Building Free Life

Description

From Socrates to Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned philosophers have marked the history of thought and changed how we view power and politics. From his solitary jail cell, Abdullah Öcalan has penned daringly innovative works that give profuse evidence of his position as one of the most significant thinkers of our day. His prison writings have mobilized tens of thousands of people and inspired a revolution in the making in Rojava, northern Syria, while also penetrating the insular walls of academia and triggering debate and reflection among countless scholars.

So how do you engage in a meaningful dialogue with Abdullah Öcalan when he has been held in total isolation since April 2015? You compile a book of essays written by a globally diverse cast of the most imaginative luminaries of our time, send it to Öcalan’s jailers, and hope that they deliver it to him.

Featured in this extraordinary volume are over a dozen writers, activists, dreamers, and scholars whose ideas have been investigated in Öcalan’s own writings. Now these same people have the unique opportunity to enter into a dialogue with his ideas. Building Free Life is a rich and wholly original exploration of the most critical issues facing humanity today. In the broad sweep of this one-of-a-kind dialogue, the contributors explore topics ranging from democratic confederalism to women’s revolution, from the philosophy of history to the crisis of the capitalist system, from religion to Marxism and anarchism, all in an effort to better understand the liberatory social forms that are boldly confronting capitalism and the state.

There can be no boundaries or restrictions for the development of thought. Thus, in the midst of different realities—from closed prisons to open-air prisons—the human mind will find a way to seek the truth. Building Free Life stands as a monument of radical thought, a testament of resilience, and a searchlight illuminating the impulse for freedom.

Contributors include: Shannon Brincat, Radha D’Souza, Mechthild Exo, Damian Gerber, Barry K. Gills, Muriel González Athenas, David Graeber, Andrej Grubačić, John Holloway, Patrick Huff, Donald H. Matthews, Thomas Jeffrey Miley, Antonio Negri, Norman Paech, Ekkehard Sauermann, Fabian Scheidler, Nazan Üstündağ, Immanuel Wallerstein, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Raúl Zibechi.

Sujets

• Partido de los Trabajadores de Kurdistán
• Kürd
• Fatty Joins the Force
• Marxism
• Kurdistan Workers' Party
• Political prisoner
• Kurdish people
• Anarchism
• Parti des travailleurs du Kurdistan

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629637686
• Langue: English

Extrait

In ancient Greek philosophy, kairos signifies the right time or the moment of transition. We believe that we live in such a transitional period. The most important task of social science in time of transformation is to transform itself into a force of liberation. Kairos, an editorial imprint of the Anthropology and Social Change department housed in the California Institute of Integral Studies, publishes groundbreaking works in critical social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, geography, theory of education, political ecology, political theory, and history.
Series editor: Andrej Gruba i
Recent and featured Kairos books:
Practical Utopia: Strategies for a Desirable Society by Michael Albert
In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism: The San Francisco Lectures by John Holloway
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore
We Are the Crisis of Capital: A John Holloway Reader by John Holloway
Archive That, Comrade! Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance by Phil Cohen
Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici
Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language by Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater
The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava by Thomas Schmidinger
Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism by Silvia Federici
Beyond Crisis: After the Collapse of Institutional Hope in Greece, What? edited by John Holloway, Katerina Nasioka, and Panagiotis Doulos
For more information visit www.pmpress.org/blog/kairos/

