Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to iKurd.net
The philosophy of Murray Bookchin, the Son of Russian-Jewish Migrants as ‘amplified’ by Abdullah Öcalan
In 1996 in a PKK training school just outside Damascus, the PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan was explaining how it was important to understand the role played by the prophets. “I am not calling myself a prophet” he smiled rhetorically.1
After his expulsion from Syria in October 1998 and his strange international odyssey in quest of sanctuary, different influences dramatically entered his life. One of these was the thought of Murray Bookchin, a thinker already in his latter years. His daughter, journalist, Debbie Bookchin, wrote glowingly of her father’s influence on Abdullah Öcalan in a piece headed, How My Father’s Ideas Helped the Kurds Create a New Democracy published in June 2018.
Born in the Bronx in 1921, her father, Murray Bookchin’s earliest influence derived from his grandmother, Zeitel Kaluskaya, a Russian Jewish revolutionary who had emigrated to the US in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution and who had smuggled guns for the anarchists. For a time, her grandson was also an ardent anarchist.
Born on January 14, 1921, as Mortimore Bookchin to Nacham Wisotsky from Belarus and Rose Kalusky, from Lithuania (Vilnius) Bookchin’s parents were socialist Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union who Americanised their family name to Bookchin. Mortimore adopted ‘Murray’ in preference over his awkward first name.
In 1998, the year that Öcalan was expelled from Syria, Bookchin had just renounced anarchism, exactly as he had rejected Marxism fifty years earlier, claiming that a new ideology was necessary, “not one that was developed during the Spanish Civil War or Russian Revolution.”
From Communist to ‘communalist’
Debbie Bookchin claimed in her essay, “Many of the defining features of the political philosophy that Öcalan began to espouse in the 2000s are firmly rooted on (sic) my father’s idea of social ecology and its political practice: “libertarian municipalism” or “Communalism.” My father saw ecological problems as inherently social problems—of hierarchy and domination—that had to be solved in order to address the environmental crisis. Social change would have to address capitalism’s plundering of the human spirit and the environment by dismantling hierarchical human relationships and decentralizing society so that grassroots democratic forms of organization can flourish.”
Öcalan’s ‘confederalism’ vs Kurdish and Turkish national identity
Debbie Bookchin claimed that her father’s social philosophy was amplified’ by Öcalan under the name “democratic confederalism,” which she believed had come to be “guiding millions of Kurds in their quest to build a non-hierarchical society and local council-based democracy.”
That view not only exaggerated the number of Öcalan’s supporters, but it also failed to take account of the divergent views of millions of other Kurds that strongly reject Öcalan’s notion of ‘democratic confederalism’ as well as his leadership. The project is not considered useful to them given the bellicose profile of their neighbours.
Murray Bookchin’s key book, The Ecology of Freedom, published in 1982 was translated into Turkish in 1994 – but Öcalan only came to read it after being imprisoned for life on Imrali Island as a consequence of the international conspiracy leading to his flight from Rome and kidnapping by Turkish Special Forces.
The plot was aided by Mossad, the United States and Europe, depositing him in Turkey after a long odyssey of travel on 15 February 1999. On the anniversary of Öcalan’s capture, Italy’s former prime minister, Massimo D’Alema recalled 26 years after events:
“It was not easy to resist the United States because President Clinton personally called me and said, ‘You must hand over Öcalan to Turkey.’ Yes, President Clinton said this, and we replied with a firm ‘No.’ Believe me, it is not easy to say no to the United States, especially as their allies…The United States has always supported the Turkish government, and of course, that’s why we faced such pressure. Yes, we are Italy, but we are allies of the United States, and we are part of NATO alongside Turkey. It was difficult for us to resist this pressure and say no to the US, and it’s understandable that Italy was under such pressure.
Yes, I know Öcalan was committed to a peaceful solution to the conflict. However, on the other hand, the Turkish government was not ready to accept this process. We cannot forget that the Turkish government was being supported by the United States. While I appreciate Öcalan’s intentions and ideas, at that time, there was no realistic foundation for them to succeed… 2
Has Islamist Turkey become amenable to Öcalan’s revised worldview – NO?
The socialist nuanced ideology propounded by Murray Bookchin made a profound impression on the isolated Kurdish prisoner in Turkish hands. In practical terms, he had been severed from his followers and closest contacts. His stumbling court performances during his trial had also led to several of his lawyers dropping his case.3 Where could he find solace?
Through a German activist aligned with the pro-PKK ‘International Initiative for the Freedom of Abdullah Öcalan’ named Reimar Heider, contact was made with Murray Bookchin still resident in the United States in 2004. Heider explained to the elderly philosopher how Öcalan had been reading Turkish translations of the books and had become a student of his ideas. Heider, a vocal supporter of Öcalan and the editor of Sean Michael Wilson’s ‘graphic novel’, Freedom Shall Prevail: The Struggle of Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish People’ claimed that Öcalan leads the way with his revolutionary ideas from prison. 4
In March 2005, the PKK leader had issued a so-called ‘Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan’ in which he claimed that “the political root of the democratic nation solution is the democratic confederalism of civil society, which is not (a) state.” He urged his followers to accept his version of “libertarian municipalism”. He told his lawyers on the rare occasions when they were permitted to visit that “My worldview is very close to that of Bookchin.”
It was not just close – it was a revision of his Marxist-Leninist outlook based upon it. Murray Bookchin passed away the following year on July 30, 2006at the venerable age of 85, having been too ill to spare Öcalan much time.
In a subsequent book written by Öcalan six years later called In Defense of the People, Öcalan detailed the vision further. Debbie Bookchin reacted enthusiastically without any accusations of plagiarism simply saying that Öcalan “echoed my father’s program from his book, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (later renamed Urbanization Without Cities), which Öcalan proposed as required reading to the HDP’s (Halkin Demokrasi Parti) mayors operating under Turkish constraints, and for the PKK’s politicians while the guerrillas were urged to read Ecology of Freedom.
Invoking the term ‘communalist’ rather than ‘Communist’ (as in the PKK’s Marxist-Leninist past), Öcalan proposed an idealised non nation state system of equal communities living in harmony on an equal basis – this, despite being jailed on an island as a special status prisoner and denied most normal rights and freedoms by his Turkish captors to whom he proposed this same ‘solution’. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of democrats and left -wing dissenters in Turkey continued to be jailed for their opinions, hundreds routinely threatened and tortured by Erdoğan’s Islamist regime.
The problem with the world view was that it was not based on Islam and came in direct conflict with Erdoğan’s embrace of the vision of the Muslim Brotherhood. Erdoğan had been videotaped when in Afghanistan in his youth as a fervent disciple of the leader of the Hezb-i-Islami, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar along with the Tunisian Islamist leader. 5
AKP founder member, Yasar Yakis, and former Turkish Foreign Minister also noted in 2021 how Erdoğan was encouraging reconciliation with the Taliban. The country appeared to be a likely haven for Al-Qaeda and Daesh fighters to gather from far and wide anew: “Several years ago, a Turkish citizen who was caught smuggling his wife and children into Syria said in his court testimony that “the way Islam is practiced in the Daesh-controlled part of Syria was more in line with my perception of Islam.” 6
The Turkish patriarchal, and religious conservatives with their strong ultra-nationalist vein long since marshalled under the AKP-MHP coalition banners have no time for “confederalism” with Kurds. Erdoğan has recently been saying there is no such thing as any ‘Kurdish issue’ or Kurdish cause in Turkey. What then to ‘confederate’ with? His view was all for a wider Muslim brotherhood with himself as sultan or caliph giving him the same nickname. The two ideologies clashed in fundamental ways. Erdoğan emphasised centralised control and rejected any notion of devolved authority such as the KCK preached and continues to extol.7
Debbie Bookchin, however, believed that her father’s ideas had become actualised in the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria –the mouthful known as the ‘Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES and AANES). In 2014, the three governorates of Kurdish Syria set up an autonomous administration under the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, dubbed in Kurdish Rojava, or west Kurdistan). The name was dropped in 2016. At the time, I asked in an op-ed. ‘Can Apo Save the Kurds?’ 8
Öcalan’s philosophical ‘initiative’ increasingly rejects nationalism and ethnic identity as the basis of national struggle instead preferring the diversity inherent in the region. The Democratic Federation of north Syria is based on his Charter of the Social Contract and is highly idealistic. Indeed, Öcalan has gone so far as to boast that he could deliver the kind of society that Bookchin had claimed would be “free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs.”
Home goals!
The former ‘separatist’ ideal of an integrated, independent nation state of Kurdistan has been shelved in favour of ‘territorial integrity’ and peace, despite the PKK finding itself surrounded by a sea of increasingly fundamentalist ‘republics’. Abandoning the concept of a Kurdish state – or even of an autonomous region (as in neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan, with which the PKK was perpetually in conflict) – Öcalan has fielded his project of a “federated system of self-determining municipalities” by orders from the top down.
Debbie Bookchin had observed that under the ‘communalist’ system the system of council democracy began at the “commune” level (settlements of between thirty and four hundred families) from where “the commune” sent delegates to the neighbourhood or village council, and from there in turn representatives would be sent to the district (or city) level and thence to region-wide assemblies. “Everyone is entitled to a say…” she said proudly, but in the PKK, there has always been one dominant voice.
