Theorizing the Realm of Consumption in Marxian Political Economy

In recent years Marxian political economy has been criticized from a variety of points of view for privileging the realm of production and for largely ignoring the realm of consumption or for seeing it more or less as a passive reflection of production.1 While there is some truth in this criticism, the problematic nature of the onesidedness is to be found less in Marx’s Capital than in the manner in which Marx’s famous text has been interpreted and utilized. For many interpreters the abstract economic laws of Marx’s Capital are to be applied directly and without mediation to concrete socio-historical reality.2 As a result, if the realm of production is primary in abstract economic law, they assume it must always be primary in the same way and to the same extent at the level of empirical social reality. But this does not follow. If we conceive of the laws of motion of capital as a theory of pure capitalism and leave open the question of the extent of their impact and efficacity in particular concrete social settings, then it by no means follows that the relation between production and consumption at the level of the concrete will mirror the relation at the level of abstract theory. In so far as a concrete social setting is capitalist, we would expect production to be important, but at the level of the concrete, capitalism never has the purity that it does in abstract theory, and consequently at the concrete level the realm of consumption may relate to production in complex ways.