Aziz Rana’s Internationalist Platform

Aziz Rana’s (2019) policy-development prescription (somewhat reformulated by me) for Justice Dems and labor organizers, as a polity-challenger coalition:

1) Labor organizing, building networks capacitating internationalist immigrant organizing leadership.

Problem: “The overwhelming tendency–and not just on the Right–is to present immigration as an issue that begins at the national border, with virtually no attention paid to the particular histories, international economic pressures, and specific US foreign policy practices that generate migration patterns” (Rana 2019).

2) Democratic budgeting exercises reworking the security state budget, to demonstrate popular capacity to democratize foreign policy, and to reintegrate foreign and domestic policy beyond the shallow, corporate-military “America First” working-class appeasement campaign.
3) Policy ideas for transitioning the US from overgrown military keynesianism on behalf of global capitalists to a wealth-circulating, democratic-tech developing, social reproductive economy appropriate to an “overdeveloped” (rentier capitalist) economy.
4) Develop trade policy with constraints on transnational property rights, linked to the domestic economy via enforced labor and environmental standards throughout supply chains, as well as policing redirected toward repatriating (sharing across production-impacted countries) excess profits and other private accumulation stockpiles.
I would add:

5) Organizing needs to address the great portions of the American working class materially and symbolically co-opted by the capitalist security state, particularly guard labor and owners of marginal businesses. These are the American working class, herded by right wing orgs and socially- subsidized into supporting global, militarized rents extractivism at the astronomical cost of global, social and environmental destabilization. Besides designing and investing in a democratic social reproductive economy to reincentivize this working class population, how can as many as possible of these co-opted working-class Americans be reorganized into supporting a transition to democracy, demilitarization, and a social reproductive economy? David Graeber’s lesson in “Army of Altruists” (2007) can be a starting point in organizing strategy: People want to work together for a great purpose.

6) Required: an assessment of policing and military capacity to tolerate v. oppose advancement to a democratic economy and polity in the US. Assessment needs to include an inventory of tools of suppression at police and military disposal.

7) Required: an assessment of the implications of US demilitarization and democratization on international investors, private and state, and their capacity to tolerate v. oppose, including an inventory of tools of suppression at their disposal.

8) Required: an assessment of antidemocratic imperial state partners’ capacity to tolerate v. oppose US demilitarization and democratization, including an inventory of tools of suppression at their disposal.

9) Note that the fight for social democracy in Sweden required that political organizers concentrate on building unions and a union confederation across the country for three decades before launching into the polity with a political party.

This planning sketch recognizes that much of finance-organized capital, as well as the conservative-Catholic US judiciary, and most of the polity are organized against democratic development. As well, it also recognizes historical structural shifts, including those identified by Rana, that can enable organizing toward stymied social, economic, and political democratic emancipation.











Building Alternatives

“To my mind, the so-called ‘socialist society’ is not anything immutable. Like all other social formations, it should be conceived in a state of constant flux and change. Its crucial difference from the present order consists naturally in production organized on the basis of common ownership by the nation… 


Engels, Letter to Otto Von Boenigk (1890).

Capital strike is a problem for working class strategy and strength, as Adam Smith, Kalecki & Sweezy keenly observed. It makes sense not just to disrupt or tear down (though certainly that, see Marx, Piven, Domhoff & Zizek), but also to build fortifications around that fundamental vulnerability, as well as to build an answer to conservatives’ play on the fear of loss. See Rudolf Meidner.

…  Jodi Dean cites Chomsky discussing the importance of working class organize-to-rule strategies, including sit down strikes, co-operative takeovers of languishing industries and economic sectors (think green technology), and a build-up of broad working class-conscicous support for such initiatives:

“In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, a multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don’t think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.” 


There is a Time for Asking, and There is a Time for Action: A warning against the fetishization of process. Strategy has to respond to conditions.

The Jacobin Spirit,” by Slavoj Zizek:

We have gone through a long period where the order’s accusation of violence, as served upon challengers, has been unassailable and final. This pacifying hegemony has almost fully infiltrated the Left.

“In the history of radical politics, violence is usually associated with the so-called Jacobin (the partisans of unity and of the struggle against factions) legacy, and, for that reason, dismissed as something that should be abandoned if we are truly to begin again. Even many contemporary (post-)Marxists are embarrassed by the so-called Jacobin legacy of centralized state terror, from which they want to distance Marx himself, proposing an authentic ‘liberal’ Marx whose thought was later obfuscated by Lenin…” (Zizek)

And yet eventually we (Leftists and conservatives, certainly. But even liberals.) have to reconcile with the fact that the order devolves into inescapable violence.

Just as violence is taboo property to us, the (terror) state is regarded as absolutely alienated from us. The logic: the state alone has legitimacy/efficiency in deploying violence, including on us; we never legitimately/efficiently use violence, yet as the order shrinks to the 1% all our (the 99%) actions, our very existences and survival, are felt as, officially declared oppositional and violent–Hence all the conservative law and extreme executive and corporate privileges. Therefore, we are absolutely alienated from the state. Violence is the unbreachable wall between us and the state.

Perhaps Zizek thinks the point of order dissolution is now. Perhaps it is (momentarily) in some places. A vigorous power-taking (surplus appropriating) strategy is thereby structurally required, and it is simply a matter of who claims that strategy, for what ends.

“This bring us to the key political point, difficult to swallow for some liberals: we are clearly dealing here not with blind market processes and reactions, but with an elaborate and well-planned (conservative) strategy — under such conditions, is not the exercise of a kind of ‘terror’ (police raids on warehouses, detention of speculators, etc.) fully justified as a defensive counter-measure? … 

The problem today is that the state is becoming more and more chaotic, failing even in its proper function of ‘servicing the goods.’ Are we still required to remain at a distance from state power when that power is itself disintegrating, and in the process resorting to obscene exercises of violence in order to mask its own impotence? 

…(As a Left response,) Even Badiou’s formula of ‘subtraction from the state’ plus ‘only reactive violence’ seems insufficient in these new conditions” (Zizek)

There comes an historical point when people have to recognize it is anachronistic, absurd, and delegitimizing (giving up legitimate power), to run around asking permission for disrupting and overthrowing the old order and building toward a new utopia (eg. a communist horizon).

“The Revolution has already decided the matter, the very fact of the Revolution means that the king is guilty, hence to put his guilt to the vote would mean casting doubt on the Revolution itself” (Zizek).  

The assumption here accords with the social movements (McAdam, Political Process) conclusion that the fact of social movement means absolute power is no more, a realization that authorizes social movement legitimacy (the social movement is performing a necessary function) and frees social movement momentum, cascade.


So far, OWS has not lost its power through asking permission, through process-oriented prefigurative politics.

That is because, even though the state is well into tyrannical “disintegration”, social movement is as yet nascent. Too many Americans, adrift, wait for elites to have a change of heart and relaunch the old liberal FDR class compromise, or, especially amongst the most powerful and their lieges, actively labor to re-establish the conservative Southern Jim Crow serfdom settlement. Most don’t imagine what’s politically possible beyond these historical tropes.

OWS still has a nascent role to play in the anticapitalist struggle, the stage after the Seattle breakthrough. That nascent role involves raising consciousness and elaborating the vision of an alternative, desirable order, as well as increasing people’s experience with collective action and socialist organization.

The role of contemporary Jacobins should be to theorize and sell the communist horizon, for the long haul. Revolution, if we’re lucky and not afraid of mobilization, organization, strategy, praxis, disruption, building alternative social structures, and intellectual work, tends to take a century of wins and losses. There will come a point when we are beyond asking permission, not to worry. I would never bother with arguing against the early-going rebels’ strategies. Nor would I dismiss the important intellectual work of setting the long-term agenda.

Direct Pressure on Israel

Noam Sheizaf’s “Ending the occupation: No way around direct pressure on Israel.” Sheizaf argues that progressive Israeli settler occupation of Palestinian land is the optimal strategy for Israel; and it will be unless there is an organized global movement, such as boycott, that puts pressure on Israel.

Such a boycott is global Leftists’ only currently-available strategy for helping Palestinians against apartheid and colonial genocide (in the Canadian sense). It will be interesting to see if a low-volume boycott is possible, and if it has any effect. The sanction against anyone attempting a high-volume boycott of Israel is enforced, and it is severe noncooperation–exclusion/shunning, black balling, job loss–considering the capitalist context, and due to the lack of an organized, alternative community that could serve as a refuge.

The only other foreseeable hope for Palestinian freedom and survival is on the tails of unpredictable shifts in geopolitical opportunity structure–for example as an unintended, secondary outcome of Chinese geopolitics and the implosion of the Anglosphere or the development of an alternative organized community within the West. Or perhaps it’s better to say that social movement strategies, such as boycott, become effective as the shifting opportunity structure aligns.

It’s a slight alteration of Marx’s 18th Brumaire truism:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under [the shifting labyrinth of] circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

My question is kind of the opposite of Walt & Meerscheim’s: Can any Leftist human community coalesce, present an opposing counterweight to, inter alia, Israeli imperial partisans? 
H1.1. Not if the Leftist community requires organizational leadership from within the Jewish community, which is already, continuously re-bound to Israel.
Q2. This then beggars the question of why there is no Leftist community in at least the Anglosphere that is not dependent upon Jewish organizational leadership or cooperation.
H1.2. Anti-communist immigration / settlement policy + state and workplace repression +  Little King politics + institutional maintenance of elite solidarity.
Q3. Can any other community present an opposing counterweight to Israeli imperial partisans? And if not, why not?
H1.3. We know that Britain managed (tribal? nomadic? low-social organization and low-network connectivity?) Middle East and N. Africa by distributing Saudi family members into autocratic, surplus-monopolizing leadership positions across the new states, a strategy designed precisely so that people in that territory cannot coalesce in opposition to the imperial, oil- and finance-controlling UK-US bloc.

Social movement strategy: An example of the thoroughness of pro-Israeli discipline in the US.

The coincidence of these factors in achieving organization is apparently decisive:

1) Capital (ownership of economic surplus)
2) Strategic alliances with global capitalist hegemons (ie UK, US)
3) Iron-clad socially- and economically-enforced discipline based on an identity legitimate within capitalism: ethnic-religious identity, not Left political identity. Uneven distribution of legitimate strategic repertoires: In the capitalist Anglosphere, Left discipline is attacked, internally and externally, as “communist totalitarianism”; whereas ethno-religious discipline is invisible, regarded as a sacred right. Effectiveness example: Dershowitz et al’s disciplinary force moved Finklestein from a critical to a pro-Zionist political position.
4) Internal-external boundary reinforcement; reliable, targeted incentives.