In the image, Abdullah Öcalan and his leaders announce the dissolution of the PKK in July 2025.

La Marx International

On May 12, 2025, the Kurdistan Workers' Party ( Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) announced the abandonment of armed struggle and its dissolution after more than four decades of struggle for the national liberation of the Kurdish people against the Turkish state. The announcement came as a result of the call by Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK's top leader, for the dissolution of the organization and the July 11 laying down of arms ceremony held by PKK fighters at Jasna Cave. The abandonment of armed struggle and the dissolution of the PKK is a betrayal of the Kurdish people's revolution led by Abdullah Öcalan and the leaders of "21st-century anarchism . " The betrayal of the PKK leadership is part of the class collaborationist policy that has been developed by 99% of the reformist, social democratic, Stalinist, ex-guerrilla and ex-Trotskyist, campist, "evasionist" leaderships, a term coined by Conor Kostick for the currents that refuse to support the Ukrainian revolution, who have also refused to support the Kurdish revolution.

An announcement in the midst of the revolution in Syria and Türkiye

The Kurds are an indigenous people who were dispossessed of their land following the border divisions drawn by the powers in the Turkish Constitution of 1924, and by the imperialist countries in the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, following World War II with the Treaty of Lausanne. Like the Palestinians, the Kurdish people were dispersed across Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and like the Palestinians, they have been fighting for their right to self-determination for over 70 years. In Turkey, Kurds make up 20% of the population, while in Syria, when the revolution against the Assad dictatorship broke out, the Kurdish people living there developed their own revolution and formed a Kurdish nation called Rojava, under the leadership of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Kurdish National Council (KNC). The PYD and the KNC established a joint administration in January 2013 for the cantons of Cezire, Kobane and Efrin, proclaiming their autonomy, thus creating the state of Rojava .

The Kurdish revolution in Syria included the formation of the armed militias, the People's Protection Units and the Women's Protection Units (YPG-YPJ), a major step forward in the struggle for women's rights, given that in Rojava, women lead armies, govern communities, are civil servants, and assume all government responsibilities equally with men. It is worth noting that this is one of the highest points in women's struggle against sexism, discrimination, and inequality in a region like the Middle East, where various Islamic fundamentalist governments permanently repress, torture, and discriminate against women, subjecting them to all kinds of torment, stoning, and forced burqas. The Kurdish revolution also became one of the vanguards of the global women's struggle in the 21st century.

The Kurdish people's revolution in Syria initiated the administration of the cantons over a population of two and a half million Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syrians, Turkmen, Armenians, and Chechens. The Syrian revolution achieved a resounding victory in December 2024 with the fall of Bashar al-Assad, which constituted a blow to the dictatorships of the Middle East, to Islamic fundamentalism, and to the capitalist dictatorship of Vladimir Putin in Russia, which had intervened in support of the Assad dictatorship. On the other hand, the Kurdish people's revolution coincided with the outbreak of the Turkish people's uprising against the government of Recep Erdogan, which began to suffer rejection by the population due to its reactionary nature, but also due to the growing poverty in Turkey, which affected broad sectors of the population.

At this time, when such favorable events for the Kurdish people's struggle as the Syrian Revolution and the mobilization of the Turkish people against Erdogan are erupting, instead of launching a revolutionary offensive uniting the struggle of the Kurds of Syria and Turkey, the PKK leadership is doing exactly the opposite, calling for the abandonment of armed struggle, the dissolution of the PKK, and integration into the bourgeois democratic regime in agreement with the Turkish bourgeois parties. At the same time, Öcalan closed the Kurdish monthly magazine Serxwebûn (Independence) after 44 years of uninterrupted existence.

A counterrevolutionary program in defense of capitalism

Öcalan emphasized the need to move from armed struggle to transforming the PKK into a political party that would run in elections and integrate into Turkey's bourgeois democratic regime. To carry out this plan, he used his political clout based on his 25 years of leadership of the Kurdish people, including the fact that he had been imprisoned for decades for being the top leader of Kurdish people's struggle organizations seeking a "peaceful resolution," and declared a unilateral ceasefire on March 1. This was followed by the organization's 12th Congress, at which the leaders of the PKK and the Free Kurdistan Women's Party (PAJK) formally adopted the decision to dissolve the PKK and end the armed struggle.

We have already seen many cases in which the capitalist state makes deals with leaders of popular struggles, offering them release from prison in exchange for the leader's release to support and integrate into the capitalist political regime. Such was the case of Nelson Mandela, who was released to support South African capitalism. From this point on, the African National Congress (NCA) became the party defending the capitalist state, governing South Africa at the service of the ruling classes. In his letter of April 27, Abdullah Öcalan states: "...just as the state has a historical trajectory, so does the commune. The free existence of peoples can only be realized through the commune. While the nation-state is an instrument of capitalism, the commune is the constitutive principle of the people. This communal social model can be institutionalized through municipal self-government. It is theoretically and practically feasible, although it depends on a deep and authentic anti-capitalist struggle..."

