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“Freedom and equality achieved through nation-states only serve the monopolies de facto, this has been demonstrated all over the world. Monopolies of power and capital never allow true freedom and equality. Freedom and equality can only be achieved through the democratic politics of a democratic society and protected through self-defense.” (Abdullah Öcalan)
This article is an attempt to offer a cursory view of the definition of the key concept of Democratic Nation in Apoism. The concept of Democratic Nation has not been much discussed on the international scene, perhaps because at first glance it does not seem to fit the anti-nationalist and anti-state paradigms of the PKK, which give the Kurdish movement a particular explosive power. To approach this term, we first have to understand that the Kurdish movement has set out to reappropriate or reappropriate terms that may well have different connotations in the dominant discourse.
The Kurdish freedom movement has an anti-state and anti-nationalist character. The cornerstones of the apoist model of society, Democratic Autonomy and Democratic Confederalism, have already been discussed on several occasions. With the very important concept of the Democratic Nation, there still remains a certain blank space, although it describes the alternative apoist model to the nation-state at the philosophical-practical level. The blank space arises in the European debate because the concept of nation is always associated with the concept of nation-state, as well as with nationalism: “The body of nations afflicted with the nationalist spirit expresses itself in the state. Precisely because of their body, these nations are also called nation-states. The body of those nations that are, however, free and in solidarity is Democratic Autonomy. Democratic autonomy means that the individual and society govern themselves with their own will. One can also speak of democratic leadership or democratic authority.” – (Abdullah Öcalan, KÜRT SORUNU VE DEMOKRATIK ULUS ÇÖZÜMÜ, Kültürel Soykırım Kıskacında Kürtleri Savunmak, 2016).
Thus, we can first of all state that the Democratic Nation is not oriented towards ethnicity or religion, but is defined by a democratic mentality. However, to really approach the concept, we should try to get closer to Abdullah Öcalan’s thought and methods.
In the historical and dialectical method used by Abdullah Öcalan, history does not unfold along the antagonism of capital and labor, as in the classical Marxist method. Rather, it manifests and reproduces itself on new levels within the framework of the antagonism of democratic and state civilization. (It should be noted that the term civilization should be understood here in its original sense of “civitas”, as a community or society, and not in the framework of colonial discourse). In the historical method of the PKK, the teleologically based historical materialism describing the inevitable social development from primitive communism to slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism to communism is understood as not immutable. The “natural society” or “primitive communism” was already described by Engels as a matricentric society and many findings from the Neolithic, especially depictions of goddesses, as well as mythologies seem to provide evidence for such an interpretation, as does the systematic repression of women at the social level in the state structures of Sumer, Akkad and the following (3). This also supports Öcalan’s observation that the imposition of domination and patriarchy was not inevitable, but a process that was maintained through violence and betrayal: “In particular, the epic of Inanna, the goddess of the first city-state of Uruk, is very revealing. This epic, which describes a time when matricentric and patriarchal cultures were in equilibrium, narrates a harsh confrontation: Inanna, as goddess of Uruk, seeks out Enki, the god of the city of Eridu, in his palace, and there claims the hundred and four “I’s,” the basic discoveries and inventions of civilization, which she considers to be her rightful property. Through various methods, he manages to return them to Uruk. This legend is a key narrative that helps to understand that era. In the epic, Inanna strongly emphasizes that the “I’s” as achievements of civilization belong to the mother goddess, that the male god Enki had nothing to do with them, but stole them by force and cunning. All of Inanna’s efforts revolve around the recovery of this culture from the mother goddess”
Although it is not easy, in the context of material findings, to explore supposedly vanished forms of society, mythology and narrative offer a rich treasure trove of insights. The primordial society, which is not a paradise even for Öcalan, but the society that existed before the imposition of the “sacred rule” of hierarchy, in its first form as patriarchy and gerontocracy, rule of the old (men), has not ceased to be, but persists as a substrate, as what Öcalan calls Democratic Civilization, which opposes state civilization and continues to resist capitalist modernity to this day.
Therefore, moving away from historical determinism and assuming that an alternative development would have been possible at any time implies that this remains true for today.
