{"id":14171,"date":"2025-07-17T10:25:30","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T10:25:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/freedomforabdullahocalan.org\/en\/?p=14171"},"modified":"2025-07-17T10:25:34","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T10:25:34","slug":"the-political-thought-of-abdullah-ocalan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/?p=14171","title":{"rendered":"The Political Thought of Abdullah \u00d6calan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Political Thought of Abdullah \u00d6calan<\/em> is a collection of four key texts extracted by his translator and editors from the prison writings, a massive collection of manuscripts and books written by \u00d6calan since his incarceration in the Imrali Prison Island in 1999. The first text, \u201cWar and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution to the Kurdish Question\u201d gives a brief outline of the history of Kurdistan. It evaluates the creation of a modern nation- state system in the region as the most destructive event in the history of the Kurds. This text also introduces the Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party, the PKK, the political organisation \u00d6calan helped to establish in the 1970s and which he led until his abduction from Kenya in February 1999. Here, he provides a general critique on politics and the way politics was pursued by the PKK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Declaring the nation-state and nationalism as a polity and ideology of social aggression, \u201cWar and Peace in Kurdistan\u201d provides a general framework for another form of politics. Analytically, \u00d6calan makes a distinction between the idea of the state and the idea of government. While the first, in the form of the nation-state, comes with oppression and homogenisation, the second is thought from the idea of self-organisation and self-government. Within this context, democratisation emerges as the advancement of the capacity for self-organisation and self-government. This idea of self-organisation is the subject of further interrogation in the second text, named \u201cDemocratic Confederalism\u201d, in which \u00d6calan embeds a discussion on self-organisation and self-government in a broad historical perspective, which is characteristic of his approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDemocratic Confederalism\u201d starts with a discussion of the emergence of the nation-state, which \u00d6calan analyses as an institution that monopolises political, cultural and economic processes. It then goes on to explain the contradiction between the nation-state and society, arguing that historically a strengthening of the nation-state went hand-in-hand with a weakening of the self-organising and self-governing capacities of people. This treaty on democratic confederalism as a method of and structure for the organisation of government takes the enhancement of society against the state as a key starting point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third text, named \u201cLiberating Life: Woman\u2019s Revolution\u201d, discusses the development of the state system and capitalist modernity in relation to the \u201cwoman question\u201d. \u00d6calan argues that the nation-state and capitalism represent the institutionalisation of the dominant male. He discusses this institutionalisation of the dominant male from the perspective of what he refers to as two, historically situated \u201csexual ruptures\u201d. The first rupture that occurred in dual-voiced society was that of \u201creligionisation\u201d around the idea of the strong man in the Neolithic era, dated at some 4,000 years ago. A masculine single voiced social culture developed, which came together with a process of silencing and \u201chousewification\u201d of women. The second \u201csexual rupture\u201d is referred to as the intensification of patriarchy through monotheistic religions. In the previous world of multiple gods, women were attributed creative powers, but in the narrative of the monotheistic religions, the position of women shifted from the creator to the created, symbolised in the claim that woman was created from a man\u2019s rib. In this rupture, the female body becomes the locus of man\u2019s sexuality, and his honour. \u00d6calan argues that when analysed from this perspective, it is clear that the abolition of this form of masculinity has to be the objective of emancipatory movements, which he refers to as the \u201ckilling of the dominant male\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fourth and final text is named \u201cDemocratic Nation\u201d. Here, \u00d6calan argues that socialism cannot be realised by mimicking the capitalist form, that is, through the establishment of the nation-state. Instead, a progressive politics should be based on the idea of a democratic nation, which he defines not in terms of a shared language or ethnicity, but as a community sharing the same mind-set. This allows him to think of the nation not in terms of linguistic, ethnic or cultural homogeneity, but in terms of common values established through deliberation. \u00d6calan relates this idea of a democratic nation to the politics of democratic confederalism, but also to the need to sustain oneself through control over the means of production, which he defines as \u201ceconomic autonomy\u201d, and to self-defence, which is not solely or even principally defined in terms of the use of force, but rather in terms of the ability to develop one\u2019s values and ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These selected texts provide a good introduction to Abdullah \u00d6calan\u2019s thoughts on society, history, religion and politics. \u00d6calan is a remarkable political thinker, and the extent and depth of his writings are noteworthy given the extraordinary conditions under which they have been written. He has written his books in almost solitary confinement, without being able to discuss his thoughts with others, and after the manuscripts left prison, he has never been able to read or correct them. Nevertheless, in these texts, \u00d6calan relates and enters debate with several contemporary political theorists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His analysis of capitalist modernity as a world system is clearly influenced by the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein; his writings on the historical development of the state and capitalist modernity recall the historian Ferdinand Braudel, who coined the term the \u201clongue dur\u00e9e<\/em>\u201d to identify and understand the long-term historical structures underlying contemporary form; and in his analysis of patriarchy and gender and the development of social hierarchies as part of such a longue dur\u00e9e<\/em>, \u00d6calan turns to Maria Mies and her thesis of women as the last colony on its head, defining them as the first colony. In his references to the (pre)Neolithic as \u201cprimitive communism\u201d, we recognise the work of Lewis Henry Morgan along with, of course, Marx and Engel. Comparisons of his work with that of Bookchin are obvious, yet \u00d6calan\u2019s writings on democratic confederalism have many resemblances also to the work of Hannah Arendt on assemblies. In his belief in consensus and deliberation as a basis for politics, meanwhile, \u00d6calan comes close to the definition of politics by Habermas. And when he defines the struggle of the PKK as one involved in making the Kurdish issue visible, a theme from recent work by Judith Butler on politics and visibility comes to mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without being exhaustive, this brief overview indicates the actuality and importance of \u00d6calan and his work in the context of political theory and debates today. My recommendation for a second edition would be to elaborate the introduction to the book with a brief discussion in which \u00d6calan and his work is placed in this wider context, showing the relevance of his thinking and the issues with which he is engaging. What is beyond the scope of this book, but equally needed, is a critical conversation on the thought of \u00d6calan, such as discussed in the introduction by Nadje Al Ali when she questions the idea in \u00d6calan\u2019s work of sex and jineology<\/em>. A deepening of this conversation as an extension towards \u00d6calan\u2019s conceptualisation of state, nation and politics would be more than welcome<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Political Thought of Abdullah \u00d6calan is a collection of four key texts extracted by his translator and editors from the prison writings, a massive collection of manuscripts and books written by \u00d6calan since his incarceration in the Imrali Prison Island in 1999. The first text, \u201cWar and Peace in Kurdistan: Perspectives on a Political Solution […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13947,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/555.webp?fit=870%2C633&ssl=1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14172,"href":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14171\/revisions\/14172"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freedomocalansyria.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}