The law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit is the expression of the law of value under the most advanced conditions of capitalist production. Under these conditions the ever greater preponderance of dead over living labor brings about such a falling relation of surplus value to total capital that a day might come when, even if the capitalist could appropriate all 24 hours of labor of the EMPLOYED army, and the laborers lived on air, the capitalist could not get SUFFICIENT surplus value to run the mammoth capitalist machine on an ever-expanding scale. The general contradiction of capitalism thus reaffirms the three principal facts of capitalist production: (1) decline in the rate of profit, (2) deeper and deeper crises, and (3) a greater and greater unemployed army.

The opposite of competition is monopoly. Monopoly was the warcry of the Mercantilists; competition the battlecry of the liberal economists. It is easy to see that this antithesis is again a quite hollow antithesis. Every competitor cannot but desire to have the monopoly, be he worker, capitalist or landowner. Each smaller group of competitors cannot but desire to have the monopoly for itself against all others. Competition is based on selfinterest, and selfinterest in turn breeds monopoly. In short, competition passes over into monopoly. On the other hand, monopoly cannot stem the tide of competition -- indeed, it itself breeds competition; just as a prohibition of imports, for instance, or high tariffs positively breed the competition of smuggling. The contradiction of competition is exactly the same as that of private property. It is in the interest of each to possess everything, but in the interest of the whole that each possess an equal amount. Thus, the general and the individual interest are diametrically opposed to each other. The contradiction of competition is that each cannot but desire the monopoly, whilst the whole as such is bound to lose by monopoly and must therefore remove it.