Real Media: Syria, Anarchism & Visiting Rojava

In the last part of Real Media's interview, a special discussion with anthropologist David Graeber about anarchism, Syria, the bureaucracy of activism and his visit to Rojava where a new kind of society is developing
I was in Syria once. I was in southern Turkey. I was in Iraq. I was in a variety of different areas within the Kurdish territories that are experimenting with direct democracy.
Interviewer: Can you tell me about what brought you there, and certainly from the very beginning?
DAVID GRAEBER: It was less that I found them than they found me. There's people involved in the Kurdish Freedom Movement that ... it started ... it emerged from the PKK, which is a rather conventional, Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group in its origins. But something about [inaudible 00:00:30] took it in this radically new direction, and a lot of it was internal processes of women guerrillas sort of asserting themselves, and introducing feminism as a big theme. Part of it had to do with the particular intellectual evolution of their leader, [Ojulan 00:00:43], who's become this ... since his arrest and imprisonment in this island prison in Turkey, has been reading a lot of Marie Bookchin and a lot of feminist theory, and kind of came around to a much more anarchist position, basically.
They decided that rather than demanding a state of their own, they wished to simply make borders irrelevant and dissolve away states entirely. And it's kind of made sense to people in that part of the world. Remember the Kurds are a population who are divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
The idea they are somehow carving a government out of that seems unlikely. And they also make the rather ... a point you hear a lot of, actually, people will say, "Well, you know, we've come to realize in this part of the world, demanding your own country is basically the same as 'I demand the right to be tortured by secret policemen speaking my own language'." It's not much of a demand. So they've come around to this idea of bottom-up direct democracy and sort of eliminating borders as the best way that they can come up with something like a Kurdistan that would make sense.
Interviewer: So the place is there? Can I even say the place is there? There is a physical place that you hinted.
DAVID GRAEBER: Kurdistan. I went to Rojava. Rojava is - or west Kurdistan - is the Syrian part of Kurdistan. It's a large section of northern Syria along the Turkish border, and about two million people there engaged in what I think considered to be one of the great historical experiments. My father fought in the Spanish civil wars, so I kind of grew up in a place where the memories of what happened in Spain in '36, '37, '38 were very vivid. So one reason I came to be an anarchist is because, I always say, most people don't think anarchism is a bad idea. They think it's insane. No police, people just start killing each other. Nobody actually organized things without leaders.
And in fact, my father was in Barcelona when it was run by an anarchist principle. They just got rid of white collar workers, and sure enough they discovered these were basically bullshit jobs, that they didn't make any difference if they weren't there.
So having grown up like that, I understand that it's possible, but there hasn't been an experiment on that scale like what happened in Spain and the Republican-controlled area, especially anarchist Kurd-held areas, since because everybody's so terrified of the people running things.
They don't mind if people say, "I hate you, I want to overthrow you" nearly so much as they say "You guys are ridiculous and unnecessary." That's what they really fear. So the enemies they like are the ones who try to replace the Marxists, basically. When those Marxists come, the police will still be there. There are probably going to be more of them, right? Anarchists come, the whole structure will be changed. People will be told that it's completely unnecessary.
So that kind of experiment they're really afraid of. They tend to stamp it out as quickly as possible. So this is the first time, I think, since Spain that you've had large area of territory under the control of people who are trying to do that; trying to create bottom-up direct democracy without a state.
Interviewer: Where else has that been tried?
DAVID GRAEBER: I mean, it's tried everywhere in the world for much of human history and worked fine. But under the modern industrial conditions, there have been various attempts. With most revolutionary history, you talk about the Paris commune, they'd have a [inaudible 00:04:18]; you talk about [inaudible 00:04:19] in Ukraine. There have been attempts to do so. But usually everybody, on all sides including the left-wingers, turn on them and try to suppress it.