A necessary condition for the continuation of the process of capital accumulation in a capitalist economy is the availability of saving. Not surprisingly, the question of who ‘abstains’ from consumption so that financial capital accumulation can take place has assumed prominence in the history of economic thought.

According to the classical economists, the only source of saving was capitalists' profits. Workers were simply not earning enough to save, thus using all of their income to finance their subsistence level of consumption. The inequality in the ownership of the means of production and the associated existence of an owning class and a non-owning class is, according to the classical economists, the key to the accumulation of capital.

The classical view on saving has survived to-date in the writings of Kalecki as well as in the work of some economists in the Marxist tradition. In more recent years, however, a variation of the classical saving function was proposed by the followers of Keynes and became the subject of fierce debate between its proponents and critics. According to this neo-Keynesian Saving Function, both workers and capitalists save, but the proportion of saving out of (capitalists' income) profits is higher than that out of (workers' income) wages. An important reason for that is suggested to be the retention of profit within the corporations.

The neo-Keynesian interest in corporate retention, I suggest, represents a tendency towards a shift of emphasis on the issue of saving from the consumer to the corporation.