Kurdish movement

Kurdish movement in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and Turkey is a family of organizations, political parties, social movements and militias, the core of which is the PKK (Kurdish workers party). Kurdish militia YPG is headed by commanders of the PKK.

Kurdish movement is not anarchist or libertarian-socialist movement. Rather, it resembles a Russian party of socialist revolutionaries of the early 20th century, PSR (not libertarian Party of Left SR and not pro-anarchist SR-maximalists). It uses a centralized party and parliamentary elections. As an old PSR todey's PKK talks about the need of private investment, the development of private businesses and wage labor (1,2). There is no social anarchist, libertarian, stateless and classless revolution in Rojava. By the way, the concept of "class struggle" is not in the lexicon of PKK.

Also PKK is a democratic movement, like PSR : nobody forbids the liberal partys and moderate nationalists associated with Barzani to operate in Rojava. They are in the opposition to PKK. It creates the opportunity for pluralism and criticism against the ruling party. The bad news is that some of the Kurds and other local residents feel sympathy to these parties. The good news is that PKK at the moment is not the Bolsheviks. They do not prevent people to be in opposition.

On the other hand PKK supports direct democracy in local communities and managed collectives (cooperatives) in the economy. In other words, they have a libertarian-socialist elements the same as Russian SR. This circumstance has led to the fact that libertarian-socialist and anarchist elements left the party in 1906 and in 1917 and created their own strong organizations - SR-Maximalists and PLSR.

PKK has huge prospects in Turkey, where within a few decades Kurds can be half of the population. So this project, or rather some trends and anarchist's oriented segments of this project, can be interested for anarchists. In addition, within PKK there are some people or faction of a minority have sympathy for anarchism. That is why you should examine the situation in Turkey and Syria.

I see two things among the anarchists. Some people just uncritically support the PKK. Cheerleaders. Others rightly say that PKK is not a anarchist, but go far from further action. However, in the world nothing could be done these ways.

In Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, anarchists led a campaign among members of the Party of Socialists -Revolutionaries. And sometimes achieved great success. So, in Bialystok and Odessa, many members of PSR moved to the position of anarchism and became the core of the anarchist movement in a big cities.

1) https://syndicalistcommunizing3.wordpress.com/2016/04/02/anarchist-critique-of-the-pkk/

2) http://www.biehlonbookchin.com/rojavas-threefold-economy/