Öcalan points out that the ultimate expression of capitalist modernity is the nation-state. The nation-state that has conjured up centuries of genocide and wars in Europe and covered the Middle East with monist regimes. In this context, the formation of the nation-state must be understood as a process that began in the sixteenth century and fructified in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe. Its roots are to be found in the bourgeoisie and bourgeois society, which got rid of the absolutist regime with the French Revolution by exploiting the oppressed, women. If the dismantling of customs barriers had already been the content of absolutist mercantilism, nationalism as a bourgeois ideology now took over this task. Öcalan states that the erroneous analysis of the nation-state and the problem of the state itself in Marxism-Leninism contributed to the downfall of real socialism: “The inadequate analysis of the question of the state by socialist ideology only deepened the problem (…) especially the right of self-determination of nations, the idea of a state for each nation contributed massively to deepening the problem. The idea of the Democratic Nation “differs from real socialism and the classic Marxist-Leninist doctrine that sustains it. The right of self-determination is freed from its limitation as a bourgeois right and is linked to the standard of social democracy. Concretely, this means that the solution of the Kurdish question is possible without statist contamination, without the pursuit of a nation-state principle and without being forced into such categories; it can be realized through democratic models of self-management of society. This is the essence of the PKK’s transformation.” As for the concept of nation-state, Öcalan harshly criticizes the overlapping of the concepts of people and nation, ethnicity and demos. Ephraim Nimni of the Center for Ethnic Conflict Studies also follows this logic when, like Öcalan, he describes the problems of the nation-state as structural; he states that “culture becomes an almost totalitarian feature for unity” something we can clearly perceive again and again in the debates in Germany, but also in the regime in Turkey. The anthropologist Gellner describes assimilation, expulsion and murder (so-called “ethnic cleansing”) as a consequence of the logic of nationalism; the 20th century bears witness to this thesis. For the aggressive nationalist mobilizations of the 20th century, congruence between state and culture was a basic requirement.
The development of modern nation states is, as I have said, closely linked to the development of modern capitalism and its markets. Western European states gradually began to replace imperial concepts in the 16th century. This process culminated when the bourgeoisie overtook the kings and feudal lords in the French Revolution and took their place. Women, the exploited women who had driven this revolution, were betrayed, murdered and subjugated at the first opportunity by the new bourgeois elite of state civilization. Nation building took place in the context of the defense and conquest of the market. Feudal taxes were abolished for the capital of its own bourgeoisie. Nations were defined as territories of production and consumption – internally at first, but aggressively expansive after consolidation. The nation, defined as “people,” provided and continues to provide the glue to bind the oppressed to the oppressors. Social scientist Jeffrey Miley describes this development as follows: “Britain, for example, used the concept of Britishness to make the working class identify with imperial projects. (…) This represents a historical problematic that culminated in the rise of fascism in interwar Europe, when state actors used the reference to the nation to mobilize the masses.” We can see that the nation-state perspective permeated everything. While positivism ostensibly displaced religion, the nation-state seems to have taken the place of God. This shows the emerging sacralization of the nation and the essentialization of this fictitious concept. Essentialization and sacralization were also evident in the emergence of “biological” racism and social Darwinism as naturalizations of the capitalist model. Nation-state thinking encompassed all areas of society and, therefore, intellectuals and philosophers were also not in a position to criticize the state system as such; at best, they were limited to partial aspects such as production. Today, in the discourse on the competitive nation state, which in Germany shows itself as a debate on localization, we see once again that the nation state is not the opposite of globalized neoliberalism, as the nationalists would have us believe, but the confrontation of workers in several competing nation states in order to win the favor of capital, in fact a frankly classical application of the nation state principle.
In contrast, apoism radically rejects this definition of nation as state, as its description of women as “the first oppressed nation” demonstrates. The understanding of the Democratic Nation is not based on territory, identity or culture, but on shared values. The Democratic Nation can coexist with states, but practically it manifests itself through Democratic Autonomy and Democratic Confederalism, its expression is radical democracy, not homogeneity but plurality as a characteristic. The separation of subject and object, manifested in dichotomies such as mind (subject) and matter (nature/object), man (subject) and woman (object), reflects the division of society into rulers and ruled. An important feature of the philosophy of the democratic nation is the abolition of this subject-object dichotomy: the individual and society are not conceived as a contradiction or a unity, but the individual as something that can only be understood in a social context, that can only be free in the context of a political society and, conversely, a society can only be free through free individuals. Not the postmodern subjectivist individual who is so isolated that he is powerless in the face of “society” – here equated with the state – and not the modern individual who means nothing in the state or society and is therefore powerless, but the individual who organizes himself freely in radical democratic structures and thus shapes society together with others. However, radical democracy also means the democratic assumption of all tasks taken away from society by the state, defense, justice, the judiciary, as well as the construction of relations beyond patriarchal oppression and exploitation. Here it becomes clear that the closed democratic nation cannot exist at all, but is about a continuous change of self-understanding in the individual – from the self-understanding of the subjectivist or objectivist speck of dust in the face of the leviathan of the state to a conscious and free individual who is in connection with and organized in society.
“We are convinced that people are more enslaved under capitalist rule – liberalism creates the illusion of freedom – in this sense, individual freedom must be discussed. Sure, we don’t live in the time of religion and kings, but people are still unable to become free individuals, they become objects. Maybe people are not sold as often as before, but today the same thing is practiced with more subtle methods. The struggle is difficult, but it cannot succeed without the liberation of the individual; we have to ask ourselves: how free am I?”
(Abdullah Öcalan, 2016).
