What is required, Malthus says, is some other group of consumers who are buyers but not sellers. Then, they can buy this remaining 20% of production, allowing the capitalists to realise the profit it represents. In effect, this is the same question that Marx addressed in Capital II, of where the money comes from that enables the surplus value to be realised as profit. There Marx showed that, in fact, the capitalists throw money into circulation in two different roles. On the one hand, the capitalist throws money into circulation as a capitalist. They buy commodities to be used as capital. But, the capitalist also throws money into circulation as merely a buyer of commodities for their own consumption. The money they throw into circulation for this purpose buys the commodities that comprise the surplus product of other capitalists. When, in turn, they sell the commodities that comprise their own surplus production, the money they previously threw into circulation thereby comes back to them.
However, Malthus has his own preferred solution to this problem. It is that the surplus production can be bought by the landed aristocracy, the clergy and other such hangers on. By this means, Malthus argues that these parasitic elements play a most advantageous role in society, by enabling the surplus production to be sold, and thereby for the capitalists to be able to realise their profits. Of course, Malthus never explains where the landlords, the clergy, or the state obtains this money with which they buy the surplus production. The same is true of the modern Keynesian form of this Malthusian theory of under-consumption.
“And so it turns out further that the author of the pamphlet on population preaches continuous over-consumption and the maximum possible appropriation of the annual product by idlers, as a condition of production. In addition to the plea arising inevitably out of this theory, comes the argument that capital represents the drive for abstract wealth, the drive to expand its value, which can only be put into effect by means of a class of buyers representing the drive to spend, to consume, to squander, namely, the unproductive classes, who are buyers without being sellers.” (p 22)
The only essential difference between this theory, and the later Keynesian variant is that, for Malthus, this overconsumption by the idlers, the state etc., is a permanent condition, required for the realisation of the surplus product as profit, whereas for the Keynesians, it is merely a periodic requirement, to correct the imbalance when the surplus product cannot be realised due to under-consumption.
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