Falling rates of profit follow from capital’s diminishing reliance on labor

Evidence

Marxian theory predicts this minimal return from labor compression as a “law” of the capitalist system, free fallin’: workers are the main source of surplus value; over time capitalism needs fewer workers, while its drive for ever-increasing accumulation of surplus value remains unslaked; the smaller the proportion of labor (“organic composition of capital”), the smaller capital’s profitability, since exploited labor is the well of profit. … This world-market, saturated-consumption, automated-production, expelled-population scenario is what Marx referred to in part III of Capital, volume 3, as “the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 53

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distills the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall into its causal mechanism.