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!

Yes, the US is purposely starving the world.

Yep. I doubt you’ll care to read the following but I’m putting it here for others to see.

The United States is the world leader in imposing economic sanctions and supports sanctions regimes affecting nearly 200 million people. … Targeted countries experience economic contractions and, in many cases, are unable to import sufficient essential goods, including essential medicines, medical equipment, infrastructure necessary for clean water and for health care, and food. … While on paper most sanctions have some humanitarian exemptions for food, necessary medicines and medical supplies, in practice these exemptions are not sufficient to ensure access to these goods within the targeted country. (Center for Economic and Policy Research)

It’s well known that sanctions are ineffective for pressuring governments, but very effective at waging siege warfare by starving and killing ordinary citizens by disease and infrastructural failures. Continuing to use sanctions in this way and to this extent, when this is well known, is definitely “purposely starving the world”. An independent expert appointed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in 2019 that US sanctions violate human rights and international code of conduct and can lead to starvation. Why does the US continue to be the world leader in imposing sanctions, increasing its use of sanctions by 933% over the last 20 years, when this is well known? It’s because they know the effect, and they’re doing it on purpose.

We can also look at some US internal memorandums from before it was more politically incorrect to talk about starving people in other countries. In 1960, U.S. officials wrote that creating “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship” through denying money and supplies to Cuba would be a method they should pursue in order to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government” in Cuba.

In other countries, we see a pattern of US officials and US-backed institutions purposely denying aid and loans to governments they don’t approve of, and then suddenly approving aid and opening up loans when a coup brings a leader they’re happy with into power. When Ghana was requesting aid under an administration that the West’s bourgeoisie didn’t like, U.S. officials said this: “We and other Western countries (including France) have been helping to set up the situation by ignoring Nkrumah’s pleas for economic aid. The new OCAM (Francophone) group’s refusal to attend any OAU meeting in Accra (because of Nkrumah’s plotting) will further isolate him. All in all, looks good.” The “situation” they were helping to set up was a coup they knew was going to happen. After a US-friendly coup took place, suddenly it was time to give the “almost pathetically pro-Western” government a gift of “few thousand tons of surplus wheat or rice”, knowing that giving little gifts like this “whets their appetites” for further collaboration with the US. You will find the same song and dance in numerous other countries, Chile being a well-documented example, if you simply look for it.

The US imposes starvation and depravation of other countries on purpose, using it as an economic wrecking ball, then pats itself on the back for giving “aid” to the countries which have been hollowed out by such tactics.

The loans which magically become available to countries that meet the US approval standards are not so pretty either, as a former IMF senior economist said, he may only hope “to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples”, there not being “enough soap in the world” to wash away what has been done to the global south through the calculated fraud of the IMF, whose tactics are designed to accomplish the same kind of goals as the sanctions are–to prevent the economic rise of any country but the US by wrecking its competitors economically, tearing apart their local manufacturing capacity and transforming them into mere resource extraction projects, redirecting their agricultural industries into exports to make sure they reach a level where they are more reliant on imports to feed themselves, and reliant on foreign aid which is ripped away whenever they do not do what the US approves of or make friends with who the US wants them to.

I refer to #3, why don’t they just do it then?

This is what secondary sanctions and the US’s various protection rackets have always been designed to prevent, which has definitely been a powerful tool for them, but it seems with the rise of the new non-aligned movement and de-dollarization its becoming a less successful one and we can see countries “just doing” what they want more and more while the US leadership waves around, as usual, more sanctions and military threats in response.

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.

Thanks for your reply!

One suggestion I would make is when you make a new thread, post a link back to the previous week’s thread so people can easily click back through them like a chain. Personally I think the timing and formatting so far are good, but of course, there is no harm in experimenting to find improvements. Thanks again for hosting this study group!

The part of this section that stood out for me begins with section 17, “Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?”, where Engels basically explains that there is no instant communism button:

No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society.

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.

Very often, people ask, “What will XYZ be like under communism/‘after the revolution’?” asking about various laws, industries, work, housing, and ways of manufacturing and acquiring goods and services. I think in many cases, the answer to these questions is a lot more mundane than some people might initially imagine. We see in section 18 a series of ideas of what a proletarian-led society might democratically implement for itself at the start of proletarian leadership. And, as OP pointed out, we see many of these (or similar) measures underway in AES countries today, providing us real-life examples of the process that we can learn from as it develops.

I think it’s worth noting that Engels points out that these would basically be democratic measures undertaken by the proletarian-led society to continually reduce the prevalence of private property, using various methods to increasingly concentrate “all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade” into the hands of the proletarian state, with the basic aim of ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat, and multiplying the society’s productive forces until “production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.”

As we can see from the real-life AES examples, this is a long process, with some changes being rapid and dramatic and easily intuitive to the average person, and others taking decades of time and having many possible approaches as well as many possible pitfalls, since longer term and larger scale generational changes like that are often harder for people to perceive and carry out from their individual position without learning more in depth about it. (Actually, on that point, I am glad that Engels specifically mentions education in section 18, as I believe it’s an important part in conveying the function of these longer generational processes to individuals in the society and strengthening their self-understanding of how they participate in building and directing their society.)

I think sections 17-20 could be good to go over with people who seem unclear on how (or why) socialist construction would take place, and on the meaning of terms like socialist-oriented market economy, socialist market economy, etc., as well as going into the reasons why development of the means of production is important (and how and why imperialism purposely hinders and sabotages that development in certain places).

Those are my thoughts, if anyone notices errors in my reasoning or understanding of the text, please point them out.

Thanks for leading this study group, I’m looking forward to its continuation.