Living in Afrin is not necessarily a death sentence for a Kurd: some corrupt collaborators, plus the elderly and indigent, endure. On the contrary, it is anyone suspected of defending their rights by working with the AANES or their military wings in the YPG (People\u2019s Protection Units), YPJ (Women\u2019s Protection Units), or SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) \u2013 whether Kurd, Arab, or Yazidi \u2013 who can expect to be disappeared into one of the region\u2019s black sites. The Kurdish movement is quite right to state that Turkey is not only opposed to Kurdish self-determination, but to the broader political program of federalism being trialled on its southern border. The movement must appeal to this all-or-nothing sense to justify its prophetic belief in its own destiny as the answer to totalizing state violence, and the correspondingly total sacrifices it demands of its loyalists.<\/p>\n
But this approach, which enables extraordinary acts of valor, comes with an additional cost. If people are told that a war is for their very existence, and that war is then lost, the question arises of how they can possibly endure the defeat? On the campaign trail, as during the Turkish military operations against the AANES, it is easier to experience heady sensations of camaraderie, courageous defiance, and noble sacrifice. But there comes a day afterward, when the war is lost, and yet the looked-for bombs are yet to fall on one\u2019s own bunker or home, and the infighting and recriminations resume. This dynamic, all-or-nothing energy may be maintained through a battle, a week, a year: but it must subside at one point, to be replaced by a curiously hollow sensation.<\/p>\n
\nThe victory has not come \u2013 in a guerrilla war pitting F-16 fighter jets against AK-47s, or an electoral process in Turkey scarcely worthy of the name, it never really could \u2013 but nor has the oblivion of total defeat. The Kurds must, therefore, find ways to endure.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Arriving in Rojava in the weeks following the Turkish invasion and occupation of Afrin, I was immediately struck by the gap between the sense of existential defeat I had anticipated and the reality of continued, frantic organizing \u2013 not only on the military front, but across diverse economic, political and cultural fields. Likewise, following the subsequent occupation of Ser\u00ea Kaniy\u00ea and Gir\u00ea Sip\u00ee, Western journalists poured through the border, fearing an Assad regime takeover, pausing only to publish weepy op-eds heralding the death of the revolution. In reality, nothing changed on the ground in terms of the AANES\u2019 political and security control of the northern Syria interior. And again, despite the \u201cheartbreak\u201d in Turkey, there is no sense the likely electoral loss should be marked by a loss of hope: \u201cMaybe we weren\u2019t too pragmatic or score-oriented. And we suffered a quantitative loss. But we have done our part for the development of democracy in Turkey. There is still hope and a second chance for regime change.\u201d<\/p>\n
As in Gramsci\u2019s \u2018synthesis\u2019, this ability to experience qualitative hope despite quantitative defeat is marked less by cognitive dissonance than negative capability \u2013 the ability to maintain mental contradictions, accept \u201cuncertainties, mysteries and doubts\u201d, and thus finding truths which exceed mere reason. The Kurdish movement\u2019s ideologues, too, valorize the ability to think and operate politically through and beyond \u2018contradictions\u2019 \u2013 a word which recurs on almost every page of the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah \u00d6calan\u2019s writings.<\/p>\n
In this aspect, \u00d6calan\u2019s analysis of world history and the movement\u2019s understanding of its own political history both recall the work of the mad, brilliant Marxist intellectual Ernst Bloch. Writing as a Jewish exile in the shadow of World War II, Bloch argues that Marxism is possessed of both \u2018warm\u2019 and \u2018cold\u2019 streams, with Marx not only instituting the science of historical materialism and thus demonstrating the logical inevitability of communism, but also releasing a current of utopian hope. Marx\u2019s task is the \u2018unmasking of ideologies and disenchantment of metaphysical illusion\u2019 on the one hand, and yet unleashing a \u2018liberating intention and… strong appeal to the debased, enslaved, abandoned, belittled, human being\u2019 on the other \u2013 instigating what may, paradoxically, be defined as the new metaphysical ideology par excellence. The warm river flows into the cold and vice versa, cool dialectics instigating the white heat of revolution.<\/p>\n
The Kurdish movement similarly speaks of \u2018two rivers\u2019 running through history, with the hidden and potent current of a repressed and democratic civil society increasingly submerged beneath the tidal bore of state power. As with Bloch\u2019s teleology, this account remains ambiguous and open to interpretation \u2013 are we cherry-picking brief moments of hope from a history of continuous defeat and repression, or recognizing the subtler Marxist dialectic of progress through, rather than in despite of, these defeats? While Rojava is sometimes represented in isolated terms as the anarchist Paris Commune, or an unexpected and fleeting irruption of hope, as suggested above the project deserves the seriousness of critiques which contextualize it as a complex long-term terrain of \u2018contradictions\u2019, between minorities and chauvinist nation-states, women and patriarchal elders, and impoverished villages and centralized economies.<\/p>\n
Albeit his account is the most radically transformative, Bloch was just one of several writers \u2013 Albert Camus, Theodor Adorno, Gabriel Marcel \u2013 who, writing in the aftermath of World War II, were nonetheless able to derive various calls for political action through pessimistic material analyses. What Bloch has in common with the Kurdish movement\u2019s own approach is his ability to recognize the extraordinary liberatory potential in dialectic analyses of politics and history. Even as the movement describes its trials in existential, all-or-nothing terms, it is equipping itself for the transcendence of these trials.<\/p>\n
This process finds its fullest expression in the secular martyr culture of the movement\u2019s militant wing. In contradistinction to the martyr culture among Islamist groups, there is a strict opposition to the active pursuit of martyrdom, and the Kurdish movement does not tactically deploy suicide bombers in combat. But when that terminal point is reached, and a fighter falls in battle or sacrifices themselves to save their comrades, they are immediately placed among a pantheon of heroes, released from the process of navigating personal or political contradictions, while being celebrated and memorialized not for their death, but for their life and struggle. The Kurdish freedom movement does not deny these deaths any more than its defeats.<\/p>\n
\nRather, Rojava and the Zagros Mountains of Kurdistan are filled with memorial gardens decorated by the red, green, and yellow-liveried martyr posters, representing not the macabre, but the ability to find an inextricable expression of life in the very moment of death.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Another, less utopian Jewish intellectual, Walter Benjamin, called for the \u2018political organization of pessimism\u2019. In language which recalls Gramsci\u2019s critique, he condemns the \u2018unprincipled, dilettantish optimism\u2019 of social democracy, recognizing the liberatory potential of surrealism as critiquing and undoing the concept of a linear process, but arguing this transformative, mercurial quality must be brought into line with an organized, \u201cCommunist answer\u201d. If the Kurdish movement were to be plainly optimistic, it would suggest that all has been well until now, or that the current modes of political participation in Turkey and beyond will suffice for victory. Rather, it is their radical critique and liquidation which is expected and looked-for, in full knowledge of what the pursuit of this end has cost until now. A movement which identifies life in the moment of death is quite capable of \u2018synthesizing\u2019 admitted defeat at the ballot-box, barricade, or front-line into its own dynamic, organized, militant patience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Many of us are familiar with the dictum, attributed to Antonio Gramsci, that socialists should be possessed by \u201cpessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.\u201d In its original context, a prison letter written to an anarchist comrade whom he accuses of simplistically claiming petty victories, the militant Italian intellectual goes on to opine how: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":260,"featured_media":2387,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"jnews_post_split":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,61],"tags":[193,142,367,368,371,370,48,369],"ppma_author":[500],"class_list":["post-2377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-slider","tag-aanes","tag-abdullah-ocalan","tag-antonio-gramsci","tag-ernst-bloch","tag-martyrdom","tag-marxism","tag-rojava","tag-walter-benjamin"],"authors":[{"term_id":500,"user_id":260,"is_guest":0,"slug":"matt-broomfield","display_name":"Matt Broomfield","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Matt-Broomfield.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Matt-Broomfield.jpg"},"0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/260"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2377"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2401,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2377\/revisions\/2401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2377"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=2377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}