Building Free Life: Dialogues with calan

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From his solitary jail cell, Abdullah Ocalan has penned daring works that give profuse evidence of his position as one of the most significant thinkers of our day. His prison writings have mobilised tens of thousands of people and inspired a revolution in the making in northern Syria, while also penetrating the walls of academia triggering debate a

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

"Where else would you expect to find a world-class political genius than... prison And I don't use the word 'genius' lightly."
--Peter Lamborn Wilson, author of Ploughing the Clouds and Sacred Drift

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

Author Bio

International Initiative "Freedom for Abdullah calan--Peace in Kurdistan" is a multinational peace initiative for the release of Abdullah calan. Radha D'Souza is a reader in law specializing in international law and resource conflicts in the third world. David Graeber, bestselling author of Debt: The First 500 Years, is an anthropologist, activist, and professor. John Holloway is an author and professor of sociology. Antonio Negri is an author and professor of philosophy and political science. He has also been a political prisoner in Italy and a political refugee in France. Ral Zibechi resides in Uruguay, where he works for Brecha and recently won the Jos Mart Prize.