As part of this process, the Kurdish movement offers a potentially useful tool to help the global Left break old attachments in pursuit of new organizational alternatives: its unique model of criticism and self-criticism. During daily or weekly sessions of what’s called “tekmil,” comrades in a given collective or commune systematically identify selfish, patriarchal, destructive, or unhelpful behavior patterns in themselves and their comrades. Unlike the bitter haranguing associated with a Maoist struggle session, criticism in the Kurdish movement is seen as useful only if it leads to generative change. Tekmil is intended to be calm, productive, and therapeutic. Militants are not supposed to criticize the actions of individuals in isolation but rather refer to the aspects of their upbringing and socialization that have engendered the counterproductive behavior in question. For example, they might note a university-educated male comrade’s patriarchal replication of intellectual hierarchies, a city-dweller’s disrespect for the natural world, a Western internationalist’s Orientalizing fetishization of violence. At the same time, the individual being criticized has the responsibility to take the criticism seriously and implement concrete steps toward its resolution—for example, that patriarchal male comrade might step back from leading group study-sessions, volunteer for extra kitchen duty, and ask other male comrades to monitor his behavior in conversations. In a sense, tekmil is marked by the same spirit as Adorno’s “negative utopianism,” expressing hopes for the new only through a radical assessment of the failures of the old. It seeks to cultivate revolutionary new personalities and collectives through a critique of what is capitalistic, patriarchal, and individualistic in the old. And this radical, negative, constructive process can help us not only on the individual but also on the organizational scale. As Nunes writes, “Perhaps we should start from the assumption that everything has failed.” Recognizing state socialism’s ultimate defeat by imperialist capitalism and the bloody suppression of would-be anarchist revolutions is not an excuse to wallow in melancholy for what could have been; it is an urgent reason to rethink both sets of tactics.
from Hope Without Hope: Rojava and Revolutionary Commitment by Matt Broomfield
