“Socialism passes through the liberation of women.” How many times has each of us heard and read these words of the Leadership? We constantly repeat this stated truth in our lives as a reality none of us disputes and whose correctness we know.

Yet a truth does not come alive merely by being spoken; it comes alive only when it is put into practice and lived. Life is a process of becoming that flows through time, and time exists within that becoming. Then your life is all the states of becoming that you fit within it. Sociology is the form of relationship you establish by coming together with the other—a necessity of existence that, in that state of becoming, gives you consciousness, understanding, form, conduct and movement. You now exist; a reality that expresses you has taken shape. The first state of that becoming is the reality into which you are born, founded on an awareness of sustaining life. What makes the human being a social being is how the thing called life is to be lived by humanity. Through socialization and reliance on the fundamental supports of this social form of life, humanity grounds the sociology of socialist organization in the human essence that exists in and of itself. Humanity's longest beginning was communal organization. Just as being an individual exists within human existence, understanding life begins with being an individual. The individual's knowledge of self comes from reliance on the nature into which one is born as well as on the mother who gives birth. Knowing begins with recognizing the nature into which you were born. In other words, it begins by knowing and learning the social nature of the mother in whom you first opened your eyes. You begin to know within yourself that the vitality of nature and the mother is the vitality of life. You exist, you are alive, you live, and what is needed to live and how to live become your search for meaning. The respect you feel for this vitality and this life, and the meaning you give and will give it, become your approach to the life that gave birth to you and brought you into being. You are an extension of nature; you did not come into existence by yourself or spontaneously. You had a first cause, and you came into being from it. Every one of us came into existence through the being of a woman, a mother. At the first beginning, the woman-mother was the one who created and gave life, but in a period when history began with writing, her freedom and her body were seized. How and to what extent can the being or beings that an unfree being creates from herself—from her body—be free? The nine months of a fetus's development in the womb are likened to the stages in which our universe came into being. It can also be observed that after birth and until the child moves beyond maternal care, the child carries within itself the entire essence of humanity's first stages. At birth, when the umbilical cord linking child and mother is cut, the fact that the child remains dependent on the mother's care, love and education has preserved itself in every age as an essence that never disappears from the truth that the human being is a social being. Although the child ceases at a certain age to be dependent on the mother, its existence comes from her. It is our mother who socializes us, nourishes us, educates us and raises us. We learn social truth from that first essence. The child wants to know, learn, recognize and try. It wants to test and apply what it has learned, acquired and sought to understand. Before colliding with the boundaries of the state, the child's initial state—pure, clean, simple and honest, with its trust, preferences, curiosity and development—is adorned with the socialist life of the primordial communal society of the mother, which we call natural society. Although the society in which a mother raises her child within today's nation-state borders is founded upon her own enslavement, it carries within itself the magnificent accumulated processes of the essential social values that still exist. When the child begins to move beyond the world bounded by the mother, and as it encounters the mother's circumstances and society, its contradictions accumulate, its questions multiply, its freedoms are restricted and its fears increase; it now faces another manner of upbringing by the mother. The mother begins to add yet another individual to a society in which she herself is not free, and to its dominant, oppressive, sexist, nationalist, selfish and individualistic system. Just as the story of each of us breaks here, so too does the story of the world. We encounter the reality of a woman who is not even aware that the society into which she brings her child is one that has been taken away from her. Because she has been convinced, and continues to believe, that the society in which she raises her child is the only reality she knows and has existed from eternity to eternity, she tries to convince her child of the same. Nevertheless, in the culture of maternal society that formed the first socialization, the essence that has not wholly broken away from what created this culture, though only twenty-five percent of it remains, is preserved through the natural bond established between mother and child during the first stage of upbringing. The first stem cell that comes from communal society shows, in the mother-child dialectic, that what exists does not disappear and what does not exist cannot come into being. The Leadership became aware or conscious of this in childhood. To create the same awareness in us, he has repeatedly recounted in his analyses his own childhood and the contradictions he experienced with his mother. Even in childhood he saw as a fundamental contradiction the reality that when the society of a nation is not free, the woman within it has been lost, overturned and deprived of selfhood. He organized and built the PKK, which he founded for the Kurdish people's national liberation struggle, on this basic mentality. As the Leadership took the first step toward the freedom problem of the Kurds, a people with a national freedom problem, he sensed in childhood that the historical fundamental contradiction in the freedom problem of a nation, a society, a culture or identities became a problem through the enslavement of women. He analyzed that the freedom of the Kurdish people passes through the freedom of women, that the problem of freedom is deeper than the problems of equality and justice, that the freedom of societies will be secured through women's liberation, and that this can occur only through the union of sociology and socialism. As a historical thesis within the democratic-society paradigm, he demonstrated that the enslavement of women and the statist society of caste hierarchy woven around that enslavement arose as a consequence of usurping socialist life, the values of communal society. Sociology and socialism, intertwined throughout social history, have been separated as far as possible by capitalist modernity's nation-state paradigm.