Building Free Life: Dialogues with calan
2020 PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-704-4 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-62963-764-8 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-62963-768-6 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933010
Cover Image: Abdullah calan by Jim Fitzpatrick
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA.
Published with International Initiative Edition
International Initiative
Freedom for Abdullah calan - Peace in Kurdistan
P.O. Box 100 511
D-50445 Cologne
Germany
www.freeocalan.org
First Published in 2019 by Aram, Diyarbakir
Translation where necessary by International Initiative
Contents
INTRODUCTION
International Initiative
SECTION I
INTRODUCTIONS, BACKGROUNDS, POSTSCRIPTS
ONE
Jumping on the Bus
John Holloway
TWO
calan, European Law, and the Kurdish Question
Norman Paech
THREE
A Grand and Comprehensive Dialogue
Ekkehard Sauermann
FOUR
Preface to The Road Map
Immanuel Wallerstein
FIVE
Prologue to Abdullah calan s The Road Map to Negotiations
Arnaldo Otegi
SIX
From World System to Democratic Civilization
Barry K. Gills
SEVEN
A Prisoner Who Is Becoming Mythical
Antonio Negri
SECTION II
THE ROOTS OF CIVILIZATION
EIGHT
Abdullah calan
Peter Lamborn Wilson
NINE
calan s Manifesto and the Challenge of Transcending Centricity
Donald H. Matthews and Thomas Jeffrey Miley
TEN
Historiography, Gender, and Resistance
Muriel Gonz lez Athenas
SECTION III
WEAVING AND LINKING
ELEVEN
Reading calan as a South Asian Woman
Radha D Souza
TWELVE
There Can Be No Utopia or Reality That Is More Ambitious Than This : The Democratic Modernism of Svetozar Markovi and Abdullah calan
Andrej Gruba i
THIRTEEN
Imaginary Dialogues with calan: Updating Critical Thinking
Ra l Zibechi
SECTION IV
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL ACTION
FOURTEEN
Making Connections: Jineoloj , Women s Liberation, and Building Peace
Mechthild Exo
FIFTEEN
calan as Thinker: On the Unity of Theory and Practice as Form of Writing
David Graeber
SIXTEEN
Rojava or the Art of Transition in a Collapsing Civilization
Fabian Scheidler
SEVENTEEN
When calan Met Bookchin: The Kurdish Freedom Movement and the Political Theory of Democratic Confederalism
Damian Gerber and Shannon Brincat
EIGHTEEN
Re-enchantment of the Political: Abdullah calan, Democratic Confederalism, and the Politics of Reasonableness
Patrick Huff
NINETEEN
The Theology of Democratic Modernity: Labor, Truth, and Freedom
Nazan st nda
TWENTY
Power and Truth: Analytics of Power and Nomadic Thought as Fragments of a Philosophy of Liberation
Michael Panser
AFTERWORD
Abdullah calan
INDEX
PUBLICATIONS BY ABDULLAH CALAN IN ENGLISH
Introduction
International Initiative
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
-Gabriel Garc a Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
While most of us refer to our own birth as a certain date, the day of our physical birth, Abdullah calan has frequently mentioned that he was born three times. The third birth-after his physical birth and the founding of the organization he is best known for, the Partiya Karker n Kurdistan (PKK: Kurdistan Workers Party)-is his paradigm shift toward his concept of democratic civilization. This book, published to mark his seventieth birthday, in a certain way, tells the story of this third birth.
The massive transformation that Kurdish society has undergone in the last forty years did not primarily happen through books. In a culture that relies heavily on oral literature, songs, conversation, and word of mouth, speeches and personal dialogue have been very important. calan-although he authored several books in the 1970s and 1980s, and a total of more than sixty to date, twelve of them in prison-is mainly a man of the spoken word and of dialogue. This makes his prison conditions since 1999, the total isolation and absence of dialogue, all the harder. Dialogue became monologue, and his only way to communicate with an audience was to write court submissions, his so-called defenses or prison writings. In the face of a possible genocide, he did not formulate an individual defense but acted as a spokesperson for his people-and eventually for all the oppressed peoples of the Middle East.
But, still, it is not fair to speak of a monologue. Abdullah calan s writings, first addressed to various courts in Turkey and Europe and subsequently published, did initiate a form of dialogue. The essays communicate with storytellers from mythological pasts as well as with living intellectuals, with companions who know him personally and unknown readers on other continents, with supporters and opponents alike-even with his long deceased mother. His writings are being translated-some of them into as many as twenty languages-and are read and discussed by people all over the world.
The International Initiative and many others have taken up this dialogue and discussed his ideas with people/s who are also weaving and building a free life. In many countries and places, we tried to further the dialogue with and between the young, women, anarchists, libertarian socialists, social ecologists, autonomists, Indigenous peoples, workers, and all those whose hearts, minds, and praxis are dedicated to furthering the quest for a free life. This book is our attempt to reflect those discussions and dialogues and the process of learning from one another.
This book for the first time collects written reactions to Abdullah calan s prison writings. It brings together a number of academics, writers, and revolutionaries who are interested in and inspired by his thought. Since it is going to appear in various languages, it is an attempt to deepen and broaden the existing dialogue. Hopefully it will also pierce through prison walls, since the severe isolation conditions in the mral Island prison allow for very little of that dialogue to get back to the author. As writing has become the means for calan to overcome his isolation and communicate with a wider audience, we hope that this book will be a way for that very audience to reach back to him and contribute to his relentless and resilient effort to create a better world.
The essays span a period of twenty years, and you will be able to trace a certain development. The topics discussed broaden in scope as they move away from the confines of nationalism and security-related issues toward more far-reaching ideas about the history of civilization and the struggle between capitalist modernity and democratic modernity as the current expression of a conflict that stretches back eons.
What is constant throughout the essays is the excitement about calan s attempt at writing a holistic history of all the oppressed and linking their different struggles to become free or remain free. New concepts arise, such as democratic modernity, democratic nation, democratic confederalism, and especially jineoloj as a form of knowledge that could bring about the transformation needed for our quest to build free life.
The book is divided into four sections. Section I , Introductions, Backgrounds, Postscripts, consists mainly of writings that have been published as forewords or afterwords to translations of calan s books. Some