COMMUNICATION 63 Moreover, rise in real wages is not automatic. It has to be wrested from the capitalists through trade union action. There is no mysterious tendency for commodity wages to go up with productivity. No trade union leadership can claim credit for such a rise if it is automatic. Workers have to fight for every bit of such rises. And yet the widening gap between the rich and the poor does intensify tension between the two classes. Marx clearly says: whether workers' wages are high or low his miseries increase. And they are miseries emerging from unemployment,—periodic and perennial—wars, destruction of life and property, hazards to workers in their industrial life and a host of other occurrences with which the current times are replete. Falling Rate of Prof it Joan Robinson makes three assertions in this regard, namely: i) K/W has remained fairly constant in recent years due to the adoption of capital-saving technology; ii) there is no way of predicting how the ratio will behave in future; iii) even when K/W rises the rate of profit need not fall. These three assertions together with her reference to rising commodity wages imply that capitalism is not likely to perish—is not doomed at least in the foreseeable future and that there are some built-in stabilizers which are likely to protect its future. This implication clearly contradicts her later assertion that capitalism is 'doomed'! Marxist writings in the last hundred years as well as the writings of bourgeois economists from Ricardo down to Lord Keynes, predict that, as development proceeds from decade to decade, investible surplus expands at a greater rate than the national product. Even if we assume that the proportion of surplus income to total income remains constant, one must reasonably expect a tendency for pressure of investment to intensify and for capital equipment to expand at a compound rate. The ratio K/W or the organic composition of capital has thus a tendency to rise and to lead to a fall in the rate of profit and, consequently, to secular economic stagnation. Technological progress which involves saving in the use of capital, undoubtedly prevents the rate of profit from falling. But, simultaneously, it tends to increase investible surplus, whereas the demand for investment suffers a relative fall. This must also tend to intensify stagnation. Capitalism in such a situation can only be saved, and that too temporarily, by engineering an enormous waste of resources in preparing for wars and in actual wars. The history of the last fifty years is a standing testimony to this suicidal waste. Whether K/W tends to rise or remain constant, the net effect must always be the same, namely, secular stagnation and the Keynesian therapy which creates more problems than it solves. It is true that if the ra^e of rise in P/W is greater than the rate of rise in K/W, the profit rate would tend to rise. But its operational significance in saving the capitalist system from doom is negligible. On the