From some of our observations in our dialogue it is clear: self-defense is connected with life, that is, without self-defense one cannot live. In fact, there is no species without a self-defense system. Self-defense is necessary for life. Now, if we look closely, we see that all species of living organisms have their self-defense system. The resistance of every particle or element in the universe to protect its existence is considered self-defense. The same system is valid for the human species and for society. However, defense for the human being is more social than merely biological. To speak of self-defense also means to understand, in a different and profound way, the reality of the universe. We see how the balance of life among ecosystems depends on diversity: there is a dynamic balance of nature in interdependence with all living things. This balance includes the function of humanity and the forms of other species through a continuous relationship of exchange with the inorganic environment. Self-defense must have an ecological focus: referring not to an immutable homogeneity, but rather to a dynamic unity of diversities. In plurality flourishes beauty, richness, freedom and equality.
All social groups in society can coexist on the basis of the differences they develop around their culture and identity without being confined to a uniform culture or citizenship.
The communities reveal their potentiality in these differences and transform them into active life. The human being with his mentality can change a situation if he recognizes himself as part of this associative nature and if he cares for a relationship beyond the anthropocentric horizon formed by thousands of years of patriarchal culture. All oppressive ideologies come from sexist behaviors. Self-defense is also about a new sense of community centered on togetherness without hierarchy and domination.
The PKK is the first and only revolutionary movement in the world to recognize that the way to socialism lies in recognizing that the first social conflict is in gender relations, and that women’s liberation is the main thing, for the elimination of power, hierarchy and for the liberation of society itself. We are mistaken if we believe that self-defense is synonymous only with armed organization. It is only useful if it defends society and all its diversities: this force represents the organization of society in all its spheres. If we observe living organisms, we see how their self-defense is limited only to protecting their existence, without domination or colonization over another species. It is the state that transforms the concept of defense into massacre, war, destruction. In the women’s guerrilla units, war and its function are analyzed: the object of war is slavery and breaking the popular will, and militarism is criticized. Militarism can be defined as the most developed monopoly of anti-socialization. Its endeavor is hierarchical authority, it is the basis of the state and profit, and of wars. Self-defense, as elaborated in the Kurdish women’s liberation movement, envisions construction and love for a common free life, and not destruction, but a deep understanding of the social nature of all living things.
If as in many areas of feminist self-defense we say that society attacks us, and for this reason, we in turn attack it, I think this is dangerous: because then we are not aware of who our enemy is. Moreover, our actions become self-destructive. Audre Lorde has taught us that we will not demolish the boss’s house with his instruments. If we talk about self-defense, we must identify the enemy, which is certainly not in society, but in the patriarchal mentality, which is the basis of the birth of the state. Abdullah Öcalan, through introspection and exposure at all levels, explained that killing the dominant man is the fundamental principle. This is what it means to kill power: to kill domination, inequality and intolerance. Moreover, it means killing fascism, dictatorship and despotism. We really need to feel how every State is an exercise in patriarchal fascism. The privileged instrument of the State is nationalism, it uses it for profit through accumulation. The control mechanism of state citizenship makes us needy people. We think about health and what medicalization implies for us. In terms of self-perception always relational, we have to understand what is health, what is then territory.
Territory is actually the air we breathe every day, it is not a geographical abstraction made of boundaries! With boundaries, which separate knowledge from each other, only new professionals of social engineering are created. We must abandon the dominant cartographies prepared by the power in our bodies and territories because they only serve their interests through division. The mentality of the State, introjected, with ready-made maps and life schemes, leaves us waiting for something to fall from the sky. It becomes the only subject. It turns us all into objects of choices imposed through the mechanism of citizenship. It makes us passive. It says that in the face of exploitation and all the systematic discomforts it triggers, such as unemployment, poverty, war, discrimination and all kinds of injustices, the fault is entirely ours or all the others’. The State, born of a negative anthropology, which has been justified in modern times as the saving element to heal the struggle of all against all, with this fiction, atomizes and individualizes us: it wants to make us enemies of each other, to make us in competition, it aspires to prevent us from understanding our true social needs and the possibility of taking joint responsibility for satisfying them. The State, and the consumerism it promotes, propaganda of liberalism when it tells us that to be free is to do whatever we want, independently of society. With the lie that makes us all equal before the law, it generates the greatest inequality in all spheres of life. If you do something to yourself, it makes you pay for it in terms of judicial power and bureaucracy through the systematic control of your movements. The state is like a husband.
A very unpleasant husband, so much so that the more it ties you to it, the more you distance yourself from the reality of social life. Now then we ask ourselves: how can we organize ourselves beyond the State? Doesn’t this question arise from the fact that we have been led to think that this is not possible? But let’s think how short is, basically, the history of our modern states, some of them are only 150 years old. How did our societies live before? how did our societies live before? Throughout history there has always been a contradiction with the hierarchical mentality of the state, and societies have always organized and developed outside the state. So, the answer is that the more we increase the confederal democratic organization of society, creating our alternative, starting from the central node of self-defense, the more the state will diminish.
