Pinchbeck argues that Rojava, the autonomous administration of north and east Syria, was a deliberate mass-scale attempt to sever democracy from state sovereignty, and that its destruction in early 2026 was a geopolitical squeeze rather than a refutation of its theory. He traces the lineage from Abdullah Ocalan's shift in solitary confinement on Imrali Island, where reading Murray Bookchin's social ecology turned the PKK founder away from Marxist-Leninist statehood toward democratic confederalism, through the communes, mandatory co-presidencies, women's councils, jineology and cooperatives built after Assad's forces withdrew. Drawing on John Holloway, David Graeber, Wes Enzinna and Luke Mogelson, and on Debbie Bookchin's description of the region as the art of transition in a collapsing civilization, he ends by treating Rojava as a proof of concept held in reserve.
In brief
- Ocalan concluded in prison, under Murray Bookchin's influence, that seizing state power cannot liberate anyone because the nation-state is itself the engine of structural violence, patriarchy and ecological destruction, and that the subjugation of women is the foundation of every other domination.
- The essay presents Bookchin's critique as showing that green consumerism, carbon taxation and renewable substitution cannot solve a crisis produced by an economic order built on limitless growth and private ownership.
- Rojava institutionalized this theory through neighborhood communes of thirty to four hundred households delegating upward, male-female co-presidencies in every office, women's councils with veto power over decisions affecting women, the abolition of child marriage, dowries and polygamy, the YPJ, and worker-owned cooperatives that David Graeber compared to the Spanish anarchist collectives of 1936.
- Its fatal structural flaw was dependence on a paradoxical alliance with the United States, which on Pinchbeck's account ended when Washington recognized the Damascus government under Ahmed al-Sharaa as its counterterrorism partner, leaving the region exposed to the Turkish-backed offensive of January 2026 and an integration agreement that surrendered borders, airports and oil fields to the central state.
- Pinchbeck's closing claim is that the experiment's suppression proves nothing about its ideas, that for over a decade millions of people demonstrated under siege that a society can run without a centralized state, institutionalize gender parity and organize an economy around the commons, and that this record stands as a blueprint for whatever follows the collapse of the current authoritarian order.
Full text
Among the many horrors unleashed by the global rise of authoritarian regimes in our rapidly shifting geopolitics, little has been written about its impacts on the extraordinary social and political experiment that was underway in eastern Syria in the area of Rojava. Unfortunately, even though Rojava has been essentially dismantled due to essentially the Trump regime um military retrenchment in the region and so on, I really believe that more of us need to really grapple with and understand what was going on there, what they tried. I really think it can provide a model for the future once the authoritarian project has collapsed, which I tend to think it will at some point. Far from being a mere wartime anomaly or localized ethnic uprising, the autonomous administration of north and east Syria represented a deliberate mass scale implementation of a radical alternative to the capitalist nation-state. For over a decade, this region operated as a living laboratory for a political theory that basically severed the concept of democracy from the structures of state sovereignty.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing uh what they accomplished. Rojava showed that current human societies could organize themselves on a large scale around the principles of ecological balance, gender liberation, and decentralized cooperation even under wartime conditions or or total siege conditions. So, to truly understand how this happened, we have to look at incredible paradox. How a philosophy that at least temporarily liberated millions of people on the ground in Syria, which was the Kurdish um minority I think uh in that area, was born inside a solitary prison cell on a remote island in the Sea of Marmara. The intellectual lineage of this experiment originates in the dramatic philosophical transformation of Abdullah Öcalan, the co-founder and ideological leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK.
Founded in 1978, the PKK initially operated as a traditional Marxist-Leninist vanguard movement seeking to establish an independent socialist state through guerrilla warfare against the Turkish Republic. However, Öcalan's capture by Turkish authorities in 1999, following a clandestine international operation, I think he was found in Africa, I mean I read Nigeria, and his subsequent solitary confinement on Imrali Island in Turkey forced him to undergo a profound transformation where he reevaluated his whole political commitments, his theories, and the introductory texts of the international initiative for his writings, it's noted that Öcalan often describes himself as being born three times. His first was his physical birth, his second was the founding of the PKK, but his third birth, and perhaps his most vital legacy, was this incredible paradigm shift toward what he called democratic civilization. This was a transformation he accomplished entirely behind bars. Unable Unable to communicate with his party cadres, isolated by walls of stone, Öcalan immersed himself in Western philosophy, post-Marxist critique, and social theory.
As the sociologist John Holloway notes, the marvel of Öcalan is that even as as an entrenched political leader, revolutionary leader, he possessed a lot of flexibility and sensitivity, enough sensitivity to completely turn his thinking around when given a better idea, and to rethink the very meaning and the possibility of this revolution that he was trying to bring about. So, in In the decisive conceptual pivot occurred when he encountered the writings of the American social ecologist and anarchist anarchist theorist Murray Bookchin. I think he was from Vermont. Uh Bookchin diagnosed that our drive to dominate nature is inextricably linked to our drive to dominate one another. Bookchin recognized that the foundational architecture of capitalism, specifically the private ownership and physical and intellectual property, is inherently ecologically unsound.
Something that maybe Rousseau foreshadowed in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. Bookchin warned the private ownership of the planet by elite strata must be brought to an end if we are to survive the afflictions it has imposed on the biotic world, particularly as a result of society structured around limitless growth. Bookchin was deeply suspicious of the reformist compromises of modern environmentalism. He argued, I think we can now say that he was totally right, that initiatives like green consumerism, eco-friendly business, carbon taxation, and even the simple transition to renewable energy are insufficient when they're in a system based on domination and uh private control of resources. Uh these partial solutions act as a smoke screen deflecting attention from the reality that the current economic paradigm can't really be salvaged for human living.
Um you get a structural violence, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. Yeah, merely buying organic food or driving electric cars is obviously not going to lead to our salvation while the underlying logic of the system remains based on infinite extraction and private hoarding of wealth and resources. There's no way we can consume our way out of a crisis created by hyper-consumption. So, influenced by Bookchin's theories of what he called libertarian municipalism, Öcalan recognized that the nation-state itself was the primary engine of structural violence, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. He concluded, reasonably, that true liberation could not be achieved by merely conquering state power or altering the flags, that the oppression of women was actually the basis of all other oppression.
Something else he took from Bookchin. In his text Liberating Life, Women's Revolution, Öcalan observed, "The history of the loss of freedom is at the is at the same time the history of how women lost their position and vanished from history. Women's downfall and loss is thus the downfall and loss of the whole of society." To correct this civilizational error, Öcalan decoupled the idea of democratic organization from the course of mechanisms mechanisms of government. He wrote, "Democracy is governance that is not a state. It is the power of communities to govern themselves without state." So, astonishingly, Öcalan's extremely radical thesis, written behind bars, then provided the model for the autonomous experiment in Rojava.
Instead of a sovereign state, Öcalan formulated a model based on Bookchin that he termed democratic confederalism, a paradigm designed to construct a stateless democracy from the ground up. In the New York Times Magazine in 2015, journalist Wes Enzinna tracked how this theoretical shift traveled from an isolated prison cell to the battlefields of Syria, noting that Öcalan began assigning Bookchin's books to PKK militants, and how this actually transformed the strategic objective of the entire movement. With this framework, societies understood not as a collection of isolated individuals or national subjects, but as a network of self-governing communities capable of managing their own affairs through consensus and voluntary federation, effectively rendering the traditional bureaucratic state apparatus obsolete. When the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2012, the sudden withdrawal of Bashar al-Assad's military forces to defend Damascus created a historic power vacuum in the northern provinces. Rather than attempting to establish conventional governments, local Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian civic coalitions seized the moment to translate Abdullah Öcalan's theoretical concepts into material reality.
The core operational cell of this new society was the local commune. This was an assembly comprising between 30 and 400 households. Power in this design flowed explicitly from the bottom upward. These neighborhood communes dispatched delegates to district, regional, and national councils, ensuring that all legislative authority remained rooted in face-to-face local participation. In his reporting, ANF documented how these ordinary assemblies managed the granular realities of daily survival under wartime conditions, resolving immediate municipal crises regarding meat prices, fuel distribution, electrical grid maintenance, and so on, entirely without the need for centralized state planning or corporate monopolies. Simultaneously, the administration of Rojava implemented what they called genealogy or the science of women.
And this was a core tenant of Ocalan's philosophy based on Murray Bookchin's ideas. To dismantle patriarchal structures, the region instituted a mandatory co-presidency system requiring that every single administrative, political, and civics office be jointly held by one man and one woman. Autonomous women's councils were granted absolute veto power over any community decisions pertaining to women's rights, and child marriage, dowries, and polygamy were all legally abolished. Writing for Defense One in 2018, Gail Lemmon emphasized that this institutional commitment went far beyond mere representation. Demonstrating that gender parity was treated as the foundational prerequisite for the region's entire legal and social transformation. This structural autonomy was defended by the all-female Women's Protection Units or YPJ, whose members approached their military service not merely as combat duty, but as a direct defense of their social emancipation.
In the economic sphere, the region sought to develop a social economy based on the commons and cooperative behavior, uh intentionally insulating itself from the extractive dynamics of global capitalism. So, really a rather just an extraordinary experiment. While recognizing limited private property, the administration systematically prioritized worker-owned cooperatives in agriculture, manufacturing, and basic services. In a major 2014 essay for the Guardian, the late anthropologist David Graeber explicitly compared the socio-economic transformations of northeast Syria to the anarchist collectivist movements of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Graeber argued that both projects successfully demonstrated that complex multi-ethnic populations could effectively organize production, distribution, and consumption around the principles of mutual aid, collective ownership, and restorative justice, even while enduring severe international economic embargoes and constant military threats.
But sadly, this beautiful experiment carried a structural flaw. Its historical trajectory was inextricably bound to a precarious, highly paradoxical military alliance with the United States. Following the siege of Kobani, where Kurdish forces successfully repelled the Islamic State, the Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Kurdish, Arab, and Christian militias, became the primary ground partner for the global coalition to counter ISIS. This arrangement created an unstable geopolitical contradiction. A radical anti-capitalist social movement protected from its hostile members by the military might of the world's preeminent capitalist superpower. As the SDF advanced against ISIS, the administration expanded its non-Kurdish Arab majority territories, such as Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.
Writing for the New Yorker, the journalist Luke Mogelson documented the intense sociological and cultural friction that occurred during this expansion. Yeah, the the the administration, you know, the fairly new administration faced incredible difficulties when it tried to introduce these progressive, secular, and feminist governance principles. As you can imagine, the deeply traditional rural Arab communities that had also been completely traumatized by years of totalitarian religious religious rule. Unfortunately, the structural vulnerability of this whole arrangement was laid bare following the rapid realignment of American foreign policy under the second Trump administration or regime seems like a better word. Upon returning to office, uh Trump enacted an explicit policy of military retrenchment, viewing the open-ended presence of American troops in Syria as a costly liability and actively signaling that northern Syria fell within a Turkish sphere of influence.
Through a series of aggressive diplomatic maneuvers, Washington normalized relations with the newly established transitional Syrian government led by Ahmad al-Shara. And yeah, unfortunately, the the final betrayal occurred in late 2025 when the United States formally recognized the Damascus government as its primary counterterrorism partner, effectively rendering the autonomous administration of Rojava obsolete. Lacking American air support and stripped of diplomatic protection, the region was left completely exposed to a massive coordinated military offensive launched in January 2026 by Turkish-backed forces. And uh yeah, the Syrian National Army. Uh yeah, it must be pretty horrible. At this point, I know there was, you know, concerns of uh you know, enslaving the population and all these terrible things.
But the physical dismantling of this autonomous zone culminated in a sweeping internet integration agreement signed on January 29, 2026, which basically was a capitulation uh where the Syrian government forces were formally absorbed into the regular Syrian National Army, uh who control the international border borders, airports, and the lucrative oil fields. All this was surrendered to the central government uh Damascus. They granted the traditional government certain concessions, temporary concessions, to prevent immediate ethnic cleansing, including the formal recognition of Kurdish cultural identity and the res- restoration of citizenship to formally stateless individuals. The radical experiment in stateless bottom-up democracy that was uh envisioned by Ocalan has been systematically dismantled and what we have now is a, you know, bad situation with a centralized state structure. But we have to see the tragic suppression of the Rojava experiment, you know, wasn't due to any inherent failure of its political or social theories.
You know, they obviously faced a completely brutal state-centric geopolitical squeeze uh and it's the same squeeze we're seeing unleashed across the planet. Uh as Debbie Bookchin and Sheidler beautifully writes in his analysis of the region, Rojava needs to be understood and I guess in a way memorialized as the art of transition in a collapsing civilization. Rojava was a flash of light in an increasingly dark global landscape. And what we can really denote about this that over a decade under the most towering conditions, millions of people successfully demonstrated that society can function efficiently without a centralized state apparatus, that gender parity is achievable and can be institutionalized, that an economy can be structured around ecological balance and the common good rather than private accumulation. So at this point, although Rojava's physical territory has been reabsorbed by the states, according to all current reports, uh yeah, at least we have this historical record of what was achieved during that time and um that's going to stay with us and and it may actually be very important for the future.
As Ocalan reminds us from his continued isolation, the struggle for a democratic civilization is not just a local, it's a global project that stretches back eons. And this is uh something that cannot be erased by an agreement signed on a piece of paper. Rojava will maintain itself as a vital conceptual blueprint and a tangible proof of concept for the alternative forms of humane organization that must inevitably emerge when our current authoritarian projects collapse, which I think eventually they will whether we live to see it or not. You know, what's what's what's too top heavy to survive will eventually fall. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to my channel.
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Transcript of the video essay, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.