Janet Biehl, author of a newly published book about Vermont social ecologist Murray Bookchin (Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin), speaks about her recent visit to Rojava, Kurdistan where Kurdish men and women have organized themselves into a democratic autonomous region based in part on principles advanced by Bookchin.
Source: Roar Magazine
Full of admiration, but not without critique: Janet Biehl shares some of her ideas on the Rojava revolution after her recent visits to the region.
In this interview, independent filmmaker and journalist Zanyar Omrani talks to Janet Biehl about her late companion Murray Bookchin, her trips to Rojava and the important question of how to build bottom-up power structures without risking the reversal of the process over time.
Janet Biehl has traveled to Rojava twice in the past year and has written extensively about her experiences and observations while visiting the autonomous cantons in northern Syria. She is the author of the book Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin.
Source: Roar Magazine
The demand for a rational society summons us to be rational beings—to live up to our uniquely human potentials and construct the Commune of communes.
The lifelong project of Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was to try to perpetuate the centuries-old revolutionary socialist tradition by renovating it for the current era. Confronted with the failure of Marxism after World War II, many, perhaps most radical socialists of his generation abandoned the left. But Bookchin refused to give up on the aim of replacing capitalism and the nation state with a rational, ecological libertarian communist society, based on humane and cooperative social relations.
Amid the sea of strife, brutality, and cruelty that surrounds them, the people of Rojava are creating a gender-equal society—and are arming themselves equally to fight ISIS and all the forces that are intent on destroying such a beacon of hope. The agent of this revolution is not the proletariat: it is the woman.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019