Marx writes for example: "popular opinion is naturally inclined to
attribute this phenomenon [of stagnation] to a quantitative deficiency in
the circulating medium, since it sees money appear and disappear less
frequently at all points on the periphery of circulation, in proportion as
the circulation of money slows down." The footnote includes: the Swiss
economist Herrenschwand's "fanciful notions amount merely to this, that
the contradiction which arise from the nature of commodities, and
therefore come to the surface in circulation, can be removed by increasing
the amount of the medium in circulation." Capital I. Vintage. 217-18
Yet Duncan F writes: "Again, a rise in T(c) or T(f) [time delays in
workers spending their wages and capitalists using monetary assets to
finance new production, respectively] will create a crisis of generalised
overproduction of commodities. In principle an expansion of money
commodity production could offset such changes in spending delays."
Again, I am not making an argument, only suggesting the one that needs to
be made by full time specialists: no interpretation of Marx's critique of
Say's Law is complete without an explanation of why Marx didn't think
additional production of the money commodity in itself could generally
remedy universal gluts.
This is obviously not an idle question in Japan today.
Duncan F suggests that the spending lags that cause (?) general
overproduction are the specific behavioral propensity of bourgeois agents,
who buy in order to sell. I don't follow Duncan F's explanation
for why such agents would actually enforce periodically such spending
delays as to cause general overproduction.
If Duncan F or anyone else wants to expand, I'll read on.
Rakesh