Forged during the Syrian war, Rojava’s experiment in radical self-government offers a lens for examining how the left sustains hope under siege.

How should the progressive left respond to the experiment of Kurdish-led revolutionary Rojava in north-east Syria with its commitment to direct democracy, ecological sustainability, women’s rights and multi-ethnic inclusivity? It is a question that is bound to have plagued anyone who has visited Rojava, for whatever length of time, and come away humbled and impressed by a people swimming against the neoliberal current that has the world in its grips.

I too have grappled with this question. While no simple blueprint can reproduce the revolution elsewhere, I have toyed with more literal possibilities, taking a leaf out of the Kurdish diaspora’s playbook — setting up citizens’ assemblies along the lines of democratic confederalism to deal with local issues, build democratic muscle, and bring about change. Perhaps it could become as effective as the local experiment in Porto Alegre in Brazil once was. Set up in 1989, it received millions in participatory budgeting and redirected services to the most marginalised communities. That seems to be the limit of what can be achieved under neoliberal states; beyond that, political imagination falters, resorting to the idea of preparedness — like the Kurds quietly setting up citizens’ councils under the radar of Assad’s Syria until the Arab Spring in 2011 created a vacuum in the north and east and allowed them to achieve an almost bloodless revolution. Assad was too busy crushing the uprising down south.

Matt Broomfield, who spent three years in Rojava, approaches the question in his own, unique and thoughtful way. He embarks on a deep philosophical and practical engagement with the idea and reality of Rojava to tackle the defeatism of the left following the failure of the workers’ revolution in the twentieth century. He wants to engender that preparedness in what he sees as a disorganised Western anarchist movement weighed down by ‘left melancholy’. He runs through the post-Marxist philosophers who failed to identify a class of people who could be tasked with the job of transforming society, dismissing David Graeber’s ‘99 percent’, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ‘multitude’, and John Holloway’s ‘rabble’, as too diffuse. He speculates whether this century’s political subject will be the climate migrant. However, it is Öcalan’s identification of women as the vanguard of change — a revolutionary force theorised as the first group of people to be enslaved — that drives the Rojava revolution and has set feminist imagination on fire everywhere.

At the organisational level, Broomfield considers whether the pragmatism of the Kurdish freedom struggle has any lessons to offer the Western Left, particularly the anarchist strand with its purist commitment to horizontalism. In Rojava, they have achieved a ‘novel synthesis: a militant, vertical organisation [which] empowers a communal, horizontal politics.’ The verticalist organisation is a leftover from the Kurdish movement’s Marxist-Leninist roots, which encourages discipline, even hierarchy, while paradoxically facilitating a decentralised challenge to that hierarchy. It is effective in a way that anarchists are not, leaving them open to subversion and co-optation, chaos and malaise.

When the existential battle for the city of Kobane, aggressively besieged by ISIS in 2014, looked in danger of being lost, the Kurds accepted the US coalition’s offer of air-cover, fully aware of the transactional nature of that relationship. This proved to be a decisive turning point in their fortunes. The willingness to sup with the imperialist devil in a desperate bid for survival discredited Rojava among some sections of the left. Similarly, they have engaged with Russia and played off several regional powers against each other, including conservative religious forces in the erstwhile ISIS caliphate. Broomfield commends this ‘respectful, open approach to the very culture it aims to revolutionise’ as a strategy that should be deployed in our own contexts.

Political philosophy is marshalled to buoy up the spirit of activists to stay with the grind of political work through a paean to hope, enriched and informed paradoxically by the very hopelessness of the struggle. Broomfield’s early Christian upbringing made him receptive to the dictum, ‘I believe because it is impossible’. He started the project to see if hope remained possible in the twenty-first century, after the Holocaust, the pandemic, the era of left defeat and in the middle of a climate catastrophe. With the help of mainly Western philosophical, literary and theological commentaries, Broomfield looks for hope that has been wrung out of despair — the only kind that can lend a spine to resistance, where even suicide could be interpreted as an act of hope for a better world. This is not the empty hope of neoliberal ideology, ‘an equal opportunity resource’, where each of us could have a better life if only we set our minds to it. Without wanting to diminish it, the book could even be described as a self-help manual for the aspiring revolutionary.

In an interesting neologism borrowed from the internet, he enumerates the ‘copium’ (a merger of coping and opium) strategies that activists can use to prevent burnout and fatalism and manage doubts and insecurities: a quasi-religious commitment to a revolutionary future; a secular leap of faith towards a socialist utopia; a healthy dose of self-delusion; and a transition from individual self-care to the collective self-care of the Kurdish movement, which discourages individualism.

Broomfield asks: if we can and do deceive ourselves in the service of capitalist hegemony, why not in the service of revolution? It is a striking question. Both require sacrifice and deprivation, and only one offers the prospect of radical change and a possibly glorious future, but the wiles and stratagems of capitalism can lure the best of us into the path of least resistance. Individualism, turbocharged by our neoliberal times, undermines the collective struggle that revolutionary change necessarily entails.

While Broomfield is refreshingly honest about the shortcomings of the Rojava revolution, his view that the compromises that it has had to make in the Arab-majority areas generated ‘the movement’s most revolutionary moments’ is unduly optimistic for a book about hope without hope. Many of the compromises entailed concessions on feminist commitments, including the reversal of a ban on polygamy — a chilling example of democracy trumping women’s rights.

Matt Broomfield’s Hope Without Hope: Rojava and Revolutionary Commitment is published by AK Press.

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