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Feeding the Body Politic

On society as a somatic being

Anna Mercury
8 min readDec 14, 2024
Photo by Sara Darcaj on Unsplash

A friend of mine went to Rojava several years ago and came back bubbling over about the thickness of society. Officially the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, Rojava is a multi-ethic, multi-religious region of some 4.5 million people that began carving out its autonomy during the Syrian Civil War. Since 2013, the region has become renown for practicing arguably the most radical direct democracy that exists anywhere on the planet today.

When my friend said society there was thick, she was referring to a palpable sense of community and mutual care that seemed to permeate all aspects of civil society and daily life. It seemed to her that people genuinely felt responsible, not only for one another, but for maintaining the wellbeing of the collective whole. It seemed that social action was not divorced from individual life, that the line between individual and collective care had blurred.

She ascribed this, in part, to the spirit of the revolution: that people there really believed in the kind of democratic, egalitarian society they were building, believed their participation in it was vital, believed creating such a society was truly possible. Beyond the spirit, there was also the structure: many commentators on Rojava have pointed to its practice of grassroots, participatory democracy…

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Anna Mercury
Anna Mercury

Written by Anna Mercury

Animist anarchist, trying to write a new world with the ashes of the old | www.allgodsnomasters.com

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