The phrases used to deny crises are useful Marx says, because they rely on insisting upon a unity, where, in fact, resides contradiction. They illustrate, therefore, that, if these contradictions did not exist, there would be no basis for crisis. So, Say's Law insists on the unity of production and consumption, purchase and sale, just as the unity is asserted of producers with consumers. And yet, in each case, this unity dissolves into two contradictory poles, both independent, as a consequence of the intermediation of money and of capital.
If money did not intervene in the process of commodity exchange, then production and consumption, purchase and sale would indeed form a unity with no potential for crisis. But, that would imply that production was dictated on the basis of use value, not exchange value. If capital did not intervene in the process of production, so that production divides into the relation of capital and wage labour, and the determination of production by surplus value, then there would be a unity of producers and consumers, and so the potential for crisis is again removed. But, if that were the case, then the workers as producers would also have to be owners of the means of production, and these means of production would thereby no longer represent capital, standing in opposition to labour, whilst, therefore, the need to produce surplus value would no longer determine production decisions.
“Every reason which they put forward against crisis is an exorcised contradiction, and, therefore, a real contradiction, which can cause crises. The desire to convince oneself of the non-existence of contradictions, is at the same time the expression of a pious wish that the contradictions, which are really present, should not exist.” (p 519)
What capital actually employs workers to produce is not use values, or even commodities, but surplus value. So long as workers produce surplus value, capital is prepared to employ labour, and thereby the worker is enabled to consume a portion of what they produce.
“ As soon as they cease [to produce it], their consumption ceases, because their production ceases. But that they are able to consume is by no means due to their having produced an equivalent for their consumption. On the contrary, as soon as they produce merely such an equivalent, their consumption ceases, they have no equivalent to consume. Their work is either stopped or curtailed, or at all events their wages are reduced. In the latter case—if the level of production remains the same—they do not consume an equivalent of what they produce. But they lack these means not because they do not produce enough, but because they receive too little of their product for themselves.” (p 519)
In fact, this is not entirely correct, as Marx sets out in Capital III, Chapter 15. The capitalists, if they had perfect foresight, and also were not constrained by competition, would like that to be the case, but they do not, which is why a condition of overproduction, whereby capital no longer acts as capital, continues into a crisis of overproduction. The workers may indeed continue to produce surplus value, even though a condition of overproduction exists, but the problem arises from the inability to realise the surplus value that has been produced, and, in part, this problem derives from the fact that producers and consumers are not coterminous, and that the conditions of realisation can be contradictory to the conditions for production of surplus value.
“As soon as all the surplus-labour it was possible to squeeze out has been embodied in commodities, surplus-value has been produced. But this production of surplus-value completes but the first act of the capitalist process of production — the direct production process. Capital has absorbed so and so much unpaid labour. With the development of the process, which expresses itself in a drop in the rate of profit, the mass of surplus-value thus produced swells to immense dimensions. Now comes the second act of the process. The entire mass of commodities, i.e. , the total product, including the portion which replaces the constant and variable capital, and that representing surplus-value, must be sold. If this is not done, or done only in part, or only at prices below the prices of production, the labourer has been indeed exploited, but his exploitation is not realised as such for the capitalist, and this can be bound up with a total or partial failure to realise the surplus-value pressed out of him, indeed even with the partial or total loss of the capital. The conditions of direct exploitation, and those of realising it, are not identical. They diverge not only in place and time, but also logically.”
(Capital III, Chapter 15)
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