The open letter of the Coordination Council of the Kurdistan Women’s Confederation (KJK) cannot be read merely as a declaration in praise of peace and an all-embracing “unity,” nor simply as an announcement that one particular form of struggle is being abandoned. If we move past the surface of its words, a more fundamental question emerges—one confronting not only the Kurdish liberation movement, but many emancipatory movements of the twenty-first century:
Can an emancipatory movement pursue new and liberatory goals while keeping its instruments and forms of struggle permanently fixed, dogmatic, and bound to the past?
The letter speaks of a historical moment in which it is necessary to move beyond “the clichés and teachings of the past” and beyond tradition, and to sustain a struggle that has endured for at least half a century in Turkish Kurdistan through “a new method” responsive to present conditions. The issue is not simply the symbolic burning of weapons or the dissolution of a party or organization. Weapons can be taken up again, and organizations can be reconstituted through another congress. The more fundamental question is this: where, how, and through what structures is the force accumulated through decades of resistance, life, and struggle in the Zagros to acquire material form from now on?
Human Ends and the Means–Ends Dialectic
Every liberation movement sooner or later confronts the relationship between ends and means. The human aspiration toward a society that is free, equal, and liberated from domination cannot remain indifferent to the means through which it seeks to arrive there. Means are not a neutral bridge between today and tomorrow; they can carry within themselves the social relations of the future. The end does not justify every means. To attain humane and emancipatory ends, humane means are also necessary.
In many historical experiences of the Middle East, the nation-state has been associated with the accumulation of power, homogenization of identity, suppression of languages—language understood not merely as a means of conversation, but as a mechanism of historical memory, culture, thought, collective identity, and a way of comprehending the world—as well as patriarchy, class inequality, and structural violence.
A movement seeking to transcend such relations must therefore ask itself: can a free society be created by reproducing the same logic of concentration, hierarchy, and obedience?
This is precisely where the question moves beyond the simple binary of “arms or disarmament.” The real question is: Where will power reside? In the state, the party, and the military apparatus—or in a conscious and organized society capable of decision-making, self-government, and defending its life and achievements?
Are Yesterday’s Instruments Adequate to Today’s World?
The workers’ October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, the struggles in Vietnam and Algeria, the emergence of the guerrilla movement at Siahkal in Iran, the courageous struggles of the Turkish left, anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements, and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, were—and in some cases remain—historical responses to specific configurations of power.
These experiences can neither be erased from historical memory nor turned into sacred, transhistorical models.
Today, global capitalism does not exercise power solely through armies and states. Domination operates concurrently through economic, financial, military, technological, informational, media, and ideological mechanisms. Algorithms and artificial intelligence have entered production, control, surveillance, and communication. KJK itself reads the present situation through what it calls the “Third World War.”
If the instruments of domination have changed, why should the instruments of resistance remain unchanged?
Must the party remain forever a hierarchical, centralized, commanding, and territorially bounded structure? Or can it be redefined—from a ruler over society into an instrument for social organization and political education, and the concept of the vanguard transformed from command and directives from above into opening the way for the conscious participation of the masses?
To question the instruments of the past is not to negate history. A living movement learns from its history without becoming its prisoner.
The Dialectic of Consciousness and Material Force
Marx identified the moment at which theory, once it grips the masses, becomes a “material force.” The Paris Commune of 1871 acquired historical significance for Marx and Engels from a related perspective: it represented an attempt to prevent political power from separating itself from society and standing over it like a Leviathan—a power that arises from society, subsequently acquires independence from it, and ultimately commands the very society from which it emerged.
From this perspective, the commune is not merely a local administrative unit. It is a form of social self-organization that seeks to return decision-making and power, as far as possible, to the people themselves and to prevent politics from becoming an alien force standing above them.
Hannah Arendt’s distinction between power and violence is illuminating here as well: power emerges from the capacity of human beings to act together, whereas violence is instrumental in character. The fundamental question is therefore this: Does the instrument remain in the service of social power, or does the instrument itself become the source of power?
