ABSTRACT
A COUNTRY in an advanced stage of economic de-cline usually finds a chief cause of its weakness in anextreme shortage of circulating capital. What started as a symptom has become in turn an aggravation of the malady. In the body economic this adrenaline deficiency appears in the form of inadequate fuel and material supplies to keep industry in operation and inadequate means of subsistence available to keep workers in employment. The weakness may even be cumulative, the deficiency once started sapping the power to repair the deficiency in the future. To restore the patient's vitality requires a current supply of fuel and materials and food (including utilisable reserves held over from the past) sufficient and available to facilitate the production of the finished goods which are needed; and if this current supply be insufficient, there is required such an initial economy of consumption of finished goods as will set free resources to increase the output of the primary requisites of production. Presumably a decay of productive capacity must have some limit: at some point before it reaches zero and threatens complete starvation, people are likely to be stimulated to make the initial effort to restore the shortage of circulating capital. But to do this will require an initial increase of fuel and material supplies and available labour power-an increase of these things in advance of any increase of finished goods; and this will demand a further economy of consumption by some section of the community in the present, in order to advance subsistence to peasants and workers employed on producing materials and fuel, and later to workers engaged in working up those materials into the form of additional supplies of finished goods. The nearer to the zero point the decline has previously gone, the more
difficult will it be to make this initial effort, and the less likely that this effort will be made on any scale sufficient to restore the system to normal health,.
