‘Enough is not enough’: Consumption and Depression

Abstract

Ezra Pound, like many radicals in the thirties, thought the Depression would be the final crisis of capitalism; however, though he thought Marx’s analysis of the self-destruction of capitalism to be substantially correct, he could not accept or advocate for Europe or America the revolutionary step taken by Russia in 1917. Instead, Pound recommended C.H. Douglas’s proposal to increase consumption by increasing the purchasing power of producers with the issue of state-controlled currency. This was a nonrevolutionary strategy to resist the logic that Marx saw as essential to the self-destruction of capitalism, namely, the falling rate of profit and the subsequent decrease of wages, leading to a steady decline in living standards.¹⁶ According to Marx’s analysis, of course, the dialectical logic of capitalist crisis could not be resisted by the means Pound advocated. But Marx was generally seen to have been superseded by the development of capitalism and the second industrial revolution, which made mass production possible. According to its defenders, capitalism in the thirties was simply going through another stage, but the advent of mass production meant that the stage would conclude the cycle of depressions that had plagued American capitalism over the past hundred years.

The survey has proved conclusively what has long been held theoretically to be true, that wants are almost insatiable; that one want makes way for another. The conclusion is that economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.

Hoover Committee Report on Recent Economic Changes in the United States (1929)