“It is a pure tautology to say that crises are provoked by a lack of effective demand or effective consumption. […]. The fact that commodities are unsalable means no more than that no effective buyers have been found for them, i.e. no consumers (no matter whether the commodities are ultimately sold to meet the needs of productive or individual consumption). If the attempt is made to give this tautology the semblance of greater profundity, by the statement that the working class receives too small a portion of its own product, and that the evil would be remedied if it received a bigger share, i.e. if its wages rose, we need only note that crises are always prepared by a period in which wages generally rise, and the working class actually does receive a greater share in the part of the annual product destined for consumption. From the standpoint of these advocates of sound and simple common sense, such periods should rather avert the crisis. It thus appears that capitalist production involves certain conditions independent of people’s good or bad intentions, which permit the relative prosperity of the working class only temporarily, and moreover always as a harbinger of crisis.”
-Karl Marx; Capital Vol. 2
“This brings us to the question of why a capitalist country needs a foreign market. Certainly not because the product cannot be realised at all under the capitalist system. That is nonsense. A foreign market is needed because it is inherent in capitalist production to strive for unlimited expansion — unlike all the old modes of production, which were limited to the village community, to the patriarchal estate, to the tribe, to a territorial area, or state. Under all the old economic systems production was every time resumed in the same form and on the same scale as previously; under the capitalist system, however, this resumption in the same form becomes impossible, and unlimited expansion, perpetual progress, becomes the law of production.”
-Lenin; A Characterization of Economic Romanticism
“The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself”
-Karl Marx; Capital Vol. 3
