The International Initiative “Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan—Peace in Kurdistan” has published the second book in Abdullah Öcalan’s five-volume work called Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization called “Capitalism: The Age of Unmasked Gods and Naked Kings” in Italian after publishing the two volumed work called “From the Sumerian Civilization to Democratic Republic”,  “the Road Map to Negotiations”, “Beyond State Power and Violence”, as well as, “Civilization: Masked Gods and Disguised Kings” ; the first volume of Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization.

“We are aware that many eagerly await the other volumes, thus we are happy to announce that the third volume of the Manifesto, “the Sociology of Freedom” will be available in 2022 Spring in Italian,” the Initiative said.

In this second volume, Öcalan shows that capitalism is not a product of the last four hundred years but a continuation of the classical civilization. He hunts down the source of hierarchy, power, monopoly and nation-state that has led to capitalism's emergence and domination first in Europe, then around the world.

Öcalan is closer to Braudel than Marx on the definition of capitalism, and he gives less importance to the mode of production than to the accumulation of surplus-value and power. The main target of his criticism is therefore the capitalist nation-state as the most powerful monopoly of economical, military and ideological power.

Öcalan notes that the fundamental strength of capitalist hegemony, however, is the competition in voluntary servitude that it has given rise to – there is not a single worker that would reject higher wages. No other system but the ideological hegemony of capitalism has had the strength to have the individual surrender this far.

Capitalism, although at the peak of globalism, he says, is really not that powerful. In fact, it may be at its weakest stage and on the brink of collapse. The crisis runs much deeper now than ever before. The renewed globalization offensive of USA is trying to control the crisis by spreading it over time and location and has declared the Middle East, main region of crisis, as a strategic war zone.

Quiet contrary to what we are continuously told the capitalist phase of city-class-state based civilization is not the last phase of the human intelligence. On the contrary, the traditional morals upon which it is based are being exhausted and the intelligence of freedom is rising in all its richness. That is why Öcalan prefers to interpret capitalist modernity as the era of hope – but the society has to develop a sustainable defense against it.

Volume II completes Öcalan’s journey through the history of civilization and the history of freedom, preparing the ground for the upcoming volume III, called “An Essay on Sociology of Freedom”.

This second volume starts with Radha D’Souza’s foreword, with an emphasis on Öcalan’s discussions on mentality, and ends with a quote from Antonio Negri’s article in “Dialogues with Öcalan—Building Free Life” PM Press): `Öcalan is a prisoner who is becoming mythical, as Mandela in the twentieth century, so he in twenty-first. He expresses a series of concepts that in the 21st century are increasingly becoming the building blocks for the political construction of a new world.  

“We hope that publishing the second volume of the Manifesto; Capitalism, in Italian encourages everyone to re-read this second volume, after all there is an urgent need for all of us who live and wage a struggle under capitalism to better understand its continuing crisis.”

https://ocalanbooks.com/#/book/la-civilta-capitalista