(en) Greece, Anarchist Collectives for Militant Proletarian
ASMPA - about Rojava revolution and internationalist solidarity
Introduction by the Anarchist Collective for the Combative Proletarian Reconstruction
(ASMPA) at the event for political briefing and revolutionary solidarity to the struggle
in Rojava. Athens 24/7/2015 ---- Our political collective, ASMPA, took the initiative to
organize this event for political briefing and revolutionary solidarity; because there are
comrades who have made the decision to join in solidarity the revolutionary struggle that
is unfolding now in Rojava. We’ve invited you here so as to directly support the
internationalist struggle and to reinforce the future of resistance there, until the
victory of the revolution. ---- Two threads of social liberation struggles meet in Rojava,
two threads which begin decades ago. One thread begins in the Lacandon jungle of the
Chiapas district in Mexico. In an attempt to reconstruct a guerilla tradition that never
really faded away in that continent, an initially small organization of revolutionaries
from a left background had been preparing their onset for a decade, in the context of a
directly dialectical relation with the oppressed social base. Through this dialogue, EZLN
left statist politics and party centralization behind. By occupying and liberating ground
for the benefit of all the oppressed, EZLN planted a seed for social autonomy, which is
growing and evolving until today.
In the years that followed, the struggle in Chiapas was a catalyst in the development of
an internationalist, anti-capitalist movement which focused its efforts on the
international mobilizations against the summit meetings of interstate directorates. The
mass rallying of anti-systemic rage at these international mobilizations, beyond borders
and familiar ground, spread once again in history the spirit of rebellion in the
metropolises of global capitalism, peaking in Genoa in 2001 and reaching a turning point
in Thessaloniki in 2003. However, in these events the revolt gained ground only
circumstantially.
The wave of rebellion sparks once again in 2008 from Greece on the occasion of the
assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos. The character of this explosion is such that it
becomes a transitional point towards the diffusion of insurrectionary movements around the
globe, which now attempt to bring down regimes, to establish social territory, to put down
the roots for revolutionary organization. But at the same time, capitalist powers and new
regional authorities exploit the destabilization of regimes, which is a consequence of
rebellions, in order to control them. In the mediterranean, in the arabic world, in latin
america, but also in the euro-american north, the anti-capitalist movements create social
territory ever more dynamically.
And so we arrive in Syria. The state assassination of some children, who dared to make a
call to rebellion via the internet, although their call did not receive a direct response,
caused the mass mobilization in certain regions of Syria. When the peaceful demonstrations
were attacked by the army, an armed insurrection broke out. The weaknesses of the baathist
regime, both internal and external, in conjunction with imperialist plans and interstate
antagonisms, gave way to both liberationist social efforts as well as to the most inhumane
cannibalism, theocracy which serves capital. It was in these circumstances where the armed
resistance and the revolutionary project in Rojava unfolded.
The second thread begins there; it is the historical sequence of Kurdish resistance. The
armed struggle of Kurdish people against the nationalism of the states that have occupied
Kurdistan until today lasted for three decades. Turkey, Iraq and Iran have perpetrated the
most extensive genocide since the Nazi holocaust, against the Kurdish communities. Within
the Turkish region, Kurdish resistance has withstood the harshest state terrorism and the
most widespread displacement by a powerful military regime.
The fall of the socialist block weakened left movements around the globe. However, the
Workers Party of Kurdistan (PKK) and its civil guards, neither turned to the rising
nationalism, nor resigned from the resistance by abandoning their proletarian base in
order to integrate into the onset of state and capital. On the contrary, the Kurdish
resistance was radicalized further, it placed its trust on social emancipation and
internationalism and so it grew stronger. Following the arrest of PKK’s leader, Abdulah
Ocalan, who, let’s remind, was delivered to the American and Turkish secret services by
the Greek state under PASOK, and despite the personality cult which was inherent in the
Kurdish movement, the resistance not only was not disbanded, but on the contrary it
developed its collective structure.
As far as the target is concerned, the struggle gave up the trap of a so called
independent state entity, which today can only be established in complete dependence to
imperialist plans and which fosters a new class of bosses, as is evident in the paradigm
of north Iraq. The demand for national self determination gave way to the direct
application of intertribal and interreligious social self direction against state borders.
The Kurdish resistance abandoned statist politics, but did not give up its arms and so it
made a deeper connection to social movements in Turkey and internationally. Let’s note
here the inability of the nationalist Kurdish organizations of Iraq to check the advance
of ISIS. While they have the support of powerful states they do not have a strong social
base. ISIS was halted in Mosul with the intervention of the civil guards of PYD and PKK.
