Huh? I quoted him asserting that mechanization would reduce wages.
Marx only identifies the introduction of machinery lowering the wage rate on the idea that with such machinery, workers are more substitutable - but as far as I know he did not account for the rising proportion of people taking up what he described as a "numerically unimportant class", "engineers, mechanics, joiners". In fact, this class of workers has not seen the same reduction or stagnation in the wage rate that Marx saw would happen with low skill workers.
"And precisely taking into account the forms of technical progress which Marx considered - that is the division of labour, capital saving, the mechanization of production and innovations - a fall in the maximum rate of profit can happen only in very particular cases, and no need arises to keep wages at a minimum in order to avoid a fall in the rate of profit."[0]
[0] https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20976/1/MPRA_paper_20976.pdf
You do have to read about modern Marxist economic replies to objections over a century old. The likes of Guglielmo Carcheidi, Kliman and Freeman, and even non-Marxist economists sympathetic to Marx answer many of these problems.
>Claiming automation would reduce wages is a basic fallacy that economic laymen believe in.
This is not strictly the claim that Marx makes, and this claim you attribute to him only comes from a particular logical view of Marx rather than his own logic.