In memory of Violeta Parra, we are launching an appeal to young people around the world to create their own research groups. In 1952, Violeta Parra began collecting over 3,000 traditional peasant songs in Chile. Her children later opened a cultural centre dedicated to popular culture. This was the beginning of the Nueva canción movement, which spread throughout Abya Yala until Europe. This cultural revival developed directly within the social struggles of the time, and contributed to the emergence of the 1968 movement.
Social history, indigenous knowledge, youth resistance, local culture... We have a history to reclaim, a free life to build! For this, we call on young people around the world to set up their own research groups.
Read this call, share it with your friends, organise a discussion about it and create your group!
YOUTH RESEARCH GROUP - A proposal for every youth
Today, youth around the world face a unique set of crises: climate and ecological devastation, endless wars, extreme isolation, patriarchal attacks, and economic exploitation. The dominant system understands the reality of the youth and their potential as a vanguard of social change. They know that the youth experience intense contradictions within this system.
How can it be possible as youth to accept a system that destroy the conditions for life on earth, that annihilates society and attacks everything that give value to life?
In order to protect itself from the revolutionary solutions that these questions demand, the system develops a form of politics that severs youth from their identity. Today, it is difficult as youth to define ourselves outside of the system’s categorisations. Without identity, young people are also disconnected from history and society.
From a young age we are told that the reality of capitalism is the only possible reality, and that the alienation we live with as a result is the only possible way of living. Without an understanding of our history and an intention to build our future, we internalise and accept this empty life as being natural.
In every generation, it has been the youth who act as the vanguard of social transformation. Yet because of our current situation today’s youth are not able to fulfil this role to their full potential. We can easily be attacked by the system and manipulated into defending it.
As the Lêgerîn network, we want to change this situation and encourage youth around the world to reclaim their initiative and their revolutionary spirit. For this, we propose the idea of the “Youth Research Group”. To introduce our idea, we refer to an extract from the 8th issue of our magazine :
“In order to get to know our history and reality we should create committees which are doing research on how liberalism spread in our society. What are the cultural roots and traditions of our society? What were its values and principles and how was the daily life organized before liberalism spread, and how did liberalism spread? What is the history of women and of the resistance against the state system and liberalism? These are all questions we should find answers for to get to know the democratic history of our society. To rebuild this knowledge about our culture will strengthen us against the attacks of liberalism.
The defence of our culture and traditions against a liberalism that tries to commercialise and commodify it is also an important task. We should develop cultural works or participate in them in order to keep culture in the hands of the society. We should not leave the topic of culture to the far right! It is valuable and forms the collective memory of our societies. By talking to the old people, by knowing our family roots, by making research of our history, we will be able to understand the present and think of the future.” ~ 8th Lêgerîn Issue
Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader and ideological guide of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement, also says that: “With a false conception of history, one cannot live properly. The better we understand the development of society, the better we can build up a proper life.”
We base this idea on the meaning of ‘Lêgerîn’: “to search”. The search for freedom is the base of life and is something that every living being strives for. We must commit to the search for truth, the search for answers to the actual crisis, and the search for our identity and our roots. As youth, together with women, we are the social group best positioned to make the revolution and build a free society. To be able to fulfil this role, we must take back our identity, our historical consciousness, our culture, our knowledge and with this our direct connection with the moral values of society outside of liberalism, capitalism, and the state.
To give a structure to this necessity, we propose the creation of Youth Research Groups organised and developed autonomously by young people. These groups would focus on researching the history of youth and society in their specific local context, whether it be in their city, region, or nation.
Research subjects of these committees could be as follows:
History of youth resistance: what role did young people play in the history of revolutions, social movements, and uprisings?
What was the way of life, the traditional knowledge, the culture, the social organization in our local territories before capitalism? And what role did young people play in this society?
Today, what is still alive in terms of local culture and democratic traditions in our territory?
What is the current situation of youth inside the capitalist system? And what role do youth play today in our local society?
How does the current system attack youth? And how has the system developed and adapted its methods of attacking the youth over time?
We understand research as something far larger than the classical understanding that confines research only to the academic world. For this, there is no fixed and unique methodology that we encourage. When freed from the restrictions of positivism, research can take many different forms and must first be developed in our daily life. Research begins by asking questions to oneself and developing the desire to find answers.
We can give some examples of research practice that could be developed inside these groups:
Meeting old people and discussing with them
Going collectively to local museums and local archives
Meeting some already existing local historical or cultural research groups
Organise public discussions about the local history & culture
Meeting youth organisations that exist today and talk to them about their activities, their understanding of youth identity, their aims, the problems they faced.. etc
Organize workshops inside schools, high-schools, colleges, universities
Walk through historical places and strive to uncover unknown histories of familiar places
For diaspora youth these research groups could also be seen as a means of self-defence against the colonial dynamic of cultural assimilation developed by the nation-state. We can use this as a way of reconnecting with youth struggles both in the homeland and the diaspora.
These groups could be public, so that they can be accessible to youth interested in research. After some initial time spent researching it will be possible to start producing material such as texts, interviews, videos, documentaries, music, comics, or podcasts. The possibilities are infinite. From the base of the research other collectives can develop themselves, like music group to revive traditional music, popular theatre companies, local youth assemblies, peasant cooperatives… etc.
Based on the perspectives given by Abdullah Öcalan in Sociology of freedom we could imagine these research groups to be part of the moral, intellectual, and cultural tasks required for the reconstruction of democratic modernity¹.
Our idea is to publish one text from one of these groups in every new issue of the Lêgerîn magazine and use our website and our social media to spread the research results. The groups will be free to autonomously develop their own works and perspectives, but we imagine a confederal structure that links the different groups and opens the possibility for exchange, dialogue and common research.
We will finish with some words from Abdullah Öcalan, from the 2nd volume of the Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization :
“The heritage of the great revolutionary society of the Neolithic Age, a society adhering to the communal order and receptive to the sanctity of life, has not yet been depleted even though so much of it, both materially and morally, has been consumed by all the civilizations. This touches my heart and saddens me.
We have to embrace as our own the history of those who so heroically resisted and attacked: let us embrace this as our own history-the history of democratic civilization. Of course, we have to scrutinize this history, which has been forgotten and appropriated, and then write and claim it as our own. We should never claim the history of the puny holders of crowns and palaces, and palatial subjects who were seduced by the trimmings of civilizational crowns and betrayed the labour of the tribal poor, their resistance and rebellion, their achievements and wisdom. Without this differentiation, the history of the democratic civilization cannot be written. And if this history is not written we cannot wage a successful struggle for democracy, freedom, and equality.
History is our roots. Just as a tree cannot continue its existence without its roots, the human species cannot choose a free and honourable way of living if it doesn’t base itself on its social history. The prevailing civilizational history proclaims that there is only one history and no other. Unless we can break free from this reductionist and dogmatic notion of history, a democratic and socially conscious history cannot be developed.
It should not be presumed that the history of the democratic civilization is lacking or void of events, alliances, and institutions. On the contrary, this history abounds with the richest materials. It has a wealth equal to that of the history of the civilization: it has its own mythology, religion, philosophy, science, and arts; it has its own authors, sages, and poets. All we need to do is to acquire the skills to evaluate, select, differentiate, and write it according to our own paradigm!
I am not saying that we cannot make use of the weapons, institutions, and mentalities of the enemies and rivals. But I am saying that, in addition, we have to develop our own mentality, institutions, and weapons, and that we should base ourselves on them. If not, we can never escape being the victims of their mentality, institutions, and weapons, and becoming like them.”
~ Abdullah Öcalan “Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization – Capitalism : The Age of Unmasked Gods and Naked Kings”
We are more than interested to have your feedback, and exchange thoughts on these proposals.
Respect and revolutionary greetings,
Lêgerîn Editorial Committee
If you are interested in setting up such a group, please contact us.
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1. The theory of democratic modernity as a guide for building a new internationalism. “Intellectual tasks of a new internationalism : The World Confederation of Cultures and Academies” Academy of Democratic Modernity. democraticmodernity.com
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