The revolutionary project in Rojava was born out of the age long Kurdish resistance. In
the context of the disintegration of the Syrian state’s control, the organized
revolutionaries of Kurdistan took the initiative to call the oppressed residents of Rojava
to organize themselves in assemblies, self defense formations and horizontal structures
for self management. Organized revolutionaries strengthen the struggle towards self
direction by opening up paths through their participation in social issues. PKK’s and
PYD’s contribution to the social revolution in Rojava is a lesson in revolutionary dialectics.
It is illogical to expect that everyone must first acquire revolutionary conscience in
order to revolt; such a stance reproduces the widespread isolation, it distances
revolutionary ideas from their vital ground, which is the everyday class conflict, and it
confuses insurrectionary and revolutionary action with the authoritarian logic. It is
disastrous to wait for everyone to organize themselves without the existence of combative
initiative, since liberated territory is necessary, in order for the exploited to be
reformed into an autonomous social body. Those who place conscience before revolt and
above the struggle, adopt a kind of bourgeois metaphysics, idealism, perhaps because they
don’t sense the immediate necessity for a revolution. By intervening in a militant way at
every critical point of the class conflict and by liberating ground through the
determination of resistance, we can liberate the potential for social emancipation.
The revolution in Rojava sprang up in the midst of a war between powers, in the furnace
where societies are pillaged and destroyed. The internationalist revolutionary movement is
taking roots whilst facing a dictatorship, imperialist control and theocratic terrorism.
In the most brutal circumstances, beyond despair, the common necessity festers and arms
itself. Capitalism will not be overcome neither with the maturing of the technological
civilization, nor with meticulous planning, but out of the degradation that is caused by
the accumulation of power and the inescapable antagonism.
Revolutions break out unpredictably through the vortex of interstate conflict. Paris
commune 1871, Russia 1905 and 1917, Germany 1918, Balkans WII. They become the sequel of
mass armed insurrection against dictatorship. Kornilov failed coup de etat in Russia, Kapp
failed coup de etat in Germany 1920, Spain 1936.
And while in Europe, revolutionary movements where either wiped out or incorporated
before the middle of the 20th century, having been attacked, disarmed or transformed, in
the periphery of capitalism the resistance to colonial rule and to imperialism continued
incessantly on revolutionary terms around the globe. To those who underestimate
revolutionary processes in places where the productive forces have yet to mature,
according to the dogma, we juxtapose the paradigm of militant liberationist struggles of
the most oppressed within the global capitalist arena. Can the exploited of the capitalist
metropolis breach their dependence on the privilege that comes with imperialist domination
and can they fight against nationalism, without the effective resistance and the
revolutionary paradigm of the third world proletariat? The armed movement in Western
Europe and North America from the 1960s onwards had accorded particular significance to
the anti-imperialist struggle and to solidarity to movements in the periphery. This was
something more than an expression of humanitarian sensitivity and consistency with the
theory of imperialism; it was a class strategy.
The social revolution in Rojava and the ongoing revolt in Turkey open up paths for the
revolutionary struggle globally.
The social self direction as is being put into practice in Rojava, transforms all
relations, be they social, political, economic, within communities, between communities,
vis a vis authorities, but also in the global field of class and interstate antagonism. On
the one hand this is a project towards direct communism, through the self organized
reconstruction of the social base and not via a centralized party determination. As the
local assemblies or communes, as they’ve been named in Rojava, assume political force, the
objective basis is created for the abolition of exploitative relations, the review of
needs, the restructuring of production, and the collective reorganization of work. Let’s
note as an example, that Rojava is the only place on the planet where the supply of oil is
under the collective management of the residents. Only the universal politicization of the
class base through processes of militant self direction, can subvert class domination, by
redefining the notion of society and of humanity.
On the other hand, the abundant social partnership, without discrimination on the basis
of race, religion or national borders, which is practiced in the open structures of self
direction and self defense in Rojava, takes away from authoritarian powers at every level
every pretence for their conservation, external intervention and repression.
Internationalism, the anti-statist perspective and antimilitarism interject into the
global war of the ruling classes with quality and force where these are realized en mass
by the social base. The revolution in Rojava is a source for the revolutionary creation of
civilization as a whole.
The catalytic participation of women in the proletarian war and their all-out
contribution into the revolutionary sociopolitical procedures, based on their autonomous
organization and its defining might, radicalize the struggle and the collective
development. In a place that is brutalized, pillaged and chained by theocracy, the
combative resistance of women becomes the front line of the revolution. The fact that the
repressed and exploited base universally joins the struggle through new forms of
co-organization, delivers incomparable strength. Women’s revolution is the womb from which
a new social life is born and it is unbeatable.
