Peter McLaren, speaking to Mezopotamya Agency (MA), evaluated the socialist paradigm shaped by Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Öcalan around the concepts of “democratic socialism,” “democratic nation,” “women’s libertarian ecological life,” “democratic confederalism,” and “moral-political society,” and stated that this paradigm functions as both a mirror and a “challenge” for socialists around the world.

 

McLaren noted that the socialism shaped by Abdullah Öcalan and the search for a solution to the Kurdish issue are not two independent paths; rather, they are like a river that flows and expands, changing its name yet never its source.

 

Emphasizing that Abdullah Öcalan mapped out the entire architecture of power that began with the seizure of class domination and later imprisoned peoples and nature, McLaren said: “The Kurds, scattered across borders like seeds on hostile soil, become in his thought not merely a nation denied, but a living archive of this history of domination. Their statelessness is not an accident; it is the fossil trace of an ancient communal world crushed by the rise of hierarchical power. To struggle for Kurdish liberation, then, is already to struggle against the entire edifice of class society.”

 

MORAL-POLITICAL SOCIETY IN KURDISTAN

 

McLaren stated that Abdullah Öcalan went beyond Marx and Lenin’s ideas of national liberation and socialism and excavated the deep layers of history, saying, “He discovered that the state itself, whether feudal, capitalist, or socialist, had too often reproduced the same logic of command. Socialism, if it merely captures the machine of the state, becomes another mask of the same type of domination. Thus his idea of socialism became not so much the seizure of the state, but the resurrection of society. Democratic Confederalism emerges as a kind of revolutionary archaeology: a return to the communal, ethical, and ecological foundations buried beneath millennia of hierarchy. The Kurdish struggle becomes the historical bridge between these layers of time. In the mountains, villages, and women’s assemblies of Kurdistan, Öcalan glimpses what he calls the ‘moral and political society’, a social body that governs itself without surrendering its soul to a sovereign. He argues that the first colony was woman, the first class was gender, the first state was patriarchy. Kurdish freedom, therefore, cannot be national freedom alone; it must be the undoing of the oldest hierarchy. The guerrilla woman on the mountain is not only a fighter against the Turkish state; she is a living refutation of five thousand years of male sovereignty. In her, socialism sheds its industrial armour and reappears as a communal, ethical revolt against domination in all its forms.”

 

SOCIALISM AND KURDISH CAUSE 

 

Stating that the Kurdish question is not a regional anomaly but a microcosm of world history, McLaren said: “To heal the Kurdish wound is to reopen the possibility of a civilization beyond the nation-state, beyond capitalist accumulation, beyond the masculinized cult of power. Kurdish society, fragmented yet resilient, becomes the experimental ground for a socialism no longer chained to the state form but rooted in councils, communes, and the self-organization of everyday life. In Öcalan’s thought, they save one another. Socialism rescues the Kurdish cause from the prison of the nation-state; the Kurdish cause rescues socialism from the prison of the state as such. Together they form what he calls a ‘democratic civilization,’ a counter-current against five millennia of class rule. He affirms that we should construct and protect democratic civilization.  It is as if the Kurdish people, long forced to live between borders, have learned to think beyond borders and in doing so, have offered the world a map out of its own historical labyrinth.”

 

McLaren stated that Abdullah Öcalan realized that the state itself, even when socialist, obstructs society and turns communal life into a kind of sediment for new ruling classes, and continued as follows: “Öcalan descends beneath the modern ruins to the first temples, the first kings, the first chains placed on women and on the earth. He learns that class, patriarchy, and the state were born together, like three heads of the same hydra. His socialism thus sheds its armour and becomes something more elemental: a resurrection of the communal, ethical, and political society buried under five thousand years of hierarchy. It is no longer the storming of palaces, but the patient rebuilding of the village, the council, the cooperative, the women’s assembly. It is the refusal to let history remain a mausoleum of empires.

