Radicalising Democracy: Power, Politics, People and the PKK by Joost Jongerden
In 2005, the Partiya Karkêren Kurdistani (Kurdistan Workers' Party) (PKK) announced that
it considered the nation-state a hindrance on the road to freedom, and that its strategic
objective was not the establishment of a state but of an interlinked network of councils
as the basis of self-determination and a new way of living together. The objective of this
article is to discuss and explain the PKK's understanding of politics as it evolved in the
2000s by looking at two concepts: 'democratic autonomy' and 'democratic confederalism.'
This article will put these concepts in a historical and comparative perspective, and
contextualise them in wider discussions in political and social sciences. The question
central to this contribution is how these concepts make sense in the context of political
theory, and how they have the potential to address fundamental shortcomings in modern
democracy. Data has been collected by the study of primary sources and interviews.
Radicalising Democracy: Power, Politics, People and the PKK
I. Introduction
In its 1978 foundational program, the Partiya Karkêren Kurdistani (Kurdistan Workers'
Party) (PKK) expressed the objective of establishing a single (united), independent state
called "Kurdistan" (PKK, 1978). Over time, this changed. In 2005, the PKK announced that
it considered the nation-state a hindrance on the road to freedom, and that its strategic
objective was not the establishment of a state but of an interlinked network of councils
as the basis of self-determination and a new way of living together (PKK, 2005: 175).
Drawing and dying for borders, argued Salih Müslüm, chair of the PKK's sister party in
Syria, the Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat (Democratic Union Party) (PYD), is a European illness
from the 19th and 20th centuries. The council model of connectivity, he declared, is the
model for the future (Müslüm, speech at the Flemish Parliament in Brussels, 19-9-2014).
The objective of this article is to discuss and explain the PKK's understanding of
politics as it evolved in the 2000s by looking at two concepts that are central to the
PKK's imaginary of a new political architecture: 'democratic autonomy' and 'democratic
confederalism.' In my discussion of democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism, I
will put these ideas in a historical and comparative perspective, and contextualise them
in wider discussions in political and social sciences. While making sense of democratic
autonomy and democratic confederalism as a praxis, that is to say both idea and
engagement, this paper aims also to contribute to a body of work that takes as its subject
a thorough understanding the PKK.
[1] The objective of this article, therefore, is to discuss, in the Kurdish context, the
ideas of democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism and show the potentiality of
these as practises that radicalise democracy. The question central to this contribution is
how these concepts make sense in the context of political theory, and how they have the
potential to address fundamental shortcomings in modern democracy. Data has been collected
by the study of primary sources and interviews.
II. Radical Democracy
Although commonly depicted as a guerrilla/armed organisation, the PKK should not be
characterised in military (or similar) terms, since it is primarily a political
organisation, prompted to use violence in circumstances in which there was no alternative
(legally permitted) avenue of genuine political expression (Bozarslan, 2004: 23; Jongerden
and Akkaya, 2011: 168-9). Militants active in the PKK today also do not refer to the
movement as a military or insurgent movement, as one such militant recently stated, for
example:
"Every single Kurdish movement is a revolt, but I don't mean the PKK is an insurrectionary
movement. It isn't. The movements before the PKK were revolts, in terms of process, aims,
and general emphasis, but the PKK is much more than this, so it shouldn't be called an
insurrectionary movement. The PKK is a politically organised movement, a freedom movement.
Calling the PKK an insurrectionary movement narrows it." (Interview with PKK militant,
E.D., 06-08-2014)
When the PKK was established as a political party in 1978, it had a classical communist
party type organisational structure. Reading PKK documents, one may distinguish between
two political objectives the movement has had from its inception. The first was a
progressive realisation of the right to self-determination, the second a reunification, or
better, reestablishment of the left, a reestablishment envisaged in both organisational
and ideological terms (Jongerden and Akkaya, 2012: 10). The PKK's ideological and
political outlook of "radical democracy" emerged in the 2000s as three intertwined
projects: democratic republic, democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism, each
intended to function as a "strategic dispositif" as ways in which Kurdish political
demands are (re)defined and organised (Akkaya & Jongerden, 2012: 22).
The project for a democratic republic aimed at the disassociation of democracy from
nationalism, of demos from ethnos. Concretely, this resulted in the proposal for a new
constitution, one in which citizenship is not defined or even conceived of in terms of
ethnicity but rather in terms of the civic republic and civil rights. While the project of
democratic republic addressed the character of the state, the projects of democratic
autonomy and democratic confederalism aimed at developing an alternative for
state-oriented politics toward a people-oriented and emancipatory politics of
connectivity. This politics of connectivity is grounded in a rethinking of the separation
between people, power and politics, and the attempt to address these disconnections.
The concept of democratic autonomy does not refer to a form of sub-sovereignty granted to
institutions within a sovereign state, the transfer of (limited) state functions and
responsibilities to institutions which form a sub-state (Reyes and Kaufman, 2011), but to
a new grounding of the political status of people, on the basis of self-government rather
than people's relations with the state (Duran Kalkan, personal communication, 28-10-2014).
The PKK carefully distinguishes democratic autonomy from autonomy. "Most people confuse
democratic autonomy with autonomy" confirms senior PKK member Cemil Bay?k "-in fact, there
is no relation between the two" he states (personal communication, 30-10-2014). Explaining
this, Bay?k goes on to say that whereas autonomy takes the nation-state as its basis,
democratic autonomy is based on democratic-confederalism.
Democratic confederalism refers to a societal organisation that can be characterised as a
bottom-up system for self-administration, organised in Turkey at the levels of village
(köy), urban neighbourhood (mahalle), district (ilçe), city (kent), and the region
(bölge), referred to as "Northern Kurdistan" (Jongerden & Akkaya, 2013a). "The basic
principle of democratic-confederalism," continues Bay?k "is self-governance of
communities." In other words, one could say, democratic autonomy concerns the ability and
capacity to have (or regain) control over political, economic and cultural institutions,
while democratic confederalism refers to the ability to decide and administer. The aim is
not to build a state, but to develop a democratic society. "Fifty years ago, a hundred
years ago," argues Duran Kalkan (personal communication, 28-10-2014), "the state was small
and society big, but today, the state is everything and society nothing." The projects of
democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism are intended to reverse this, to develop
the self-governing capacities of people and thus to radicalise democracy.
III. Democratic Autonomy and Democratic Confederalism: Yesterday and Today
Following the work of Murray Bookchin, it was the imprisoned Abdullah Öcalan who initiated
debate on democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism among the Kurds (Biehl, 2012:
10; Öcalan, 2008). Bookchin differentiates between two ideas of politics, the Hellenic
model and the Roman, which gave rise to two different imaginaries of politics and
understandings of government. The first, the Hellenic model, stands for a participatory
and communal form of politics, with which Bookchin aligns himself, and the second, the
Roman model, for a centralist and statist form, which he rejects (White, 2008: 159). The
statist, centralised Roman model has a herd of subjects (Kropotkin, 1897), while the
Hellenic model an active citizenship (Bookchin, 1991: 11). Bookchin argues that it was the
Roman model that was to become the dominant form in modern society, informing the American
and French constitutionalists of the 18th century. The Hellenic model exists as a counter-
and underground current, finding expression in the Paris Commune of 1871, the initial
councils (soviets) that emerged in the spring-time of the revolution in Russia in 1917,
and in the Spanish Revolution in 1936-39.
