Democratic confederalism is NOT libertarian socialism

Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Assembly (Post-Comprehension)

“Whether nation-state, republic, or democracy — democratic confederalism is open for compromises concerning state or governmental traditions. It allows for equal coexistence.” — Abdullah Ocalan (Democratic Confederalism) [emphasis added]

The transition to modernity roughly began and ended from the 15th to the 18th centuries. This time saw Capital’s long 16th century ending around 1640, liberalism’s emergence in the late 17th century in the climate of the post-glorious revolution, in the words of John Locke and the actions of the radical Whigs, and early modernity roughly starting around 1730. From its start, liberalism has not only had to battle dynastic rulers and clergymen but also capitalism and alternate forms of modernization. It is unsurprising then that, in this constant existential conflict, there would come a form of liberalism that resists the excesses of nation-statism.

The liberal project is (generically) in pursuit of a “commonwealth of humanity,” a political entity that expresses itself through governmental contracts like constitutions and charters that stretch out in a uniform fashion to shield those within from the excessive emptiness of linear time by ensuring the freedoms of individuals through a (theoretically) mutual relationship of contractual upkeep that guides the moral and social progression of an enlightened society. “Contractual upkeep” is an obligation that liberals have in maintaining their society that is supposed to respect the mutual relationship of the social contract, which guarantees the follow-through of “same birth” or homogenesis. However, one of the central conflicts of development that exists within liberalism is how and when to recognize the shortcomings or even outright violations of the social contract.

We can simplify liberal history here by identifying six eras of contractual upkeep that it has gone through:

• The 1690–1799 era of upkeep was simple: removing institutions of “unsame birth,” or the “heterogenesis” of dynasties, by either removing monarchs outright or forcing them to accept the constitutional concession. This initial period of upkeep had limited success and range with the revolutions in America, France, and Haiti most notably. Crucially, within this initial period of upkeep, two primary forms (or ideological subgenera) of liberalism emerged that hold great sway over the ideology’s morphological directions in its species manifestations: centrist and radical liberalism.
• The 1799–1849 era fifty-year spread after the victories of the American and French revolutions is split between the 1799–1815 Napoleonic Imperium and the 1815–1849 slow springtime. The Napoleonic wars sparked a Jacobin social scare around the world that centrist liberals used against their radical kin, while conservatives in general would use it against liberalism in its entirety. The principle narrative equipped around the scare was the idea that radical policies of universal suffrage and popular democracy produced social instability and gave rise to chaotic rule like that of Napoleon’s. These fifty years would see a dramatic fissure between centrist and radical liberals, as the reputation of Jacobinism and Bonapartism would scare centrist liberals toward seeking alliances with liberal conservatives to help build the “stability” of governments with slow procedural constitutionalism. A principle dispute that divided the centrist and radical liberals was with regard to suffrage, as the centrists preferred a censitary approach, limiting voting rights to “rational property owners,” as the radicals preferred a more universal approach, although not always complete, as Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism’s legacies of pushing for “equal suffrage” are severely tarnished by the simple fact that “equal suffrage” here meant non-property-owning white men.
• The 1849–1914 era witnessed the aftermath of the 1848 revolution’s failure to secure republican victory over Europe and the rise of alternative movements to liberalism such as vertical socialism (or authoritarian socialism) and horizontal socialism (or libertarian socialism). Here liberalism began its war with Marxism and anarchism, most notably, as centrist liberalism secured a steady and stable coalition with liberal conservatives while radical liberalism was further marginalized within the liberal canon and began to find itself lumped in with socialist movements. The radical liberal would often find themselves dismissing the socialist label less and less, as they would frequent early socialist movements and became a large inspiration for anarchism and Marxism.
• The 1914–1945 era witnessed the “30-year war” between America and Germany for, at first, hegemony over the world system and then the Allied forces securing the world system’s survival against the Nazi world empire attempt during World War II. Centrist liberalism found its biggest challenges across the European continent during this time, as most countries here would become authoritarian regimes, some fascist but most authoritarian conservative. What at the time seemed like the last hour for liberalism turned out to be one of its most crucial. In the aftermath of the allied victory stood a host of new liberal states with much stronger constitutions than before.
• The 1945–1991 era saw the yalta pact, which in fact created an international ideological coalition of centrist liberalism and Marxism-Leninism, with the former having more dominance in two-thirds of the world and the latter given dominance in about one-third. During the Cold War, the ideologies maintained this joint geocultural dominance of ideas while engaging in many national conflicts between each other, notably in Vietnam and Korea. Since centrist liberalism had far more influence and territory over the world and the Marxist-Leninist one-third continually had to reform itself to maintain economic parody with the other two-thirds, we can say the geoculture was undeniably liberal. It is easy to say that this period of upkeep was at its strongest for centrist liberalism, at least until cracks began showing in the 1970s. For radical liberalism, however, it was the weakest, as it was officially removed from the liberal canon. The official diagnosis that would separate it from its ideological sibling was that the Jacobin regime of 1793–1794 was the first “totalitarian and illiberal regime.” Liberal Conservatives, of course, would be adopted as the “rightful sibling,” as they too had come to disown their own ideological sibling, illiberal conservatism, as “brutish reactionism.” Centrist liberals had come to name their arch-nemesis totalitarianism, all things threatening to liberal democracy and its “open society.” The three major forms of totalitarianism in the canon are: Jacobinism, Communism, and Fascism. Totaltiarianism’s defeat in 1945 amounted, to the centrist liberals’ minds, as signifying to them that they were coming to live in a “post-ideological and post-political era” in which their ideology would reign unchallenged.
• Finally, the 1991-present era in which liberalism is no longer the dominant ideology of the world-system and a vacancy of dominant ideology persists. This has produced arguably the most important threat to centrist liberalism since the two world wars, as they face the electoral threat of rising populism and the existential threat of worsening climate conditions that could mean humanity’s extinction. The focus of upkeep here has been expanding the deconstructionist capabilities of the omni-competent state through mass surveillance, intergovernmental coalitions, and multinational corporations as the source of political reinforcement, legitimization, and imperialism.

