Domesticated Criticism

Rastinews — "Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com'è, bisogna che tutto cambi"

In Lampedusa's celebrated novel The Leopard, as Sicily's ancient aristocracy is shaken to its foundations, the young and ambitious Tancredi whispers a startling piece of advice to his uncle, Prince Salina: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

Spoken on the threshold of an approaching upheaval, the line points to an old paradox aimed at preserving a system. For Tancredi, "change" meant no genuine transformation. It meant absorbing the new wave while carrying old privileges forward in different forms. Political authorities have long reached for this same maneuver in moments of crisis — smothering a rising wave's energy through a fake transformation — as one of their safest harbors.

For political organizations, structural crisis is, in one sense, not a matter of practical error but a radical rupture between theoretical ground and social reality. When that rupture hits, political authority tends to strip outside criticism of its transformative substance and turn it into an apparatus of restoration that reinforces the system instead.

It may be useful to name this technique — one that gains traction as systemic crises deepen — "restorative criticism."

This licensed form of criticism draws its motivation not from genuine transformation but from the moments of relief politics needs. Restorative criticism keeps its eye on political authority, waits for the right moment to "intervene," and steps in precisely when politics needs to be seen criticizing itself. Rather than touching structural causes, it repairs the flaws that spill into view, serving the system's continuity. By domesticating criticism — rendering it harmless to the system — this approach papers over root problems with surface fixes and confines the crisis to a temporary repair zone.

Vague calls for "radical purification" rising from that repair zone act as a kind of filtration device, rather than addressing the source of the murky water. This filtering approach detaches the problem from its structural roots and drags it onto the ground of individual morality, opening an artificial reckoning meant to soothe both the crisis and the conscience. The technique also hands political authority a controlled space for "self-criticism," making it sustainable. By fixing attention on outcomes while veiling the real source — showing the smoke and hiding the fire — this illusion only reinforces the very mechanism that produces the problems.

This conceptual illusion surfaces just as strikingly in debates over Kurdish politics. A common tendency avoids touching the political and ideological impasses of the dominant Kurdish movement, or prefers to argue only over surface outcomes. Yet a political movement whose primary fuel comes from the dynamics of a colonized nation is judged by its capacity to convert national and collective demands into legal and political gains. Dissolving those rights and demands into a vague pool of abstract, loosely defined discourse — "brotherhood of peoples," "democratic nation," "integration" — is not a temporary bottleneck. It points to a preference for statelessness, one with its own functional machinery already built. Ample information and documentation back up this strategic choice. A movement that shifts its survival strategy away from concrete, measurable goals such as political sovereignty and legal status, toward a utopian plane, inevitably breaks from politics' real balance of power and collapses inward.

The Rojava experience stands as the closest example of what this strategic shift has cost on the ground. By converting real political opportunities into a fiction of "universal" or "regional saviorhood," this style of politics functions not as an engine producing gains but as a brake mechanism pulling national energy into a colonial wheel. Here is where the mechanism intersects with our argument: to the extent that this brake blocks energy from reaching outward gains, it turns inward and drives bureaucratic decay as well. Political drift and ethical erosion are organically linked. Once an ideological organization breaks from rational political ground and collapses inward, it stops being a tool serving collective interests and turns into an end in itself, aimed at protecting its own privileges and comfort zone. With its energy for vital political goals blocked, loyalty to a personality cult replaces the standard of collective success, and the survival of the organizational apparatus replaces social priorities.

The cases of structural violence that have surfaced publicly in recent days, and the "whitewashing reports" that obscure who was responsible for them, stand out as the sharpest examples of this structural decay. Where collective goals are absent, transparency and social oversight erode; where merit is absent, ethical standards erode with it. The macro-level political collapse seen in the Rojava case and the micro-level ethical collapse now on display feed each other. A body that turns rigid and unwieldy by positioning itself against historical and social reality is bound to breed disease within its own tissue. The corruption on display, then, is not a simple malfunction in the system's workings — it is the structural outcome of a paradigmatic design that has smothered Kurdish national dynamism.

Despite this tangled picture, the restorative critic who steps in at precisely this threshold avoids questioning the crisis's underlying causes. By debating only surface outcomes, that critic severs the causal link between strategic "aimlessness" at the macro level and ethical decay at the micro level.

In short, this tame intervention — which detaches the problem from its root causes and reduces it to individual or managerial failings, or to purely external factors — confines the systemic crisis to the repair zone described above, making the structural source of the problem untouchable by the very hand of "criticism."