As Marx describes, this widening range of use values, available for consumption, not only creates the market for them, but also creates and shapes the consumer.
“Hunger is hunger; but the hunger that is satisfied by cooked meat eaten with knife and fork differs from hunger that devours raw meat with the help of hands, nails and teeth. Production thus produces not only the object of consumption but also the mode of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production therefore creates the consumer.” (p 197)
“Hence production produces consumption: 1) by providing the material of consumption; 2) by determining the mode of consumption; 3) by creating in the consumer a need for the objects which it first presents as products. It therefore produces the object of consumption, the mode of consumption and the urge to consume. Similarly, consumption produces the predisposition of the producer by positing him as a purposive requirement.” (p 197-8)
The identity of production and consumption can be reduced to three aspects. First, there is the direct identity, whereby production is consumption and consumption production, which economists call productive consumption. Even so, they distinguish between productive consumption, i.e. the consumption of labour-power and materials, in production, and consumptive production, which is considered in relation to things such as education and training that produces labour-power. Marx discussed this in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 4.
Secondly, there is their mutual relation, by which there is nothing to consume without production, and no point in production without consumption.
Thirdly, production determines the forms of consumption, whilst consumption, by continually destroying use values, creates the need for further production.
“Moreover by its need for repetition consumption leads to the perfection of abilities evolved during the first process of production and converts them into skills. Consumption is therefore the concluding act which turns not only the product into a product, but also the producer into a producer.” (p 198)
It is this identity that forms the basis of Say's Law. The reasons Say's Law is false have been set out, but Marx also notes another fallacy, which is that it speaks of a nation in the abstract, as a singly entity, whereas it is comprised of classes, with different and antagonistic interests, each having widely different revenues, and so partaking in the process of distribution on widely differing and antagonistic bases. This is the point that Marx makes in Capital III, Chapter 15. Consumption/demand is determined,
“by the proportional relation of the various branches of production and the consumer power of society. But this last-named is not determined either by the absolute productive power, or by the absolute consumer power, but by the consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits. It is furthermore restricted by the tendency to accumulate, the drive to expand capital and produce surplus-value on an extended scale. This is law for capitalist production, imposed by incessant revolutions in the methods of production themselves, by the depreciation of existing capital always bound up with them, by the general competitive struggle and the need to improve production and expand its scale merely as a means of self-preservation and under penalty of ruin. The market must, therefore, be continually extended, so that its interrelations and the conditions regulating them assume more and more the form of a natural law working independently of the producer, and become ever more uncontrollable. This internal contradiction seeks to resolve itself through expansion of the outlying field of production. But the more productiveness develops, the more it finds itself at variance with the narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest.”
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