 

DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERALISM IS THE ARCHITECTURE OF THIS NEW CIVILIZATION'

 

Democratic Confederalism is the architectural drawing of this new civilization. It is a city without a throne, a constellation rather than a pyramid. Power flows horizontally like water through irrigation channels, not vertically like a command from a fortress. It binds Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, women and men, human and earth, into a fabric of mutual governance. It does not ask permission from the nation-state to exist; it grows in its cracks, like grass between stones, quietly undoing the illusion that sovereignty must always wear a uniform. For the left, this is a mirror and a challenge. Too often it has mistaken the capture of the state for the emancipation of society, the management of power for its abolition. Öcalan’s path whispers a harder, more ancient truth: that socialism must be social before it is statist, ethical before it is administrative, feminist and ecological before it is merely economic. Democratic Confederalism calls the left back to its buried roots.. To the Paris Commune, to the soviets before they were chained, to the councils, the communes, the dreams of a world where the many govern themselves without becoming a new One”

 

ABDULLAH ÖCALAN’S SOCIALISM 

 

Saying, “Öcalan’s socialism, then, is not a flag planted on a palace, but a seed carried by the wind. It does not promise a single dawn, but a thousand small mornings. And Democratic Confederalism is its soil: the place where freedom is no longer postponed to ‘after the revolution,’ but practiced, imperfectly and courageously, in the living present” McLaren stated that capitalism shapes the world and society, and that Abdullah Öcalan discovered this. He added that in doing so, Öcalan deepened Marx’s ideas, and expressed the following: “His observation is like a lantern thrown into the shadowed corridors of Marxism. Traditional socialism, he argues, built its cathedral around class, labor, and capital, but left the question of identity, the nationality, ethnicity, gender, and ecological embeddedness of human life, hovering in the rafters, unlit and unattended. Capital alone, he warns, does not dictate the world; it moves within the halls of the nation-state, whose walls channel, confine, and weaponize human difference. In this sense, the main contradiction of our era is not simply worker versus capitalist, but the many forms of human life versus the rigid architecture of territorial states, each demanding uniformity and obedience. Capital thrives, yes, but it does so riding the back of the nation-state, which disciplines identity itself.

 

DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERALISM IS A POETIC RUPTURE 

 

Democratic Confederalism, the model Öcalan proposes, is a poetic rupture in this edifice. It imagines society not as a pyramid with the state at its apex, but as a river delta: flowing, branching, local, self-governing, and intertwined. Gender equality, ecological responsibility, and the recognition of ethnic plurality are not concessions but foundations. Socialism here becomes socialism of the living, rooted not only in the critique of production but in the liberation of identity, community, and collective decision-making. It is a socialism that says: to change the world, one must transform not only the economy, but the very map on which humans are expected to fit themselves.”

 

INTERNATIONAL STRUGGLE 

 

According to McLaren, Abdullah Öcalan’s ideas function as both a mirror and a “challenge” for socialists around the world; he elaborated as follows: “Öcalan’s thesis asks us to see socialism not as a monolith imposed from above, but as a living mosaic, where the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of identity converge. It is an invitation to reconcile the Marxist critique of value with the anarchic, pluralistic currents of real human life, to envision a society where the state is no longer the arbiter of identity, and capital no longer the arbiter of worth. The left must rise to meet this vision: not simply as critics of capital, but as architects of freedom. The left must see the attacks of nation-states not merely as military or economic maneuvers, but as assaults on the very possibility of plural human life, on culture, identity, and self-determination itself. When states enforce uniformity through violence, they weaponize difference, turning existence into a crime. Building an international struggle alongside the Kurdish people and Öcalan is vital because their fight is not only for a people or a region, but for a model of freedom where democracy, gender equality, and ethnic plurality can flourish. Solidarity with this struggle expands the horizon of the left: it teaches that emancipation is incomplete if it ignores identity, diversity, and the local roots of self-governance. Supporting the Kurds is supporting a vision of socialism that is plural, ethical, and alive.”

 

‘WE NEED ABDULLAH ÖCALAN’S VISION’

 

McLaren, stating that history will always remember those who speak the truth, noted the following: “If applied globally, Öcalan’s vision could reshape the architecture of societies, dissolving the monopoly of nation-states, weakening the grip of centralized capitalism, and fostering systems where democracy is lived daily, not only exercised periodically at the ballot box. It challenges the old order to recognize that freedom is inseparable from equality, pluralism, and ecological stewardship. In this way, his ideas do not merely promise reforms, they plant the seeds of a world in which oppression, exploitation, and forced uniformity are no longer the horizon of human life. We need Öcalan’s vision of the future now more than ever, for in a world fractured by empire, war, and ecological ruin, his call for a society of freedom, equality, and plural life is not merely guidance, it is the compass by which humanity may yet navigate the storm.”

 

MA / Deniz Karabudak