>>> ForstaterM at umkc.edu 05/07/01 06:11PM >>>
One of my students, Benton Wolverton, found this interesting footnote in volume
2 of Marx's _Capital_:
"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!"
(((((((((
CB: There is a whole school of Marxist economists who have always emphasized that this is not an unusal recognition by Marx of the importance of the working class as the mass consuming class in capitalist society, but rather that this concept is very much central to Marx's analysis. A main quote demonstrating this is in Vol. III of _Capital_ , Chapter XXX:
"Let us suppose that the whole of society is composed only of industrial capitalists and wage-workers. Let us furthermore disregard price fluctuations, which prevent large portions of the total capital from replacing themselves in their average proportions and which, owing to the general interrelations of the entire reproduction process as developed in particular by credit, must always call forth general stoppages of a transient nature. Let us also disregard the sham transactions and speculations, which the credit system favours. Then, a crisis could only be explained as the result of a disproportion of production in various branches of the economy, and as a result of a disproportion between the consumption of the capitalists and their accumulation. But as matters stand, the replacement of the capital invested in production depends largely upon the consuming power of the non-producing classes; while the consuming power of the workers is limited partly by the laws of wages, par! ! tly by the fact that they are used only as long as they can be profitably employed by the capitalist class. The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit."