I just found out about this guy today, and after a cursory look into his work, I thought of your post because it seems he is potentially covering this kind of thing, Prof. Oliver Boyd-Barrett. This page lists the courses he teaches as “The Political Economy of Mass Communication”, “The Political Economy of Hollywood and the Press”, and “Media Representation and Propaganda in Times of War and Terror”. And when I looked him up he has books titled (for example) “Media Imperialism”, “Approaches to Media”, “Conflict Propaganda in Syria: Narrative Battles”, “Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis: A Study in Conflict Propaganda”.

Considering that I only just now found out about him, I can’t exactly vouch for his work, but he wrote this 2021 article about Ukraine which is how I found him.

Ultimately it means meet/talk with other people and engage in planning and work to accomplish something together, whether that thing is big or small.

Easiest thing to do is look around for people who are already organized, e.g., a party or other org focused on a particular issue. IMO if someone has no experience with organizing whatsoever, then they can benefit from joining almost anything, even something run by liberals, anarchists, etc., just simply to see what kind of dynamics are at play when people are trying to work together to accomplish something. A lot of orgs and such are not easy to find online. It’s better to just go to protests and demonstrations or to community projects and start meeting people and learning about what they are doing by word of mouth. People who are involved in organizing are typically going to be open to teaching/involving new people. A demonstration is the kind of place where people are purposely trying to educate and involve the public. Just don’t come across as a cop and be wary that some people trying to involve you in things might be cops themselves lol. Approach groups with a critical eye, join a small-scale/low-risk org whose goals you support to learn about the practical dynamics of how organizing works and to build up a network of acquaintances and friends, and keep learning from there. Trying to organize something from scratch with no experience is possible but if you don’t have a clear idea of what you’re doing nor have a group of other people who are keen and intrinsically motivated to work on the goal, it’s going to be pretty difficult.

When reading books written in the imperial core, about the enemies/targets of imperialist nations, I would keep this in mind:

Former CIA case officer John Stockwell: Well for example, in my war, the Angola war, that I helped to manage, one third of my staff was propaganda. […] We would take stories which we would write and put them in the Zambia Times, and then pulled them out and sent them to a journalist on our payroll in Europe. But his cover story, you see, would be what he had gotten from his stringer in Lusaka, who had gotten them from the Zambia Times. We had the complicity of the government of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda if you will, to put these false stories into his newspapers. But after that point, the journalists, Reuters and AFP, the management was not witting of it. Now, our contact man in Europe was. And we pumped just dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists–in one case we had the Cuban rapists caught and tried by the Ovimbundu maidens who had been their victims, and then we ran photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country of the Cubans being executed by the Ovimbundu women who supposedly had been their victims.

Interviewer: These were fake photos?

Stockwell: Oh, absolutely. We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists, you know eating babies for breakfast and the sort. Totally false propaganda.

Interviewer: John, was this sort of thing practiced in Vietnam?

Stockwell: Oh, endlessly. A massive propaganda effort in Vietnam in the '50s and in the '60s, including the thousand books that were published–several hundred in English–that were also propaganda books sponsored by the CIA. Give some money to a writer, “Write this book for us, write anything you want, but on these matters, make sure, you know, you have this line.”

Interviewer: Writers in this country? Books sold and distributed in this culture?

Stockwell: Sure. Yeah. English language books, meaning an American audience as a target, on the subject of Vietnam and the history of Vietnam, and the history of Marxism, and supporting the domino theory, et cetera.

Interviewer: Without opening us up to a lawsuit, could you name one of them?

Stockwell: No, I could not. The Church Committee, when they found this out, demanded that they be given the titles so that the university libraries could at least go and stamp inside “Central Intelligence Agency’s version of history,” and the CIA refused because it’s been commissioned to protect its sources and methods, and the sources would be the authors who wrote these false propaganda books, some of whom are now distinguished scholars and journalists.

Source (video interview)

Also note:

• It’s a recognized problem in south Korea that “time and time again, conservative outlets and foreign media circulate and reproduce rumors [about DPRK] based on questionable sources … retractions and apologies are rarely ever provided when the reports are shown to be false” and “Sometimes, the South Korean government itself has been the epicenter of false reports … The situation has been made worse by defector groups aggressively proliferating claims from unverified ‘North Korean sources,’ as if attempting to draw attention to themselves.”

• South Korea’s national intelligence service (NIS) forges documents to frame people and tortures them into false confessions as well as pays defectors for sensational stories and harasses and silences people who say positive things about DPRK (and takes away their passports so they can’t go back, even when they came to south Korea against their will)

• UN human rights researchers who have worked directly with defectors from DPRK have written about how testimonies are made unreliable by cash incentives paid by the NIS and other organizations: “North Korean refugees are well aware of what the interviewer wants to hear. … The more terrible their stories are, the more attention they receive. The more international invitations they receive, the more cash comes in. It is how the capitalist system works: competition for more tragic and shocking stories. … In my 16 years of studying North Korean refugees, I have experienced numerous inconsistent stories, intentional omission and lies. I have also witnessed some involved in fraud and other illicit activities. In one case the breach of trust was so significant that I could not continue research.”

Edit: So, to summarize – Former CIA case officers have discussed how they pay academics and journalists to write thousands of books about foreign communist enemies that contain whatever content the author wants as long as it pushes certain specific lines; the CIA regularly plants false stories into foreign newspapers and gets them circulated around; the NIS (formerly the “KCIA”, formed on the US-backed side during the Korean War to combat communists) is known to forge documents, extract false confessions, pay people to lie or embellish to the point that mainstream south Korean liberal media and UN researchers say it’s making it too hard to tell what’s true; defectors with sensational stories receive payments and get book deals and international speaking tours while people with positive things to say get arrested and surveilled by intelligence agencies…So, keep that info in mind as you consider what’s going on with these books.

Regarding your announcement–thank you OP for starting up this project, I looked forward to it each week that it went on, and appreciated seeing everyone’s reflections on the texts. I also liked the simple format and gradual pace. I hope everything works out well with your IRL needs and commitments. Take care!

My study response–As last week I found myself unable to answer the study questions quickly enough, I am going to go with a bit more of a free-form response this time so I don’t end up taking too long to participate. And since I barely participated last thread, I’m just going to make my reply this time be about the text as a whole.

If anyone sees errors in my response, please let me know. I’m not trying to write authoritatively but rather to check my understanding and see whether I can summarize a few of the major points.

Thanks again OP, I’m glad you started this study group.

1. What is the difference between “Labour” and “Labour Power”?

I believe the distinction here is that labor is the action of laboring/working itself, while labor power is what Marx explains as a commodity that the laborer sells to the capitalist, which I think is the laborer’s potential/capacity for labor. The unique quality of labor power that makes it different from other commodities is that it is able to generate more value than it possesses on its own. I still feel uncertain about how to fully describe the difference between the concepts of labor and labor power, however.

And…Once again, I’m short on time, so I will have to try answering more later!

I did the reading, but haven’t had time to type up a reply yet unfortunately. Hoping to have some time soon!

This is another one that I haven’t read before so I’m glad it’s the next one we’re covering. My weak point in understanding theory has also mainly been around the more detailed economic side. I often have some trouble understanding Marx’s writing style, but I think the introduction by Engels helped me better understand some of the things that I’ve felt my understanding was lacking in.

In particular I found this passage helpful:

In the present state of production, human labour-power not only produces in a day a greater value than it itself possesses and costs; but with each new scientific discovery, with each new technical invention, there also rises the surplus of its daily production over its daily cost, while as a consequence there diminishes that part of the working-day in which the labourer produces the equivalent of his day’s wages, and, on the other hand, lengthens that part of the working-day in which he must present labour gratis to the capitalist.

In the next paragraph he states: “[the portion of value] which the capitalist class retains, and which it has to share, at most, only with the landlord class, is increasing with every new discovery and invention, while the share which falls to the working class (per capita) rises but little and very slowly, or not at all, and under certain conditions it may even fall”.

Again, like one of the quotes that stuck out to me from our previous reading, I feel like it helped my understanding when the focus was put on the big picture. Sometimes the more detailed explanations about how value is generated get me thinking only about how this affects the worker in particular, and forgetting to think about how it affects the entire proletariat and bourgeoisie’s development as classes. Of course the details are necessary to understand the whole larger concept, but I think these quotes helped keep my understanding on track.

I also appreciated these lines at the end of the introduction: “This condition becomes every day more absurd and more unnecessary. It must be gotten rid of; it can be gotten rid of. A new social order is possible […] there will be the means of life, of the enjoyment of life, and of the development and activity of all bodily and mental faculties, through the systematic use and further development of the enormous productive powers of society, which exists with us even now”.

I don’t have more time today, so sorry if this post seems kind of disorganized, but those are my main thoughts. Looking forward to next week’s thread.

I made a comment touching on this topic recently: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/320572/comment/249005

An excerpt of my post:

Puberty blocking medicine has been in use already for about 40 years, for children who start their puberty too early. Now it can also be used for children who, upon beginning puberty, start experiencing or continue to experience gender dysphoria. The medicine is not used on children who have not begun puberty.

Once usage stops, puberty will resume. “It’s more like a pause. If we stop the medicine, puberty can restart,” says Dr. Cartaya. She adds that once it begins again, the body will go through puberty that’s associated with the sex assigned at birth. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-are-puberty-blockers/

Children can go off these blockers and resume their natural puberty when they want to, or, when they are a bit older (I believe in the U.S., it’s after 16) they may start hormone therapy that gives them the opposite sex’s hormones.

The article linked above notes: “Puberty blockers are generally safe when used on a short-term basis. They’ve even been used to treat conditions like prostate cancer, breast cancer and endometriosis.”

The main ill effect of puberty blockers is that it can limit bone mineral density, so the child’s doctor will monitor the child’s vitamin D levels and make sure they receive enough calcium.