AKADEMÍA UM LÝÐRÆÐI, JAFNRÉTTI OG MANNRÉTTINDI
Sunnudagsins 29. júní mun ég – og margir aðrir – minnast sem stofndags Academy of Social Science en það er stofnun sem tengist sagnfræðilegum og félagsfræðilegum rannsóknum kúrdíska stjórnmálaleiðtogans og fræðimannsins Abdullah Öcalans svo og annarra á svipuðum slóðum og hann í fræðum og pólitík, Murray Bookchin (látinn), John Holloway, Andrej Grubačić, Targol Mesbah, David Graeber (látinn), Denis O´Hearn, Havin Guneser, svo nokkur séu nefnd. Kjarni þessara hugmynda snýr að lýðræði á nýjum forsendum, jafnrétti kynjanna, sjálfbærni og virðingu fyrir mannréttindum og náttúru.
Sofnunin Academy of Social Science verður staðsett í Eindhoven í Hollandi – ekki stór í sniðum en þeim mun öflugri hef ég trú á. Á stofnfundinum voru fluttar ræður og frábær tónist, sungin og leikin.
Við opnunarathöfnina töluðu fimm ræðumenn og var ég í þeim hópi. Auk mín fluttu erindi þau Andrej Grubačić og Targol Mesbah og var málflutningur þeirra fræðilegur og vandaður. Þá flutti John Holloway innblásið erindi. Hann er þekktur fyrir fjölmargar bækur um kapítalisma, anarkisma og lýðræði svo og fyrir tengsl sín við kúrdíska baráttuhreyfingu og Zapatista hreyfinguna í Mexíkó. Urðu með okkur John fagnaðarfundir en hann var kennari minn í stjórnmálafræði við Edinborgarháskóla þegar áttundi áratugurinn var að ganga í garð. Bundumst við þá vináttuböndum sem aldrei hafa rofnað þótt langt væri á milli okkar, hann í Puebla í Mexíkó og ég í Reykjavílk. Lokaræðuna flutti svo Havin Guneser sem er einn helsti þýðandi verka Öcalans en auk þess hefur hún skrifað talsvert frá eigin brjósti.
John Holloway í ræðustól við opnunarathöfnina
Havin Guneser og Denis O´Hearn hafa bæði tekið þátt í fundaröðinni Til Róttækrar skoðunar í Reykjavík.
https://www.ogmundur.is/is/greinar/um-framtid-kurda-fundur-i-idno-3-juni-kl-12
https://www.ogmundur.is/is/greinar/samstodin-birtir-myndband-af-fundi-um-mannrettindi-i-tyrklandi
Tónlistin sem flutt var við setningarathöfnina var stórkostlega gefandi. Annars vegar voru það bandarísku feðgarnir Sonny og Quinsy Saul sem fluttu frumsamið efni í hæsta gæðaflokki og tvær konur Nure Diovani og Zelal sem léku á fiðlu og píanó og sungu. Þarna sannaðist enn eina ferðina hve mikilvægt það er að leita til listamanna sem kunna að lyfta andanum.
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The Academy of Social Science was opened in the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands on June 29th. The Academy will be based on the works of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan´s research and writings and likewise the works of those who have inspired him and he has inspired!
At the heart of these ideas is democratic confederalism, gender equality and sustainability in the environment.
Below is my speech from the opening, some thoughts inspired by our troubled time.
Ræðu mína birti ég hér að neðan. Ekki verður um hana sagt að hún hafi verið fræðileg, nær því að vera pólitísk hugvekja sprottin úr nánasta samtíma:
There is reason to be optimistic.
How do I dare say that?
The world is on the brink of nuclear war.
The ecosystem is dangerously threatened.
Fascism is on the rise.
Freedom of speech is being infringed ever more in large parts of the world. Since 2021 - and this is before Trump - 16 thousand book titles have been banned from public school-libraries in the United States, amongst them Beloved by Toni Morrison, the Handmaid´s tales by Margaret Atwood, the Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and so on and on...
And then of course we only need to take a quick glance at those who hold the reins of power, not only in the United States but all around the world, to realize the threat the world is up against by those who should be its guardians.
But in spite of all this I say there is reason for optimism. But why?
I will try to explain why and in the light of that discuss this project of ours and its importance; why this Academy could play a crucial role. Or more to the point, why it is going to play a crucial role.
First of all, I want to remind us that in times of crisis economic and social currents and forces tend to become more apparent. This certainly is the case now. Locally and globally forces at play are more visible to more people than they have been for a long time. And what is discernible is easier to discuss, analyse and grapple with than is the case when everything is in a haze. It is not sufficient to be in possession of even the best of analytical tools if people do not recognize the need to make these tools applicable.
As regards visibility, Donald Trump has undeniably helped a lot. When he said he wanted Greenland everybody was shocked. And why did he want Greenland he was asked. For strategic reasons Trump said and because of the assets, the valuable raw materials to be found there, his aide added. A former security adviser to Trump, John Bolton, who fell out with him during his former term in office, was shocked. On air he was asked why; did he disagree with the president? Not at all Bolton replied, but presidents do not talk like that – not in public that is!
With Donald Trump you do not need the little child in H.C.Andersens´s fable who had pointed at the Kaiser and exclaimed that he was without clothes. Donald Trump likes to go around without clothes, naked – stark naked. Everybody should be able to see everything. Thus, everybody was welcome to see that he was after raw materials in Ukraine – the same assets the Europeans were grabbing in silence, already having acquired, together with Ukranian oligarchs, a third of arable land in this breadbasket of Europe. And then there are all the other valuables to be stolen by the vultures that invariably hoover over countries in crisis.
All this is becoming visible. And more than that. History is becoming alive as never before. The Danes who took possession of Greenland in centuries past, now in a state of shock after the brute´s exclamations, are reminded that only just over a hundred years ago, in 1916 they had sold a colony they had taken possession of in the Caribbean, the Danish West Indies or Virgin islands, for $25 million dollars, somewhat more now of course, to the United States of America. Never did the rulers of Denmark ask the population of the Virgin Islands – primarily slaves they had taken captive in Africa and transported to the Caribbean to work on their sugar-cane fields; never had they asked what they wanted – where they wanted to belong.
So I am talking about history coming alive and I am talking about transparency and visibility. We should not forget to mention values – the much-acclaimed western values which we hear so much about when NATO discusses the importance of increasing military spending. But also here I suspect that many military minded people are getting a little shy - and how should it be otherwise? To most people it should indeed be obvious that those who gave the world such an aggressive industrial capitalism that it has become a threat to this same world; that those who administered industrial slavery, colonialism, imperialism, modern racism, the Holocaust and two world wars; they not only have a lot to learn about the damage they have inflicted on humanity but that they should refrain from boasting about their values.
My thoughts go back half a century – to Edinburg University in the late 60´s, early 70´s, the student in modern history and politics, Ögmundur Jónasson, the mentor, only a couple of years older than the student, John Holloway, educating and inspiring. The class struggle was being discussed, the forces at work in history and no doubt the commodification of human relations under capitalism – something John Holloway has written so brilliantly about in recent years and what is indeed a core element in Abdullah Öcalan´s analysis of the disintegration of society.
As I have a few minutes I want to tell you of my own experience, how I witnessed these theories in practice. I started my working career as a tv reporter and analyst at Icelandic State Television. This was around 1980 when Thatcher had come to power in the UK. I will do away with monopolies, she said, and start with the worst monopoly of all, the labour unions, and I will give every citizen a stake in capitalism by tax reduction to investors, also the small ones. And of course, she added, I will privatize and cut away the fat from the state. This was the essence of what she said.
And all this she did. But unemployment rose because of her economic policies, from five hundred thousand to a million, and from one million to a million and a half, and when there were two million unemployed, I started to predict Thatcher´s downfall. But it never came, even when unemployment rose to 3 million. What I forgot was that even if there were 3 million people unemployed in Britain there were many more millions at work and happy with their lot. And then I realized that society was changing or rather, the way society was thinking was changing. This could not have happened in the post-war years – society would not have allowed it. And remember, Thatcher had said that there was no such thing as society, only individuals competing. Many of us saw this at the time as wishful thinking on her behalf; her supporters thought the prophet had spoken. And to some extent, they were right.
They believed the future was theirs. And indeed Fukuyama had told them that history had come to an end, now freedom was simply about choosing between brands of washing-powder in the supermarket.
This was the time Reagan, Thatcher, Hayek and Friedman and friends were preparing to export capitalist structures on a global level – in this sense neoliberalism was a flight forward as Dutch political economist Kees van der Pijl phrased it, a flight forward, out of the class compromises in the post war period, making capitalism more global but also more fragile to changes in production, access to raw materials and so on. And as I became well aware of in my trade union work, from the mid 1990´s, efforts in the international marketplace to oil the machinery would be in line with this and not confined to trade and tariffs, as had been decided at Bretton Woods at the close of the second World War. Now there was a concerted effort to impose capitalist structures within all societies which were under the IMF and the World Bank umbrella. This was the idea with the establishment of the World Trade Organization in the mid-1990s.
