content tagged with An Anarchist Reading of Öcalan

The authoritarian legacy of real socialism and the hollowed-out representative structures of liberal democracies no longer respond to humanity’s quest for freedom.

Öcalan’s concept of “democratic modernity” is a holistic counter-paradigm to capitalist modernity’s centralized state apparatus, industrialist economy, and nation-state formation.

From the late 1990s onward, Öcalan interpreted the collapse of the Soviet Union not merely as a victory of imperialism but also as the structural failure of state-centric socialism.

For Öcalan, who declared that “the state is one of the most dangerous inventions in human history; it is the crystallized form of monopoly on power," the idea of a “stateless democracy” occupies a central place in his ideological transformation.