"Contradiction in the capitalist mode of production: the labourers as buyers of commodities are important for the market. But as sellers of their own commodity--labour-power--capitalist society tends to keep them down to the minimum price."
An unusual recognition by Marx of the importance of the working class as a source of consumer demand, giving it quite a 'Keynesian' flavor along the lines of the paradox of thrift or other paradoxes of macroeconomics.
It reminds me of a clever editorial cartoon during the 1990 recession: the picture shows a number of factories, all connected to one another by roads. Each factory is saying: "We don't want to hire people, we just want to sell them stuff!" ____________ In Wall Street Doug also intimates that marx is an underconsumptionist. The most acute expression of the intuition behind the underconsumptionist theory of contradiction and crisis probably probably remains after seven or so decades Otto Bauer's which was adapted by Paul Sweezy in his Theory of Capitalist Development (1942), p. 183:
Drawing from Bauer (Henryck Grossmann's theoretical nemesis), Sweezy specifies the contradiction thusly: since with accumulation there is the declining ratio of the rate of growth of consumption to the rate of growth of means of production, while the ratio of the rate of growth in output of consumption goods to the rate of growth of means of production remains stable, "there is an inherent tendency for the growth in consumption to fall behind the growth in the output of consumption goods."
But why, Bernice Shoul asked in her 1947 Radcliffe dissertation, should we accept the assumption of a necessarily fixed relationship between either the stocks or the rates of growth of the means of production and the means of consumption? Even if the historical relations have been as Sweezy specifies, why should such fixed relations hold in practice, much less in theory?
Moreover, Sweezy seems to explain too much. According to the Bauer/Sweezy theory, there should be chronic underconsumption (or overproduction), yet then how are we to explain periodic crises, i.e., the alternation between prosperity and depression?
Marx himself underlined that crises are in fact always preceded by a period in which wages rise generally and the working class actually gets a larger share of the annual product intended for consumption. How could this be if the evil of crises are caused by workers receiving too small a portion of their product?
Finally the theory leads to the acceptance of the capitalist system for the implied conclusion is that all could be well if only income distribution could be altered. The question of income distribution becomes not only a matter of "justice" (thereby creating an academic cottage industry for Rawlsian reflections on the difference principle) but also a quixotic struggle to stabilize the capitalist system.
Understood by only a few (Grossmann, Shoul, Mattick Sr) Marx's own theory remains a spectre, a haunting one to be sure.
Rakesh