The PKK's projects of democratic confederalism and democratic autonomy stand in a rich
tradition of thinking and doing politics. Murray Bookchin (1991) placed autonomy and
confederalism in the Hellenic tradition -with expressions in the Paris Commune (1871), the
initial soviets (councils) that emerged in the revolution in Russia in 1917 and were later
supressed, and the Spanish revolution of 1936-39- in opposition to the authoritarian Roman
tradition, on the basis of which our polity has been shaped. Darrow Schecter (1994:
74-102) discussed the council current within the communist movement, referring to Rosa
Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci and, in particular, Anton Pannekoek. Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri (Hardt & Negri, 2004), but also Hannah Arendt relates the council movement to
currents in the American Revolution and the idea of "the citizen's right of access to the
public realm" (Arendt, 1990 (1963): 127).
According to Arendt, the councils are the lost treasure of revolution, representing "an
entirely new form of government, with a new public space for freedom, constituted and
organised during the course of the revolution itself" (Arendt, 1990 [1963]: 249).
Historically, these councils have been established in revolutions in America, France,
Russia, and Spain; today, they are revived in Kurdistan under the umbrella of the Koma
Civakên Kurdistan (Association of Communities in Kurdistan) (KCK), coordinated in Turkey
by the Kongreya Civaka Demokratîk (Democratic Society Congress) (KCD), and in Syria by the
Tevgera Civaka Demokratîk (Democratic Society Movement) (Tev-Dem).
The PKK's idea of radical democracy can be viewed from a historical perspective, but may
also be compared with present-day social movements or projects elsewhere. A few examples
should suffice to give an impression of the wider horizon. Since the PKK has been compared
to the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation)
(EZLN) (Gambetti, 2009; Kucukozer, 2010), the most obvious point of contemporary reference
is to the political project of this movement. The democratic autonomy and democratic
confederalism being developed in Kurdistan clearly resembles the Zapatista creation of
autonomous municipalities in Chiapas (southern Mexico) (Stahler-Sholk, 2000) and its
adherence to autonomy as a bottom-up development of self-organising and governing
structures and capabilities. Like the PKK today, the EZLN claims not to want to take power
(in the sense of control of the state) but to develop alternatives for the sovereign power
of the state by creating a network of practices through which self-government can emerge.
Like the PKK, the Zapatista conceptualise this self-government in terms of assemblies,
which are not only institutions of administration but also spaces of deliberation, with
accountable and revocable delegates and "posing the possibility of the permanence of the
rule of all." (Reyes & Kaufman, 2011: 516)
One can also find similarities with the socio-political struggle of the (primarily
Brazilian) Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Movement of Landless Rural
Workers) (MST) to transform relation between people and between people and the state and
the development of the idea of active citizenship (Wittman, 2009). More generally, one may
note the recent round of mass street protests and occupations, from environmentalist and
anti-globalist activism (notably with the anti-G8 demonstrations and riots in Seattle,
1999) and developing into the Occupy movement, which has also seen expression in the
emergence of spontaneous assembly movements (e.g. in Istanbul, 2013) and raised the
profile of pre-existing direct democracy platforms (e.g. the People's Assembly Movement,
in the UK).
IV.Power, People and Politics
The PKK's project of radical democracy and the idea of council democracy or
self-administration (democratic confederalism) and the development of autonomy potentially
address three problems: the separation of sovereign power from people, the separation of
people from one another and the separation of power and politics.
4.1. The Separation of Sovereign Power from People
In the early modern (18th century) conception, democracy was considered the rule of
everyone by everyone. Yet the way in which the idea of democracy has become
institutionalised as "government by officials who are accountable and removable by the
majority of people in a jurisdiction" is far from this (Hardt and Negri, 2004). Arendt
(1990 [1963]: 268-9) argues that "representative government has in fact become oligarchic
government (...) though not in the classical sense of rule by the few in the interest of
the few; what we today call democracy is a form of government where the few rule, at least
supposedly, in the interest of the many" - so that the most the citizen can hope for is to
be 'represented', where a system of representation implies a delegation of interests.
