Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis: Small Map

Some of those who slander the Kurdish movement justify their biased judgments by extending their sectarianism to the Palestinian movement, saying that they are aligning themselves specifically with its left wing. They overlook the fact that the resistance has a united political front. Furthermore, they ignore the fact that the PFLP’s sister organization, the TKP-ML, as well as the other Maoist and Stalinist organizations of the Turkish movement, have a long-standing strategic alliance with the PKK and are fighting in Rojava and Qandil. And perhaps they have not read anywhere, because they only read what they already know, that the DFLP participates in international conferences on global democratic confederalism, which are organized on the initiative of the Kurdish movement. The suggestion of ideological sectarianism on the revolutionary struggle of the masses of the capitalist periphery constitutes an abandonment of both the revolutionary anarchist tradition and of Leninism, with its Bakuninist influences especially on the question of international struggle, and a transition to revisioned anarchism and while it underestimates the class struggle in all its dimensions, it leads to pacifism, or to a return to the bourgeois influences of Marxism, which predicted the annihilation of “historically insignificant nations,” that is, to a return to the glorification of colonialism. Thus, the idea of proletarian solidarity beyond the North- South border is left to the economistic, puritanical academic laborism of the metropolis, which expects the disintegrated workers elite of the North to save the whole Earth, and indeed without a civil war.

 Both movements, Palestinian and Kurdish, have the same main political enemy and they know it: the capitalist metropolis, the global monopolies of power. At this stage of the global confrontation between North and South, both movements avoid directly attacking the central imperialist powers, as long as the latter do not directly attack their specific territories. Both are engaged in a long and bitter conflict with the proxies of the center, islamic and zionist fascism. Is perhaps the task of direct confrontation with the militarism of the metropolis the responsibility primarily of the class revolutionary movement of the countries from where it launches?

From the Atlantic to the Gulf

 The Palestinian left resistance calls on the Arab masses to rise up. Comrade Georges Ibrahim Abdallah sees the Arab revolution coming from the Atlantic to the Gulf, due to the deep economic crisis of all reactionary regimes. He sees the revolution echoing between the north and south of the Mediterranean.

 Arab nationalism brought victories for the Arab popular classes in the last century, but it was unable to free itself from the class bonds of imperialist control and was eventually fully integrated and ended up being outright counter-revolutionary. Neither its secular nor its religious versions can break free from the framework of control set by the central imperialist powers, because they are based on capitalist exploitation and state authoritarianism. Such is their class structure.

 The problem cannot be solved by escaping into abstract theory about the basic class relation of the capitalist mode of production. As was proven 15 years ago, the revolution of the Arab masses is imminent. Those who underestimate the importance of cultural identities within the class struggle are essentially playing on the ideological side of colonialism. Monopoly accumulation begins with the opposition between city and countryside, center and periphery, and with military conquests. Social identities have been targeted by capitalist expansion and development since long before the formation of the industrial working class. The capitalist mode of production may have first appeared in Venice and then spread further northwest, but let us not forget that Venice was the hub of circulation for capital and plunder between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, that is, between European hegemony on the one hand and the Middle East and the Mediterranean world on the other. The Arab revolution is intertwined with the global socialist revolution, as is the revolution of all communities, social bonds and cultures that have been trampled on by empires and capitalism. The Commune of 1871 was sparked by the uprising against occupation. Bulgarian revolutionary anarchism, a powerful example from our history, was fertilized by the seeds of Bakunin’s political line in the resistance against the Ottoman Empire. Also, the revolutionary tradition of the Iberian peoples as well stemmed from the resistance to the Napoleonic French occupation.

 However, cultural identity and the conditions of oppression and exploitation do not determine the course of the struggle. The third element determines whether the struggle will develop in a revolutionary or reactionary direction: the political program. The Arab revolution will only succeed if it takes the form of a proletarian revolution for universal equality and social self-determination, uprooting class and related political dependencies on imperialist monopolies. The task of the proletariat on the northern side of the Mediterranean is to break down the objective and subjective class barriers between North and South, striking at the unequal and genocidal economic policies and military structures of the metropolis. It is an idea with historical experience, but one that needs to be upgraded in terms of its class-social roots, its political coherence, and its objectives.

The Janus of the South?

 Throughout its historical development, the state has appeared in two forms. On the one hand, within its borders, since the state is always a demarcated occupation over land, it is the political structure in which class relations are concentrated in a given territory. On the other hand, it is a structure of military, economic, and political attack or defense against anything that is not under its control and thus has not been incorporated into its own class formation. The metropolitan, i.e., model state, is the historical structure of exploitative expansionism. In various historical phases, the internal structure of the metropolitan state exhibits elements of equality for certain classes, in contrast to its structured external relations. For example, the hegemonic Athenian democracy. In any case, the real elements of popular power are the product of a fierce class struggle, while the fictitious elements of equality are the political management of class relations by the exploiting classes. In this context, the state is a system for integrating the social achievements of internal class struggle into its military, political and economic expansion. From the perspective of class struggle, the two aspects are interrelated. It is impossible to view class struggle on a national scale as independent from international power relations and the relationship between the exploited social forces and the state. Unless, of course, we settle for metropolitan nationalism.

 In the South, the unity of the two aspects is also inherent, and we will see this specifically in Kurdistan and the Arab world. While in general the nation state is the establishment and organization of the city’s sovereignty over the countryside and its competitive relationship with the rest of the world, its spread outside Europe (and here we must be able to distinguish it from pre-existing empires) is a development of resistance to colonialism, but on the terms of the dominant capitalist culture. In this sense, comrade Georges Ibrahim Abdallah noted the following: “The Americans, together with Israel and the reactionary Arabs, are destroying everything we have achieved historically. The state itself is a construct that was won through hard struggles. Nevertheless, they are working to dismantle this state and all its institutions, transforming the region into chaos where ethnic groups, religious minorities, and barbarians tear each other apart, while the Israelis and Americans sit back and decide which “human animals” deserve their protection today and which will be sacrificed […] Of course, the bourgeoisie and its political pawns are the enemies of our army. They don’t want us to have a national army. They don’t want us to have a nation-state. They want a bunch of thugs and criminals running around so they can use them to bring our people to their knees. […] I hope that we will manage to build a strong army, capable of defending us, one that will replace all resistance.”¹

 At this point, comrade Abdullah Ocalan has updated the historical anarchist view, concluding after the assimilation of the state-monopoly bloc that the spread of the nation state did not liberate peoples and ethnic groups from capitalism, but instead tied them to dependence on global economic and political-military monopolies. In general, the conclusion is correct, but we need to look at its variations more specifically. It is crucial not to lose sight of the interconnection between the external and internal substance of the state, which is only by way of exception univocal from the outside in.

 Any state that does not belong to the monopolistic centers, to the extent that it wants to have economic relations with the global market and therefore with other states, is directly or indirectly subject to unequal exchange relations, due to the historically accumulated unequal development of capital productivity and due to the military-political and economic control of markets, and especially of innovation, by the central monopolies. Thus, a virtually unchanging pyramid of domination and accumulation, center, periphery, and semi-periphery has historically been formed. Every state outside the center chooses between the inevitable blackmail of exploitation and exclusion. Such is the external appearance of inter-state relations, as relations between states and not as direct class relations. The internal appearance of these same relations is the overexploitation of the proletariat of the (semi)periphery. The reproduction of international inequalities is not based on exploitation in general, across class lines, of some nations by other nations, but on exploitation of the popular classes of the state class formations of the (semi)periphery. The local exploiting classes, which mediate the relations of overexploitation, increase them for their own benefit, simply because they exist within this chain. In the 20th century, class peace within (semi)peripheral states was generally attempted through national policies of partial independence from central monopolies and the distribution of preserved value between the local bourgeoisie and the popular classes. Of course, these reformist policies of national unity do not overturn the coercion of overexploitation or exclusion, while the profits of the local exploiting classes increase either way.

 The inherent and inevitable tendency of capital to evolve/develop, compels every section of the international bourgeoisie to participate in the global market. Slowly, quickly, or fundamentally, every post-metropolitan state has entered into relationships of dependence and unequal accumulation. Every state, regardless of the historical and social depth of its nationalism, decomposes and recomposes class relations under the domination of central monopolies. Economic, political and cultural assimilation is insurmountable in capitalism.

 Instead of being an exception, social-capitalist states proved the historical impasse of state-led independence from unequal international accumulation. From the 1950s onwards, the USSR made gradual transformations towards private accumulation. The “allied” states were economically dependent and bound by unequal exchange relations with Russian imperialism. A typical example was Guevara’s denunciation of the exploitation of Cubans through the wheat sold to them by the “mother of the revolution.” Or the Albanian socialist state, which, in order to abstain from international exploitation, ended up completely isolating itself from economic cooperation, with the result that its productive capital remained stagnant for three decades. So today, states that open up to Chinese capital investment are putting their working classes in a relationship of overexploitation and colonial anti-social plunder, which seems alternative but is class-wise identical. In any case, the dominant imperialist powers are on the march. This process includes the serious loss of popular support for the Venezuelan government, the American military campaign and the kidnapping and hostage-taking of its president.

 The collapse of the Russian state-monopoly empire paved the way for the imperialist plunder of the nation states of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus, and then the Middle East and Africa. Through military and economic terrorism, the Euro-American center attacked every structure of relative national independence and regulated overexploitation. In the Middle East, there remain two major ethno-state structures that the Euro-American monopolies want to liquidate in order to complete their absolute domination there: the Iranian and Turkish states. This liquidation is attempted both directly, through military terrorism and economic blockade, and indirectly, through the triggering of conflicts, coups, right-wing and fascist movements, etc. Where possible, the destabilisation takes the form of the dismemberment of the nation-state, so that it can be replaced by more, but competitive, inadequate and therefore completely dependent state formations. Whether through national resistance and the eventual levelling of what was once a politically autonomous nation-state, or through the adaptation of the local exploiting classes to the demands of the central monopolies, neither the territorial integrity of the state nor the continued rule of the established dominant classes can be guaranteed. The imperialists always want their own mediators of overexploitation. The fact that the Turkish state remains a member of NATO and for many decades has taken on the role of provocateur on behalf of the American center, does not make it protected, but rather ripe for the provocation its own disintegration.

 The policy pursued by the PKK, whatever it may be, has a decisive influence on the evolution of the Turkish state and imperialist plans for the Middle East, not only because it is a powerful revolutionary movement, but also, purely objectively, because it is a wedge in the restructuring of Middle Eastern states, insurmountable by all capitalist forces. The Kurdish movement understood the historical process in time and evolved its political theory and goals. It rejected the claim to a national state, the mechanism of attachment to the monopoly pyramid. Instead, it linked historical experience to the prospect of social transcendence of the state, removing the national struggle from its conservative heritage. Faced with the blackmail, exploitation or exclusion, it countered this in practice with the internationalist and cross-border confederalism of the self-organized society. Bakunin’s proposals for the revolutionary commune and federalism are blooming here. Federalist communist politics has a class character. Rejecting the nationalism that inevitably accompanies statism, the PKK and KCK refused to take a profitable position of mediation in the overexploitation of the Kurdish people.

 It is important to understand the depth of the anti-nationalist position of the apoist national movement. Rejecting separatist programs, it took the most critical position against the central monopoly policy of disintegration and plunder of the Middle East. By defending the integrity of existing state entities, nation-states within their borders, the apoist movement resists the imposition of new class and political barriers. In one way or another, the local exploiting classes are attached to transnational networks of overexploitation, because this is in their class interest, and so their resistance is always limited. In northern and eastern Syria and northern Iraq, it has been proven that only the confederal self-management movement has the motivation and the strength to resist military invasions. As Bakunin predicted before the Commune of 1871, the national resistance of the bourgeoisie is inherently sold-out, but popular defense can succeed. In Syria, it has also been proven that only the confederal grassroots movement is historically capable of overcoming collaborative nationalism, suppressing sectarianism, and preventing national disintegration. This form of national resistance, although it may occasionally ally itself with the state, which is inevitably a mechanism of class exploitation, aims to prevent the imposition of heavier forms of domination in the context of the monopoly offensive.

 On both sides, the Kurdish movement and, belatedly, the deep core of Turkish nationalism, understand that peace in the Turkish heartland and the unity of the Turkish state are at stake. The peace proposals of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan to the Turkish state respond to this perception, with a view of preventing widespread war and defending the integrity of the Turkish state. Peace between the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state could be a powerful barrier to the advance of the central imperialist powers in the Middle East. The slander of various historically uneducated sectarians who see an American hand behind every move of the apoist movement is not worth discussing. It is easy to exaggerate one’s revolutionary and anti-imperialist credentials, but how many forces has each mobilized and how much popular power has each built against Turkish fascism and the imperialist pyramid?

 Like any popular movement, the Kurdish movement does not fight with nihilistic motives. The military conflict serves specific socio-political purposes. Since secession has been rejected as a goal, the conflict aims to overturn the balance of political power within the established territorial borders. As anarchists we rightly reject any assimilation of the social movement into the state, but any conflict with the state demands an immediate political victory for social forces, whether or not its recognition by institutions is sought. The peace proposals of the Kurdish movement have been demands to secure the power of resistance. The current negotiations in the isolation of Imrali are, for the Kurdish movement and its allied revolutionary forces, a deliberate step towards the political crystallisation of the political and military victories they have achieved through decades of multifaceted resistance. The recognition of Kurdish self-determination and equality, the abolition of counter-revolutionary policies and institutions, part of which will be the release of many political prisoners, and finally, a reform of the political system towards the long-standing goals of the PKK and of almost the entire Turkish revolutionary left. Moreover, the political line of the People’s Front, the only different line that has a militant basis, does not seek the destruction of the state, but the immediate transition to a “people’s state,” as popular as a state can be. From an anarchist point of view, the question of stages or immediacy in the seizure of power is irrelevant, since either way it negates the immediacy of popular power.

 Ideological criteria are effective when they enrich the understanding of the reality of competing subjects, not when they are projected onto subjects who do not recognize them as their own. We are obliged to understand the Kurdish movement, like the Palestinian movement, as national movements. The PKK and the KCK identify themselves within the socialist tradition and, indeed, within the anti-state, anti-capitalist current. However, their main political goal is not the historical victory of certain ideas, but the development of the historical steps of an ethnicity in its struggle for liberation. As long as the state exists, the consolidation of the gains of the masses depends on a relationship of political power with the state, whether this is political overthrow, so-called dual power, secession, or institutional integration of victory. The institutional demands of the Kurdish movement are as natural as was the establishment of the eight-hour working day after Chicago for the labor movement. It would be unrealistic to ascribe a critique about a reformist turn at a time when a national movement is achieving a political goal for which it has fought hard for half a century.

 Since the goal of secession has been rejected, any resistance movement in relation to the state looks either to political overthrow or political reform. In the anti-colonial struggle, political overthrow can mean the expulsion of the settlers. Kemalist colonialism was not a settler enterprise: it was the continuation of an empire, while colonization had taken place centuries earlier. The Turkish state committed genocides with the aim of ethnically cleansing its territory, but the Turkish ethnicity had long been established. To define the issue in class terms, the Turkish nation is not a class of colonists with active roots in the capitalist metropolis of the North or the steppes of Mongolia; it is a multifaceted class formation, a large people under the authority of the bourgeoisie and central monopolies. As the Kurdish movement emphasizes, Turks and Kurds have walked together through history and cannot be separated today. It is not up to the Kurdish movement to overthrow the class power of the Turkish state, at least not on its own.

 These specific conditions complicate the position of the national question within class relations. Since the Turkish revolutionary movement made its historic mass advance (1970…), two paths have emerged: One was to demote the issues of national oppression and, more generally, the colonial nature of the Turkish state into the general class struggle. This path sacrificed the political autonomy of the Kurdish movement, its demands, and the struggle against the particular class relations brought about by national oppression. The other path brought the buried social subjectivity to the fore, relegating the class demands of the struggle to second place. Historically, it is not self-evident that the anti-colonial struggle relegates the class struggle to second place. There have been different examples. The peculiarity of Turkish genocidal nationalism produced this particular complication. It is inappropriate for me to argue here theoretically against the apoistic idea of a historically generalized democratic society, which is placed above class struggle. However, it is clear that this particular ideological framework responds to the needs of the specific national struggle, given the current class-political conditions. For the intelligentsia of the metropolis, what matters is the soundness of the theory, and from this derive both the exorcisms and the idealization of apoism. For the internationalist socialist movement, what matters is how the struggle progresses and what its limits are.

 We can and must understand the apoist position of underestimating class struggle and the position of coexistence with the state (“democracy plus state”), both simultaneously and independently. The particular historical conditions in which the Kurdish anti-colonial struggle is being waged have, on the one hand, forced the emergence of national oppression and exploitation independantly from a general proletarian revolutionary program for the Turkish class formation, even though this specific national oppression is undoubtedly part of the sequence of class relations. On the other hand, they have forced the formation of a program of coexistence with the Turkish class formation until a socialist revolution takes place. Consequently, institutionalization of coexistence (also) in the state. The two positions, on class struggle and on the state, automatically produce mutual consequences: a double loop of positive feedback, which locks the two positions in their conservative intensity. Acceptance of appeasement with the state implies the rejection of the political overthrow of class power. That is why the apoist movement falsely characterizes the party state established by the Bolsheviks as a workers’ state. With a historical distortion that resists the libertarian assessment of the Russian Revolution, the proletarian revolution is condemned along with the party dictatorship. Of course, this political narrative is bourgeois liberal and, in fact, of the right-wing tradition. The state is perceived as a mechanism of heteronomy, oppression, and exploitation, but it is not opposed by the exploited classes, but by a cross-class democratic society. We know that without the abolition of wage labor and the value of capital, direct and universal deliberative democracy cannot be achieved: it is limited and dependent on the given accumulation of capital. On the other hand, the devaluation of class struggle puts on the agenda the peaceful marginalization of the state and its gradual transformation. This is an idea that spread in the 1990s, from the fusion of liberal social democracy with anti-authoritarian academia. It also intersects with Murray Bookchin’s powerless reformist democracy. The programmatic proposals and practices it has produced clearly belong to the line of alternativism and reformism. A. Öcalan has aptly noted that the primary revisionism of the socialist program was the retreat to statism. However, apoist theory itself makes concessions on this point, because it has relegated class struggle to second place. This retreat did not arise now, during negotiations with the Turkish state; it is ideologically constitutional. It must be understood that the retreat is not a right or wrong approach for global socialism; it is intertwined with the specific class, political, and social conditions in which the Kurdish struggle is being waged.

 The historical materialist understanding of the ideological positions of each resistance subject is concretized and confirmed by examining the transformations of its applied political practices. At the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the subsequent invasion of the Islamic State, the Kurdish movement had no ideological reservations about replacing the collapsing state with autonomous revolutionary institutions. Nor did it give in to the unfounded hope of peaceful coexistence with the Islamic State. And today, it is not surrendering militarily or politically to the new Islamofascist regime. In Turkish territory in 2015, the Kurdish movement defended the democratic autonomy of Kurdish cities with an armed uprising, and the Kurdish leader even criticized his organization for not supporting the uprising with all its might.

 The apoist position on the fundamental importance of social self-defense de facto calls into question the political power of the state. The broader class movement cannot be excluded from this political right, which the Kurdish movement, with the women’s revolution, has brought to its ultimate class consistency. If the basis for the abolition of patriarchy is the abolition of male domination over women and over life as a whole, the basis for the abolition of capitalism is the abolition of the domination of labor by capital, that is, the abolition of the extraction of surplus value from wage labor, the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. If the abolition of patriarchy is a prerequisite for the free coexistence of the genders, then the abolition of the wage labor-capital relationship and the equalization of the value of labor internationally are prerequisites for the abolition of class exploitation and the free coexistence of nations. However, attributing responsibilities that do not belong to the Kurdish or Palestinian movements is worse than unfair: it is hypocritical and reactionary, because the task of revolutionary class struggle with complete terms belongs to the still politically powerless international anarchist movement or, from the point of view of the left, to the turkish or european anti-capitalist movement, that is, to those who lay the blame. Movements that take responsibility for their actions can distinguish social victories from political compromises. The recognition of kurdish self-determination within the turkish class formation will be an important victory for the Kurdish people, for the internationalist movement, and for anti-monopoly resistance in the Middle East. The abolition of counterrevolutionary and dictatorial laws, which will lead to the release of political prisoners, will be a victory for the social movement. The extent of these changes is influenced by the participation of the turkish anti-capitalist movement in the struggle for the release of A. Öcalan and the resolution of the Kurdish question. Sectarian attitudes have led to fragmented victories, while a united front opens the way for everyone. The possibility of the destruction of the turkish state by a federalist socialist revolution is open, as it is open for all states worldwide. In the immediate term, the Kurdish leader’s long-standing peace promoting stance and his current response to the turkish state’s call protect the multiethnic people of the turkish class formation from a sectarian war for the sake of the central monopolies.

 Within the world of states, the establishment of institutions of popular self-government and socialist transformations appears as a state within a state, because it presupposes the territorial uprooting, if not the total overthrow, of the political power of the state. Let us just consider that until recently, the Greek oligarchic media referred to Exarchia as the “state of Exarchia” because of the long-standing daily practice of opposition to police authority in our neighborhood. From the perspective of political power competition, the external appearance of revolutionary relations and institutions is always the competition for dominance, regardless of their qualitative characteristics. From an anarchist perspective, popular political institutions that realize economic equality and direct universal democracy are not a form of authority, since they abolish heteronomy on the basis of social production. However, for the world of power, revolution is inevitably a competitive power. The Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria was from the outset, and continues to be after the change of regime, a state within a state. This fact is a huge revolutionary achievement, not only for the Syrian people, but for the social movement internationally. The same applies to Zapatistas autonomy, which is why the institutional Mexican left opposes it. The stage of the struggle in which revolutionary socio-political institutions are established has been called a situation of dual power. In an internal coup, the change of political rulers takes place rapidly. Social revolution, on the other hand, always goes through the stage of so-called dual power, precisely because it liberates social territory before political overthrow, which it cannot achieve without a revolutionary social base. When the revolutionary social movement delays in replacing state institutions with autonomous popular institutions and in implementing socialist transformations, the counter-revolution advances to uproot the movement. The idealistic anarcho-communists who in 1936 and ’37 in Spain blocked workers’ and social self-management and socialization, juxtaposing a flimsy anti-authoritarian ethic of power sharing with the statist political forces, ended up joining one side of the state’s dual authority, ultimately leaving its sole sovereignty intact.

 In the test of civil war, the tendency toward fragmentation of political power can be unleashed. Different forces within or against the state find the opportunity to assert their own needs or are forced to resist independently in order to survive. This is also the case in the relationship between anti-colonial and broader anti-occupation movements and the state. Resistance forms one or more poles of political power against an occupying administration or even a collaborationist national government. Such is the situation in the occupied areas of Rojava, with the settlers of Turkish colonialism, such is the situation in Bashur, with the collaborative regime of Barzani, such as in Palestine with the collaborationist regime of the Palestinian Authority, such as in Lebanon, with a NATO protectorate state and its pro-Zionist sects. Anti-colonial resistance always appears as a state within a state, regardless of the particular characteristics of class relations and political institutions within it. Revolutionary anarchism aims at a federalist socialist revolution in all social resistance movements, not underestimating the political power or the resistance itself to colonialism, national oppression, and imperialism, but understanding the historical class-political character of these forms of power.

 When effective resistance appears as a state within a state in relation to the pre-established state, it is treated by other states, which, being states themselves, think in terms of political power and territorial sovereignty, as a de facto but shadow state. Each state, according to its interests, seeks to ally itself with and integrate the new de facto state into its international policy or to eliminate it. As soon as a piece of land is freed from an established power structure, the entire capitalist world wants to devour it in one way or another. The blackmail, exploitation or exclusion, is immediately activated against any autonomous territorial resistance. No state recognizes de facto political power within a resistant social formation before the latter submits to the exploitative and assimilative terms of the former. This means that, in addition to establishing relations of economic dependence and unequal exchange, the “friendly” existing states demand the transformation into a new state with all the characteristics of the state as a system of political heteronomy and exploitation, or its integration into the pre-established state. That is why the Zapatista autonomous administration of Chiapas has been for three decades and will remain a shadow socio-political entity for the Mexican state and the central monopolies, as long as it does not succumb to the blackmail of assimilation and exploitation. The de facto state of Hamas in Gaza was razed to the ground along with all its basic infrastructure when the Palestinian resistance organization refused to play the role of the administrator of the large prison. Although the DAANES maintains good diplomatic relations and military cooperation with NATO and Russian imperialists, it has no official political recognition, nor was it even invited to the inter-state dialogues on Syria, while the new fascist regime of Al Qaeda was immediately recognized by the EU, with high-level envoys, and also passed by the White House. The Syrian state of confederal self-government continues to be terrorized by Turkish colonialism and Islamic State gangs because it does not bow to the monopolistic extortion of exploitation. The EU continues to treat the PKK with counter-revolutionary “terrorism” policies because the apoist movement resists the dissolution and plunder of the Middle East.

 The Kurdish Freedom Movement has accumulated analytical intelligence and experience sufficient to understand political developments more deeply than anyone else and in a timely manner. Even before Assad left, it saw that the Syrian state had entered the orbit of the American mandate and that its harmonization with the Abraham Accords was imminent. The position of the Kurds is no longer determined by political-military relations within Syria, but exclusively by the relations surrounding the New Middle East plan and, specifically, by relations with Israel as the appointed guardian of the Euro-American center. For the central monopolies, the integrated self-determination of the Kurds will remain a legitimate goal, as a counterweight to sunni fascism and turkish nationalism; a two-sided lever of control. However, this means increased pressure for political and economic subjugation. After the regime change, the military alliance against the Islamic State ceased to be an advantage for the autonomous social movement in Syria and became a tool of blackmail to impose dependence through the relentless stirring up of multifaceted attacks by the turkish occupation forces and their mercenaries, by the Islamic State, and by the new regime against the confederation.

 As the imperialist realignment of the Middle East accelerates, the weakness of the Kurdish movement in the web of inter-state relations intensifies. Due to the territorial and political strategic position of the Kurdish people, the radical achievements of the intercommunity and women’s revolution in North and East Syria leave a serious control gap in the middle of the monopoly plan.

 Peace between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement will protect the Kurds in the four regions of Kurdistan and all communities in Turkish territory from the slaughter of imperialist policies. From the perspective of the internationalist movement, the question remains open as to which direction the Turkish-Kurdish peace will strengthen: monopolistic hegemony or anti-capitalist social autonomy? This will be determined by the position taken by the Kurdish movement in the class struggle and the likely upcoming popular revolution due to the economic collapse of the Turkish class formation. It will be determined more fundamentally by the resilience of social autonomy in Syria and, primarily, by whether the Kurdish Freedom Movement will invest in stabilizing monopoly control and advancing the New Middle East plan or in the social revolution around the Mediterranean, supporting its historical vanguard, the Palestinian revolution. Let us remember that the programmatic declaration of the HBDH (United Revolutionary Liberation Movement), the alliance of the Turkish revolutionary left and the PKK, founded in 2016, proposes democratic confederalism for Kurdistan and popular democracy for Turkey. The spread throughout Syria and the deepening of the revolutionary achievements of the confederal movement will be an indicator. Comrade Bese Hozat from the KCK said a year ago: “If the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria cannot secure and protect its existence and freedom, there will be no ground for a democratic solution in Northern Kurdistan. These developments are interdependent. Without a democratic solution in Northern Kurdistan, it is not possible for the democratic autonomous system of Rojava to maintain its existence and freedom.”

 The reflections between the internal and external aspects of resistance, seen through the prism of the state, are also recognizable in the Lebanese resistance. Hezbollah and its allies in the national resistance are a state within a state, and this relationship is the objective aspect of popular power against Zionist invasions and collaborationist forces. Half a century ago, the imperialists dismantled Lebanon, resulting in the perpetuation of a situation of multipolar power. The anti-occupation resistance condensed this situation into a central duality between itself and forces subservient to the central monopolies. After the great victory against the Zionist invasion of 2006, the duality institutionally took over the state itself. The national resistance participates in governments, the army, etc. However, the transnational front of Euro-American imperialism continues to treat anti-Zionist resistance in terms of “counterterrorism.” As the resistance movement grows stronger, so does the coercion, assimilation and exploitation or exclusion. When a movement actively intervenes against the military supremacy of the central monopolies, the exclusion escalates into brutal terrorism, as happened against the Lebanese people after 2023, due to their alliance with the Palestinian resistance. Even before the Lebanese resistance entered the fray, a NATO fleet (including Greek ships) was deployed and lined up opposite Lebanon. Regardless of its class composition and its relationship with the state, the Lebanese resistance will never receive institutional recognition from Western European and American centers, nor as a legitimate government, unless it adapts to an opening of the Iranian state to their monopolies and political directives. Under the current conditions of imperialist terrorism, military invasions, and the fomenting of antisocial internal conflicts, comrade G. I. Abdallah’s position that the Lebanese people want a strong state and a strong army with a resistance mentality and leadership echoes the demands of the resistance against monopolistic encroachment. What will be the class-political composition and form of the social institutions of the de facto pariah state? This is determined by the Lebanese people through their struggle. The class-political composition of the national resistance shapes the state institutions. Hic Rhodus, hic salta.. Certainly, however, the mediation of overexploitation by secular or religious capitalist forces makes resistance to monopoly domination open to sellout just when it becomes strong. Equally certain is that passive or active political acceptance of imperialist campaigns to change regimes or dismantle states in the global (semi-)periphery plunges the popular classes into disaster.

 Let us shift our analytical lens a little further south. Let us answer the ideological and political question of whether there should be a state of Israel that includes the Palestinians and/or a state of Palestine, starting with the most important issue: What would be the definitive victory for the Palestinian people within the global capitalist system? The position that a revolution cannot take place in the South without a proletarian revolution in the capitalist metropolis is out of the question, because it expresses bourgeois positivism and is politically colonialist. A class-based view does not mean abstract generalization—that is the objective work of capital—but holistic concretization in the social terrain in question. As part of the multinational migrant proletariat, the displaced Palestinians inside and outside the occupied or besieged land have the right to conditions of security and freedom not inferior to those available to the popular classes of the imperialist metropolises. The possibility of a free life for the displaced in their place of origin is a fundamental demand of the migrant struggle. Free return. The revolutionary Palestinian goal is to objectively secure the self-determination of the Palestinians in the historical lands of their community. Does the international recognition of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel serve this goal? It certainly does not serve it as a whole, since it divides Palestine between two states. A state reduced in size compared to the historical Palestinian territories was and remains a plan of the central monopolies. Acceptance of limited borders and coexistence with the Zionist colony signals the abandonment of the national revolutionary goal and any prospect of class liberation for the Palestinian people, because it brings about legal coexistence with the terrorism of the Zionist guard and political dependence on the imperialists. The results of the Oslo compromise agreements have confirmed this historical view. As far as the external appearance of the state is concerned, the Palestinian Authority is a puppet of the imperialists, the Zionists, and the reactionary Arab regimes. Internally, it is a brutal dictatorship and a ruthless class guardian – a profiteer of monopolistic overexploitation. Incidentally, let us not forget that the Palestinian left initially supported the Oslo Accords. The key issue is the recognition of the Zionist colony, which is necessary for all the central monopolies in order to terrorize the Middle East and, in particular, to keep rebellious Palestine in permanent subjugation. The permanent Zionist military threat is a prerequisite for the dependence of the Palestinians. The two-state plan is a demand for the definitive subjugation of the Palestinians and the entire Middle East to the terror of the colonial state and the central powers behind it. The ethnic-class apartheid established after Oslo in the West Bank, Gaza, and the colonial hinterland will be upgraded to an international institutional level with the demarcation of the two states. A Palestinian state that will come from outside cannot be anything else. The plan was put back on the table after the revolutionary operation “Flood of Al-Aqsa” in order to divide the Palestinian people and manipulate their resistance. The latest relevant UN resolution was the result of stubborn resistance to genocide, but its purpose is solely to deceive the Palestinian people and the internationalist movement.

 The slogan, “from the river to the sea,” is not rhetorical hyperbole: it expresses the main political goal of the Palestinian revolution. The historical liberation of all the territories in which the Palestinian community is rooted must be achieved objectively, through national and internationalist struggle, without waiting for its recognition by other states. The institutional recognition of free social territories comes with the strengthening and expansion of the internationalist struggle. Palestine free from Zionism, from a class-social perspective, will not be another state instead of the previous one, Israel, a scenario that devalues the liberation war. The abstract generalization of the concept of the state obscures historical inequalities and the class background of the anti-colonial struggle and thus, however idealistic its intentions may be, contributes to monopolistic counter-revolutionary propaganda. The settlers, that is, all Israelis, have stolen the land from the Palestinians, with endless genocide and terrorism. Even if the colonial state could become a little internationalist (which it cannot), it would never return the land to the Palestinians and the productive infrastructure built by the multinational proletariat to the international proletariat. Historical justice is not a matter of religious or racial rivalry, as bourgeois ideology conveniently misinterprets it. Palestinian resistance organizations, both secular and religious, emphasize and affirm that Jews were and will remain welcome in Palestine, on condition that they respect the freedom of the Palestinians. But land and freedom go hand in hand.

 The apoist critique of the fragmentation and multiplication of states, which aptly focuses on dependence on monopolies and the capitalist basis of state mediation of social and international relations, is certainly valid in the case of adding a Palestinian state next to the Zionist one. However, the same criticism is misguided insofar as it promotes the theory and experience of the Democratic Nation and democratic confederalism in the coexistence of Palestinians and Jews within and alongside the state of Israel. The historical differences between the Turkish, Syrian, and Israeli states are crucial. The Turkish state originated from an empire with a multi-ethnic and multi-religious population. The Turkish ethnicity, which is the majority within the state’s borders, is composed of all class strata and mainly of the exploited popular classes. Under the given circumstances, the separatist stance on the Kurdish question, a reality of national oppression, caused contradictions in terms of the unity of the class struggle. The Syrian state also has historical roots and, at the same time, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious composition of its people. The Kurdish movement there remained patient in the given situation of ethno-class oppression for thirty years, until the Arab uprising, when it sowed the seeds of inter-communal confederalism, not through integration into the Syrian state, but through the de facto state of the Kurdish and broader social revolution. Israel is a modern construct of monopolies, without broad popular roots in the territory. In general, the nation-state is a capitalist construct, but specifically, the state of Israel is the absolute construct of a state of military settlers. Based on its radical origins and structural connection to the central monopolies, and based on continuous primitive accumulation, i.e., the plundering of Palestinian land and the management of the Palestinian proletariat as surplus, discredited and at any moment biopolitically annihilable, a class wall rises between the two ethnic groups, determining all their relations, regardless of class divisions within the Palestinian ethnicity. The development of class divisions within the Israeli formation is an internal leakage and reproduction of the racist class relationship with the indigenous people. The colony, born with a strong national-socialist base, slipped into the expansion of internal class inequalities, not only because it is capitalist, but more specifically because of the intersection of its identity-based racism with the need to expand its fascist-militarist base. There is no hope for this policy to evolve in an internationalist socialist direction, since once Israeli citizens are deprived of their private and collective national ownership of the land and the wealth built upon it, they will lose all incentive to remain in Palestine. That is why the majority of them will fight to the end, with all the inhumanity they have shown for a hundred years, in order to maintain their class privilege, until the revolution throws them into the sea. It is no coincidence that there has never been a revolutionary struggle within the colonial national formation in the history of the state of Israel, while on the contrary, the Turkish people have a huge revolutionary tradition and the PKK was born from its womb. Anarchists and other dissidents of Israeli nationality themselves understand and declare that the state of Israel must be destroyed, not in general because every state must be destroyed, but specifically because this state can be nothing other than a colony of extermination. When asked whether this position is a rule against every settler state, such as the US, the answer has been given by the indigenous and black movements, which advocate the destruction of the American colony (abolish American plantation). The chronic weakness of the white left and white anarchism in the US is due, among other reasons, primarily to the absence of contact with this main political goal and, instead, to subservience to bourgeois progressivism.

 The Constitution of the DAANES secures free migration and settlement in its territories. At the same time, the liberation of Afrin, Serakaniye, and Gire Spi from the settlers brought in by Turkish colonialism is an indisputable demand for justice. Class justice precedes peaceful coexistence and transformative justice. The displaced people of Afrin must return to their homes and embrace their olive trees. Likewise, the displaced people of Palestine must return to the flattened land of their parents, from the river to the sea. The revolutionary invasion to the colonial hinterland on October 7, 2023, reminded us that no oppressive force and no revisionism can erase the historical social purpose.

 With what political program, with what form of militant vanguard, will the South be liberated? This is decided every time by social resistance, since it shapes and nourishes its vanguards. The choice between exploitation and exclusion is a decision of the people. This determines the political form of the struggle. And it is always a popular choice. No political power can make this decision without popular consent. Otherwise, it faces popular uprising. Dictatorships that serve imperialist monopolies can withstand opposition. The choice of self-exclusion from certain forms of overexploitation cannot stand without a popular base. Historical experience provides guidance for this general rule, which applies to various forms of political formations. Albania under Enver Hoxha, anti-American Cuba, autonomous Chiapas, autonomous North and South Syria, and even Bolivarian Venezuela in the early years of Chávez’s rule, which, having self-sufficiency and international power in basic minerals, participated in economic exchanges outside US control, make up a variety of class and political backgrounds with the common characteristic of resistance to exclusion thanks to popular consensus. The class-political background, constituting the internal aspect of international class relations, influences their dynamics. Let us not forget that the Zapatista uprising referred to the NAFTA Agreement and that the democratic confederalism that was implemented was a response to the ongoing imperialist war in the Middle East. On the other hand, any administrative organization that is detached from the collective forces of labor and free society forms a managerial (controlling and repressive) class that has an interest in integrating into the transnational chain of overexploitation in order to increase the surplus value it reaps. The state has a persistent reactionary tendency, both in relation to monopoly domination and towards the people it governs. Sali Berisha and Fatos Nano left the core of the Party. Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin did so too, and indeed, from a gradual transition to private profit in an imperialist state that had no problem with exclusion. We saw how Arab nationalism was integrated, we saw the consequences of the economic liberalization of the Syrian bourgeoisie, we saw the bourgeoisie of Bolivarian Venezuela tied to Chinese imperialism, the intensification of the exploitation of its popular classes and the opening up to American monopolies (before Maduro’s abduction), and we still see the balancing efforts of the Iranian state, a semi-regional imperialist power that has no problem surviving due to exclusion but has a problem of popular consensus, on the one hand on capitalist exploitation and on the other on its internal tension due to the exclusion .

 The popular overthrow of mediation politics of monopolistic overexploitation or bourgeois exploitation in conditions of exclusion does not remove the coercion of exclusion, nor does it ensure better conditions of monopolistic overexploitation. When a popular community decides to resist exploitation by accepting the burden of exclusion, it has every reason to do so without the state’s or external political mediation. However, when it accepts a certain degree of exploitation in order to avoid total exclusion, the dynamics are more complex. Unmediated exploitation is met with reaction, which includes the maintenance of forms of exclusion and harsher conditions of exploitation. Imperialists want class and political agents within the territory they plunder in order to control the relationship. That is why when the people of the South decide to enter into an unequal exchange relationship, they also choose the corresponding political mediation, despite the fact that this will develop its own super-exploitative class interests. There is no question of “delayed consciousness”; there is a question of unreversed historical inequalities. Every political program and every network of international political ties expresses a specific synthesis of relations of monopolistic overexploitation and/or exclusion. This is how the exploited classes of the periphery and semi-periphery choose their political leaders.

 For the Palestinian people, the Palestinian Authority represents submission to blackmail without ensuring the lifting of the general exclusion, since the Zionist plan does not aim at their overexploitation, but at their universal displacement. The resistance wing of Fatah represents a network of international ties of dependence that could potentially break the blockade, Hamas represents another network, which has indeed broken the blockade in various areas and in various ways, while the armed left (the Popular Front, its Syrian faction, and the Democratic Front) represent a historical program that has been wandering without objective foundations on an international scale against the central monopolies for the last three decades.

 What program and what open path do we as anarchists represent against the blackmail, exploitation or exclusion, and more specifically for the struggle of the Palestinian people against the blackmail, “voluntary” adaptation to ethnic cleansing or through genocide? Participation in humanitarian activism and political protest is not a distinctive feature of an anarchist program, nor is it a powerful path against monopoly terrorism: it is the least that anyone who is ashamed that genocides are possible thanks to the wealth produced by the working class worldwide can do. Anarchism should not simply take the lead in expressions of internationalist solidarity, but more fundamentally, be at the forefront of the organized fight against transnational counterrevolution, as it was the socialist current that, since the First International, raised the question of proletarian power based on the direct control of production on an international scale. The focal points of historical revolutionary anarchism are more specific than the general political and social expressions of internationalist solidarity: direct opposition to economic and military terrorism, focusing on the deactivation of its productive base and mobilization in the war on the fronts and in the hinterland of the class-political enemy. In simple terms, the first, which is the implementation of the social revolution program itself in the current year, involves, on the one hand, blocking the monopoly capital involved in the counterrevolutionary enterprise in question, through strikes, blockades, sabotage, and auxiliary boycotts, and on the other hand, the solidarity-based circulation of labor power, goods, and money. Mobilization in the war conflict realizes federalism in the immediate field of physical confrontation between living forces. Physical confrontation means, above and beyond the quantitative elements of resistance to violence, a confrontation of intellect and morality. Without joint mobilization, the labor movement falls into bourgeois humanism and pacifism, freezing the subjective and objective revolutionary development of the proletariat and international solidarity.

 These two paths are not novel proposals. From the time of Bakunin’s international Alliance and Cipriani’s expeditionary forces, to international participation in the confederal revolution in Syria and anti-militarist sabotage in the metropolis of the North today, revolutionary anarchism has not forgotten its duty of equal participation in the international class war. Recently, we saw blockades in Greek commercial ports against the chain of Zionist military supply, and strikes in Italian ports, while a short time ago, various unions participated in the campaign for the release of A. Ocalan. Nevertheless, the internationalist grassroots movement has a long way to go before it will be able to influence the balance of power and thus dismantle imperialist terrorism. The organic depth and breadth necessary for the autonomous popular movement to become effective on an international scale requires the development of revolutionary syndicalism with the support of an international anarchist political-military organization. The common strategic line is the reproduction of the federal revolutionary commune in the capitalist periphery and in the movement of the metropolis; it continues to be the one suggested by Bakunin.

 Palestine endures like no other place on Earth, but in order to break the blockade without depending on warmongering capitalist powers, it needs to be embraced by the Arab and Mediterranean socialist struggle. The Arab people are the critical mass that can drive out the occupiers. The multinational proletariat of the Euro-Mediterranean states and Turkey has a responsibility to destroy the bases of military aggression of the central monopolies and make the Mediterranean impassable for their military rule. If these goals seem distant, it means that we must revise our horizons. The transition from nationally confined local horizons to international ones is not an idealistic leap that follows national revolutions: it is the evolution of class struggle since the First International.

 The siege of fortified Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank will continue until the next major blow to the terrorism of the central monopolies behind Zionism, a new October 7 that will break down the North-South wall. Right now, we must resist the dispatch of any occupying force to Gaza, which will aim to accomplish what the Zionist army failed to do: the destruction of the armed Palestinian resistance. After the latest prisoner exchange, the war has not frozen, it has escalated on an international scale.

 Revolutionary anarchism does not invest in the “peace” of the monopolies; it acts to smash the transnational pyramid.

 Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis

 Domokos Prison

 December 2025, during the international struggle with prisoners in British prisons, in solidarity with Palestine.