Frantz Fanon warns against reducing liberation to merely changing rulers and flags. Murray Bookchin, through social ecology, direct democracy, and confederal structures, seeks to return politics to society and popular assemblies. And in the evolution of the thought of **Abdullah Öcalan—imprisoned on İmralı Island—**a contemporary formulation of democratic confederalism, councils, communes, self-government, ecology, and women’s liberation emerges.
The significance of this development does not lie in placing an individual at the center of history, but in the attempt to give these concepts material existence within a social movement.
Consciousness: When It Becomes a Material Force
Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (Woman, Life, Freedom) is itself a living example of this process. Emerging from the Kurdish women’s movement, the slogan gained powerful resonance during Iran’s 2022 uprising and moved beyond geographical borders. At such moments, words cease to be merely words; they become a common language of resistance and collective consciousness.
By contrast, slogans such as “One Nation, One Flag, One Leader” articulate another logic of power. Its structure recalls the well-known Nazi slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (“One People, One Reich, One Leader”), as well as formulations of political unity centered upon a single leader and a unified political community. Structural resemblance does not in itself establish the historical identity of different movements; the issue for the present discussion is the conception of power embodied in such formulations.
Peace Without Disempowering Society
A transition toward democratic politics should not be confused with faith in states. Peace cannot be sustained by signatures and agreements alone. Peace requires rights, institutions, guarantees, and a conscious and organized society.
If “democratic integration” is at issue, we must ask: How will freedom of association be guaranteed? What place will linguistic and cultural rights occupy? What independent role will women have in decision-making? And what mechanisms will prevent the return of denial and repression?
Such questions are not objections to peace. They are conditions for taking peace seriously.
Here, the fundamental antagonism is not between peoples and nations, but between the governed society and a power that separates itself from society and rises above it—a power that, within class society, safeguards relations of control, exploitation, and inequality.
The Leviathan (Hobbes’s metaphor for powerful, centralized sovereign authority), in this critical reading, is the power that comes to sit on society’s shoulders. Peoples of different languages and cultures are not inherently enemies. State nationalism, discrimination, and policies of division can turn their differences into antagonism.
It is precisely here that reconciliation, solidarity, and peace acquire an emancipatory meaning: not the reconciliation of the governed with domination, nor peace understood as the disempowerment of society, but reconciliation and solidarity among peoples and the prevention of imposed military and violent solutions.
The issue is not replacing one form of control with another, but returning power from above society to within society, so that the state, the party, the defensive force, or even an international organization does not become a new Leviathan.
Peace becomes durable when society itself becomes its material force: an organized society capable of resisting the imposition of war and violence and possessing the capacity to deter aggression and defend its life and achievements. In this sense, a defensive force is not a power standing above society, but an instrument subject to society’s will and oversight—capable of deterring violence and defending against it.
Here a dialectical relationship exists between the “weapon of criticism” and the “criticism of weapons.” The significance of Marx’s formulation for this discussion does not lie in glorifying arms, but in recognizing that material power cannot be overcome by moral argument alone. To safeguard its freedom, society requires consciousness, organization, independent institutions, and a real capacity to defend its life and achievements.
Rojava: Society or the Instrument?
The historical experience of Rojava should neither be mythologized nor ignored. The effort to establish communes, councils, structures of self-government, and autonomous women’s organizations—with all their achievements, shortcomings, and contradictions—places a fundamental question before us:
Does the weapon command society, or does society command its instruments of defense?
The power of society cannot be measured simply by the number of weapons it possesses. Consciousness of the necessity of freedom becomes power when it is organized. A commune becomes power when people possess agency within it. A council becomes power when it enables genuine popular participation. Autonomous women’s organization is power. Social solidarity is power.
And when the existence of a society is threatened by armed violence, its capacity for self-defense becomes part of the question of survival. The decisive boundary is the boundary between defending society and dominating society.