Indeed, according to Hardt and Negri (2004: 247), representation has a dual nature in that
it "simultaneously connects and separates." Representation not only implies a connection
between the represented and representative, but also disconnects the rulers from the
ruled: "When our power is transferred to a group of rulers, then we no longer rule, we are
separated from power and government." (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 244) The separation of
people from sovereign power is a basis for state-formation, Hardt and Negri argue,
defining democratisation as "[e]very step that narrows the separation between
representatives and represented," so, to "neutralise the state's monopoly of power" it
follows that democracy "would have to be constructed from below" (Hardt & Negri, 2004:
249, 251).
For Arendt, this should also imply the forming of opinions "in a process of open
discussion and public debate;" people need to become proactive, to lead the process, since
it would not suffice were we merely "supporting, while action remained the prerogative of
government." (Arendt, 1990 [1963]: 268-9, 271) It is precisely this relationship that the
co-chair of the PYD, Salih Müslüm, criticises, arguing that the relations between state
and people in the Middle East over the past decades have been conceptualised and practiced
in terms of an active state with the people as its objects, while the new model of
democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism is based on active citizenship, with
people as subjects in their capacity to decide and act, debating problems and enacting
solutions by the people and for the people (Salih Müslüm 19-9-2013 at the Conference on
New Models and a Solution of the Kurdish issue, Flemish Parliament, Brussels). In a
similar vein, Cemil Bay?k (personal communication, 30-10-2014) and Duran Kalkan (personal
communication, 30-10-2014) argue that the paradigm shift includes, among others, a shift
from state-building to society-building, and, relatedly, from taking power ('iktidar,' as
in state or sovereign power) to the development of societal self-governing capacities.
4.2. The Separation of People from one Another
Representation does not only separate people from power, but also turns politics from a
public capacity into a private one. The ballot box represents the capacity of private
choice, since it is based on giving people a right in their private capacity, the right to
vote. This relation, argues Arendt (1990 [1963]: 277), is transformed into that of
individual seller and buyer, while political action is to stand in front of others and to
form opinions, whereby the space of a plurality of perspectives on political topics can be
formed (Sitton, 1987). The ballot box does not provide a space to be public and political,
a space of encounter (Merrifield, 2011), but only one of private action and the expression
of choice (selection from a given range of alternatives).
According to Arendt, political activity cannot be narrowed down to the individual right of
choice, since is also about a public engagement with others, and, as she notes (Arendt,
1958: 57), the significance of being seen and heard by others derives from the fact that
everybody sees and hears from a different position. For Arendt, freedom is the freedom to
act as citizens, and this means to participate, to be heard, to debate, to exchange views
and to make decisions. Freedom, therefore, is not about giving people power in the private
capacity, but about people being empowered in their capacity of citizens though the
establishment of a public space. And thus does Arendt (1990 [1963]: 253) refer to council
democracy as a treasure of revolutionary tradition, of the public spaces people
historically created to form opinion and make decisions together. It is indeed such a
council democracy system that has been initiated by the KCK (through the KCD and the Tev-Dem).
4.3. The Separation of Power and Politics
Democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism also address the problem of what Bauman
(2007: 1-2) calls the separation of power and politics in modern society. Power, defined
as the ability to get things done, and politics, the ability to decide the direction and
purpose of action, were previously available to the nation-state, but they have been
divorced. A changing political economy -in particular the globalisation of capital, in
combination with the neoliberal contracting out of functions previously performed by the
state- has turned national and formal politics into "a protracted exercise in deciding
what ought to be done- without actually being able to do it." (Roos, 2012) Without the
ability to get things done, responsibility is not much more than an appeal. Without the
capacity to decide, responsibility cannot be assumed. The PKK's project of democratic
autonomy, one could say, is about the capacity to control, while democratic confederalism
is about the ability to decide. This would imply that the PKK's twin projects of
democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism bear the promise of re-connecting power
and politics, not in the context of homogenising nation-state politics, but in the form of
an assembly based form of self-government.
