Stateless Democracy

quent male-dominant social culture but also what to build
in its place. Without understanding how masculinity was
socially formed, one cannot analyze the institution of the
nation-state, and therefore will not be able to accurately
define the war and power culture related to statehood. This
is something we need to emphasize because this is what
paved the way for feminicide and the colonization and exploitation
of peoples. The social subjugation of woman was
the vilest counter-revolution ever carried out. Öcalan points
out that “the sword of war wielded in state and the hand of
the man within the family are symbols of hegemony. The
entire classed society, from its upper layers to its lower layers,
is clamped between the sword and the hand.” 1
Capitalism and the nation-state represent the dominant
male in its most institutionalized form. Capitalist society is
the continuation and culmination of all the old exploitative
societies. It is indeed a continuous warfare against society
and woman. To put it succinctly, capitalism and the nationstate
are the monopoly of the tyrannical and exploitative
male. It is enough to look all around the world and see a renewed
increase in the violence, exploitation, and suppression
of women. This is happening not only in the so-called
Third World countries, but all over the world.
A main objective of capitalist modernity’s ideological
hegemony is to obliterate the historical and social facts
concerning its conception and essence. This is because
the capitalist economic and societal form is not a social
and historical necessity; it is a construct, forged through a
complex process. Religion and philosophy have been transformed
into nationalism, the divinity of the nation-state.
The ultimate goal of its ideological warfare is to ensure
its monopoly on thought. Its main weapons with which
1. Abdullah Öcalan, Liberating Life: Woman’s
Revolution (London: Transmedia Publishing,
2013), p. 29.
to accomplish this are religionism, gender discrimination,
and scientism as a positivist religion. Without ideological
hegemony, with political and military oppression alone,
maintaining modernity will be impossible. While capitalism
uses religionism to control society’s cognizance, it uses
nationalism to control classes and citizenship, a phenomenon
that has risen around capitalism. The objective of gender
discrimination is to deny women any hope of change.
The most effective way for sexist ideology to function is by
entrapping the male in power relations and by rendering
woman impotent through constant rape. Through positivist
scientism, capitalism neutralizes the academic world and
its youth; it convinces them that they have no choice but
to integrate into the system, and in return for concessions,
this integration is assured.
But unambiguously clarifying the status of women is
only one aspect of this issue. Far more important is the
question of liberation; in other words, the resolution to the
problem exceeds the importance of revealing and analyzing
it. During the last quarter of the twentieth century,
feminism managed to disclose, to a certain extent, the
truth about women. But the Kurdish freedom movement
and Öcalan took it a step further and based their analysis
of society on “moral and political society.” They drew a
relationship between freedom and morals and freedom and
politics. In order to develop structures that would expand
our area of freedom, morals were defined as the collective
conscience of society and politics defined to be its common
wisdom. But how do we now work towards this?
In order to be able to stop the perpetuation of capital and
power accumulation, and the reproduction of hierarchy, we
need to create structures towards a democratic, ecological,
and gender-liberated society. To achieve this, the dismantling
of power and hierarchy is an absolute necessity. The
social system of democratic modernity is democratic con-
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