Karl Marx – Producers and Consumers are not identical

“So long as the owner of the weaving mill reproduces and accumulates, his workers too purchase a part of his product. They spend a part of their wages on calico. Because he produces, they have the means to purchase a part of his product and thus to some extent give him the means to sell it. The worker can only buy, he can represent a demand only for commodities which enter into individual consumption, for he does not himself turn his labor to account. Nor does he possess himself the means to do so … the instruments and materials of labor. This already therefore excludes the majority of producers, the workers themselves as consumers, buyers of many commodities where capitalist production prevails. They buy no raw material and no instruments of labor. They buy only means of subsistence. Commodities which enter directly into individual consumption. Hence, nothing is more ridiculous than to speak of the identity of producers and consumers, since for an extraordinarily large number of branches of production, all those that do not supply articles for direct consumption, the mass of those who participate in production, are entirely excluded from the purchase of their own products. They are never direct consumers or buyers of this large part of their own products, although they pay a portion of the value of these products in the articles of consumption that they buy. This also shows the ambiguity of the word ‘consumer’ and how wrong it is to identify it with the word ‘buyer’. As regards industrial consumption, it is precisely the workers who consume machinery and material, using them up in the labor process. But they do no use them up for themselves and they are therefore not buyers of them. Machinery and raw materials are for them neither use-values nor commodities. But objective conditions of a process of which they themselves are the subject of conditions.”

from:
Theories Of Surplus Value - Chapter 17 (Audiobook)
https://youtu.be/KOnZwdG-pq8

Видео Karl Marx – Producers and Consumers are not identical канала grubernitsch