ABSTRACT
As long as artisans, divided among small shops, have counted on selling the results of their work in the next town, they knew their customers, and they learned almost instantly when their customers’ incomes declined and, consequently, the demand for their labor decreased also. But since large capitals brought together in large factories, not craftsmen, but factory hands, they could no longer know the consumers who may live perhaps hundreds of miles distant, and who knew nothing of their distress, or the decline in demand, till the moment when, suddenly, their master dismisses them, perhaps as they are just about to marry, or to increase their family. Sismondi, the classical economists, and Marx are all in agreement that it is capital that, in an industrial society, determines the demand for labor. Both Sismondi and Marx derive their cycle theories from fluctuations in capital utilization, which are coupled to under-consumption.
