The standard presentation of the rising organic composition of capital assumes that its central effect is a falling rate of profit, since the rate of new value extraction also falls. The arguments around this point are complicated, highly technical, and might lead us to miss the major point here. Regardless of what we think about the profit rate, what is important is that rising organic composition of capital measures the extent to which living labor has been thrust out of the production process, the extent to which dead or past or objectified labor predominates. The results of this dynamic are various: it can produce crises of employment for those expelled from production, the so-called superfluous populations; it produces crises of underconsumption (since he or she who does not work does not eat); and it produces underutilization and underinvestment, because in cases of high-organic composition investment in new plant and machinery is unlikely to net higher profits. Because of this last effect, technical change begins to slow and capitalists pull their money out of production, instead preferring speculation in stocks and real estate. But tracking these developments in all their complexity might cause us to miss the central implication of this analysis: crises in capitalism are the result of a society that has become too wealthy and too productive for its own good, a capitalism that requires less and less work and that as a result finds its perpetuation threatened. Capitalism is a self-undermining social form.