What is the relationship between sociology and socialism? Why is socialism the most accurate sociology? Answering, or trying to answer, these questions correctly will enable us to understand and implement more effectively the democratic-society process in which we find ourselves. The human being is a social being. The question of why the human being is social can be approached from several directions. Did humanity socialize because human beings are weak compared with other species in nature, because of the necessary conditions of survival, or because their biological structure makes socialization natural and necessary? Or are these and still more views all valid explanations of socialization? The sociological social organization of humanity and the relationships formed through cultural values have shaped life. In this sense, socialism plays an important role in the birth of sociology and is what ought to be. Humanity's first organization was democratic, socialist and communal—that is, ethical and political. The world of meaning that makes the human being human was organized along socialist lines. The sharing and relationship established with the other, the will toward continuity and sustaining life that exists in all beings, is existential. Being part of nature, the bond coming from nature and the intrinsic consciousness of freedom gained strength through socialization. Production and sharing together, along with the division of work and duties, generated a form of organization arising from collective production and collective sharing; based on joint decision-making, it produced a style of administration that implemented the best, the most workable and the most possible. This tendency in the division of work and duties, grounded in everyone's ability, strength, skill and assumption of responsibility, rests upon individuals' talents and skills making life more beautiful and developing it. There is no condition such as being unemployed, powerless or untalented, or simply refusing to act. The understanding of economy, politics and administration is based on harmony with nature and a mentality of communal life. Because the democratic socialism of social humanity is society's longest historical sociology, it became the first cause of the modernity of every age as ages changed through inheritance. With the caste structure's transition to statist society, aristocratic rulers who constructed a caste-based mentality imposed an elitism of power above society as sociology through divine power, their ideology of eternity. From that day to this, this sociology has infiltrated society's entire accumulation of values and assumed many forms, widening the distance between socialism and sociology. As a result, society's first values and its foundational sociology are the fundamental building blocks of democratic modernity.

