Abdullah Öcalan’s May the 1st message

Foreword

Since the 1980s, Abdullah Öcalan has always used the international day of struggle of the working class as an opportunity to analyse the situation of the world socialist movement and to derive perspectives for the struggle for self-determination and socialism in Kurdistan and the Middle East. After his abduction and imprisonment on the 15th of February, 1999, his opportunities to make himself known to the outside world were limited to short messages that only managed to get past the prison walls via his lawyers. Nevertheless, he never missed an opportunity to address his movement and the public with messages of greetings on the occasion of the working women’s day of struggle on the 8th of March, the Kurdish New Year, Newroz, on the 21st of March or the 1st of May. This text is a message from Abdullah Öcalan on the occasion of the 1st of May demonstration in Amed (Diyarbakir) in 2014. It is Abdullah Öcalan’s last May the 1st message before he was subjected to a stricter detention regime and total isolation in April 2015.


Long live the solidarity of the working class and all peoples!

Socialism is more necessary than ever, but at the same time the distance from socialist ideology and practice is an expression of both the crisis of socialism and that of capitalism. The crisis of socialism is not due to objective causes. The crisis is due to subjective factors, namely the lack of a consistent consciousness, a coherent organisation and coherent action. There is no doubt that the ideological hegemony of capitalism is the most important external factor here. But what is decisive is the lack of a socialist ideology and practice. Instead, there is an eclectic approach and an eclectic practice.


Either society or nothingness

In this era of hegemonic finance capitalism, the attack is directed not only against labour, but against society as a whole, its history, ecology and future. This means: socialism or barbarism, society or nothingness.
The gene of capitalism, which has emerged like a gnawing rat in the depths of history, has infected the entire social body of our time like cancer. There is no doubt that the information monopoly has also played an important role in this. For social liberation, it is therefore essential to wage the information war in unity with the struggle for the moral-political society.
To do this, we must oppose the three pillars that support the system – capital monopoly, industrialism and the nation state – with a socialism based on the communal economy, ecological industry and the democratic nation. In other words, we must create the alternative to capitalist modernity through democratic modernity.
The hybrid systems of real socialism, social democracy and national liberation have failed because they did not go beyond a one-sided developmental economism in the struggle against capitalist modernity. They turned capitalism into a raging monster. The path to salvation is democratic modernity based on the democratic nation, ecological industry and the communal economy.


The freedom movement is leading the way

Today, the Middle East is the weakest link in the hegemonic system. In a way, a third world war is taking place there. Kurdistan is at the centre of this region. The freedom movement is capable of leading the anti-hegemonic struggle of all peoples, nations and cultural groups in this region. The workers and the unemployed must lead this struggle with their own ideological and practical weapons. By learning from their history and making the history of the peoples of the region their own, they must assume the leadership role for the whole of society, especially for the peasantry and the suburbs.
By defining its historical mission in this way, the PKK resolutely expresses its internationalist solidarity with the working class of Turkiye, all working people and the peoples of the region and promises to fulfil this solidarity with its practice.

Long live the solidarity of the working class and all peoples!
Down with capitalist hegemony!

Abdullah Ocalan

Typ F prison Imrali

25. April 2014