... mind you Lenin’s answer to Charles’ problem ‘wage laborers are only paid so much, and it is always less than enough to buy all the consumer commodities which they produce’ was that workers are not the only consumers. Capitalists consume, both privately consuming luxuries, and as corporations, consuming those intermediate goods and machines that go to make up consumer goods. The total demand, therefore is greater than the demand of the working class. Lenin explains in Capitalism in Russia, which he bases on Marx’s second volume of capital
^^^^^ CB; Yes, though when James and I debated this about ten years ago on Marxism-Thaxis , I found in the same _The Development of Capitalism in Russia_ that James quotes here, Lenin quoting Marx as follows:
"‘The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses.’”
Sure the capitalists consume all James mentions above, but there are still a lot of personal consumption commodities that the capitalists don't make up the difference by buying.
Full paragraph:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch30.htm
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, partly 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.