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.
