Description
The question of the political and the state has reemerged in the 21st century as a key issue. In moments of disruption, forms of politics developed that were not based on the party and the state but on self-organization centered around the council or assembly as its institutional form. This included the assembly movement in Argentina (2001), the Arab Spring (2010), Occupy (2011), and the 15-M movement in Spain (2011). Convening for the first time in 2017, the “Fearless Cities” global network builds directly on these experiences, aiming to “radicalize democracy, feminize politics, and drive the transition to an economy that cares for people and our environment.”Similarly, a range of post-Marxist political parties and movements have also turned away from the party-state institutional from and towards the assembly as the foundation for political action. These include the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) in Mexico with its project of “autonomous municipalities”, the Chavista in Venezuela with their communal-council network, demobilized members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC) with their orientation towards the building of agrarian communities and urban cooperatives, and the Union of Kurdistan Communities (Koma Civakên Kurdistanê, KCK), which has emphasized confederal networks of self-organized communities as the foundation of a political society.
The attempt to develop new institutional forms in which people organized in assemblies become the principal political agents is often referred to in broad terms, such as “municipalism” or “new municipalism” and “communalism”. Essentially, these represent the creation of a public sphere of decision-making and administration through the establishment of a confederal network of assemblies. An important background to these attempts has been the neoliberal restructuring of the state. With its strong emphasis on individual responsibility and the centrality of the market, the state’s distributive functions have eroded and social inequalities increased. This has triggered not only social unrest but also a deep distrust of the state, now widely viewed as an institution facilitating the “1%”—a term used by the Occupy movement to refer to the new global elite that profits from the neoliberal making of a political-economy of extreme inequalities. Another background has been the failure of revolutionary movements to enhance their program of social justice through the capturing of the state—either because they were not able to achieve that or because it resulted in a bureaucratization of the political and the construction of new hierarchies and inequalities.
Although the neoliberal restructuring of the state and the failure of political movements to address injustices through the state has placed the political and the state at the center of debates, however, the issue is not new. Whether and the extent to which the political struggle for social and political justice should focus on the state or also or else create its own institutional forms is a concern with deep historical roots. It has been a persistent and returning one within social and political movements challenging inequality since at least the 19th century. Its main symbol has been the Paris Commune referring to the popular council movement that developed in the context of the defeat of the French army in the Franco-Prussian war. Rejecting the central state and capitalism, the Commune represents a strong undercurrent in political thought and practice, thrusting the practice and idea of a political beyond the state to the forefront of political debate. The leading thinkers who recognized the council as a new form of the political and an alternative to the party-state centralism have been Anton Pannekoek, Hannah Arendt, and Murray Bookchin.
It was Bookchin’s work that influenced Abdullah Öcalan and led to a rethink of the aims and methods of the struggle he headed as the inspirational co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK). Based on a reading of primary sources and interviews with leaders and activists in the movement, the aim of this contribution is to discuss the political thought of Abdullah Öcalan and the changes within the PKK against the historical background of the practice of council democracy and radical political thought.
| Period | 23 Jun 2022 → 24 Jun 2022 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Council democracy as an alternative to representative democracy: Inaugural Conference of Arendt in Aberdeen 2022-24 series |
| Event type | Conference/symposium |
| Location | Aberdeen, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |