The consequence of these labour-saving technologies is to raise productivity. It is this rise in productivity which means that for any given amount of labour, more materials are processed, that results in the rise of c relative to v + s. This rise in productivity results in lower unit values of all commodities, including those that comprise the constant capital and labour-power. It produces a new qualitative rise in social wealth, including for workers, as Marx describes in The Grundrisse, as being The Civilising Mission of Capital. So, it is, also, this which results in Marx's concept of the long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall, not as a cause of crises, but as a consequence of the means by which they are resolved. In a similar vein, Marx notes that, in longer established capitalist economies, where he pool of savings is larger, and particularly where former industrial capitalists retire from production, and live off such savings, the rate of interest also tends to fall.
There is nothing in any of this that leads to some continually intensifying crisis leading to collapse. Each crisis only leads to resolution by these means, and a new period of expansion, as Trotsky, also, described in The Curve of Capitalist Development, and in Flood Tide. The expansion itself requires ever larger single markets, which, itself, creates the dynamic of multinational states and a world economy, which is, also, a precondition for Socialism. The poverty of the working-class is not to be understood in terms of its standard of living, which rises in an upward curve, but in terms of its inability to, individually, own the means of production, which assume an ever more gargantuan scale, even out of the reach of private capitalists.
Private ownership of industrial capital is superseded by socialised capital, the collective property of the associated producers. Indeed, Marx's position should not be seen as a critique of capitalism – as against his critique of political economy – but, as simply a scientific analysis of its inevitable dynamic and metamorphosis into Socialism. “Inevitable”, of course, only on the condition that the working-class understands the nature of the already transpired transformation of productive and property relations, and asserts its legal rights, as resulting from them. Its failure, so far, to do that is a failure of its political leadership.
The reality is that, by the end of the 19th century, that process had removed the role of the private capitalist from production. That functional role was undertaken by a growing middle-class army of professional managers, drawn from a publicly educated working-class. It was, from that time on, only a matter of revealing this reality to workers. There was/is no real difference between these corporations and the worker cooperatives, other than the very significant difference that, in the former, control over the capital was/is exercised by shareholders, who are not the owners of that capital, but merely creditors. In no other sphere does the law enable creditors to exercise such control over property they do not own. The task of Marxists was to bring this property question to the fore, and to engage in a political struggle for industrial democracy, as the rational extension of the previous struggle for political democracy.
“At this juncture a 29 years old manufacturer came forward as a reformer — a man of almost sublime, child-like simplicity of character, and at the same time a born leader of men such as is rarely seen. Robert Owen had adopted the teaching of the materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment: that man's character is the product, of his inherited constitution on the one hand, and of his environment during his lifetime, especially during his period of growth on the other. In the Industrial Revolution most of his class saw only chaos and confusion, and the opportunity of fishing in troubled waters and getting rich quickly. He saw in it the opportunity of putting his favourite theory into practice, and so of bringing order out of chaos.” (p 336)
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