Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
On Sunday last week, Damascus fell to Salafi terrorists and other imperialist-aligned forces. Regardless of the flaws of the ousted government, this is a horrible situation for the Syrian proletariat as well as for the people of Palestine, Lebanon and others. We can only hope for the perseverance of the Syrian workers and the remaining anti-colonial resistance.
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Rojava Kurds are native to Syria, they aren't occupiers. They are a people fighting for self-determination.
So did Russia.
What metric are you using?
"One could say that Syria had lost them for good once they lost them to ISIS." ISIS, not Rojava.
Yes, and it did not deserve critical support at that time.
It is not ruled by a communist party and its economy is capitalist. Having some workers' cooperatives does not make a country socialist.
My bad. But Rojava never meant to secede from Syria. They are still called DAANES today, administration of north-east Syria. Yes, they took the oil fields to fund themselves. But without any other source of funding (their main industry is agriculture) it was an attempt to secure a source other than US aid. We wouldn't fault a person stealing to feed themselves, in my mind it's the same thing.
As I mentioned in another comment, SDF could have done "whatever they wanted" in the areas they control, but they decided to build an egalitarian, democratic society that respected minorities and religions. What more can you ask for under the circumstances? Yet they did much more than that.
If a little "thievery" is the price for that, if I were in their shoes I would have done the same. Stalin was a bank robber, for example. I'm sure he stole from some people who were nice.
Right. But we can see that conditions can change. Also, I think there are degrees of cooperation. You cannot say that Rojava is the same as Israel, for example, when it comes to cooperating with the US.
There are only about 1000 US troops left in Syria. US has no intent on fighting Turkey or their militias, they didn't help SDF hold Manbij. It's unlikely the US would help the SDF fight against HTS if they decide they want the oil fields DAANES controls.
But let me ask you this, what would have to happen or what kind of conditions would there have to be for you to think that Rojava is a socialist project worth studying? There's no Syrian government for SDF to give back the oil to.
Can you connect the dots ffs.
I'm stupid, connect them for me.
I would fault a person repeatedly stealing essential things required for another person to survive
In what sense are they egalitarian and democratic? A capitalist country, even if it's relatively decentralized, is neither egalitarian nor democratic in any meaningful sense
Like I said, it may be worthy of critical support in the future, but certainly not now
The first step would be to have a socialist, anti-imperialist government
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From a lengthy article (from 2016) analysing the economy of Rojava. written by a Russian Marxist (that's how he is described, don't know for certain).
Sure it's not full communism, but it's obvious they don't want to be capitalist.
Rhetoric is easy, but in practice, Rojava has no proper state, no vanguard party. Not wanting to be capitalist doesn't really matter if their economy is de facto capitalist, even if the welfare net is larger than in most capitalist countries or there's more local democratic participation.
It feels like I'm repeating myself at this point so I'm going to end it here
OK. I will just say that one must examine Rojava as it exists in its current conditions, and not compare it to some ideal.