In every age, different proposed solutions emerge for society's problems. Some solutions are based on particular values, while others turn toward new values and understandings. The modernity of each age contains the sociological dynamics that determine how societies are organized, how people relate to one another, the importance of values and social conduct. These dynamics contribute to the emergence of modernity. Within the modernity that emerges concealed in the dynamics of society, capitalist capital gives an important role to private property, individual gain and competition. The nation-state's central authority in particular is used to control the economy. In capitalist modernity, state authority grows stronger and the concept of the nation-state becomes pronounced. The ideology assigned to this concept is brought to the fore through emphases on freedom, equality and justice. Individuality is emphasized, and people are encouraged to pursue economic opportunities. As the nation-state's central authority becomes a stronger structure under capitalist modernity, the emphasis on individuality increases still further. This individuality weakens relationships within society and reduces or eliminates sociality. In no age did an emphasis on freedom severed from freedom itself create a central authority as powerful as the nation-state under capitalist modernity. Whereas caste-aristocratic structures once manipulated social dynamics through divine power, in capitalist modernity the ideological manipulation of the nation-state turns society into voluntary slaves. At the beginning, caste dynasties that created the state through divine power upon the creations of communal sociology capitalized the age's tendency toward democratic modernity by building the nation-state and appropriated it for their own ideology. By absorbing social values into fields of power against society, they continue through the construction of mentality to strip social sanctities of their essence and to weave and expand those fields. The dynasty of caste, the family's center of domination and the domains controlled by a group or groups have always produced fields of power. The socialist struggle waged against capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries set out with the claim that it would remove social values from capitalism's domain of domination and return them to society. Yet while seeking to bring socialism to completion by constructing a class-based socialist nation-state in place of capitalism's class-based nation-state, the caste mentality lying hidden in the fields of power and domination ensured the central continuity of the nation-state. A socialism that produced class-based power was unable to reveal the modernity of democratic-communalist sociology.

The Kurdish sociology and democratic-modernity paradigm revealed by the PKK's reality of leadership, together with the axis of social struggle in the accumulated socialist values that have reached the present day, have always been the unchanging essence of life's dialectic. From the conditions of its initial emergence to the present, the Apoist Communalist Comradeship Movement, as a democratic-socialist movement, has met change and transformation through analysis based on criticism and self-criticism, in the light of the Leadership's Manifesto for a Democratic Society. The process of democratic society and the effort to read and understand the Leadership's Manifesto for a Democratic Society have entered their second year. As a socialist movement, the construction of the socialist personality has been the PKK's greatest legacy. Yet the construction of a socialist personality nevertheless requires struggle and continuity. Although we have tried to explain it above, the fact that human sociology has a socialist essence does not mean it cannot change. When a tendency that turns from the accumulated first-existing essence into its opposite becomes denial-based oppression and usurpation, the sphere of freedom narrows, and conduct deriving from these conditions creates a caste or aristocratic sociology. From the contradiction between commune and state to the present, this sociology recreates itself again and again within society's dynamics. When we consider the Leadership's statement that sociology and socialism must now meet, it may also mean understanding that the historical dialectical method, which has been approached through class contradiction, must be freed from the interpretation that opposites must necessarily destroy or replace one another. Because the commune is the social form of the mother-woman, the values formed there and their structural functionality underwent structural change through the enslavement and appropriation of woman and the society she had created. The murderous caste structure took the form of the state and became a form above society. Society, which was free when women were free and lost its freedom through women's enslavement, gains functionality through the structural transformation of social values. Since the fundamental values of socialism—freedom, equality, justice and social solidarity—are the basic dynamic of structural transformation in every age's social change and transformation, we can say that sociology is also socialism. In the name of society, these structural-functional dynamics are distorted through discourses founded on society's freedom, prosperity and security, and placed at the service of the sphere of power belonging to the central authority of caste-aristocratic structures, grounded in political and economic interests. The struggle against capitalism underwent such a process through nation-state modernity. Central authority does not disappear merely through class contradiction or through classes exchanging places. The social dynamic can close the distance that has opened by giving sociological functionality to socialism's fundamental concepts.

The enormous accumulation developing in science, in the positive sense, gives society perspective on its knowledge. Incorrectly constructed knowledge bends the axis of struggle against capitalist modernity toward capitalism's interests. The saying that a wrong life cannot be lived rightly gains importance here. A society whose woman is enslaved cannot ignore that life cannot be lived rightly after the first wrong, in any age, and can never be lived rightly under capitalism's liberal conception of freedom. Through continuous great labor, sacrifice and cost, the obscured history of humanity carried society's essential dynamic into this age. The cumulative experience of this historical heritage took shape in the PKK, which has completed half a century. The Kurdish question, which compressed into half a century its struggle against five thousand years of caste-based, centralist, dominant and society-destroying mentality, was analyzed in depth in the reality of the PKK through the Leadership's democratic-modernity paradigm. During a freedom struggle that continued without interruption for half a century, it did not wage only the freedom war of an oppressed and colonized nation; it fought the obstacle standing before the freedom, first of all, of women, nations, the oppressed, faiths, nature and living beings in nature. Calling the one who knew this best a pioneer, a revolutionary or a devoted person required a memory, and the accumulation within this memory developed on the basis of continuity, belief and trust coming from the essence. Our Leadership, the true child of the mother goddess, strengthened society's dynamics through democratic modernity's construction of a democratic-nation mentality: socialist struggle cannot be confined to a single state, and the problem of freedom cannot be eliminated by multiplying it with yet another state.

