Beyond State, Power, And Violence

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After the dissolution of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) in 2002, internal discussions ran high, and fear and uncertainty about the future of the Kurdish freedom movement threatened to unravel the gains of decades of organising and armed struggle. From his prison cell, Abdullah calan intervened by penning his most influential work to date:Beyond State, Power, and Violence. With a stunning vision of a freedom movement centered on women's liberation, democracy, and ecology, calan helped reinvigorate the Kurdish freedom movement by providing a revolutionary path forward with what is undoubtedly the furthest-reaching definition of democracy the world has ever seen. Here, for the first time, is the highly anticipated English translation of this monumental work.Beyond State, Power, and Violenceis a breathtaking reconnaissance into life without the state, an essential portrait of the PKK and the Kurdish freedom movement, and an open blueprint for leftist organising in the twenty-first century, written by one of the most vitally important political luminaries of today.

Reviews

"calan's works make many intellectuals uncomfortable because they represent a form of thought that is not only inextricable from action, but also directly grapples with the knowledge that it is."
--David Graeber author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years

"calan's writings written in captivity are thus in the tradition of the ideology of the PKK as a left national liberation movement, which also includes the claim to change their own society. However, calan is apparently also one of those whose political thinking was sharpened by the forced abstinence from daily politics and who succeed in further developing their political thinking in captivity."
--Thomas Schmidinger, author of The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava

"calan's plea to build a strong and complex self-organized civil society without taking direct action against the state is similar to Zapatismo in Chiapas.... Finally, Karl Marx's realization should be remembered: 'An idea becomes material violence when it seizes the masses.' And Abdullah calan's message has seized the masses in Kurdistan."
--Nikolaus Brauns, historian and journalist, author of Partisanen einer neuen Welt: Eine Geschichte der Linken und Arbeiterbewegung der Trkei

"calan is the Gramsci of our time."
--Tamir Bar-On, author of The World through Soccer and Beyond Soccer

Author Bio

Abdullah calan actively led the Kurdish liberation struggle as the head of the PKK from its foundation in 1978 until his abduction in February 1999. He is regarded as a leading strategist and the most important political representative of the Kurdish freedom movement. Andrej Grubacic is the founding chair of the Anthropology and Social Change Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies-San Francisco and coauthor of Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History.