When the Assad regime crumbled, almost overnight, last December, there was an upsurge of shock, elation and disbelief – in Syria, and across the globe. In the days and weeks that followed, the world watched on as ordinary Syrians, who had borne the brunt of Assad’s pitiless crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2011-12 (and the subsequent civil war), celebrated in the streets, expressing their jubilation at the idea of re-building their country, after almost fifteen years of relentless conflict and horror. For some observers, however, the overthrow of Assad was also accompanied by trepidation and uncertainty as to what was coming next – given the political make-up of the oppositionists that had finally toppled the dictatorship. Backed by Turkey – a military power notorious for its ruthless attacks on Kurdish communities in Rojava (and within its own borders) – the forces that filled the vacuum after Assad’s flight were led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an off-shoot of Al-Qaeda, now masquerading as competent centrists. The reported massacre of Syrian Alawites by new government troops last month arguably confirms the worst of what HTS is still capable of, while for the Kurdish autonomous movement – whose radical militias heroically saved 10,000 Yazidis from extermination and enslavement at the hands of ISIS in 2014 – the prospects for peace seem narrow at best. In Rojava, hope (like international humanitarian aid) remains in short supply.
And yet, the struggle continues – as Matt Broomfield attests in his new book, Hope Without Hope: Rojava and Revolutionary Commitment (forthcoming from AK Press). A co-founder of the Rojava Information Center, Broomfield spent three years in Western Kurdistan as a freelance journalist from 2018-2020. Grounded in that experience, and fusing a variety of political and philosophical sympathies, his study will be required reading for anyone with an engaged interest not only in the Kurds’ path-breaking experiments in democratic autonomy, but in emancipatory politics more broadly – and the possibility of effecting durable, transformative change.
Among other things, Hope Without Hope might be understood as a guidebook for people who believe – against their own better judgement – that the twenty-first century still holds democratic potentialities that have yet to be made manifest. Beginning “with basic tasks in our local communities”, Broomfield asserts, “we can nonetheless always keep the utopian, internationalist horizon of democratic modernity in view.” Questions of organizational effectiveness abound in his text, even as he makes room for the visceral – and in some cases, actively millenarian – passions that enliven revolutionary endeavours. “Faith”, he suggests, “can only be realized when one has the courage to admit” that “any logical belief in God is absurd”, and something similar might be true of eco-socialism: that practical, ever-more necessary dream of a society freed from exploitation and inequality, embraced and sustained by each, for all. As here, Broomfield inclines towards the dialectical in the perspectives he posits and the conclusions he draws.
One result – which may aggravate or appeal to radical readers, depending on their exact political persuasion – is his self-confident favouring of both horizontalism and verticalism, or democracy and discipline, joining them together in a preferred hybrid he describes as “networked Leninism”, as the way of the future. “Historic grievances” aside, he suggests, there is an increasingly palpable “parallel between the decentralized, anarchist Left and its centralized, party-focused counterpart”, both, he argues, “competing with one another in their fatalistic attachment to discredited organizational tactics.” To support his case, he writes with candour, and subtlety, not only of the resistance movement in Rojava but of global struggles – from Syriza in Greece, and the Arab Spring across the Middle East, to Occupy Wall Street and the Sanders presidential campaigns in the USA – defined as much by their strategic limitations (and failures) as by the idealism and actions they inspired. Despite repeated upsurges of anti-authoritarian and socialist movements worldwide, he observes, capitalism is winning. In fact, its foremost adherents and beneficiaries seem to be growing more ferally totalitarian, more brazenly imperialistic, more bloated by prejudice and xenophobia, with every passing year.
Citing the recently published If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Broomfield notes that its author, Vincent Bevins, makes no mention of Rojava in his otherwise wide-spanning survey – an omission which may limit Bevins’s call for a sort of rejuvenated Trotskyism (in all but name), party-oriented but also adaptable to changing circumstances. Hope Without Hope maps out an alternative road to a similar state of (stateless) grace, premised on the conviction, in Broomfield’s words, that the “Kurdish movement offers a concrete, legitimate, political program, which has proven rugged enough to keep millions alive through a decade of war and is worthy of analytic respect in its own right.” To this end, he examines the tactics and achievements of the Kurdish confederalists, while also offering detailed engagements with a spectrum of intellectual figures – from Karl Marx and Paulo Freire, to Michael Bakunin and Søren Kierkegaard, to Walter Benjamin and Abdullah Öcalan – always seeking a counterweight to the kind of “utopianism”, as he puts it, that remains “blind to the horrors of the world.”
Broomfield is discerning and honourable in his approach, shaping his analysis to the specificities of the political dilemmas he addresses, without avoiding the moral requisites of critique and self-examination. There is clearly a contradiction, for instance, between the Rojavan revolutionaries’ professed dedication to eco-socialist values and the oil-powered local society, permanently gearing up for battle or self-defence, which they have been forced to maintain on the ground. This, however, is less a matter of personal hypocrisy than a reflection of the evolving (and frequently desperate) necessities of their situation: the rebels in Rojava are making history, just not – to put it mildly – in conditions of their own choosing. “When internationalist militants are asked what they’ve learned in Rojava,” he says, “the response is almost inevitably the same: patience.”
Broomfield writes with a gut-felt appreciation for what he knows people, including his Kurdish comrades, can do when they work together: a sincere humanism which at the same time deepens his perception of the appalling, entrenched, shockingly violent power systems and ideologies against which socialists must struggle. Hope Without Hope is an attempt to wrestle and tame this intractable predicament to a point of productive equilibrium: to offer an honest assessment of our collective prospects, without granting despair a total claim. If “revolutionary commitment is not to wither on the vine”, he argues, “it must become deepened and strengthened through struggle, joint sacrifice, and comradely criticism.” Such comments are symptomatic of Broomfield’s progressive style and ecumenical attitude throughout.
Significantly, whereas a volume such as Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan – now almost a decade old – offered a compilation and synthesis of first-hand accounts from the front-line in Rojava, Broomfield’s book rather resembles a diagnosis. The guiding emphasis is slightly different, and this affects the tone and manner of proceeding. Hence, remarks from “Kurdish comrades” (who are rarely named) are anecdotally cited throughout Hope Without Hope, but the main object, it seems, is to unriddle a particular kind of negative capability, which Broomfield feels in his bones: the urge to believe fervently in a politics and a political outcome which you know, somehow, to be unrealistic or even unrealisable – with Rojava offered as a case in point. The “tensions that animate political life in Rojava”, Broomfield reflects, “remind us of the ethical and political imperative to remain dissatisfied, sick, ill at ease with the world.” As an insight, this is useful, even courageous, but the fact that Broomfield’s voice is the predominant one we hear – always meditating, or mediating, on our behalf – can lend his speculations an interiority which is sometimes impermeable.
For all his eloquence, on occasion Broomfield’s analysis pitches itself too knowingly – and perhaps, too glibly – to those Cultural Studies graduates (perennialy jaded, incurably wealthy) who tend to roost comfortably in the academic rafters of global anti-capitalist opinion. If he brings urgency and cogency to his discussion of Öcalan and Marx, he also, with a kind of sonorous flair, invites Nietzsche and Bugs Bunny to the festivities, adding them to his roll-call of cultural exemplars – as if their appearance there were natural or witty. Post-doctoral researchers with an admiration for Slavoj Žižek may emit a breathless titter on encountering such references, but other socialistically minded readers may not be so impressed. Strung-out, disenchanted revolutionaries, needless to say, can decide for themselves as to whether this postmodern fluency of Broomfield’s enhances his account, or flattens it.
In general, and notwithstanding his familiarity with a range of radical Christian traditions, Broomfield’s writing style is intensely rationalistic, and his searching articulations of existential hope and political despondency are constrained by his belief that even faith is a matter of will, choice, and utilitarian decision. Striving continually to classify and explain, he views the quasi-religious assurance that many of his Kurdish co-revolutionists hold in their own struggle with a mixture of personal sympathy and intellectual scepticism – a dispassion that excels in the art of nuanced designation, and yet lacks feeling (compare it, say, to Hemingway’s stirring, grief-filled tribute to the international volunteers who travelled to Spain to fight against Franco in the late 1930s).
Despite his wariness of “simplified myths of history”, there is also a disconcerting note of calculation, verging on condescension, in some of the questions Broomfield chooses to foreground. “What would it take to organize excluded populations”, he wonders, “in such a way that we not only provide humanitarian care or solidarity but also reap strategic capital from their location at the nexus of state power?” And how, he further ponders, is “The Left” to meet the immovable challenge “of communicating dialectical thinking to the public”, or of developing, indeed, “a political vocabulary capable of the same reach as the simplifying, reductive Right”? Generous and thorough-going as his endeavours in Rojava have been, the subjectivities Broomfield deploys (his “we” and “The Left” above) still seem firmly anchored in the discourses and perspectives of university-educated socialists back home, most of whom, tacitly or otherwise, still somehow conceive of themselves as the natural leaders of that herd-like “public” Broomfield evokes, waiting to be led to emancipation. Wherever we stand in that equation (i.e. above the unruly, not-yet-enlightened masses, or among them), as climate catastrophe looms ahead, surely the days of scheming as to how best to “reap strategic capital” out of such abstractions lie behind us.
Hope Without Hope should be approached as a communal resource as well as a personal testament. Broomfield has outlined a philosophy of despair that is generative as well as truthful, rooted in a range of critical and political theories even as it remains organizationally focused and historically aware – and adaptable, most importantly, to the dispiriting circumstances that persist across a variety of contemporary contexts. In all of this, as Broomfield sees it, collective struggle is both the aim and the method: by keeping going, people learn the worth of the hopes and possibilities they hold in common, against the odds. “I believe because it is impossible”, he admits (drawing on an early Christian credo). We owe him our gratitude: for the work he’s done to revive the Promethean promise of the socialist cause, and for restoring Rojava to its central place on our map of the revolutionary world. The stakes have never been higher.