V. Radical Politics beyond Retreat and Engagement
The ideas of democratic confederalism and democratic autonomy have the potential to
address a series of disconnections between power, people and politics, but they may also
alter the idea of radical politics. Radical politics have often been discussed in the
context of a dilemma between retreat and engagement: a retreat from the established
political forms and institutions to develop alternatives or an engagement with the
established forms and institutions in order to practice change. In her work on the idea of
radical democracy, Chantal Mouffe (2013) creates an opposition between the ideas of exodus
and engagement. Exodus here refers to a form of political action that consists of a
rejection of and defection from the state. Its principal aim is the development of a
non-state public sphere and a radically new type of democracy based on construction of and
experimentation with forms of self-representative and extra-parliamentary democracy
organised around councils. This exodus implies a negation, however, with the aim of
rendering irrelevant the meaning of the state in daily life. In opposition to that, Mouffe
(2013) distinguishes a politics of engagement, which holds that radical politics should
engage with institutions in order to disarticulate them, to separate them from existing
discourses and practices, with the aim of constructing new ones.
The first option, the exodus, is the strategy of Hardt and Negri, the strategy of protest
movements that say "We don't want anything to do with parties, with trade unions, with
existing institutions because they can't be transformed; we need to assemble and organise
new forms of life; we should try democracy in presence, in act".
[2] This is the position of the radical left. The second option, the strategy to which
Mouffe (2013) adheres, is to create something by engaging with existing institutions and
transform politics from an arena of antagonisms, in which the other must be defeated,
through an agonism in which we positively deal with and accept differences. This is the
position of the reformist left. In its project of democratic autonomy and democratic
confederalism, however, the PKK seems not to make a choice between the retreat or
engagement: it creates its own alternatives (the councils) while engaging with existing
institutions (the municipality).
This double position, of both developing one owns alternatives while engaging with
existing institutions, is close to what Henri Lefebvre (2003) refers to as "transduction."
Transduction for Lefebvre is to connect to actual practices and grounding oneself in the
realities of the moment, without, however, accepting the existing boundaries of
contemporary society. The aim is not to connect to existing struggles and institutions or
going beyond the existing order, but to connect to existing struggles and to go beyond the
existing order. "We must never remain contained within the actual," Lefebvre says, "we
must always move toward the virtual, that which has not yet been actualised." (Purcell,
2013: 320) It represents a radical engagement with the actual without limiting oneself to
what exists.
The developing of alternatives brings us again to the difference between autonomy and
democratic autonomy, as indicated by the senior PKK leader Cemil Bay?k. Autonomy, as
indicated, is based on the transfer of (limited) state functions and responsibilities to
institutions that form a sub-state, while democratic-autonomy refers to practices in which
people produce and reproduce the necessary and desired conditions for living through
direct engagement and collaboration with one another, in the political domain but also in
the economic and cultural domains. This idea of reproduction of the necessary and desired
conditions for living together is conceptualised as 'self-valorisation' in autonomist
Marxist literature.
The concept of self-valorisation was developed in Toni Negri's (1991) reading of Marx
beyond Marx, in which Negri presents an alternative reading of Marx that grants primacy
not to capital, but to labour. This inversion of perspective, so typical of the autonomous
Marxist approach, brought the idea of "practices of autonomy" and "self-activity" to the
centre of political debates and analyses (Tronti, 1980) and "provides a useful concept to
draw our attention to struggles that go beyond resistance to various kinds of positive,
socially constitutive self-activity" (Cleaver, 1993). In a similar vein of thought, the
philosopher and pedagogue Ivan Illich drew attention to the need to reclaim life from the
state and its professionals through the development of autonomous capacities.
