However, if crises were an inevitable feature of capitalism for Marx, they were not in themselves the central point in his analysis of its long-term dynamic. They were a cyclical feature of the system which it had managed to cope with several times by the time Capital was published, however great the hardship they had caused to the mass of the population, the distress to those capitalists who went bust, or the occasional outburst of popular discontent. They were not in themselves going to bring the system to an end. As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky put it nearly 40 years after Marx's death, "capitalism does live by crises and booms, just as a human being lives by inhaling and exhaling" .23 The long-term dynamic came from elsewhere than the crisisfrom two long-term processes at work in the system, processes that were a product of its ageing as it went through each repetition of the cycle of expansion and contraction.
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall
The theory
The first of these processes is what Marx called "the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" (sometimes called, for short, by Marxists since, "the falling rate of profit"-the phrase I will often use here).
This is one of the most difficult parts of Marx's theory for newcomers to his ideas to understand, and also one of the most contentious. Non-Marxist economists reject it. So the often perceptive Observer economic columnist William Keegan has denounced Marx's account as "an obsolete economic textbook which was itself written during the early, faltering phase of unreformed capitalism" quoting the French economist Marjolin to the effect that, "A modicum of experience and some knowledge of history was enough to cast doubt on the [Marxist] theory of an inevitable decline of capitalism owing to a falling rate of profit". 24 Many Marxists who accept the theory of value and the main contours of Marx's account of the crisis are just as dismissive of it.25 Others hedge round their support for it with so many provisos as to effectively cut it out of any account of the system's long-term development.
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond