A revolution doesn’t begin in a book. It begins with an emotion, a bursting of one’s banks in reaction to the world one finds themselves in. Often, it’s an anger at the violence wreaked so eagerly upon us and those we care for. Or it can be a pang of wist and the and the drive to search for meaning that makes one wonder, “why is the world so? If we built it this way, could we not build it differently?” Sometimes it’s just a gripping frustration at the callous indifference to suffering which has become so discomfort in the mundane of the capitalist modernity.
It is this reflexive human instinct to, in the words of Che Guevara, “tremble at the sight of injustice” that is the spark which lights the fire of revolutionary in individuals and communities. It is emotion which must motivate and drive us to search for tools to contrast new ways of living and to remain ever dissatisfied as long as even one person is left overlooked or left behind. As emotion drives action, theory guides it.
Stories Shaping Society
Here we should consider the role mythology has to play in the shaping of our societies, in our conceptualisation of society’s structure and workings, in our image of what an ideal society looks like and how close we perceive our own society to be to this ideal. The stories we tell not only frame our world-view but in fact further than this our stories become our reality defining not only the ways in which we view the world but also how we approach and interact with it. The current iteration of this superstructure in the form of capitalist realism has become all so persuasive that many have come to earnestly believe in its propagated tale that humans, by nature a social and cooperative being, are inherently greedy and simultaneously fail to recognise the contradiction in this assertion that if this were true, society would require a system that rewards rather than punishes greed.
Mary Midgely interprets society’s super structural stories as key elements in our interaction with the world. Midgely explains, “Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning.” Taking Midgley’s description as a starting point it can be seen that mythologies are woven all around as, competing for our attention and vying with one another to lead us to different interpretations of the world. Myths existence is present of course in the oral tales passed down from generation to generation, in folk stories and the rich mythologies of indigenous peoples but also in the narratives told in the political sphere (such as the harking back to a supposed lost golden age much employed by nationalists) or in the interestingly self-aware example of propaganda which occasionally through direct misinformation but more often through purposeful distortions aims to construct a specific truth in service of a wider narrative or interest.
It is through the monopoly and exercise of physical force and the control of narratives that systems ascend to and maintain dominion over our lives and communities. Such is the power of mythology that when one particular narrative becomes hegemonic, it not only shapes reality but in the eyes of many of us manages to obscure its mythological essence cloaking itself in the guises of common sense and empirical truth. Modern capitalist society demonstrates this well. Most people do not study the works of Adam Smith or the developments of 17th century Dutch and British economies that lead to the development of modern capitalism yet they nevertheless consider capitalism to be an intuitive truth of the world. In the face of its overwhelming presence and incessant repetition of its narratives, making this conclusion is understandable.
Countering Hegemonic Myths
In this context, a foremost revolutionary task must be the weaving of our own stories that recount the lost, seldom heard or never told lives of the people who have always resisted capitalist modernity. The history of women, the stories of creation being told amongst the indigenous people of the Americas, the Dreamtime myths of the aboriginal peoples of Australia so ancient and well-preserved that they contain details of geological events that occurred thousands of years ago and the Hurrian legends of a pastoral people fighting the insidious march of city and surplus-based hierarchy.
The revolutionary potential in myth should not be underestimated, in the Kurdish Freedom Movement the effect it has had upon Kurdish society is already profound. Tearing down fascist myths such as the passive role of women in the family and the concept of the nation state, Rêber Apo’s ideas have profoundly altered Kurdish society. Nazan Üstündağ describes the situation as so, “despite all its negative effects, we can say that the war in Kurdistan has resulted in a geography where nationalism, capitalism and the family systematically fail to be reproduced.” This is evidence of the manifestation in Kurdish society of Rêber Apo and the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s rejection of familiar capitalist and Western tales such as the steady forward advance of progress. The Kurdish Freedom Movement has no interest in rewriting or revising this story; it is time of the speaking of older and truer stories. This is the basis of Rêber Apo’s new paradigm which calls into question both the validity of these myths and their alleged modern origins, instead assessing them to be continuations of societal hierarchy which begun thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia with the rise of the Sumerian state.
Art and media have a defining role in shaping the way society interprets the world however, the relationship formed between the two should not be understood as unidirectional but rather as constituted by a dialectical relationship wherein changes in a society’s values, reactions to events and shifts in ethical and moral standards must likewise be reflected correspondingly in a society’s myth-culture, thus, a myth-culture that contains values antithetical to or unacceptable within the values of a society cannot be easily imposed upon and integrated by that society. This somewhat explains how overt propaganda might be highly effective in influencing one group whilst appearing blatantly transparent to another.
In his analyses of the mythologies of the Middle East and Europe, Rêber Apo provides many examples attesting to this dialectical relation between society and mythology. Chief amongst these is the slow but consistent decline in the status of women and images of femininity across world cultures, from the depictions of goddesses and women as leaders in all sections of society as found in the egalitarian, matriarchal societies of the Neolithic, through subjugation under the Sumerian cleric state and commodification in capitalism. (Commodification began, however, long before the rise of modern capitalism. Marx’s warning that “the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and indeed becomes the most wretched of commodities” can be aptly applied to describe the structural and ideological violence wielded against women to achieve this reduction in their societal status) Rêber Apo tells us that this story may be the hegemonic one but it’s certainly not the only one nor does it show even half of the true picture of history. There is also the story of resistance of the democratic society in constant ideological and physical struggle with capitalist modernity. That is, the antidote to capitalist modernity is present there within the system itself, not biding its time on the fringes but forming the core and base of society without which any community, regardless of the power wielded against it or the artificial conditions imposed upon it, cannot function.
As revolutionaries we must therefore not shy away from engaging in our own creative pursuits, such as writing, producing art, theatre and film, as means to combat the hegemonic narratives around us and provide a dual power structure in the ideological realm. Duran Kalkan says, “To be a great revolutionary, one must be a great novelist” and goes on to explain that, “The construction of one’s mindset forms the foundation of the construction of the individual and society and it is here that the formation and revolution of the personality most develop. The deepest ideological struggle is done by works of art and literature.”
Beyond the Binary
The creation of our own stories and the rediscovery of those we have lost, our revolutionary mythology, will provide us with a guide to approaching the world and inform our decisions as we seek to construct societies that cooperate with the complex natural systems around us (of which we ourselves are a part and should view ourselves accordingly, that is, as an intrinsic element of nature rather than a separate force detached from it) instead of societies which subjugate these systems. Similarly, mythology is instructional in our rationalisation, understanding and accepting of the vagaries of such systems too, whose forces can feel capricious or at times almost wilfully unjust. Humanity, finding itself at the mercy of this vast and incomprehensible power, has developed stories around the world which aim to teach and come to terms with this condition.
The First Nations peoples tell stories of a mischievous, shapeshifting deity who brings fortune and calamity seemingly at random to all it encounters, including itself. These stories were analysed by psychologist Carl Jung who considered the ubiquitousness of “trickster deity” myths in world cultures to be a psychological archetype, a representation of a human need to rationalise and interpret an irregular and unjust existence. Another example can be seen in the figure of Loki who manages to fool even the gods themselves, a demonstration that no power is above the whims of the world.
Such stories are key to the development of holistic approaches to the problems we encounter. Capital-based power structures reject such methods, employing instead a brutal perversion of the scientific method. The scientific method understands the universe to be an immensely complex but ultimately finite systems its rules definable and therefore proves it knowable. Capital-based power perverted this pursuit of knowledge by interpreting the scientific method as “the world is knowable and therefore exploitable”. In modern capitalism, the aim of every human endeavour is subordinate to profit, often not, at least originally, from intention but by sheer force of the parameters of the system in which the endeavour takes place. In this system, should we choose to place a community by a river, capitalism will reject the approach that tries to understand the ebbs and flows of the water or the approach that would observe the water and build around it. The system would favour draining the water or otherwise subdue this system at the lowest cost. The short-sightedness of dealing in this aggressive, slash-and-burn fashion invariably results in unpredictable and devastating consequences. Flood barriers and the paving over of the land around rivers reduces the amount of water absorbed into the ground, causing floods of greater proportions than would otherwise occur. This is in stark contrast to indigenous peoples’ mythologies of river dragons and gods, who understand well through these stories that when shown respect the river is one’s greatest friend and the source of life but if damaged and treated poorly, is capable of taking a great revenge too.
Finding the balance needed to cooperate with, migrate and shift in conjunction with the natural cycles of nature is a matter of imagination. We cannot expect to be able to apply a cookie cutter solution to all situations; communities must come to know and understand their own land, tell its stories and create solutions accordingly.
To Democratic Modernity
As we apply this holistic approach to our interaction with the world, we must also turn it inwards using it to inform our inter societal and intra societal formations. Accordingly, we must cast down the capitalist myth of the egocentric “rational actor” who only makes decisions for personal self-interest, understanding that instead, true freedom arises not from the ability to always do as one wishes regardless of others but from the ability to fully develop as the member of an interconnected system. Society is much more than a collection of individuals or families, no matter how capitalism may try to alienate us from one another or atomise us down to the smallest possible unit. In order to overcome this process of alienation, we must draw inspiration from the social formations which existed for the majority of human history and which still lives now in the ancient stories we tell and in the daily acts we do for one another without expectation of reciprocity or compensation. As we understand natural systems to be complex and not something that can be calculated to the last degree, we must understand ourselves similarly and adopt approaches that emphasise interwoven, rotation-based civil duty and cooperation.
In order to accomplish the immense tasks of social transformation and the overthrowing of the oppressive power structures, our greatest ally and educator will always be the telling and common weaving of the story of who we are, what we wish to become and our long, shared journey. The interpretative nature of these stories providing us with a flexible and multi-faceted lens with which to view the world, in place of the lens of rigid dichotomy and subject-object relationships.
Revolutionary mythology is therefore the act of countering hegemonic myths, it is the rediscovering of lost stories, it is working to understand the world around us and our place as a connected piece of it, it is forming our truth of the world and, above all, it is living as that truth breathing life into our myths as they give us the means to interpret meaning in life. Revolution doesn’t begin in a book but it thrives in stories. And stories and myths are far more than books, they are our acts as revolutionaries and communities and our guide on the road to democratic modernity.
From: https://www.nuceciwan121.xyz/en/2023/04/revolutionary-mythology/