The ultimate significance of the Kurdish movement’s knowledge-sharing is less the potential construction of any formal, global counterpower to capitalist hegemony than in allowing the diversification and rejuvenation of strategic perspectives. Rather than fondly expecting Syrian-style revolution in Madrid or London or conversely rejecting revolution outright in favor of purely local reformism, we can work through our melancholy win practice and conversation with the Kurdish movement and others with experience of actually achieving revolutionary change. Through this process, we can gain insight on our own fleeting moments of triumph to cement more lasting change. For example, what might it have taken for Black Lives Matter to achieve the total overthrow of the US justice system in a single state or city, replacing it with a truly grassroots alternative? At the elast, any such victory would require decades of organization and preparation in diverse Black communities throughout (for example) Ferguson or Louisville; steadily accumulating money, propert, and expert personnel; emboldening thousands of young people to risk lives and livelihoods in pursuit of a common goal; and fostering ties with experienced international comrades with real-world experience of establishing effective counterpower to the state. pp 88–89

Öcalan’s ideology was crafted to put fire in (Kurdish) bellies, not pass peer review. p 101

…the extent to which a metanarrative is capable of transforming reality is the same extent to which its failure precludes future transformation. p 109

Colonial contact is often marked by extraordinary violence so dehumanizing it naturally leads the victims to assume their conquerors must be either subhuman, superhuman, or both. Moreover, it’s almost inevitable that colonial conquest will lead to a collapse of the known world. These wars are marked by the arrival of unknown technology from beyond the horizon, in a manifestation of superior power (and unobtainable wealth) as brutal and unavoidable as the great colonial wall that divides Kurdistan. In such a context, national resistance frequently coalesces around the millenarian idea. p 130

In a sense, the Kurdish movement is even fortunate that its own millenarian prophet remains confined to a prison island. Öcalan’s confinement and maltreatment remains the rightful focus of political activity seeking his liberation. But despite the personality cult around the leader, he remains practically unable to be tempted into even the most minor accretion of material wealth or power. …If this movement is a cult, it’s one where the leader genuinely reaps no personal gain whatsoever. Nor can the PKK’s central committee, hiding in remote cave networks, be said to enjoy the luxuries of power. p 141

Can the Left find ways to care for our comrades and keep up our morale, while also accepting a fundamental dissatisfaction with reality as inherent to transformative political action? Can we lay claim to a willful, world-refusing political sickness without dying from it—or being cured altogether? Can we accept that our personal goal is not to be stable, well, or safe, even as we strive to achieve these goals for our world? Can we stop burning out but keep on burning? p 158

Just like their forebear Bugs Bunny, the meta-modern generations know the game is rigged; but they’ll play it anyway. They know climate catastrophe is inevitable; they’ll fight it anyway. They risk their lives fighting cops in their country’s manifestations of the wave of horizontal revolutions, or campaign for an aging left populist politician, whilse simulteneously dismissing any actual prospect of systemic political change. p 177

As we saw, the total loyalist might too easily close their eyes to their comrades’ failures to live up to the Kurdish movement’s principles on either the personal or political level, thereby harming both their comrades and the revolution itself. Conversely, the cynical idealist recognizes and holds these contradictionsm wrestling with them even as they continue their work in support of the movement’s broad goals. For example, the total loyalist might downplay an incident of abuse, choosing to believe that Kurdish revolutionaries are immune from engaging in patriarchal behavior. But the cynical idealist would follow the Kurdish women’s movement in recognizing that patriarchal power dynamics exist even within the radically autonomous women’s movement itself, thereby proving the need for continual anti-patriarchal struggle once more. If the total loyalist were confronted with incontrovertible evidence of an abuse of patriarchal power or a lack of women’s solidarity, the shock might drive them from the movement altogether. But the cyncial idealist knows that individual failures only prove the need for continued revolutionary organization on the internal front. They are alert to contradictions and shortcomings and therefore protected from the shock of small defeats. …The cyncial idealist views the AANES’s efforts to reckon with these challenges as potentially revolutionary in their own right yet simulteneously knows better than to expect perfection from any political movement. pp 195–196

Yet those of us interested in the active political formation of a better world can and must learn from pessimistic and absurdist philosophy, since we are placed under a triple existential burden. We must believe that the present world we’re seeking to revolutionize is nonetheless worth living in; and yet we must also believe in a notional, unrealized better world yet to be; and we must further believe the struggle and sacrifice necessary to achieve that world are justified. p 199

After the pattern of Bloch’s socialist Not Yet, we might call this spark the And Yet. It’s that stubborn, absurdist residue, that which remains when life is subtracted from life and yet some form of life still remains. It is not hope in a better future or transcendent external meaning, still less in political organization. This journey costs Ka-Tzetnik not less than everything: and yet. There is something left over. p 226

…resistance imlpies an intractable, pig-headed refusal to give in, pushing back rather than yielding, or indeed breaking through to triumph. Resistance does not deny or present suffering but wrestles with it, dwells with it: Shivitti… Resistance is not revolt, still less victory. It’s closer to what the Palestinians call sumud, their steadfast endurance and refusal to yield before state violence. Resistance is ugly, dogged, unreasonable, demanding a pointless commitment we can demand of no one save ourselves, expect of no one save our comrades. p 232

…the lessons learned from suffering are useful only insofar as they renew political commitment aimed at alleviating that suffering. p 236

The coronavirus crisis suggested a number of ways the coming catastrophe might unfold. The pandemic was marked by state-mandated restrictions on freedom of movement; paramilitary nativist violence; brutal management and expulsion of migrant workers; and jealous government control of essential resources. In all these ways, it prefigured the likely politics of a climate catastrophe, itself anticipated to realise fresh plagues into the world. States will not wither away but accumulate power and legitimacy as global temperatures rise and resources dwindle, doubling down on border securitization, resource accumulation, event the potential ghettoization of minorities within their borders. Right-wing militias, gangs, and paramilitaries will patrol their borders. At the same time, the technocrats who preach ’never again’ will find ways to massage Western elites into complacency, confining the fires to Kurdistan, Bangladesh, the Horn of Africa, and other conveniently forgettable and out-of-the-way places. As we’ve seen with the rise of competing visions of post-state power and governance in Syria, both new Rojavas and authoritarian alternatives will flourish and compete in the terra nullius left behind by shrinking, jealously protectionist states. Climate catastrophe both opens the possbility for and imperils the hopes of political transformation. p 259

…climate catastrophe can repoen the dialectic of history, creating an opposition that must be resolved through some form of revolutionary eco-socialist organization, perhaps built around the climate migrant. The climate crisis has already created room for a post-Leninist sense of historic revolutionary crisis to creep back into mainstream political discourse. As self-described ‘apocalyptic optimist’ Dana Fisher puts it, ‘I believe we can save ourselves from the climate crisis that we have caused; I also believe it will only be possible with a mass mobilization driven by the pain and suffering of climate shocks around the world. This realization is driving climate activists further left, away from a prefigurative politics of retreat and toward the more militant modes of organization and resistance proposed in How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Socialism, decolonization, slave emancipation: there are many historic instances of movements that began as peaceful, liberal, and ineffective before making a radical pivot en route to achieving their historic and global victories. Someday soon, the climate movement will have to make its own radical turn. Extinction Rebellion is nothing compared to the extinction revolution that could emerge as howls of protest from the Global South solidify into a truly global movement. To put it simply: heat is a catalyst. p 260

The Syrian conflict, it was suggested at the start of this book, is the Spanish Civil War of an incipient global catastrophe. In both cases, regional forces engaged in an anti-fascist struggle for survival found the conflict served a prelude to interstate violence breaking out anew on a grander scale and yet created opportunities to advance a radical democratic socialist alternative through the crisis. The comparison can help us to anticipate the potential ideological, political, and military contours of World War III. We can also explore concepts of internationalism and utopianism, and the possibility of improbable, non-statist leftist alternatives emerging to exploit the breach between quarreling state powers in the contemporary Middle East and beyond. But the comparison also implies the near inevitability that those left movements will suffer statist repression, manipulation in proxy warfare, defeat, and bloody liquidation… To this end, the Spanish Civil War also offers lessons in memorialization, martyrdom, and noble sacrifice. Whatever fate ultimately befalls northern Syria, we will never forget the sacrifices of its defenders… And we will never forget the victories either, however small, fleeting, and doomed they might prove to be. Rojava’s revolution wil stand in history as one concrete utopia, a notional idea that became material, geographic reality, through which all manner of people, movements, and revolutionaries could find cause for hope. p 265–266