Like the freedom fighters who joined the PKK, the society from which the PKK emerged and our people were influenced and strengthened by the Leadership's socialist personality and by the culture created by the tradition of resistance that this personality revealed. At first, a great many of us did not possess a theoretical command of the concept of socialism or of the life meant to be created around it, nor did our people possess much such command. Even if socialism was not known as a concept, the people and militants practically saw and knew that the harmony of demand and attitude they saw in the Leadership and in the movement he represented, which concerned them directly, and the simplicity of conduct and implementation were socialism; what was called socialism was in fact understanding and applying the Leadership, and if such a life was to exist, this was the life that ought to be. Our people's boundless trust in and great commitment to the Leadership did not arise only because he had emerged from among the people; it also encompassed his uninterrupted, continuous and breathless implementation, and his making others implement, for half a century without change, the answer to how the honorable life he set forth in the initial period should be lived. For fifty years, together with and among the people, from the first leading cadres to the fighter who joins today, the realization of what the struggle requires—who one is, why one set out, for whom one set out, what is needed for this, what one will do and what one must do—has taken place together with our people and before their eyes. Just like the first leading cadre at the beginning and every candidate who later joined, our people learn about this Leadership and the socialist life and modernity he created within the struggle and try to apply them. Thus, the PKK may be a party, but the reality of the PKK has always been a social freedom movement beyond being merely a party in the conventional sense. This arises from the social personality of the Leadership's reality. The Leadership's book Insistence on Socialism Is Insistence on Being Human, which can be counted among the first works, knows from the depth of its analysis of historical society and social truth why socialism must be insisted upon, and that the sociological reality of individual and society can be understood within socialism. Just as the Leadership's reality was not formed by knowledge-based knowing alone, it arose as the total reality of the whole through consistent practice in the way of life that constitutes this reality. Even on the island of İmralı, he conveys to us through examples, always and everywhere, how the democratic-socialist way of life that he applies, lives and seeks to create is to be lived. He explains that knowing how life should be lived, or even imagining that one lives it, is not enough on its own; under every condition, at every time and place, in every duty and responsibility, and whatever position and responsibility the people give and entrust to you, and whoever you may be, socialist life and conduct must not bend, nor can the grounds on which they might bend be left exposed. Every cadre, militant and guerrilla of this social movement, and indeed the entire Kurdish people, knows the way of life of the Leadership's reality. He does not merely explain how labor and values should be approached; he himself applies what is necessary in the best and most deserving way, and teaches in that manner. We know that he feels great anger toward those who know but do not apply, who see but do not understand, and who show no respect because it does not suit their interests. If we return to our first days of participation and training, while training strengthened our understanding of and respect for life, the reality of the Leadership and the life examples of the martyred comrades among its leading cadres were narrated and studied to teach what a socialist personality was and how to become one. If today we still address the reality of the Leadership and the reality of the martyred comrades like a creed of socialist personality, we must view it not merely as the accumulation of knowledge through learning and development but as one aspect of strengthening the respect for life in knowledge that has not yet been made living reality. From the Leadership's meeting notes, we know what books he reads, what time he goes to sleep and gets up, how he spends his time, what he wears, and even that anything beyond need is wasteful—from the stitch he placed in his coat to his use of both sides of the napkin in his hand. Proceeding from all this, we know that the examples of frugality we heard from comrades who stayed with the Leadership in the Leadership's field were not merely examples of frugality; they were a teaching that demonstrated the consciousness and will to live and apply continually what one believes and says. When I was a new fighter, one recollection related by comrades who had lived with the Leadership was especially similar to the example of the coat the Leadership stitched and continued to wear. A pair of socks that the Leadership wore constantly had become so worn and had been stitched so many times that one day a woman comrade took them and threw them away so that the Leadership would no longer wear them. When he could not find his socks, the Leadership began looking for them, and the woman comrade who had discarded them had to tell him what she had done. The Leadership explained and taught that despite everything, the socks could still be worn, that they had been bought with the sweat of the people, and that this must not be forgotten. This knowing, learning, attitude and conduct must determine our practice just as it develops and strengthens socialism and our socialist theory.

