. On the class nature of the Rojava Revolution - comments of David Graeber on libcom.org

Some concrete examples of how the Rojava revolution is anticapitalist (by D. Graeber)
David Graeber, the anarchist anthropologist, just came back from an observation mission 
with an Anglo-American delegation to the Rojava, the Kurdish region of Syria. He expressed 
a lot of enthusiasm for the revolution and was highly critical of leftists and anarchists 
who did not want to engage with the Kurdish liberation movement, most notably the PKK, on 
the ground that it is not pure enough. He was of course attacked by the ultraleft and was 
asked for evidences that the Rojava revolution is indeed anticapitalist. Here?s is answer 
(as published in 2 comments on the libcom website below the said interview 
http://www.libcom.org/forums/news/no-genuine-revolution-interview-graeber-evrensel-newspaper-29122014).

* * *

Evidence? The reason I said the revolution was anti-capitalist was because every single 
person I talked to said that they were anti-capitalist and considered capitalism to be the 
revolution?s ultimate enemy. Many stated the explicit formula: ?you can?t get rid of 
capitalism without getting rid of the state, you can?t get rid of the state without 
getting rid of patriarchy.?

(?)

Maybe rather than just scoffing at people who are actually engaged in daily revolutionary 
struggle, you might want to check out some of the voluminous literature produced by the 
Kurdish movement on this subject. I was hardly going to map out a detailed economic 
analysis in an interview where I wasn?t even asked any questions about the subject anyway. 
But if you?re actually curious - I suppose there?s some possibility you might be - I could 
make a brief introductory list

* the economy of Rojava in general and Cizire especially was of an artificially dependent 
agrarian economy which suppled wheat, cotton, but also petroleum to be processed elsewhere 
in the country (there were no mills or refineries in Cizire itself.) Roughly half of land 
and other resources were state owned but run effectively as private fiefdoms by various 
government officials or members of their family; otherwise there was a bazaar economy 
supplying basic needs, much of it made up of black market or smuggled goods. After the 
revolution the bourgeoisie almost universally fled, and Baathist-owned land and buildings 
were taken under public control and distributed either to local communes, which exist on 
each neighbourhood level, and are organised on directly democratic lines, or to 
municipalities governed by delegates chosen by the communes. These are allocated to 
various projects, ranging from Academies for popular education, to cooperatives. There 
have also been efforts to create publicly run mills, refineries, dairy processing plants, 
and the like to process raw materials that had previously had to be sent off to facilities 
in other parts of Syria.

* the academy system is a key part of the economic strategy, offering 6 week intensive 
courses in various forms of expertise that had previously been monopolised by the 
Baathist, which was very much a rule-by-experts style of administration. There is a 
conscious strategy of deprofessionalization of knowledge to prevent the emergence of new 
technocratic classes. Economic academies not only train in technical knowledge but 
emphasise cooperative management and aim to disseminate such skills to as much of the 
population as possible.

* The aim is to connect cooperatives directly to one another so as to ultimately eliminate 
the use of money entirely in the cooperative sector.

* in addition to the collectives and cooperative sector there?s an ?open economy? sector 
which includes the existing bazaar economy, which, however, now falls under the ultimate 
authority of the local communes which intervene to enforce price ceilings on anything 
considered an essential commodity. Since there is a strict economic embargo on Rojava, 
most of the goods available in the bazaars are actually smuggled in from elsewhere, so 
it?s not surprising it remains largely in private hands. Key necessities (mainly wheat and 
petrol that are produced locally) are distributed free to local communes and collectives, 
by a central board.

* We asked about trade unions but were told that since the ?open economy? section is 
basically commercial, consisting of small shops, or even people selling things in front of 
their houses, and almost all production is in the hands of worker-owned collectives, this 
wasn?t a priority. There was, however, a women?s union which aggressively organised for 
the rights of caring labor, paid and otherwise.

* a few indigenous capitalists do exist and have not been expropriated though; some are 
even part of the formal (largely Potemkin) ?self-administration? government; the language 
used to justify this was that the revolution aimed to ?change the ground under which they 
operated? by shifting the way the economy as a whole functioned, and to change the 
structure of political power so as to make it impossible for them to translate economic 
advantage into political influence, and thus ultimately, to continue to operate as 
capitalists in the long run.

* the unusual aspect of the class discourse was the idea that women themselves constitute 
the original proletariat (arguing here from the German Ideology, etc), and that class 
differences between men are less applicable between women. This goes along with the 
formula that capitalism depends on the existence of the state and the state depends on the 
existence of patriarchy. The elimination of what was often referred to as ?capitalist 
modernity? was seen as having to involve an attack on all three simultaneously. For 
instance, the family was seen as the primary place of production, production being 
primarily of people, and only secondarily of material wealth (reversing the idea of 
production and social reproduction), and women as the primary exploited class within that 
system; the solution they are trying to put into practice is to undermine both the 
possibility of a reimposition of state authority and of patriarchy simultaneously by 
devolving the means of coercive power into the local directly-democratically organised 
communes (security forces are answerable to the ?peace and consensus? working groups of 
each commune, and not to the formal ?government?) and ensuring that both the security 
forces themselves and the communes are composed of women. The emphasis on giving women 
military and weapons training is not a matter of war-time expedience; people actually 
insist it is a key part of how they conceive a broader anti-capitalist project for the 
transformation of social production which would make it impossible to restore a top-down 
capitalist economic system.
http://nicolasphebus.tumblr.com/post/106580014578/some-concrete-examples-of-how-the-rojava