The immanent dialectic of capital: Falling rate of profit and the crisis of late capitalism

This article critically reconstructs the law of the tendential fall of the rate of profit, as formulated by Marx in Volume III of Capital , as a concrete expression of the intrinsic dynamic of developed capitalism. It argues that this tendency operates as a two-sided law that simultaneously entails a falling rate of profit and an increasing absolute mass of surplus value, which makes it irreducible to a linear process of systemic collapse. Drawing on a reading that articulates Marx’s exposition with Moishe Postone’s theory of the dialectic of transformation and reconstitution, the article demonstrates that the immanent limits of capitalist production contain within their own movement countertendencies that reconstitute the capital relation on ever higher bases of social productivity. The countertendencies identified by Marx – rising exploitation, wage compression, cheapening of constant capital, relative surplus population and foreign trade – are critically examined and their concrete operation in the crisis of late capitalism is outlined, from the artificial intelligence-mediated extension of the working day and the geopolitical struggle over critical raw materials to the political economy of genocide. Against collapse-theory readings of Marx, the article holds that the falling rate of profit drives an increasingly destructive reconstitution of the capital relation whose distance from catastrophe tends to narrow, while the possibility of a determinate negation of capital remains inscribed in its immanent contradictions.