This movement's training has never stopped, nor has it ever been interrupted because of conditions. Even during more than ten years of continuous, uninterrupted and extremely intense warfare, training was never suspended. Indeed, military and ideological training was developed more systematically and broadly than in any other period. Fifty years of struggle-filled resistance created a sociality composed of thousands of fighters. From a colonized society and from women and men raised with the psychology of oppression and without freedom, the Leadership built a socialist sociology. From a society and individuals unable to define who they were and left without definition, he built a mentality of free thought. From our own experience, we know that coming from a society in which we could not be ourselves, it is not at all easy to determine with whom and how to build the freedom struggle one will wage for oneself. The Leadership developed the educational method, way of life and form of relationship founded on knowing oneself, knowing how one will live and knowing how to fight with that knowledge. He developed the attitudes and conduct—that is, the ethics, rejections and acceptances—of the relationship we will establish with one another, with the opposite sex and with nature, and of respect for all values formed around these relationships. As I said before, we strengthened and developed our knowledge through hearing, seeing and living our earliest lessons and by learning from lived examples. Why, then, do we think that today, despite all this developing knowledge and accumulated experience, we have regressed where we should have grown stronger in developing individuals with will and respect? Since the reason is not a lack of education, temporariness, which divides life into periods, exerts a powerful influence on the becoming of each of us: the place in which a person positions oneself and the assumption of responsibility have not developed; one does not see oneself as the organization, does not see the will to take ownership of life, does not imagine the life one wishes to build, and does not really know how one lives the life one is living. In the past we learned what we wanted and lived accordingly; now, knowing what we want but failing to do what it requires creates centralist power relations in which a calculating and temporary style of relationship that puts the self first does not multiply the will. The Leadership says that respect for women is socialism. On what basis has respect for women developed, or on what basis should it develop? How respect for women should be established and what it should mean become important. As socialist relations multiply, structure and functionality multiply; they move beyond temporary balances of power and become institutionalized. If free relations remain limited, are considered sufficient, and do not spread or multiply, respect for women is established within a relationality of temporary power and balance-emotion. If the semantic content of dignity and respect is established according to the point from which one looks, it means that it has not been constructed within the dynamic of the existential essence. Looking at the reality of the Leadership and how it is lived contains very important examples and answers. While building what is sought to be brought into being, the reality of the Leadership expanded a multiplication grounded in the consciousness of developing and broadening the strength that rests on the essence. The dignity that is expanded is what is gained through the multiplication and accumulation of strength. The dignity that is created rests on the existing reality one represents. While the dignity that each woman establishes in her own way is one thing, the dignity she cannot develop within herself affects the whole. Dignity in the approach to women exists to the extent that it represents the values of socialist life. If this remains weak, then we do not assign the same meanings to equality, freedom, justice—that is, conscience—which are socialism's fundamental concepts, or to communalist concepts. Concepts and the methods of applying them must not be stretched. Of course, it is important here not to fall into crude materialism. Making socialism structural and functional requires struggle throughout life's continual states of becoming.

Revolutionary greetings and respect.

Berbihiv Amed