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Comment by cholantesh | Hacker News Reader

Might be because since 2019 and the withdrawal of the US military presence in NE Syria, the relative prosperity of Rojava has plummeted. This draws into question exactly how 'autonomous' said autonomous zone was.

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> This draws into question exactly how 'autonomous' said autonomous zone was.

It seems like you're conflating sovereignty with economic dependence, which are two distinct concepts—being entirely economic independent seems highly geographically dependent. Few regions in the world are lucky enough to even have this option. For instance, you can be economically dependent on neighbors but still locally determine who runs the local courts. So it's not great evidence of how their society is run, particularly when other states—say, Afghanistan, where the current government has clearly exercised local sovereignty—have similarly been affected by the withdrawal of US troops and the seizing of assets.

To be fair, reality can often conflate those two concepts too. What I mean is that in some cases a lack of sovereignty can lead to economic catastrophe if people are willing to pillage your economy by force. As you note it depends on circumstance though - Lichtenstein can get away without having an army; Rojava can't.

Sure, but Rojava is very specifically cited by anarchists and left-libertarians in the west as an example of a principality that's self-sustaining and capable of existing apart from global capitalism. Until 2018, evidence suggested this was true. In fact, their economy, ie, the material basis upon which their society exists (which IMO suggests that there isn't a meaningful distinction here), appears to have been scaffolded by its status as a client of the US. None of this is really true of Afghanistan. It's not cast as some kind of role model, and it has no illusions of building a successor society.

Yeah that's on of the things that get hand-wavity when you bring up these city-state type plans as well as anarcho-whatevers. They generally wouldn't be big enough to defend themselves from religious extremists or nation states acting against them--many of them not even figuring in defense against other entities and saying "we're pacifists". That kind of stuff only works when external factors like aggressive neighbors don't figure in.

I mean, if you're going to make that kind of political argument you can claim that Western Europe's postwar prosperity and relatively strong welfare states are a by-product of America footing the bill for defense (plus the seed investment of the Marshall Plan).

That, and surplus value extraction from the global south, yes.

This is downvoted maybe due to its tone but I understand the general point here to be a valid and known issue with anarchist communities?

Most models include various types of People's Militia. YPJ is the military of Rojava. Interestingly, it's a military without a hierarchy, just individual teams with some basic coordination.

Yet with this they were able to beat ISIS when others had failed.

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