In this sense, Jin, Jiyan, Azadî is more than a slogan; it constitutes a paradigm: women’s liberation as a measure of the liberation of society; life as the relationship between human beings, society, nature, labor, and the ecosystem; and freedom not as a promise postponed until the day after victory, but as a set of relations that must begin to be created here and now.
The Central Message of the KJK Letter: What Replaces the Centrality of Arms?
KJK does not speak of the end of struggle. It speaks of opening a “new path” and entering a phase that is more social, more radical, and deeper.
The fundamental question is therefore: What is to replace the central position previously occupied by arms?
If the answer is passivity, trust in the state, or reducing politics to parliamentarism, such a transition may disempower society.
But if—as I understand the message of this letter—the center of gravity of resistance shifts toward the organization of social institutions, the organized power of women, workers, and the urban and rural dispossessed, councils and communes, politics rooted in society, and society’s capacity to defend its life and achievements, then resistance has not ended. Its material foundation has shifted from the centrality of the instrument to the centrality of society.
In such a transition, arms and armed struggle no longer constitute the center of gravity of resistance. Organized society becomes the center of gravity, and political, organizational, and defensive instruments must remain subordinate to the will of society—not society to the instrument.
This means a movement:
from the power of the instrument to the power of human beings;
from command to participation;
from concentration to self-government;
from organization above society to organization in the service of society;
from abstract consciousness to organized consciousness and material force;
and from freedom as a promise for tomorrow to freedom as a social relation created today.
From Society to Internationalism
Yet this social power cannot remain restricted within a single geography. Capital, war, technology, media, and the hegemonic mechanisms of neoliberal globalization operate across borders. Resistance, too, requires the capacity to establish transnational connections.
This does not mean leaping from actual societies toward a global command center. Organization must take root simultaneously at local, regional, and global levels: beginning in people’s concrete lives and struggles, becoming a shared force through regional connections, while simultaneously expanding toward an internationalist horizon.
Rooted in society, connected across the region, organized in internationalist solidarity.
But solidarity that remains confined to declarations, agreements, and moral support has not yet become a material force. The question of organization therefore returns: What new forms of internationalist organization can connect the struggles of women, workers, the dispossessed, councils, communes, and social movements on regional and global scales without themselves becoming a new Leviathan or another hegemonic center standing above society?
The issue is not to reconstruct a global command center. It is to discover forms of organization capable of coordination and common action while deriving their power from below; forms that recognize differences among peoples while preventing them from remaining fragmented in the presence of global capital.
If neoliberal globalization has organized capital, knowledge, technology, and power from above through transnational networks, an emancipatory response can be sought in the opposite direction:
against the globalization of capital from above, the organization of society from below;
against the monopolization of knowledge, the socialization of knowledge;
against the fragmentation of struggles, regional and internationalist connection;
beyond the locally confined party, an internationalist political organization;
and against the accumulation of power, self-government and alliances from below.
From this perspective, the KJK letter is not a farewell to struggle, but a summons to a more difficult historical test:
Can the force accumulated through more than half a century of resistance move beyond the centrality of arms and be reproduced throughout society without disempowering society or relinquishing its capacity to defend its life and achievements?
Can power be wrested back from the Leviathan—from the party, the army, or any organization that acquires autonomy above society—and returned to society itself?
And can this social power be connected from the local to the regional and simultaneously to the global, without creating a new center of command?
If such a transition is possible, what replaces the centrality of arms is not powerlessness. It is the material power of organized society.
Perhaps the meaning of the “new method” can be found precisely in this movement:
not the end of resistance, but the transfer of its center of gravity from the instrument to society;
not the disempowerment of society, but the materialization of power within society itself;
not local isolation, but regional and internationalist connection;
and not globalization from above under the command of capital, but the global organization of society from below.
The answer will not be written by a single leader, a single party, a single letter, or theory alone.
Society itself will write the answer—where consciousness and collective reason become organized, where organization serves society, where leadership acquires material form within society, where solidarity crosses borders, and where organized human beings themselves become the material force of their own liberation.
Abbas Mansouran
27 September 2026