But to begin with we have to change our way of looking at our history and, above all, understanding society. For example, I have heard that in our discussions we sometimes use the words “capitalist society” to refer to the oppressive system in which we live. We make a serious mistake by instinctively relating these words. Because in this way we are looking at society through the eyes of state patriarchy. We cannot say that societies, political history and humanity only live with the dominance of state and capitalist organizations. Decentralizing our optics outside of power we have to look at the multifaceted and full of self-regulation reality of the life of the universe, to enter into a deep search with all the democratic and communal systems present in all epochs of history and in different geographical contexts, based on confederal units, urban confederations, of villages, of women’s communes, which have lasted until today. Communal and democratic institutions, confederations of tribes and villages with their defense systems, realized in the time frame of tens of thousands of years of human history, as opposed to capitalist modernity which, let us think, is only 400 years old.
Society without the State has always existed, but a State, without society, cannot exist.
Moreover, society is not capitalist. Capitalism is not an economic structure that permeates society, nor is it a structure of modes of production. It is power. It is an ideology, and it is not even definable as economics, it is anti-economics. Economist readings of capitalism are a problem. Our lives are not determined by economics. With our common life choices we understand our needs and exercise control over our production. over our production. Changing the way we understand economics is also self-defense. Marxism, realizing itself in the seizure of power through the state, analyzed capitalism in a positivist and deterministic way. As a necessary and inevitable evolutionary historical passage. For Marx, from a Eurocentric perspective, society changes adjectives from time to time according to the habits of the time: it changes its dress and is called “primitive society”, then “slave”, then “feudal”, then “industrial” and finally capitalist, in this progressive and linear tendency. It is interesting however to see how, unlike Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, links the realization of capital to the condition of a “non-capitalist society”.
Not only that: she considers a connection between the global and the local, between internal and external political decisions, between the international level and the internal to the same countries. Looking at his time, he saw the links between the capitalist system, industrialism and colonial militarism. He made a great critique of industrial militarism as an ideological part of capitalism. And looking at the imperialist period of his time, he explained how world politics has become the scene of threatening conflicts: certainly not because of the openness that societies desire for capitalism. Or because of its shortcomings in the attempt to modernize. But because there are antagonisms already existing within the European capitalist states which, competing among themselves, have transplanted themselves in other parts of the world, and which, there, bring ruptures and separations. Rosa Luxemburg realizes that society is neither colonial nor macho. It is capitalism and the nation-state that is the most institutionalized form of the dominant male mentality and destructive control over nature. It is of fundamental importance to remind ourselves every moment of the anti-capitalist character of social nature, understood as a continuous process of association and communalization. This makes it easier for us, because in order to bring about change, there is no need to create a new society, but rather to reinforce the society in which we live, starting from our closest relationships.
Jineolojî teaches us that in self-defense, for example, against the positivist mentality of history, we have to be self-critical, to reorder analysis and feelings in a holistic way, to formulate new solutions.
To speak of self-defense in the moment of chaos means to form through connections the practices we are developing in the face of an unprecedented common force. This is an opportunity to explore alternatives, to strengthen society, to improve ourselves in the capacity for autonomy, communal self-regulation that expresses itself in the form of freedom. To do this, it is important to get out of the dynamics of liberalism: freedom cannot be individualized, we can be free and ourselves only in plurality. For this reason, as the comrades from Barcelona have explained, self-defense will not liberate anyone, if it is a matter of learning well, each one of us, self-defense techniques. This will certainly never solve our social problems. Beyond pragmatism, which makes us live from day to day, destroying memory and future, we have to think in lasting terms. Only when our common strength becomes a long-term knowledge, conscious common direction in self-government can conscious common direction in self-government can be carried out as self-defense.
We often hear that there are no values left in society, yet I believe it is important to make a deep inquiry into what societal values are and how we reason within or outside the categories of the system when classifying them. Because society is itself ethical and political, intrinsically open and free. open and free. In the third volume called “Sociology of Freedom,” Öcalan thus explains society as a distinct naturalness that is the result of an evolution of millions of years, a continuation of the earlier animal world and an extraordinary product of the world of intellect and feelings. Öcalan thus defined it as an integrity, a universe of five million years (the history of the Universe) that knows itself.
Jineolojî criticizes feminisms when they distance themselves from society with a positioning only of anti-system opposition because the risk is not to propose alternatives, becoming marginal. Jineolojî does not propose itself as an alternative to feminism, but as a truly inclusive social science, which tells us that to know ourselves we have to understand the universe. To understand how self-defense is this process of continuous association and communalization, we must overcome the binarisms and dichotomies posed by positivism, such as society-individual, subject-object, body-mind, matter-energy, local-global.
To continue on part III…
