Interesting read for sure, but I kept wondering if not almost the exact same article could have been written by someone visiting China during the time of the cultural revolution, just that in hindsight things would appear somewhat different?

She paused for a moment. “Is that it? Nothing else? No other criticisms?” She was challenging me to dig deeper. In Kurdish revolutionary culture, couching your criticism in a compliment or an excuse is seen as a sign of dishonesty and liberalism. It should instead be treated as a gift, as something essential. “Be direct,” her tone seemed to suggest.

I like that Heval Newroz accepted and encouraged criticism; that she views the revolution not as a finished work but a project still in progress. I agree you can't expect society to change quickly, and education is the key. I hope their revolution continues to progress in an anarchist direction.

Thanks for sharing the article.

Thank you. This is a long reading, but an interesting one. I have been curious about how it's going in Rojava, but the war closer to home has overwhelmed my senses and attention. I've been a bit fearful that the Assad regime might recover and reconquer (ISIS seems a spent force by now), or that the Erdogan regime might think of some new way to menace them.

Some remarks to the article:

In most communities, the speed of structural change had far outpaced changes in public consciousness. /.../ In a statist revolution the question of structure is primary. The will of the people matters only insofar as it affects the power of the state. But if the goal itself is for power and initiative to flow from the bottom upward, then as a rule the revolution can only proceed at the speed of popular consciousness. For a community to truly govern itself, a critical mass of its people need to want to govern themselves in the first place, and they need to share some fundamental assumptions about what that means and why it is important.

A common problem. Doing a revolution at such a pace that it doesn't scare the heck out of less adventurous people seems like a very difficult trick.

“Armed struggle is the easy part,” a community organizer named Baran once told me. “To pick up a gun and go to the front is simple. What’s difficult is to organize society, to build a new system.”

Baran is probably correct on the matter from one aspect: it is easy to start an armed struggle, and the matter of starting to fight an opponent - even if it's overwhelming and ends in defeat - is not a complicated affair, but convincing people is endlessly complicated.

However, at the point where I view an illustration in the article - the graves of their martyrs, among them an YPJ commander who died in a Turkish drone strike - I feel that I have to argue against his point. Winning against an enemy who has access to more technology and more money, and collects resources from a bigger area with more people - even if they aren't willing contributors - is not a trivial problem. Whether it's Rojava trying to hold ground against Turkey or the Syrian dictator, or Ukraine trying to hold ground against Russia - numbers matter, technology matters, economy matters, diplomacy counts (Rojava, being landlocked among neigbours fearful of a Kurdish state, even if they affirm that they aren't a state and won't destabilize other states, is especially disadvantaged)...

...if an enemy can fly a strike drone into the heart of your free territory unhindered, and drop a laser-guided bomb on a delegate returning from a conference, then you have to choose (a nasty choice) between organizing a better society, improving education or medical care or economy... and organizing air defense. Which is why Turkey should be figuratively "dragged over coals" when it again attacks Rojava. I'm not even saying "if", but only "when". :(

War is a business that makes people and societies harsh and eventually - authoritarian. It is a great tragedy that another promising revolution is having to grow up amid war. :( I hope they manage to resist its influence.

I will keep in mind to check for a follow-up story because I don't have any contacts in Rojava and they seem really under-represented on the web.