However, no sooner do capitalists succeed in paying lower wages and/or hiring fewer workers, than they may well face another contradiction. The workers may now have less income than they had before because wages fell or automation hit. Thus they will be less able to buy what capitalists need to sell. To benefit by lowering their outlays to workers, capitalists have inadvertently undermined the demand for their products. The virtually universal drive to economize on labor costs operates in contradiction to the parallel drive to sell all that is produced.
