>
>Rakesh, aren't these flip sides of the same coin, different moments in a
>unified totality, blah de blah ... when workers are exploited in the
>capitalist labor process they at one and same time leasing their labor-power
>in exchange for wages (ultimately insufficient to allow expanded
>reproduction) and creating the to-be-appropriated surplus value (also
>ultimately to allow
>expanded reproduction) ... in looking for an "ultimate cause," aren't you
>approaching the problem too positivistically and too diachronically (I may
>be way off,
Well first you are not as way off as I was in my little ricardian exercise today (which made little to no sense, i fear, so i'll stick to the marx stuff).
Charles, you and I are agreed that Marx is here arguing that the social capacity for consumption is not simply people's capacity to consume but this capacity as governed and necessarily limited by the requirements of surplus value production. But if Charles included the whole passage, as well as interpreting it in the context of the argument as a whole in Capital 3, then I think it's clear the specific limit to consumption Marx holds to be explanatorily fundamental to a crisis of general overproduction (the very possibility of which was denied by classical economics) is located in surplus value production itself. This does not mean that underconsumption is any less real than overproduction (indeed they are flip sides of each other); it is to say that the contradiction in production is explanatorily fundamental.
Since the appropriated surplus value to allow for expanded reproduction is short--that is, the greatest quantity of surplus value that can possibly be extorted from the diminished working class is no longer sufficient to augment the value of the accumulated capital-- workers won't be hired and the already produced commodity output won't be fully realized. No doubt at all this will be due to the poverty and the restricted consumption of the workers and especially the unemployed, but it is the general crisis due to an underproduction of surplus value that expresses itself as a problem of the realization of surplus value and insufficient buying power of the working population. This then helps to understand that crises are actually overcome with the social capacity for consumption actually declining relative to the accumulated capital!
Moreover, this is not to say that in the real world due to disproportionalities and partial overproductions recurrent realization problems cannot spill over (especially in a highly leveraged economy) to a general crisis, though such crises should be solvable through a redistribution of capital. For this reason Marx consciously and explicitly abstracts from all difficulties with realization in order to demonstrate a limit capital meets in surplus value production itself.
As Mattick noted (and I have been draw here from his Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory) "If the accumulation process can be depicted in abstraction from the circulation process, the process of reproduction can also be traced without considering hte realizatin problems it encounters in reality in order to explain the meaning of the circuit of capital. One can find this mode of procedure reasonable or not; at any rate, Marx believed that although his absract model of the capitalist process of circulation did not correspond to reality in some ways, it could nevertheless contribute to a better understanding of reality." p.94
yrs, r