Initially, liberalism tried to reduce the emptiness of capitalism (first by removing empires and then by using constitutional statism), but soon the perversions of nation-statism produced their own sources of emptiness. It’s then conceivable that a form of radical liberalism would emerge in the early 21st century (specifically in 2005, when Ocalan issued the Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan) that would argue against the uncommon birth or “heterogenesis of nation-statism” by expanding its commitment to popular sovereignty through assembly and direct democratic reforms. An argument that has similarities to early 19th-century American Jeffersonian tradition of the ward-republic. Where a “ward-republic” (small unit of direct and communal governance between localized individuals) builds up with others to form bottom-up republican governance to reinforce social virtue throughout society. The vision for “democratic modernity” of Ocalan’s thought is split between two paths to try and overcome “capitalist modernity.” On one side is the path for a theoretical global uprising of “democratic nations” from around the world to overthrow the interstate system of nation-states with their own new interstate system composed of “democratic nations” that would then create a cooperative, confederal, and egalitarian global economy. The other and far more likely path is simply a reduced form of this “democratic modernity” in the form of a new reformist trend within the system that would see existing nation-states implementing democratic autonomy in their constitutions. Where the existing interstate system seeks out more cooperative forms of capital accumulation, it transforms their nation-states from monocultural to multicultural states as those democratic nations are recognized with some degree of autonomy within those wider borders. Either path results in a new development for capitalism and nation-statism rather than actually replacing existing modernity. Arguably, each path directly conflicts with the other over whether to concede ground or use violence to implement a “friendlier interstate” of sorts.

Interesting enough, the project of the nation-state has already been undergoing large campaigns within it to build more multicultural nations. Latin American left populism (and even the more broad radical democracy movement) notably has pushed the concept of plurinationalism to combat the monocultural excesses of nation-statism with its attempt to provide indigenous people with a recognized place as one of the primary national groups within states like Bolivia, Chile, etc., with its own limited successes. In the beginning, the nation-state project had deep ethnocratic elements within it, producing states that outright limited the rights of citizens, resources, and freedoms to one ethnic group. Over time, tremendous resistance movements formed within those marginalized groups that were suppressed as they fought for the general idea (and great diversity of thought between them) for more subjectivity in society. Ocalan is a latecomer to this larger and older development.