In a 2017 analysis, Wes Enzinna, explained in his Bizarre and Wonderful: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist that he had personally visited the experimental ‘confederacy’ writing:
“Over the next two weeks, I visited popular assemblies, female-led militias whose fighters lectured me on the evils of capitalism and patriarchy, and a mayor who told me she saw the nation-state and “hierarchical, statist mentalities” as threats as grave as IS, whose jihadists had tried to suicide-bomb her office the week before. At the Mesopotamian Social Sciences Academy in the city of Qamishlo, the library included Bookchin’s “The Third Revolution” and Andy Price’s biographical study, “Recovering Bookchin.” His work has never been translated into Arabic; Syrian Kurds mostly learn his ideas from Öcalan’s writings, or at a PKK training academy, where Bookchin’s work, much of which was translated into Turkish in the early 1990s, is required reading. “America?” a young militiawoman guarding a checkpoint said one morning, as she handed me back my papers. “Like Bookchin!” 9
Enzinna also noted how Janet Biehl, Murray Bookchin’s former partner and biographer had also twice visited Rojava after her book, Ecology or Catastrophe, came out and said, “It’s so fascinating and bizarre and wonderful.” Despite that, in an essay from November 2015 posted on her blog, Paradoxes of a Liberatory Ideology, she confessed to having been troubled by the personality cult around Öcalan, “whose picture appears in every office, hall, hospital and barracks. “
Biehl criticised a law passed by the Culture Ministry prohibiting the publication of books unsuitable “to the morals of society.” She asked the ‘culture minister “Can you publish books supporting capitalism? Or that disagree with Öcalan? The “general reverence” for Öcalan and his ideas is “troubling,” she wrote. “A bottom-up system generated from the top down: by now the paradox is enough to have the visitor’s head spinning.”
Many Syrian Kurds feel the same unease with the philosophy and with the personality cult. Those living under PYD’s control, claim that Öcalan’s texts have been imposed upon their children in schools across the autonomous region, including in the sizeable Kurdish city of Qamishlo. The works ostensibly propound the ‘wisdom’ of the PKK leader and have become part of the (mandatory) curriculum in the same manner as the PKK and PYD insist that Öcalan’s project is not just for ethnic Kurds, but “for all peoples of the region, regardless of their ethnic, national, or religious background” – drawing on Bookchin.
“The quest for an independent Kurdistan has been subsumed by the demands for ‘Freedom for Öcalan.’ “
The PKK has gone even further in practice in terms of continuing to obey the dictates of an imprisoned leader and have imposed Bookchin’s ideas through a system of sub-organisations such as the so-called Democratic Society Congress (DTK), operational in Turkey. Outside the physical boundaries of modern-day Turkey – just like KADEK before it, the recently named ‘Kurdistan Communities Union’ took over the role (KCK, in Kurdish, Koma Civakên Kurdistan). Again, paradoxically the old Marxist-Leninist rhetoric in the PKK’s bases, schools and training camps has not altogether lapsed and self-criticism sessions, as well as the form of address being that of heval (comrade) endure side by side with Bookchinism, “amplified” now as “Apoism”. The quest for an independent Kurdistan has been subsumed by the demands for ‘Freedom for Öcalan.” Campaigns, protests and international lobbying are now dominated by this demand instead of the right to a Kurdish nation state and Kurdish identity.
With Öcalan’s recent edict to dissolve the PKK and end armed struggle officially announced on 12 May 2025, the practicality of his philosophical outlook is debatable.
Few Kurds outside the PKK’s wider framework read from Bookchin’s hymn book. The SDF/PYD that is led by Commander, Mazloum Abdi, rejected the PKK leader’s call to lay down arms at the time reasoning that it did not apply to themselves and is “not related to us in Syria…If there is peace in Turkey, that means there is no excuse to keep attacking us here in Syria.” 10
However, Abdi revealed more recently that the SDF had agreed a conditional ceasefire with Turkey two months before and is still open to further dialogue, respectful of Öcalan’s edicts. In this regard it is useful to recall that Ferhat Abdi Şahin is credited with having been a member of the PKK’s Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) back in 2013. He gained recognition in battle and in diplomatic initiatives with the West under his military name of General Mazloum Kobane. His home village of Halanj is close to the Kurdish enclave of Kobane. The Turkish army carried out a massacre there on June 23, 2020. 14 Şahin had joined the PKK back in 1990 when Öcalan led the party from Damascus and went by the nom de guerre of Şahin Çilo. He remains wanted on Turkey’s most wanted terrorist list. Turkish Islamists and nationalists declare a lasting hatred of him.15 –16
ISIS remains an active threat in the area between HTS controlled Syria and the Kurdish region – a component of instability compounded by numerous Turkish-run militias that have also not disbanded. The Trump-Erdoğan notion of putting the ruling jihadist militia, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), in charge of the two detention facilities long policed by the PYD/SDF that still holds some 10,000 ISIS families may cause serious trouble down the line. 17 Abdi said a joint committee with HTS would be formed to discuss their future. He also warned that if inclusive institutions were not formed, civil war could return amidst the security vacuum.18 His general rhetoric reflects the Bookchin model espoused by Öcalan.
The Islamist HTS regime is pushing for strong centralisation from Damascus entirely at odds with Öcalan’s vision of egalitarian ‘confederacy’ and decentralisation. From the outset, HTS (that arrested and tortured scores of PYD militants in Idlib) insists with ally, Turkey that the Kurdish entity merges with the new regime and the SDF disbands. 19
Kurds that have known Öcalan personally shake their heads in dismay. An exiled Kurdish academic living in Europe who knew Öcalan before he gained power (who preferred to remain anonymous) sighed:
“I thought the Kurds would finally wake up and reject all this nonsense, but once again as in the past, I am disappointed. There are two official ideologies today: One is the Kemalism of the Turks and the other is the Apoism of the Kurds. Apoism is just like a cult. It has always been this way and it continues to be so.
This expectation of mine was not in such rejection coming from Apo: I expected, hoped for, and dreamed of it coming from Apo’s servants. But this did not happen either. I always hoped that maybe they would rebel, express their reactions and come to the conclusion that Apo was a traitor. But as always, I was wrong. This is a hopeless case.
Unfortunately, the latest developments are so frustrating and so catastrophic that they could trigger a heart attack. It is difficult to explain anything to such brainless Kurds nowadays.” 20
Even the PKK’s long running newspaper, Serxwebûn (Independence), has announced its closure after 47 years in operation echoing the semantics of the leadership in furtherance of ‘ideological truth and democratic theory’. 21
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMfJRnWu52Y
2 https://medyanews.net/president-clinton-personally-called-me-to-hand-over-ocalan-to-turkey-former-italian-pm-dalema/
3 See, the Turkish translation of my book, Martyrs, Traitors & Patriots – Kurdistan After the Gulf War, (Sehilter, Hainler, Yurtseverler -Korfez Savasindan Sonraki Kurdistan) Avesta Yayinlari, Istanbul 2007 banned by Erdogan’s government in 2015.
4 https://anfenglishmobile.com/features/heider-it-is-important-to-reach-out-to-peoples-other-than-kurds-to-ensure-Ocalan-s-freedom-75805
5 https://www.turkishminute.com/2017/06/10/video-saudi-owned-al-arabiya-deletes-story-on-erdogans-ties-with-warlords-amid-gulf-crisis/
6 https://www.arabnews.com/node/1915416
7 https://ikurd.net/psychological-war-kurds-pkk-2025-05-16
8 https://ikurd.net/can-apo-save-the-kurds-2016-03-05
9 London Review of Books, July 21, 2017
10 https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2025/02/27/sdf-chief-says-ocalan-s-disarmament-call-is-for-pkk-and-not-related-to-us-in-syria-
11 https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/2015/10/28/interior-ministry-issues-a-list-of-turkeys-most-wanted-terrorists. Pro-state Daily Sabah noted: Citizens can also use the new emergency anti-terror hotline “Alo 140”, or “155” for police and “156” for the gendarmerie. The ministry also stated that the identifies of those who provide information relevant to arrest or capture of the listed terrorists will remain classified…In the event of information leading to the capture of a low-level member, the reward is TL 200,000 ($68,432) and for senior level officials from the PKK and Kurdish Communities Union (KCK) – an umbrella organization that includes the PKK – the amount is TL 4 million. Ankara does not require informants to be Turkish citizens to receive the reward, as the regulation in the Official Gazette also does not specifically indicate such a condition…
12 https://x.com/eha_news/status/1187697416717438977?lang=bg
13 https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/ahmed-al-sharaa-syrias-new-leader-from-jihadist-to-stateman/
14 https://hawarnews.com/en/halanj-massacre-when-the-turkish-occupation-began-to-target-peoples-will-in-ne-syria
15 https://x.com/MevlutCavusoglu/status/1188032179080704000
16 https://syrianobserver.com/who/whos-who-mazloum-abdi.html
17 See my paper: A Caliphate by any other name would smell the same.
18 https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/843317/mazloum-abdi-breaks-silence-talks-with-damascus-ceasefire-with-turkey-and-the-shape-of-a-new-syria
19 Additional reading: B. B. Özpek, The Peace Process between Turkey and the Kurds: Anatomy of a Failure (London: Routledge, 2020)
20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb3tva4SEb8
21 https://hawarnews.com/en/serxwebun-newspaper-ceases-publication
Sheri Laizer, a Middle East and North African expert specialist and well known commentator on the Kurdish issue. She is a senior contributing writer for iKurd.net. More about Sheri Laizer see below.
The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.
Copyright © 2025 Sheri Laizer, iKurd.net. All rights reserved
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