It awaited a neo-mercantilist in the White House to question this trend, somebody who recognized that the world had changed, his own country and the industrial west in general was in a rapid process of change, in fact to some extent undergoing de-industrialization, and furthermore those who had been allotted the task of producing cheap shirts and socks for the wealthy part of the world had now become serious competitors in a global digital economy. This of course was Doanld Trump, the Don Quixote of our time, who now sees it as his mission to destroy all those who pose a threat to a monolithic world order, the American 21st century.
But where was the left in this turmoil? In a word, the left was lost, without directions. In the traditional left there was in fact no left left which again had consequences for the way society developed. The German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck once said that when social democratic and to a degree socialist parties had been engulfed by market ideology the right thereby lost its life-west. By that he meant that the right had always been able to rely on social democracy correcting the course when it had gone too far. Thus, social unrest that came with the American Depression in the 1930´s was met with Roosevelt´s New Deal and at the same time the British labour movement brought Keynesian economics to the table.
Now there is no such life west to be had any more and in Davos the chosen few meet the corporate world to discuss what is to be done.
It should be of no surprise that parliamentary politics of nation states seem to be heading for a serious crisis, something that goes hand in hand with rising fascism and the undermining of the whole international framework created in the wake of the second World War. When the US together with the Coalition of the Willing invaded Iraq in 2003 they ware at pains to find a credible justification – which of course was the alleged existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – No such justification is needed any more. Judges of the International Criminal court are being sanctioned and persecuted by those who want to do away with a law-based international order and instead have a rules-based world where they and they alone set the rules.
Although Capitalism is thus all-around and seemingly having its way it is vulnerable, always in danger of becoming the victim of its own greed, either dying of overdose as Wolfgang Streeck is convinced is the fate awaiting it or creating conditions it cannot control.
I do not think greed or overdose is going to be its downfall – indeed I don´t think capitalism will collapse of its own accord. It will not fall unaided. We are needed. We are the crisis of capitalism John Holloway once said. But for this to be the case we must know where we are heading, and we must try to foresee the hurdles that are likely to be in our way.
In the presentation of our Academy it says to the effect - with reference to Abdulah Öcalan´s analysis - that while the dominant forces of the modern world-system are attempting to overcome the structural crisis in every way they can and to establish a new system of exploitation and domination it depends on us whether as individuals or communities, to find the alternatives and thereby acquire the conviction that change is possible, otherwise the dominant forces will prevail.
I have a suspicion that most people gathered here – if not all - are better versed in the historical and theoretical works of Abdullah Öcalan than I am. But what attracts me to his works and political endeavours are not necessarily his ideas in the minute details but the premises he builds on, the importance he places on equality, democracy, ecology and – this being crucial for me – the idea that you must start with yourself; that all of us together must start with ourselves. According to Öcalan gender equality is not something you acquire after the revolution – on the contrary there will be no revolution without gender equality.
In other words, creating a free society is not as if you were building a box and then putting freedom into that box – the changes you are advocating or fighting for must be seen in the process of constructing the box.
And this is no mere theory it is also practice. I am aware that you cannot generalize about the Kurdish people any more than you can with other peoples whose numbers are counted in the millions. But you may be able to see customs and traditions being created and becoming prevalent. And this I have recognized in those Kurdish communities and institutions influenced by the teachings of Öcalan.
And now Abdulah Öcalan wants to lay down arms and disband the PKK to pave for peace negotiations. It is to be seen how the Turkish authorities will respond to this outstretched hand.
But in a world intent on weaponizing, killing and destroying, this is a voice the many will want to listen to. And the many will be open to learn about the thoughts and reflections behind this message.
Ernst Hemmingway says in his novel Farewell to Arms that wars are not won by victory.
In other words, you do not become victorious by killing and destroying your enemy. This is very much in line with Öcalan´s thoughts, who has called for an end to the culture of conflict for the solution of problems. Intelligence is needed he said in his statement from May 2019, and to quote, “we need political and cultural strength instead of tools of physical violence… For us, a dignified peace and a democratic political solution are paramount.”
As I understand this, to end a war, to solve a conflict is a societal process.
I am looking forward to being taught about this when I start in elementary class in this Academy which I wish success in helping to make the world better. I am sure it will rise to expectations.
This is why I am optimistic.
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