A short while ago I was going to work on a comprehensive list of sites and articles on the revolution in Rojava but fortunately Andrew Flood of the Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland has done it one better. Flood was central in promoting awareness of the Zapatista uprising and revolution in Chiapas Mexico, in the late 1990s.
Resources on the Rojava revolution in West Kurdistan (Syria)
Of particular note is how Flood clarifies one of the arguments — purportedly of the classic vulgar Marxist variety — that since Rojava hasn’t completely broken with the “wage system” it isn’t “full communism” and therefore isn’t of value to us, the revolutionary Left, or worth support.
Generally critiques of the Rojava revolution from the left come in two forms. The more standard one focuses on the role of the PKK and dismisses the revolution in totality on the basis of the PKKs past record. This is discussed in the introduction to this page.
The second is much rarer and essentially comes from a set of fringe Marxist ideas that have some influence with some anarchists. They insist that to be a ‘real’ revolution the wages system and market have to be abolished and Full communism introduced. The point being that it is not enough that this is a goal to be worked towards, it must already have happened. Advocates of such a position tend to see gender liberation as an irrelevant distraction, no more than a nice add on for a ‘real’ revolution. And their productivistist bias means that environmental concerns are no more than a tool to critique capitalism.
The point to start with that is to understand that you can’t simply abolish wages, you have to instead remove the need for wages. Otherwise you just end up with a secondary underground market where the real economic activity goes on. Historically even draconian states such as under Lenin or Stalin have proved unable to abolish such activity despite jailings and executions.
Can we say either that the abolition of wage labour has happened or that it is the goal? Briefly no, but read on …
The economic model being pursued is complicated by the deliberate under development of the region under Assad which means there were not even any cement factories or grain mills, the main product cash economy product apart form oil being wheat. This means there isn’t much of a classical working class in the old school marxist factory sense or indeed factories to seize. The economy is a mix of agriculture, small machine shops and oil extraction along with state run electricity, phones and other services.
That makes the sort of box ticking such critics suggest a poor fit to the actual conditions . Not an impossibility but the same forces for collectivisation don’t exist as in a factory setting so it would required a deep mass ideological commitment, as indeed was present in some villages in rural Spain during the revolution there where both wages and individual ownership were abolished. If you’ve seen the film Land & Freedom you are familiar with how that happened in some places.
So far as I understand economic change in Rojava is happening at the level of
1. setting up co-ops (with agricultural ones using land abandoned by the Assad regime ).
2. providing certain necessities free (so partial filling of the requirement for wage abolition), but from the Point of View of consumption rather than production.
3. a certain amount of war communism – again a form of wage abolition but not necessarily intended to be long term. In Kobane under siege food was reported by BBC journalists as being freely available to all.I have seen references to some co-ops operating on a ‘according to need’ basis, this appears to translate in reality into a family wage, again similar to much of revolutionary Spain so the take home wage is proportional to the number of people dependent on the wage. If this is widespread it is indeed a significant step towards a real abolition of wages.
