Introduction

The account given in Capital 3, Chapter 30 of the secular underconsumption trend with its reliance on “non-producing classes” to assure markets (MECW 37: 482–3; Chapter 4, p. 130), is prefaced by a statement regarding various sources of cyclical instability, including “price fluctuations, which prevent large parts 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,” “sham transactions and speculations, which the credit system favours,” “disproportion of production in various branches of the economy,” and “a disproportion between the consumption of the capitalists and their accumulation” (MECW 37: 482; emphasis added). This passage is followed by the assertion that “[t]he 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” (483; cited Chapter 4, p.). But we shall see that this is not the line followed in the detailed analyses of the cycle, Marx positively rejecting underconsumptionist explanations of the cycle as far as expenditure out of wages is concerned, in the light of labor scarcity and high wages immediately before the crisis.