>>> Rakesh Bhandari writes
b. if we include the world wide stage on which capital accumulates, have we not witnessed what what Alain Lipietz has called bloody Taylorism? Indeed it may be cheaper for firms to use labor intensive techniques since as they only pay for labor power, not labor; their new mobility has allowed them to use very cheap wage workers indeed, including of course in the US? ___________ Charles: The Marxist paradigm predicts this. Living labor (variable capital) is the only source of new value and surplus value. Each decrease in the labor intensity of the technique or decrease in variable capital relative to constant capital (increase in productivity) decreases the value produced per time because it decreases the socially necessary living labor time per commodity (See Volume I of Capital).
This is why as the OCC (c/v) increases, the rate of profit falls, the element in the famous law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which some people foreground as the cause of business cycle downturns.
__________ Charles Brown