Culture & Resistance

Culture and resistance Culture means beauty. What is beauty? It is aesthetic expression, which touches us in the depths of our souls and hearts. Why does culture touch us? It allows us to look deep into our own selves, in our own history and those of any people(s) whose culture we may experience. Culture is a crucial source of strength for a people. Thats why no tyrann could ever really defeat a society, if he couldn‘t destroy their culture. Culture is the tradition of freedom. Abdullah Öcalan describes the relationship between culture and capitalist modernity: "The four hundred year history of capitalist modernity is the history of a kind of genocide in the name of the homogeneous nation against the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society with its diverse political entities and its self-defense (mostly cultural, sometimes physical genocides). In the process in which the nation state homogenised society, the nation based on a dominant ethnicity, religion, denomination or other group phenomenon, many traditions and cultures were attempted to be destroyed either through genocide or assimilation. Thousands of tribes and peoples were virtually wiped out along with their languages, dialects and cultures. Many religions, beliefs and sects were banned, folklore and traditions assimilated, and those who could not be assimilated were expelled, marginalised, their cohesion fragmented. This meant sacrificing all historical existences, cultures and traditions to a historically-socially senseless nationalism along the lines of 'one language, one flag, one nation, one fatherland, one state, one anthem, one culture', which ultimately served to disguise the concentration of modern trade, industry, finance and power monopolies as a nation state. It wreaked the greatest destruction among the millennia-old cultures and traditions. But these cultures and traditions, close to extinction and usually condemned to a marginal life, are beginning to blossom again and multiply like flowers after a rain in the desert. The resistance of cultures is reminiscent of the flowers that prove their existence by piercing rocks or breaking through the concrete of modernity poured over them and re-emerging into the light of day.” (Abdullah Öcalan - Sociology of Freedom) Culture is songs, is poems, stories, history, language, it‘s how we prepare food, how we dress, the way we work and live. When we express ourselves in a cultural way with full devotion, we draw deep connections to others. We weave the net of a free society and turn away from a system that wants us to be only individual consumers or brainless workers and wants to see us under one flag and under one superficial homogenic ghost of an articifial culture. Today the flowers of culture are stolen and locked up in elite institutions for the rulling classes, while its roots are used as pyschological warfare for the numbing of the masses. Culture should be the expression of society. A society that struggles because of the love for eachother. Maybe that is where the greatest beauty lies. Expressing ourselves in songs, dances and poems alone, will not leed to a free, equal and just society and yet there is a fundamental relationship between fully living culture and the struggle for freedom. So how do you experience culture? How are your ways of expressing culture linked to the history and struggle of the traditions of your society? How do you see your cultural work or expressions in the face of capitalism and power monopolies? Those are some of the questions we want to dive into in this workshop. For the workshop we would also like to invite the participants to bring poems, songs, dances or any other cultural form that reflect the culture of resistance from their history. The workshop will be lead by activists from Germany organized around the The Initiative for Democratic Confederalism https://www.i-dk.org/ and their friend from Slovenia

Fenna Joken, Hugo Peckes, Matej Kavčič