#murray bookchin

Hi, my partner opened an Etsy shop. Go buy all the things, thanks.

I’ve read almost all the material you can on the Rojava Revolution [in english], the current expression of the Kurdish freedom movement, “one of the world’s longest running contemporary resistance movements—a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old struggle stretching the opulence of the Ottoman Empire to today’s bloody civil wars in Syria and Iraq [p. 5]” and this short collection of anonymous essays is my favorite.
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The one redeeming thing I can see out of our disastrous occupation and invasion of Iraq is peace and security for the Kurds, and democratic confederalism and social ecology are two beautiful underpinnings to such a tragic story.
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“A revolution has its moment. Whether it is the Arab Spring, or the Occupy Movement, or Ten Days That Shook the World, there is a time when a spark hits some kindling and a time, or place, ignites. Whether the flame becomes strong, or withers without additional fuel, or gets put out, violently, always remains to be seen.
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And so, now, we have Rojava. A man serving a life sentence in Turkey found one of Murray’s books, decided to read them all, and then convinced his followers [PKK] to create a real-life laboratory of liberatory expression. In a most difficult historical situation, in a most remote region, surrounded by enemies on all sides, this egalitarian exercise could almost be on a fictional moon. But it is real.
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“To inspire our own work at home, we need to hear from those creating fragile and imperfect oases of freedom.” [p. 6] (at New College of Florida)

You may have seen reports about U.S.-backed forces liberating the city of Raqqa from Daesh. What no one has talked about is that those forces are the YPG/J, whom I’m writing a significant portion of my thesis on.

The ecologically sustainable, feminist, and democratic movement in Rojava [N. Syria], inspired by the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, and his transition from Marxist-Leninism to democratic confederalism in a tradition similar to the Zapatistas in Chiapas and based on theories on social ecology and libertarian municipalism of the late Murray Bookchin, should seriously be given more credit and celebrated more.

Biji Kurdistan, Rojava, Raqqa!

“Capitalism was an inherently self-destructive system. Bookchin realized early in the 50s that its fatal flaw was the fact that it was in conflict with the natural environment. Destructive both of nature and of human health. It industrialized agriculture, it tainted crops and by extension people with toxic chemicals. It inflated cities to unbearably large megalopolitan size cut-off from nature, it turns people into automatons, damaged both their bodies and their psyche. It pressured them through advertising to spend their money on useless commodities whose production further harmed the environment. The crisis of capitalism then would result not from the exploitation of the working class but from the intolerable dehumanization of people and from the destruction of nature.”

 –Janet Biehl: From Marxism to Democratic Confederalism

long live the rojava revolution!