’ Akkaya and Jongerden situate the PKK’s ideological reorientation in the context of the same global trend as I do. Though, unlike Bookchin, they see it as something to be celebrated. Bookchin, The Next Revolution, 111; Akkaya and Jongerden, “Reassembling the Political,” 2–5.

52. Edmonds, “Kurdish Nationalism,” 88.

53. Öcalan, Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, 24.

54. For Bookchin, the non-hierarchical structures of ‘organic society’ began to be dissolved by the late Neolithic. But Öcalan is not a particularly close student of Bookchin’s, and he seems to associate the traits Bookchin finds in ‘organic society’ with the (supposedly-Neolithic) Kurds.

55. As McDowall reminds us, ‘There is a danger of outsiders dismissing such myths as worthless; they are valuable tools in nation building, however dubious historically, because they offer a common mystical identity, exclusive to the Kurdish people.’ A Modern History of the Kurds, 4.