The development of modern society, Illich (1977) argued, comes together with a war on
autonomous subsistence activities -in which we need to read subsistence activities not
only in terms of the economic organisation of life, about which Marxist thinking is
primarily concerned, but also of activities that sustain human life in other fields, such
as schooling and health, two of the fields to which Illich directed his attention, and to
the political, an issue discussed by Arendt (1990 [1963]). The negative operation of modem
institutions is to undermine the self-helping capacities and abilities of people,
subordinating human productive activities to the command of professionals. Democratic
autonomy is about reclaiming work form the sphere of value production and reclaiming life
from professionals and the development of self-governing capacities (Gibson-Graham, et
al., 2013). Like the self-valorisation idea of the Italian autonomists-Marxists and
Illich's idea of developing autonomous capacities, democratic autonomy as developed by the
PKK is not so much a project of resistance, but one of building alternatives. "To be a
revolutionary movement means to construct, not to destroy," said Cemil Bay?k in a recent
interview (personal communication, 30-10-2014). The construction of a new society, the PKK
today believes, is based on the development of new forms of administration and government
beyond the existing order. As such, it does not aim at destroying the existing order, but
aims at rendering it irrelevant by constructing alternatives.
VI. Conclusions
This article has looked at the PKK's understanding of radical democracy through the
exploration of two of its key-concepts or projects: democratic autonomy and democratic
confederalism. I did not only look at how these projects have been defined by the PKK, but
also presented the concepts in a historical and comparative perspective. Concerning the
historical dimension, I have showed how the ideas and practices of democratic autonomy and
democratic confederalism connect to a counter-current in political history, referred to as
the Hellenic model. This model stands for a participatory-democratic form of politics,
based on active citizenship. Concerning the contemporary dimension, I have focussed on the
similarity between, on the one hand, the PKK's ideas and practices of democratic autonomy
and democratic confederalism, and on the other, experiments and experiences elsewhere,
referring especially to the EZLN in Mexico and MST in Brazil.
Democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism have the potential to addresses
fundamental problems in representational democracy, namely the separation of people from
power, the separation of people from one another and the separation of politics and power.
I have explored this potential referring to the work of, among others, Antonio Negri and
Michael Hardt, Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman. I have also indicated that thinking and
working along the axis of democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism comes together
with a rethinking of progressive politics. It is not about an either-or choice between
retreat and engagement; it is a choice for transduction, connecting to existing struggles
while moving towards what has not yet been actualised by enacting it.
These issues - the historical and contemporary dimensions of the PKK's project of
democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism, the reconnection of people, power and
politics, and the issue of transduction- have only been touched upon here. More than an
elaborate treatment of the issues, this represents an outline of a possible theoretical
and empirical research agenda. However, what is clear is that thinking along the lines of
democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism has the potential to address fundamental
flaws in our contemporary polity and radicalise the idea of democracy.
Assistant Professor Joost Jongerden, Wageningen University
Please cite this publication as follows:
Jongerden, J. (March, 2015), "Radicalising Democracy: Power, Politics, People and the
PKK", Vol. IV, Issue 3, pp.64-78, Centre for Policy and Research on Turkey
(ResearchTurkey), London, Research Turkey. (http://researchturkey.org/?p=8401)
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Wittman, Hannah. 2009. "Reframing agrarian citizenship: Land, life and power in Brazil."
Journal of Rural Studies (25): 120-130.
VIII. Endnotes
[1]For this, see Akkaya and Jongerden (2011, 2012), Grojean (2014), Gunes (2012), Gunes
and Zeydanlioglu (2013), Imset (1992), Jongerden and Akkaya (2011, 2012, 2013a, b) and
Marcus (2007).
[2]See 'A Vibrant Democracy Needs Agonistic Confrontation' - An Interview with Chantal
Mouffe. [Accessed date 6 March 2015], Available at:
http://www.citsee.eu/interview/vibrant-democracy-needs-agonistic-confrontation-interview-chantal-mouffe
Related Link:
http://researchturkey.org/radicalising-democracy-power-politics-people-and-the-pkk/
http://www.anarkismo.net/article/28157