Since 1945, the notion of “homogeneous nation-states” has begun to hit the back burner for a number of reasons. One was the global outrage over the atrocities of Nazi Germany, which sent a shiver down the backs of humanity. This led to the word “nationalism” itself becoming a bad word of sorts in many regards. The other was the trend of increased capital globalization that couldn’t tolerate more open and blatant forms of racism. The image of a unified global marketplace was that of a group of multiracial business executives coming to end bigotry with endless and open consumerism. While this obviously didn’t kill racism and in actuality continued it under new developments of bigotry like colorblindness, tokenization, etc., it also didn’t do much to defend homogeneous nationalism either. The perceived notion of “racial and ethnic differences eroding” began to take shape, and this led to developments in supremacist and outright fascist ideologies such as Benoist’s vision of ethnopluralism. To say the world is composed of “homogeneous nation-states” is an outdated notion that right-populism would like to see return given that it isn’t really the case anymore. Interestingly, nationalist scholar Anthony D. Smith, who defines nation-states as a single culture/ethnicity state, has argued that most states today usually don’t fit this and has suggested the term “polyethnic states.” Irrespective of whether you think the nation-state is inherently homogeneous or not, it should be telling that even those within nationalism studies have moved beyond simplistic notions regarding modern statism. Even the most notable holdouts to this trend of de-homogenizing nationalism, Apartheid South Africa and Israel, the two most notorious post-war ethnocratic regimes, have only served to further reinforce the notion that homogeneous nationalism results in large-scale genocide and the destruction of exploitable people that the capitalist system needs to survive. Capitalism would like to cheer for Apartheid South Africa’s end and take credit for “ending racism,” but Israel continues to be a grim reminder that even old historical blunders die hard. Another one of those reasons for nationalism to take a back seat was also to make room for multinational and intergovernmental entities like the UN, EU, and the many monopolistic corporations that exist today to come in and further capitalist development. So Ocalan’s pitch for his own version of pluralistic nationalism is far less novel than he or his supporters would like to claim.

To say DemCon isn’t a form of libertarian socialism will sound odd and downright wrong to those who think that it is. That is definitely the terminology that got attached to the movement by its commenters, supporters, and even believers. However, Ocalan’s dismissal of international communism as a goal, opting for “democratic nations” run by “democratic authorities” rather than a free association of producers, is precisely one of the reasons why he falls short of the libertarian socialist label. A quick response to this could be, “But what about mutualists?” While it’s true they don’t accept communism, they still envision a world of free association that isn’t divided by nations, even if said nations are democratic. While Being heavily disagrees with the maintenance of “stateless markets,” at least they understand the central goal of socialism to be free production. They also understand not to subtract freedom towards some blind blunderbuss of “majoritarian authority.” The persistence of a world of democratic nations that can violate minority dissent in favor of majoritarian governance and harmony in DemCon theory is already a prerequisite in most radical liberal thought. What Ocalan is doing is making sure it’s more participatory and far less potentially bigoted towards different people groups. The concept of popular sovereignty remains here, and the notion of dismantling such concentrations of political power is precisely dismissed to preserve “democratic authority” within those plural and distinct “democratic nations.”

It seems clear that Ocalan’s project is part of the larger species of radical liberalism that Being would call radical republicanism. It views liberalism’s contractual upkeep as best served through a majoritarianism of virtue exhibited by the “citizenry of plain or common folk,” particularly against the rise of “artificial aristocracy,” which radical republicans argue is created by minoritarian systems of governance, and opposed to the focus on industrialized proletarianism as advocated by anarcho-syndicalists and Marxist-Leninists, which are also both charged with creating new forms of “artificial aristocracies” because of their disconnect with local culture and its people. This citizenry forms a commonwealth, republic, federation, or “councils of good governance” (in the case of the neozapatismo in Mexico, who have also created their own guerrilla republic of sorts), which comprises the citizenry’s mass will by direct and delegated institutions. These “common folk” form a government around a cult of active citizenry through constant participation in democratic processes. Those delegates and leaders that are chosen or arise are deemed “leaders of the mass will,” who’ve attained their positions from the perception that they’re highly merited individuals who can best serve the perfection of the majority’s will in places the common folk cannot directly reach or participate in. The “virtuous citizenry” here tended to be viewed by radical republicans as coming from rural rather than urban centers and therefore exhibited good and authentic national character.

It’s important to note the ethnocratic elements in early radical republicanism (even early nationalism more generally) further developed and influenced the creation of a form of illiberal conservatism referred to by Being (and Roger Griffin) as democratic right-wing populism, which diverted from the goal of egalitarianism towards inegalitarianism. The pervasive condition of ethnocracy over the history of liberalism cast a deep shadow where many abominations rose up from. This shadow, when cast in the other direction, forced many radical liberals to combat ethnocracy directly, even nation-statism more broadly, leading to a focus on more communalistic and consociationalism approaches to social organization. So while Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism are also forms of radical republicanism, their focuses were concerned with 18th and 19th century political conditions and would conflict with what the DemCon’s have added in their manifestation of the ideology.

It’s no wonder that the constitution for Rojava (officially the autonomous administration of North and East Syria) is called The Charter of the Social Contract and is premised on creating a more democratic and cooperative form of society when this is in direct response to the unitary and oppressive nature of the Syrian Arab Republic. Its dictator Bashar al-Assad has taken on his own developments of Ba’athist philosophy; it too is a radical liberal manifestation premised on creating an egalitarian republic for Arab peoples but through a transitional centralized elite who are supposed to teach its citizens virtue. Although that supposed future egalitarian society has been constantly postponed with more and more oppressive attempts to control the people as much as possible.

Ba’athism and democratic confederalism represent two very different poles within the radical liberal tradition. One views the people with distrust as an unvirtuous mass in need of a virtuous centralized dictatorial teacher, while the other views the people as learning virtue the best through them exercising it through direct, distributed, and federated processes. One tries to create a homogeneous Arabic national identity and consciousness, and the other is focused on building a society founded on recognizing the different ethnicities within the region, using a bottom-up form of consociationalism to recognize ethnic pluralism, instead of collapsing them into one. It’s fascinating to see how human cosmology can produce such wildly different visions even within the same political ideology and general geographic region. Both entities involved are in the Syrian civil war against each other. In fact, it would seem that Ocalan’s struggle with the Turkish and Syrian governments reflect within his understanding of fascism where he views it as an excessive form of monocultural nation-statism, while this understanding is tremendously flawed it does make sense given that democratic confederalism itself is a response to the excessive nation-statism of both the Turkish Right-Populist and Syrian Ba’athist governments, who both wish to see the Kurdish population vanished into assimilation or bloodshed.

Ba’athism used to be the new radical liberal kid on the bloc, but by this point it’s a virtually dead political ideology. Starting in the 1940s, its most infamous claim to power was the Saddam regime, from 1979–2003, that ended with the American-led coalition during the second Gulf War. It too was surrounded by the socialist label and rejected liberalism in rhetoric, but for the Baathists, “socialism” amounted to nationalist justice, sovereignty, and common prosperity. A large overlap between the Ba’ath and DemCon can be viewed here as both ideologies have claimed “socialism,” but neither desire a new world of free association but rather one where the nation is free from emptiness and in pursuit of a common destiny between its members within an egalitarian republican society. It’s important to again stress that despite this common cause, both people within these ideologies have very real differences that have resulted in dead bodies between each other in combat. They’ve even accused each other of fascism, but neither is correct in this charge. As Being has placed DemCon as part of the radical republican species of liberalism within the context and evolution of 21st century politics, Ba’ath for Being is part of the Jacobinism of mid-to-late 20th century political evolutions. It used Rousseau’s narrative of vitreous degeneration to argue that the Arabic nation had degenerated from a premodern egalitarian society into a “decadent” and “reactionary” modern society, thus the masses were seen as too corrupted and tainted and required the transitional centralism of perfectionist democracy to rebirth Arab society into becoming egalitarian once again.

The main source of critique here was that DemCon follows more closely from the historical development of liberalism (specifically from its radical liberal side) and exhibits from within itself a more 21st century-adjusted manifestation of the liberal species of radical republicanism. Moving far away from the old ethnocratic baggage and more towards an inclusive and better cooperative attitude to building an egalitarian republican society. Even if said republic is called an “autonomous administration” or “democratic nation.” The essence of Rousseauian virtue was creating a world of governments where all of humanity could discover a common or “same” path forward in building a liberatory society founded on the unified will of the masses. Establishing a set of rights to both expand and secure the enlightened wisdom of peoples, but this time accounting for more different people groups and better addressing their problems, from a liberal perspective. For those who are willing to accept the initial premise here that DemCon is a liberal rather than socialist political ideology but see no issue with that, then there isn’t much left to say to you. But for those more stubborn then what remains is for Piper to explain from a more libertarian socialist focused critique as to why DemCon fails to be a species of socialism, let alone from the libertarian socialist tradition.

