Editing Abdullah Öcalan (section)

=== Democratic confederalism ===
{{main|Democratic confederalism}}
[[Democratic confederalism]] is a "system of popularly elected administrative councils, allowing local communities to exercise autonomous control over their assets, while linking to other communities via a network of confederal councils."<ref name=":0">Paul White, "Democratic Confederalism and the PKK's Feminist Transformation," in ''The PKK: Coming Down from the Mountains'' (London: Zed Books, 2015), pp. 126–149.</ref> Decisions are made by communes in each neighborhood, village, or city. All are welcome to partake in the communal councils, but political participation is not mandated. There is no private property, but rather "ownership by use, which grants individuals usage rights to the buildings, land, and infrastructure, but not the right to sell and buy on the market or convert them to private enterprises".<ref name=":0" /> The economy is in the hands of the communal councils, and is thus (in the words of Bookchin) 'neither collectivised nor privatised - it is common.'<ref name=":0" /> [[Feminism]], [[ecology]], and [[direct democracy]] are essential in democratic confederalism.<ref>{{cite book|title=Democratic Confederalism|last=Öcalan|first=Abdullah|publisher=Transmedia Publishing Ltd.|year=2011|isbn=978-3-941012-47-9|location=London|page=21}}</ref>

With his 2005 "Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan", Öcalan advocated for a Kurdish implementation of Bookchin's ''[[The Ecology of Freedom]]'' via municipal assemblies as a democratic confederation of Kurdish communities beyond the state borders of Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Öcalan promoted a platform of shared values: environmentalism, self-defense, gender equality, and a pluralistic tolerance for religion, politics, and culture. While some of his followers questioned Öcalan's conversion from [[Marxism-Leninism]] to [[Social ecology (Bookchin)|social ecology]], the PKK adopted Öcalan's proposal and began to form assemblies.<ref name="utopia2"/> It became also the ideology of the [[Democratic Union Party (Syria)|Democratic Union Party]] (PYD) and is applied in the [[Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria]] (AANES).<ref name=":27" />