The falling rate of profit forces capitalists to intensify labor exploitation

Evidence

As the rate of exploitation rises the rate of profit tends to rise, but as the organic composition of capital rises the rate of profit tends to fall. In Capital , Vol. III, Marx argues that the long-run tendency of capitalist accumulation is to raise the organic composition of capital to such an extent that the rate of profit will fall even if the rate of exploitation is rising. Attempts to overcome the tendency require therefore a very considerable rise in the rate of exploitation, which Gramsci sees as happening through “Fordist” methods of intensification and rationalisation of labour. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2376

Categorization

• XREF: The Fordist intensification mechanism is the economic substructure beneath Gramsci’s later claims about hegemony, Taylorism, and consent-producing factory discipline. — connects to: Grossmann claimed capitalist overaccumulation forces profit-rate decline and terminal crisis — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 131; Capitalism calibrates incentives to make workers risk death for subsistence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 194; Pollock located capitalism’s crisis in sectoral disproportions rather than falling profit rates — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 239 (+7 more)
• SEED: Angle: how an abstract economic law (profit-rate decline) becomes a lived regime of speed-ups and time-discipline — tracing crisis theory into the shop floor.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2376