Transcending the State

Inspired by the events in the Rojava, in northern Syria, I have recently been reading and re-reading ‘The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan’. While some of it is specific to the Kurdish people and their relation with the Turkish state, much of it is broadly applicable, especially to Utopian Socialism. There is one particular quote by Öcalan that I want to analyze here (from pg. 142):

Democracy’s fundamental function becomes evident in this manner. It can only increase the opportunities for freedom and equality by restricting the state, making it smaller and by trimming its octopus-like tentacles and their power over society. Towards the end of the process, perhaps the state will become redundant and fizzle out. The conclusion we draw from this is that the relationship between the state and democracy is not of one toppling another, but of transcendence (emphasis mine).

Here he’s talking about the conflict between democracy (or Democratic Confederalism) and the nation state. And the crucial point Öcalan makes is that state power cannot be overthrown. Particular states can be overthrown, but state power itself cannot. Attempting to overthrow state power invariably results in the reconstitution of state power in a different form, with a new ruling elite. And once it has reconstituted itself, the state will never wither away of its own accord, as Marx unjustifiably claimed it would. The new state always seeks to institutionalize itself as it strives to maintain and broaden its own power, which is always to the detriment of democracy. The great number of Leninist inspired failures that litter the historical landscape bear this out conclusively. The key to building a stateless society, therefore, is that the state must be transcended. Again - state power cannot be overthrown, but must instead be transcended.

For the Kurds, having recognized that state power can play no role in the building of a democratic and sateless society, this means an explicit renunciation of any attempts to build a Kurdish nation state, separate from the Turkish state. Instead, they seek to establish autonomous, self-governing Kurdish communities within the framework of the larger Turkish state. These autonomous communities would parallel the functions of the state without reproducing its form. The Utopian Socialist movement seeks to follow the same general path with regard to the various nation states it interacts with. The degree of autonomy they can realize in practice is the degree to which they are able to insulate themselves from participation in the wider market economy and from entanglement with the state bureaucracy. The more self-reliant they can become, the more their autonomy will be self-actualizing and need not rely on any explicit recognition from the state itself. These parallel institutions can then begin to slowly usurp the functions of the state, thus causing it to “become redundant and fizzle out”. 

The concept of the nation state is beginning to show severe signs of decay around the world. As the number of failed states continues to grow, and even the seemingly more robust European models are beginning to fray around the edges, the transition could come more quickly than would at first seem likely. The events in the Rojavan area of Syria are a prime example of just how quickly that could happen. With the collapse of the Syrian state during their civil war, the Kurds, inspired by Abdullah Öcalan’s Democratic Confederalism, managed to quickly fill that void with their own stateless solution. Utopian Socialists should be primed to take advantage of similar opportunities in other failing states, and by expanding the intentional communities movement they would well poised to do so.