We already know this entire model of Öcalan's "commune" by other names, from Sub-Commander Marcos and the EZLN of Mexico, for example, which proposes that an alternative world to capitalism can be built within capitalism. And what would the model of "combating capitalism" proposed by Öcalan and 21st-century anarchism look like? By creating cooperatives. For Öcalan and 21st-century anarchism, it doesn't matter if global corporations dominate the world economy, if Wall Street is driving the entire planet into stagflation amid the exhaustion of globalization while millions sink into poverty. For anarchism, the fight against capitalism is through creating cooperatives, peacefully opposing a communal model to the "nation-state," a program we already know from the proposal of Sub-Commander Marcos and the EZLN when they spoke of building " A world where several worlds fit."

That's why the "21st-century anarchists" are laying down their arms and negotiating with Erdogan's reactionary government. In their view, they don't see the need to destroy the capitalist state; simply establishing the "Communes" will be enough to achieve "democracy" and an "ecological economy," based on a precarious theory called "Democratic Modernity." This is how Öcalan explains it in his letter: "...To transcend hegemonic modernity and its auxiliary paradigms of real socialism, we have attempted to develop a new, analytical, and alternative socialist theory, which we call Democratic Modernity... In this concept, we replace the three pillars of modernity—the nation-state, capitalism, and industrialism—with the principles of a democratic nation, communalism, and an ecological economy."

Is it true that one can build "another world" within the capitalist world with the theory of " Democratic Modernity"? And is it true that this is how "democracy" is achieved? To say that one can coexist with capitalism by building "communes" to achieve "ecology" and "democracy" is like saying one can live in a cage with a hungry tiger. The capitalist state is a violent machine at the service of multinationals and the ruling classes; one cannot coexist with it unless one accepts its subjugation. It is completely false that one can build "the commune" in opposition to the capitalist state, which is an inextricably corrupt and murderous institution that defends the interests of the ruling classes. What must be done is to abolish the capitalist state and impose a workers' and popular government. That is the only way to achieve true "democracy."

The " 21st century anarchists" are a movement made up of charlatans such as John Holloway, Tony Negri, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Heinz Dieterich Steffan, Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Murray Bookchin, and Subcomandante Marcos, who formulated the theory that there was no longer any need to fight for power. "Taking power generates bureaucracy ," as they put it in texts such as John Holloway's " Changing the world without taking power." The program of this entire autonomist-anarchist movement is reduced to a movement of networks and nodes, in reality to cooperativism and reformism, identical to social democratic revisionism, only with new clothes.

Voices of dissent against Öcalan begin to emerge within the Kurdish movement.

But the world is undergoing a global process of political revolution in which thousands of activists, militants, and leaders are rebelling and breaking with the treacherous policies of social democratic, Stalinist, ex-guerrilla, bourgeois nationalist, ex-Trotskyist, and other leaders. The same process applies to 21st-century anarchism. Some leaders have already formulated nuances or objections to Öcalan's proposals, such as Zagros Hiwa, spokesperson for Foreign Relations of the KCK, who stated on Sterk TV that the resolutions call for an end to the armed conflict, not disarmament, and questioned the feasibility of this, given the proximity of 100 meters between Turkish soldiers and guerrillas. Other leaders of the Kurdish movement, such as Amir Karimi, of the PKK branch in Iran-Kurdistan, have openly expressed their dissent with Öcalan's proposals.

Öcalan's call has generated division, uncertainty, and a wide spectrum of responses among Kurdish activists, based on the bitter experience of failed negotiations such as the 1989 Vienna talks, which ended with the assassination of Kurdish leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou and his team, as well as the murder of his successor, Sadegh Sharafkandi, in Berlin in 1992. Mass state violence against Kurds included torture, forced displacement, and cultural erasure. Widely perceived as a unilateral capitulation, Öcalan's change of heart caused shock within the movement, with many interpreting it as a form of humiliation. Pressure from the Kurdish revolution forced the capitalist government of Recep Erdoğan to officially acknowledge that the Turkish state committed mass murders of Kurds, stripped them of their rights, and initiated this violence in places like Diyarbakır Prison.

Erdoğan admitted to burning villages, criminalizing unidentified individuals, banning the Kurdish language, and denying mothers the right to speak Kurdish with their children. Delivered after the symbolic disarmament of the PKK, the speech, which insisted on the unity of Turks, Kurds, and Arabs, marks a shift from insurgency to reconciliation and serves as a spectacle orchestrated by the oppressive state, showing that the "peace" negotiated by Öcalan is, in reality, a makeover of domination. The ideological evolution of accepting dissolution is a capitulation, because those who achieved the victories were the militiamen on the battlefields, while their leaders sought civil and institutional legitimacy by making pacts with Recep Erdoğan, who seeks to extend his power beyond the constitutional limit by presenting himself as the architect of a new "peace process."

