For years Abdullah Öcalan has unraveled the sources of hierarchical
relations, power, and the formation of nation-states that has led to
capitalism's emergence and global domination. Capitalism: The Age of
Unmasked Gods and Naked Kings is the second volume of his definitive
five-volume work The Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization. He
makes the convincing argument that capitalism is not a product of the
last four hundred years but a continuation of classical civilization.
Unlike Marx, Öcalan sides with Braudel by giving less importance to the
mode of production than to the accumulation of surplus value and power,
thus centering his criticisms on the capitalist nation-state as the most
powerful monopoly of economic, military, and ideological power. He
argues that the fundamental strength of capitalist hegemony, however, is
the competition in voluntary servitude that a market economy has given
rise to--not a single worker would reject higher wages--resulting in an
unprecedented ability to convince people to surrender their individual
power and autonomy. Öcalan further contends that the capitalist phase of
city-class-state-based civilization is not the last phase of human
intelligence; rather, the traditional morals upon which it is based are
being exhausted and the intelligence of freedom is rising in all its
richness. That is why he prefers to interpret capitalist modernity as
the era of hope--but only insofar as we are able to develop a
sustainable defense against it.
