Production and consumption

From MarxWiki

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx explains how modern economics relies on linear flow to explain the relationship between production, exchange and distribution, and finally, consumption. Modern economics relates them in a hierarchical manner which separates them from each other. It is this separation that Marx also critiques. He believes that they are all interdependent: production determines consumption and the opposite is also true, and this is his reasoning: production uses up producers facilities, ways of production, and decreases natural resources. The availability of resources determines the level of consumption in an economy simply because an economies potential level of production (or the level of income) directly relies on the factors of production: the less stuff you have available as supplies to make the final product, the less of that final product you can make, and therefore sell. You don’t have to be an economist to understand this: in fact, in today’s world which is constantly facing the depletion of the earth’s resources (oil, for example), consumers rely on the connection between production and consumption without realizing that it was not always this way, and that economics is still in a process of relating the two in a way that highlights the ways that means of production inform consumption in an economy.

Another interesting facet of production and consumption the different relationships, ishow it affects the roles of men and women and helps to facilitate such stratuts in gender and class through the division of labor. `The division of labor in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in turn is based on the natural division of labor in the family and the separation of society into individual families as opposed to on another, simultaenously implies the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labor and its products, hence property, the nucleus, the first form of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first form of property` (Marx and Engel's German Ideology, 52)