Citations and further reading:

• Abdullah Ocalan — The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan: Kurdistan, Women’s Revolution and Democratic Confederalism
• Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White — (Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage)
• E-International Relations — Interview — Anthony D. Smith (https://www.e-ir.info/2013/09/03/interview-anthony-d-smith/)
• Immanuel Wallerstein — World-systems Analysis: An Introduction
• Immanuel Wallerstein — The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914
• Roger Griffin — Interregnum or endgame? The radical right in the ‘post-fascist’ era
• Roger Griffin — Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler
• Mourad Magdi Wahba — The Meaning of Ishtirakiyah: Arab Perceptions of Socialism in the Nineteenth Century
• Dalal Arsuzi-Elamir — Nation, state, and democracy in the writings of Zaki al-Arsuzi
• Jacob Talmon — The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy

Libertarian Socialism as farce (Piper Tompkins)

Marx once said that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. In the case of the political development of Abdullah Ocalan, nothing captures his movement and ideas better. He went from the pioneer of a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla insurgency that claimed the lives of civilian bystanders to a captured and imprisoned shell of his former self, looking for a way to moderate his vision of national liberation. Like many similar movements during the Cold War, he saw Marxism-Leninism as his people’s path to liberation from national oppression. Aiming to liberate the Kurds from national oppression under Turkish rule.

He and his organization, the PKK, fought an insurgent campaign against the Turkish state aiming to establish Kurdish national self-determination. The independent Kurdish state would, upon achieving independence, establish a Soviet-style “socialism.” Thousands died in the insurrection, including civilians. The PKK had established itself on the model of many communist/national liberation groups in the 20th century, one that substituted its military-political struggle for the struggle of the masses for self-liberation. In some circumstances, this substitution at least led to the overthrow of the national oppressor, but not here.

Instead of overthrowing Turkish control over the Kurds, Ocalan’s insurrection was defeated, and he was captured. In self-defense, Ocalan transformed the ideology of the PKK. On trial for an attempt at the revolutionary overthrow of the Turkish state, he proclaimed that it was not his movement’s goal to make a social revolution but merely to achieve Kurdish autonomy. Many in his movement perceived the about face and left. For those that stayed, Ocalan provided a wholesale reworking of the movement’s ideology inspired by his readings of political theory, including ecological theorist Murray Bookchin. Bookchin was a self-styled Anarchist for much of his political career, but he rejected the basis of Anarchism in class struggle in favor of local, communitarian democracy based on the concept of the citizen.

Ocalan, through what’s best described as a cult of personality, effected his movement’s transformation from Marxist-Leninist revolutionary Kurdish nationalism to “Democratic Confederalism.” “Democratic Confederalism” is a political ideology that sees citizens of national groupings across the world as the transformational force (or “subject”) of history. It calls on them to produce grassroots, communitarian democracy, organized through confederations, which are politically and ethically pluralistic and harmonious, while facilitating the construction of democratic nations. Ocalan’s dynamism, along with the self-insertion of women militants who carved out a role for feminist politics within the ideology of “Apo,” allowed him to lead a new movement for national democracy while being kept prisoner by Turkey.

He lifted the idea of face-to-face democratic confederation from Bookchin, who himself, for most of his political career, thought of it as a “communalist tendency within anarchism.” It was his association with Bookchin and Bookchin’s association with Anarchism that prompted western Anarchists to see the new feminist-democratic forces organized through the PYD, YPJ, and YPG that heroically conquered a collection of Syrian cantons (“Rojava”) against ISIS during the Syrian Civil War as a new Anarchist-led revolution. The failure of this reading is due in part to the fact that Bookchin’s own anarchist status is questionable.

Bookchin became interested in anarchism after he was convinced by the bureaucratically established class peace of the post-WW2 period that the working class was no longer the subject of history, leading him to abandon Marxism. Social democratic/new deal politics used social programs and union power to buy off the consent of the Anglo-American working class. This social compact as well as the monopolization of the revolutionary movements that did exist by the geopolitical interests of “socialist states,” dominated by a ruling class of party and state officials that had successfully subordinated the workers and peasants over a third of the world, created a crisis in revolutionary socialist political theory.

Revolutionary Marxism and national liberation struggles came to be dominated by “Marxism-Leninism,” the official ideology of the “socialist states,” which justified state-led capital accumulation at the expense of the workers and peasants as “building socialism” to defeat capitalist imperialism and produce the material abundance required for communism. The main trend in Western (non-Marxist-Leninist) Marxism was the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. The theory of the school was synthesized before the rise of Nazism as a research programme that combined Marxist social science and Marxist philosophy to contribute to revolutionary class struggle. After the rise and fall of Nazism, the school’s theory shifted to the dismal prognosis of total domination of labor by capital via bureaucratic “instrumental reason” tied to the bourgeois state and scientific establishment and the commodification of culture represented by consumerism. With second-generation critical theory and the “communicative turn” led by Jurgen Habermas, critical theory became a tool for justifying the liberal social contract of civil society and thus liberal democratic capitalism.