On the other hand, Erdoğan hopes to win over part of the electorate and fracture the opposition with a mendacious discourse of "peace," despite the reality that there is an emerging alliance between Kurdish forces and opposition currents, as in 2019, when the support of Kurdish voters was crucial to the opposition's victory in major cities like Istanbul and Ankara. That is why Öcalan's policy could not be more treacherous and perfidious: Just as the Turkish people's revolution against the regime begins and the Kurds ally themselves with the opposition, Öcalan comes out to formulate "peace" with Erdoğan and pushes for disarmament. Also, just when Erdoğan's policy of speaking of "peace" could not be more mendacious and false, all Öcalan does is legitimize it. It is the fear of the Kurdish revolution that drives Erdoğan to speak of "peace . "

The reality is that Öcalan's policies hamper the fight for regional autonomy in Turkey, as well as for the right to Kurdish-language education, the reinstatement of repealed municipal mandates, the return of exiles, and a general amnesty for political prisoners. At the same time, the fact that Öcalan remains the undisputed authority of the movement, centralizing decision-making in a vertical structure that suppresses internal pluralism, demonstrates the falsity of "21st-century anarchism," which is a form of Stalinism of class collaboration and betrayal of the revolution in disguise.

And to those who oppose his policy, Öcalan says in his recent statement: "I can say that those who oppose the process have no value. They will fail." He summarizes his fear of the emergence of new leaders who will overwhelm and surpass his traitorous policy. That is why leaders like Bese Hozat, co-chair of the KCK Executive Council, stated in an interview following the symbolic disarmament of 30 guerrillas in Iraqi Kurdistan in July: "If we were to unconditionally comply with all the demands of the state, the result would be the following: other groups would be expected to do the same: destroy their weapons, return to Turkey, and surrender. If that approach were to become the norm, the fate that would await us and our comrades would be imprisonment or death. But that future is not what we accept..."

The PKK is not an isolated guerrilla force, but rather part of a broader network established since 2002 through the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK), which includes the PYD in Syria (2003), the PJAK in Iran (2004), and the PÇDK in Iraq (2002). These are sister organizations, and although nominally autonomous, there may be leaders or militants within them who express dissent with Öcalan. The fate of the guerrilla forces in the Qandil Mountains remains uncertain, but many reaffirm the right to self-defense. In Rojava, for example, the Autonomous Administration maintains a formidable security infrastructure, including the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the YPG-YPJ, and the Asayish forces, with an estimated membership of over 80,000. In Rojhilat (Iranian-ruled Kurdistan), the PJAK continues to organize opposition to the Iranian regime. These groups reflect a deeply rooted cross-border movement with guerrilla and partisan militias.

Long live the Kurdish people's revolution! Down with Öcalan's betrayal and 21st-century anarchism!

It will not be easy to break the resistance of this formidable Kurdish movement, which is leading one of the most extraordinary revolutions of the 21st century. The movement has demonstrated a capacity for survival unmatched by many revolutionary actors, supported by the mobilization of workers and the people. What is at stake is the fate of the Kurdish revolution, as part of a larger revolutionary movement, the Second Arab Spring shaking the entire Middle East, and at the same time a global revolutionary movement inextricably linked to the Kurdish revolution and national liberation movements such as the Third Palestinian Intifada.

We at the Marx International reject all agreements between the PKK leaders and Abdullah Öcalan, just as we have done in a timely manner when Hezbollah and Hamas signed agreements that go against the struggle of the peoples of the Middle East. Öcalan's repeated calls for the disarmament of the PKK are a betrayal of the revolution, but we orthodox Trotskyists are not surprised: We expect nothing from the traitorous leaders of 21st-century anarchism, professional liars like John Holloway, Tony Negri, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Heinz Dieterich Steffan, Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Murray Bookchin, or Subcomandante Marcos. We call on honest Kurdish militants, and those throughout the world who are part of this current, to break with it. Öcalan's policy makes it clear that this current is useless and that this entire autonomist-anarchist movement is a cooperative social-democratic reformism that betrays revolutions.

From the Marx International, we call on you to reject Öcalan's call, not to lay down your arms, not to dissolve any of the organizations like the YPJ or the YJA-Star (the Free Women's Units, îneyên Jinên Azad ên Star ), nor the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK). Do not trust the Turkish state, these murderers, or the capitalist armies, do not let your guard down, do not trust the enemies of the revolution. Wherever possible, do not even dissolve the PKK, even taking into account the political and programmatic differences we have with these movements. But Öcalan's line is a real danger that could claim the lives of many honest and courageous revolutionary comrades. We support all those brave Kurdish leaders who fight for a way out opposite to Öcalan's, for a new revolutionary Marxist leadership of the Kurdish movement. The Kurdish revolution must triumph, on the path of the struggle for Global Socialism.