The Kurds’ democratic resistance to ISIS demonstrates that anti-fascism cannot be separated from the wider struggle against capitalism, patriarchy and the state. By Dilar Dirik It was in the fall of 2014, only months after the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) made massive territorial gains inside Syria and Iraq, committing genocidal and feminicidal massacres, that a…
Category: Stateless Democracy
Thoughts on Rojava : An Interview with Janet Biehl
Full of admiration, but not without critique: Janet Biehl shares some of her ideas on the Rojava revolution after her recent visits to the region. Janet Biehl Zanyar Omrani In this interview, independent filmmaker and journalist Zanyar Omrani talks to Janet Biehl about her late companion Murray Bookchin, her trips to Rojava and the important…
Murray Bookchin’s Collected Works
A Short Biography of Murray Bookchin By Janet Biehl Murray Bookchin was born in New York City on January 14, 1921, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents who had been active in the Russian revolutionary movement. In 1930 he entered the Communist youth movement, joining first the Young Pioneers and then the Young Communist League, serving…
Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy
By Janet Biehl In February 1999, at the moment when Abdullah Öcalan was abducted in Kenya, Murray Bookchin was living with me in Burlington, Vermont. We watched Öcalan’s capture on the news reports. He sympathized with the plight of the Kurds—he said so whenever the subject came up—but he saw Öcalan as yet another Marxist-Leninist…
The Philosophy that Inspired the Kurdish Resistance
Bookchin’s municipalist ideas, once rejected by communists and anarchists alike, have now come to inspire the Kurdish quest for democratic autonomy. Joris Leverink for Roar Mag The introduction to the new book The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso, 2015), explains how Murray Bookchin – born to Russian Jewish immigrants…
Stateless Democracy: How the Kurdish Women’s Movement Liberated Democracy from the State
By Dilar Dirik “Azadî”, freedom. A notion that has captured the collective imagination of the Kurdish people for a long time. “Free Kurdistan”, the seemingly unattainable ideal, has many shapes, depending on where one situates oneself in the broad spectrum of Kurdish politics. The increasing independence of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in South Kurdistan…