Affected by the crisis of revolutionary theory and thus convinced of the exit of the working class from the revolutionary project, he turned to an ecological anti-capitalism that saw hierarchy and commodification as practices that violated people’s interconnected obligations to each other and the environment by allowing humans to dominate each other, the market to dominate human beings, and human beings to dominate nature. Thus he theorized that modern industrial society had to be radically decentralized to produce local democratic associations that would reinforce humanity’s obligations to itself and the ecology, abolishing the market and class divisions as well as the centralized political state. In anarchism, he found a program for replacing centralized political power with federated, directly democratic regional assemblies. Against individualist Anarchists who refused subordinating their goals to an organized mass movement and anarcho-syndicalists who were only interested in direct democracy and collective decision-making for the purposes of establishing worker control of society and then the free association of producers, he urged Anarchists to take up “libertarian municipalism” and “communalism.”

In “communalism,” Bookchin offered a political ideology that sought radical democratization of industrial society to bring about institutions of collective decision-making that ensured that all were bound by their obligations to work toward sustainable human development. Libertarian municipalism was the communalist political strategy in which a communal movement of citizens would organize various associations and run candidates to the lowest levels of electoral office in order to capture local administrations and transform them into self-governing communal assemblies, which would then take over production and plan it according to social needs, leading to the evaporation of the state bureaucracy, market mechanisms, and class distinctions. For years he tried to pitch communalism to the anarchist movement. It never worked, and he and his fellow communalists left the anarchist movement shortly before his death as a result.

Bookchin failed because he was never really an anarchist, or “libertarian socialist.” Anarchists always responded to his pitch by saying that anarchism is not about “collective,” or democratic rule, but free association. Anarchism rejects the idea that there need to be some “democratic bodies” that bind individuals together in voluntary arrangements, which they are then obligated to respect. Anarchism as well as Marxian varieties of libertarian socialism such as council communism and Marxist-Humanism, and Marx himself maintained that society should be organized via free and equal relationships of interdependence in which not even a majority vote would enable subordination of one group to another. Society would provide the means of independence for human individuals, not subordinate them to democratic procedure.

For libertarian socialists, if the confederation is to become a mechanism of democratic rule over the citizens, then it must stand above the citizens as a power separate from the social relations among the citizens. This, however, is impossible since it would be constituted by those same relations. Thus the confederation, divorced from the free association of producers, would become a false community in the same manner as the centralized political state, claiming to represent the entire society while in reality establishing a management structure for the subordination of the productive activities of the producers to the abstract “face-to-face democracy.” Even granting that libertarian municipalism could get off the ground and become a mass movement, it would likely only reinforce local state bureaucracies and divisions of labor, thus failing to even provide an alternative to capitalism.

This is exactly what took place in Rojava when Kurdish democratic forces took control of it. Instead of creating a direct communal democracy which pointed the way to a post-capitalist society, it produced a semi-state partly governed by local councils and partly by a top down structure with a representative democracy and a constitution that allows private property. Anthropologist David Graeber who visited Rojava, described this structure as one of “dual power,” but admitted that the local assemblies are part of the same governing structure as the centralized apparatus, rather than standing against it as the Russian workers’ and peasants’ soviets stood against the provisional government. Further the PYD became a chief asset for the United States in the fight against ISIS.

While libertarian socialists salute feminists defending themselves and their people from violent, theocratic Salafists, the integration of the PYD as a force under the strategic toolbelt of the United States transforms it into a potential resource for US imperialism. The same force that rained down blood and death motivating the very creation of ISIS. Democratic confederalism is not even as radical as communalism. Ocalan has given up on transcending capitalism and embraced Nordic social democracy. Apoism is not libertarian socialism, it is the justifying ideology of a failed Stalinist insurgent and his movement who can only aspire to being tools of US power.

Sources
De Jong, Stalinist Caterpillar Into Libertarian Butterfly?
Ocalan, Democratic Confederalism
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-syria-anarchism-visiting-rojava
https://theconversation.com/us-military-presence-in-syria-carries-substantial-risks-but-so-does-complete-withdrawal-23556
Bookchin, Libertarian Municipalism
What Is Communalism?
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
Social Anarchism and Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm
Biehl, Bookchin Breaks With Anarchism
Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice
Honeywell, Anarchism: Key Concepts In Political Theory
Van der Linden, On Council Communism
Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom