As to Rojava / Ocallan / Bookchin specifically, its allowed to exist by the imperialist powers as a counter / balkanization / separatist project against Syria.
A lot of these “de-centralized” setups, under any name, whether its called, confederalism, anarcho-syndicalism, commune communism, worker coops, etc, all suffer from the same problems. An organized decision-making body is needed to overcome an even more organized capitalist military, and organized economic production that takes into account a comprehensive view of the economy to build a large plan, directing production at every level, is necessary.
These utopian “small scale” attempts were thoroughly debunked by Engels in socialism, utopian and scientific. Another quote from Engels that Parenti mentions:
Decentralization vs. Survival
For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.
Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872-73 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta),” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”
Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency–which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack. One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government.
Some more links about why decentralized systems fail not just militarily, but also as a production system:
Thank you for all this info, I guess I just get mystified by the bourgeoise notion that the imperfection of the political system is the problem and not the power dynamics between classes and social groups
As to Rojava / Ocallan / Bookchin specifically, its allowed to exist by the imperialist powers as a counter / balkanization / separatist project against Syria.
A lot of these “de-centralized” setups, under any name, whether its called, confederalism, anarcho-syndicalism, commune communism, worker coops, etc, all suffer from the same problems. An organized decision-making body is needed to overcome an even more organized capitalist military, and organized economic production that takes into account a comprehensive view of the economy to build a large plan, directing production at every level, is necessary.
These utopian “small scale” attempts were thoroughly debunked by Engels in socialism, utopian and scientific. Another quote from Engels that Parenti mentions:
Some more links about why decentralized systems fail not just militarily, but also as a production system:
Thank you for all this info, I guess I just get mystified by the bourgeoise notion that the imperfection of the political system is the problem and not the power dynamics between classes and social groups
No probs.