Let’s for a moment look at the problem of theocratic terrorism. Should we support in
every possible way the resistance against the onslaught of Islamic militarism, it is not
because of our fundamental polemic against religion. Nor is it because we wish to side
with imperialist liberalism. On the contrary, in Rojava, religious faith is not
persecuted, whilst in democratic Europe, Islamic culture is demonized and persecuted,
within the framework of a strategy to inflame interreligious conflict, class oppression
and intensity of military control and fascism.
Islamic militarism has been bred by the euro-american capitalist centre, mainly by the
U.S., since the 60s in order to turn the proletarian rage of peripheral countries, to
strike communist movements, to distort anti-imperialist resistance and to throw societies
into the chains of totalitarianism. During the post soviet era, NATO’s never ending war
campaigns inflamed Islamic militarism. The local state authorities, such as the former
regimes of Saddam and Assad, marshaled the same tool. The disdain for human life and
freedom, the rampant destruction and the glorification of authoritarianism, as are
exemplified in Islamic militarism, shape the modern mirror of the antagonism of state and
capital.
In Syria, western imperialists and the baathist regime alike have invested in Islamic
militias, in order to control social insurrection and to manage their contradictions, by
means of the strife of the most oppressed. The only reliable bulwark against widespread
destruction, but also against imperialist intervention, is the revolutionary movement of
Rojava, because it is based on popular self defense and autonomy from every authority, and
is opposed to theocratic totalitarianism, not as a tactical position but on principle.
However, the most fundamental criteria for the strategy of the revolution are the
promotion and defense of liberationist social achievements. Those who claim that war
should be waged against all powers simultaneously, are perhaps unable to comprehend from
their standpoint, what the revolutionary project requires. It is imperative to choose the
determinant conflict at each moment in time, so as not to be crushed inside the
antagonisms amongst different powers. Today, in Syria, the victory of the social
revolution against theocratic militarism is of great historical and global significance.
And for this reason, revolutionary comrades have come from distant places to fight in Rojava.
The internationalists who fight in solidarity in Rojava have breached national borders;
the state borders that are guarded by the masters’ armies as well as the internal borders
before all. Turkish and Kurdish fighters live and die side by side. Proletarians from
Europe and the Balkans left the racist retrenchments and the western privileges behind,
opening up paths towards the global revolution.
We state openly that we are calling people to join the struggle where the battle is
taking place. Distanced support is insufficient, even hypocritical. Intellectual critique
is hostile, anti-proletarian and counter-revolutionary. Quoting the Anarchist Popular
Union from Brazil (UNIPA): “For the revolutionary anarchists who defend materialism and
dialectics as a method of analysis, what is important is the precise character of the
unfolding struggle, whether it is just or unjust from the viewpoint of the social
revolution. An anarchist organization must never abdicate its ideological, strategic and
theoretical principles. This, as opposed to a puritan detachment, suggests participation
and internal dialogue within the mass movement, with an understanding of the
particularities of every tendency and faction, their history and present.”
We wish to note at this point that the comrades who fight in Rojava counter in practice
the crypto racist statements which suggest that migrants should stay in their own
countries in order to struggle. It is every person’s responsibility, and it must be a
conscious responsibility for every revolutionary, that she/he shares all her processions
with the oppressed, and above all that he shares in the struggle where the most oppressed
live. Internationalists in Rojava are truly fighting against the causes of displacement,
smashing the conservatism of the capitalist metropolis.
We will not close this introduction on a happy note; In Kurdistan, in Turkey, in the
ghettos of the U.S., in Mexico, in Egypt, in the Ukraine and around the globe,
proletarians are being slaughtered and are fighting. We do not intend to publish a nice
brochure with this here event; rather we wish to strengthen the class war.
Here in Greece, conditions are worse. Facing the most brutal pillaging and terrorism
perpetrated by a collapsing regime, there is no organized and combative movement ready to
resist. At the same time as the armed left movement in Turkey and in Kurdistan is moving
beyond statist politics, here many anarchists and leftists have lined up behind its most
despicable form, social democracy. At the same time as the flame of revolt is spreading
around the globe, here some have “discovered” the end of insurrection. And the state is
raging on unrestrained.
Either we shall attempt the revolution today when it is necessary, or we shall be buried
at the pit of history. There, in Rojava is the trial. Here, in the desert of despair we
must build all that the living revolutions teach us.
asmpa.espivblogs.net
asmpa@espiv.net
