ANKARA- Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin magazine, has expressed his support for Abdullah Ocalan's call, saying it offers "an alternative path the national question".  

 

Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin magazine, sent a message of support through the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) for Kurdish People's Leader Abdullah Öcalan's Call for Peace and Democratic Society.

 

Sunkara's call reads as follows: ""From here in the United States, I’m watching with real hope the prospects for peace and justice in Turkey. Abdullah Öcalan’s Peace and Democratic Society Call lays out an alternative path on the national question—one that rejects separatism and instead pushes for democratizing the nation-state and redefining citizenship as a shared political and constitutional project.

 

The peace process in Turkey is not just a local question. It represents a historic opportunity for the oppressed to resist both global and regional imperialism. What’s powerful about the Kurdish movement is how its political vision goes beyond ethnic identity and points toward a more democratic order and a future that is most just for all people in Turkey and the broader Middle East as a whole.I stand in full solidarity with this effort."

 

WHO IS SUNKARA?

 

Bhaskar Sunkara, one of Fortune magazine's "40 under 40" in 2020, is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine, one of the most prestigious outlets of the American Left. Sunkara, who was also the president of the monthly magazine Nation, founded by abolitionists in 1865, became one of the intellectual references of the international left with his work The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

 

As an intellectual figure, Bhaskar Sunkara also contributed to the rise of the American Democratic Socialists, for which he served for a time as vice-president, re-popularising ideas of the American Left that had long been marginalised - for example, the nationalisation of healthcare, worker cooperatives, class-based politics. As the organisation's membership grew rapidly in 2016 with Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, Jacobin and Sunkara's messages had an impact on new recruits.

 

Bhaskar Sunkara redefined Democratic Socialism as "a labour-centred, democratic socialist route that goes beyond European-style social democracy", and Democratic Socialism has become a movement that has influenced American politics with the rise of figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.