Re: [Marxism] Marx was a "restricted consumptionist"

[paul illich <paul_illich@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Surely the "absolute consuming power of society" is reached
maximally only by lifting at least some of the restrictions on
worker consumption, as making them too consumers pushed
the outer limits of the planet rape machine even further out
(not only by allowing increased consumption, but also by 
undermining working-class solidarity that had been forged in
shared poverty). 

I'd like to see this sentence of Marx in context, but taken at
face value it seems to me it may have been a valid "ultimate
reason" pre-consumerism, but less so since. Of course, a
depression will have us revert to the former, but workers
stopping the machine before it reaches the limits of it's
destroying power was made a mockery of long since 9and all
to the worse). 

Wasn't it Trotsky, somewhere in his works of 1905, who 
predicted the consumerist buyout as a method for capitalism 
to extend it's sell-by date?

However I look at it, though, it seems to me that Marx's
impulse to ground the real crises in a material limit rather
than an abstract one is typical, and probably in may ways
correct. I have been reading a book on Bookchin that is
strongly critical of neo-malthusian thinking, but that all
too typically tars anyone who is concerned about material
limits and has seen enough to believe they are there with
the same brush as pessimistic doom-sayers - surely, if we
approach the limits of the system, then "poverty and restricted 
consumption of the masses" becomes a very real and
defining condition, and our failure to engage, due to relative
comfort, as great misfortune. To deny that doom-sayers
will be seen as ultimately right seems to deny the reality
that capitalism is creating, but it is a great shame that we
have failed to fight capitalism hard enough over the last
few decades: it would be nice to have been able to scoff
at doom-sayers because our actions had made them wrong.

The quote from Marx needs context for me, because taken
alone and at face value it appears to allow an interpretation
that says "so treat the workers fairly and there'll be no crisis,
hooray" and the "outer limits" of society be damned (not an
interpretation I can conceive as being a correct one from the
grand old man).
 
Paul



"The 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 outer limit "
(Capital vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 472-73) ; quoted in _The Development
of Capitalism in Russia_ by Lenin

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