An in-depth look into the inner workings of the commune system in Northeast Syria (Rojava) and how they work in practice to give people direct say over the decisions that affect their lives at the most local level. I also call for people to form communes throughout North America and the world.

2020- The Communes of Rojava have many lessons to teach us in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertainty that has arisen from it globally.

This is a 45 minute documentary about the Kurds, Assyrians, Arabs, and Yezidis in Northeast Syria (Rojava) who’ve spent the last 9 years dealing with the uncertainty and precarity we are just now beginning to face, turned to their neighbors to get themselves through civil war and ISIS attacks, and are emerging through it all with a new society that is far more beautiful and far more free than they had before. It’s a story of hope and I think it is very instructive for us about the possibilities that can emerge out of crisis when neighbors “pod up”. Some historical context: The formation of “communes” in Rojava did not come out of nowhere. Kurdish people had been oppressed in all four modern nation-states that were built over their traditional homelands: Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran- denied the ability to speak their language, sing their songs, denied their very existence as a category in some states, barred from citizenship in others, prevented from even growing fruit trees or having any of their own means to sustain themselves. Since the 1970s they have fought back against their oppression and often made common cause with other oppressed minorities such as the Assyrian Christians. In Northeast Syria they had been secretly and illegally organizing support structures to fill the gaps that the state left in their communities, and the idea of the communes came about as their homegrown ideology of Democratic Confederalism won favor among many different ethnic groups in the region. Democratic Confederalism is a kind of hyperlocal direct democracy where local people band together to meet their needs themselves and ultimately make the state obsolete. It emphasizes ethnic and religious pluralism, women’s freedom, and ecology- all refreshing in light of the authoritarian states dominating the region. This is the background that takes us to 2012, when the Syrian government completely pulled out of Northeast Syria to fight a civil war in their major cities, leaving a power vacuum. That vacuum could have been filled by jihadists or aspiring authoritarians as in many parts of Syria, but instead thanks to the building blocks of the communes and civil society organizations that were already in place, the local people were able to step in and govern their own lives in a remarkably smooth transition.

0:00–2:50 Defining The Commune
2:51–5:53 Defense Committee
5:54–11:09 Health Committee
11:10–15:29 Peace and Consensus Committee
15:30–23:40 Economic Committee
23:41–29:21 Education Committee
29:22–37:40 Women’s Committee
37:41–42:56 A Call for Communes Everywhere!

Rojava is a term no longer officially used their because it is rooted in the Kurdish struggle and is Kurd-centric as a name, but the society is being built as explicitly multi-ethnic so is now called the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria to reflect this diversity. I used the former term because, sadly, it is the word most people know. The Internal System of the Communes In Rojava: http://www.aymennjawad.org/2018/04/th…

The Co-operative Contract of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria: https://mesopotamia.coop/the-co-opera…