Abdullah Öcalan has released a new theoretical text that reimagines the foundations of Kurdish identity, social struggle and political organisation. With the subheading, “Standing at the close of one era and on the threshold of another in Kurdish reality and challenges”, the document lays out a wide-ranging philosophical framework for a post-nationalist, democratic society rooted in gender equality, ecological consciousness and a redefined concept of freedom.
Dated 25 April and published in English on 15 June by the Vigil for Öcalan Initiative, Perspective was presented as the guiding text for the now-concluded 12th Congress of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). In it, Öcalan traverses history from the Neolithic revolution to the industrial age, proposing a reinterpretation of human civilisation through the lens of dialectical thought and Kurdish collective experience. “Traditional Kurdishness was destroyed,” he writes, tracing the collapse of religious and tribal leadership from the 20th century back to its mythic antecedents in Mesopotamia.
Structured in an introductory note and seven chapters, the Perspective aims not merely to direct political strategy, but to offer an existential and historical account of the Kurdish condition and its global resonances. At the heart of the document is a decisive break from nationalism, statehood and class-based Marxism. Instead, Öcalan calls for a new paradigm centred around the “commune” — which he defines as a moral-political society that replaces both the liberal state and the Leninist party-state.
“Without understanding the reality of leadership correctly, you cannot walk, let alone lead society,” Öcalan writes, criticising what he sees as internal stagnation within the Kurdish freedom movement. His concept of “leadership” is framed not as personal authority, but as the construct of collective consciousness through ideological struggle — a concept he defines as the “Apo era”.
One of the most radical features of the document is its feminist re-reading of civilisation. Öcalan locates the origins of patriarchy not in capitalism or class relations, but in the symbolic and material defeat of woman-centred Neolithic societies. Drawing from the Epic of Gilgamesh, he argues that the myth represents the historical break from goddess worship and matrilineal clan structures to male dominance through violence, sexual control and centralised authority.
“The man, with his little club of five or ten close allies, obsidian blade in hand, kills wherever he goes,” he writes, describing the birth of the state and war society from the ashes of early communal life. He attributes the roots of modern gender violence to this rupture, including the transformation of sacred temples into institutions of sexual control, and the eventual codification of patriarchal law through the Torah, the Bible and the Qur’an.
This critique of patriarchy is not an aside but foundational. For Öcalan, gender hierarchy precedes and conditions class hierarchy. He contends that true freedom cannot be achieved without women’s liberation, which he considers the primary contradiction of historical society. “Socialism can only come through women’s liberation,” he declares, describing jineology — a feminist science developed within the Kurdish movement — as key to any future political project.
Öcalan’s critique of Marxism is sharp yet sympathetic. While acknowledging Marx’s importance, he challenges what he sees as its economic reductionism and statist tendencies. He proposes replacing the class struggle with the struggle between “state and commune” as the fundamental contradiction of history. For him, the commune is the living core of human society — evident in the earliest clans and still latent within modern municipalities.
“The tribe’s oppressor becomes the state, the clan chief becomes the ruler, and ordinary members continue as commune,” he writes, asserting that Marx’s model of historical materialism must be revised to account for the ethico-political roots of human society.
On modernity, Öcalan develops a concept of the “Three Horsemen” — capitalism, nation-state and industrialism — which he describes as the core components of globalised oppression. He argues that real socialism failed because it internalised two of the three: the nation-state and industrialism. Modernity, he writes, has become a civilisational crisis marked by ecological destruction, spiritual emptiness and the militarisation of life.
Against this, he proposes “democratic civilisation” — a non-statist, multi-ethnic and decentralised system that prioritises the values of coexistence, mutual aid and ecological harmony. Rather than a traditional peace treaty or power-sharing arrangement, Öcalan envisions a civilisational transformation, rooted in Mesopotamian heritage but global in scope.
Throughout the document, there is an insistence that understanding history correctly is key to unlocking political possibility. From his prison cell, Öcalan constructs not a linear manifesto, but an epistemological framework — an effort to think beyond the binaries of East and West, religion and science, man and woman.
While the Perspective was written in the context of the PKK’s internal congress, its implications extend far beyond. Its call to replace state power with communal ethics, class war with gender liberation, and industrial growth with ecological balance, represents one of the most ambitious politico-theoretical projects to emerge from the Middle East in recent decades.
“Only those who wage war can make peace,” Öcalan writes, but the document makes clear that peace, for him, is not merely the absence of war. It is the construction of a society capable of sustaining dignity, freedom and plurality — a society that must begin by rethinking everything once assumed natural.
The publication of Perspective follows Öcalan’s call of 27 February for a “Peace and Democratic Society” solution, and comes after the PKK’s decision in early May to dissolve its organisation and formally end its armed campaign. While those developments mark a historic turning point, Perspective provides the ideological and theoretical grounding for what Öcalan describes as a new era in Kurdish political thought.
