The Greek translation of the third volume of Abdullah Öcalan’s five-part ‘Manifesto of the Democratic Civilisation’, ‘The Sociology of Freedom’, was announced at a book launch in the Greek capital Athens on Sunday 6 April. The book, which was translated into Greek by Basilis Manolas, was published in partnership with Meyman Publishing House and Stasi Publishing House.
Reimar Heider, translator of many of Öcalan’s books; Spiros Koruklis, owner of Stasi Publishing; Katia Zagoritou, a researcher at the University of the Peloponnese and Professor John Holloway of the University of Puebla in Mexico, who joined online, all took part in the event.
Holloway, who penned the foreword to the English edition of The Sociology of Freedom, commended the book as “an important contribution to the dialogue of hope, a dialogue that is taking place all over the world”. He highlighted the significance of the concept of a “moral and political society”, which lies at the heart of the Kurdish leader’s philosophy. Öcalan, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 1999, describes it as the “original state of societies”.
Öcalan wrote the Manifesto of the Democratic Civilisation in just over three years (2007–2010), a magnum opus in which he distilled 35 years of radical theory and revolutionary practice from his solitary cell in İmralı Prison. After reinterpreting the history of civilisation from its beginnings to capitalist modernity in the first two volumes, the founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) presents a method for solving the most pressing problems of the 21st century in the third volume, The Sociology of Freedom.
Öcalan introduces a new social model based on democratic confederalism as an alternative to capitalism. Topics such as existence and freedom, nature and philosophy, anarchism and ecology are explored, and while existing socialist struggles are criticised, concrete proposals are made for a new social system founded on three pillars: ecology, grassroots democracy and women’s freedom.
An audiobook of the English translation of The Sociology of Freedom was recently published by the Academy of Democratic Modernity on 4 April, Öcalan’s 76th birthday.
The third volume was originally written in Turkish. It has also been published in Spanish, English, German, Italian, French, Kurmanci (Kurdish), Arabic and Persian.
