A Partial Celebrationist Experiment

While I’d prefer that a Celebrationist experiment be tried because of pure enthusiasm, that’s rarely enough for groups of people to create great change. Great societal change seems to come on the heels of perceived necessity. Accelerating automation will soon provide this perception for people pretty much everywhere, and that’s the reason I expect a Celebrationist experiment to be tried in the near future.

There are other circumstances that can cause this perception of necessity. Great instability in the physical environment is one of them. Consider Syria’s Kurds. Not to be confused with the Kurds located elsewhere, the Syrian Kurds have embarked upon a major social experiment with Celebrationist elements. They also happen to enjoy the proud distinction of having beaten back an attempted ISIS invasion in their city of Kobani, despite most of the world expecting another ISIS massacre.

Since ISIS is a ruthless, well-armed invader with the courage of its convictions, this Kurdish city must have really had something worth fighting for. And they did.

Says the Huffington Post: “The world watched in resignation. The lone superpower said it would not help. U.S. officials grimly predicted the city would fall. Yet the small band of Kurds held on for days, then weeks. The U.S.-led coalition against the self-described Islamic State began to help, first with a smattering of airstrikes then with daily assaults. And by January 2015, in a stunning turnabout that has been called a contemporary Stalingrad, the Kurds won.

In succeeding, the Syrian Kurds defended not just a strategic outpost in the Middle East, but also a utopian idea of government they’re putting into practice — what they talk about as a space where decisions are made at the neighborhood level, where gender equity and ethnic inclusion are legally mandated, and where barter is becoming more important than currency.”

Herein lies one of the wildest tales of social engineering I’ve heard. It starts with a man of Russian Jewish ancestry, who grew up believing in Marxism.

The Syrian Kurds’ leader derived their philosophy from long engagement with Murray Bookchin, a self-described libertarian socialist. His vision was “… of a world where citizens’ assemblies supplant state bureaucracy and environmentalism is king.”

“His passing sparked a celebration of his life in the Kurdish regions. And now, Syrian Kurds have — at the urging of Abdullah Ocalan, an imprisoned Kurdish icon — built a Bookchin-inspired society that is the antithesis of the Islamic State.

The territory where the 1.5 million or so Syrian Kurds have launched this social experiment, carved out of the wreck of Bashar Assad’s police state, includes Kobani and two other small “cantons,” or regions. They call it all Rojava.”

Bookchin grew up a communist, but … (later) set out to “rethink everything,” (He) began to dream of a future in which machines could replace most human effort and free individuals could develop themselves as they saw fit. But he believed that in the interim, social problems — the biggest among them the struggle between amoral corporate power and humanity’s best interests — would lay waste to the natural world. “The notion of progress, once regarded as faith in the evolution of greater human cooperation and care, is now identified with ever greater competition and reckless economic growth,”

Bookchin said…. “I wrote about alternative technology, arguing that technology should be as humanly scaled as possible,” Bookchin recalled in the later interview. In Bookchin’s view, “utopia was no longer just an idle dream, but something that could happen,” according to his biographer and longtime companion, Janet Biehl.

“Murray’s contribution to that was to figure what is going to be the institution,” she said. Bookchin proposed reshaping a capitalist world by setting up micro-level systems of local popular assemblies. Such a political structure would, he believed, marry the best of both the intellectual traditions he valued.

While Rojava has its critics, it has successfully implemented a system in which local groups of citizens select representatives, apparently through consensus. Those representatives select higher-level representatives. All representatives are subject to recall. Ultimately, the whole society of 1.5 million people is represented by two co-presidents; always a man and a woman.

We need the first Celebration Society to be successful. That means eliminating existential risk factors as much as possible. Rojava is unfortunately in a highly unstable part of the world, so I would not favor an early Celebrationist experiment happening there. However, once Celebrationism is widely recognized as a viable successor to capitalism, we might be able to co-create a Celebration Society in this most unlikely location.

Rojava includes many brave men and women who are willing to go their own way, following principles they hold dear. That’s a great beginning to a eventual conversation with them about Celebrationism.