In this way depreciation can ease the pressure on the capitalist system as a whole, with the burden of paying for it falling on those capitalists who were driven out of business, but not on those who remained. Those capitalists who die bear many of the costs of depreciation for the system as whole, making it possible for those who live on to do so with lower capital costs and eventually higher rates of profit than would otherwise be the case. "The crises are always but momentary and forcible solutions of the existing contradictions. They are violent eruptions which for a time restore the disturbed equilibrium" .48
There is a continual double interaction between the long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall and cyclical crises. The rise in the ratio of investment to labour employed as new investment takes place during periods of expansion exerts a downward pressure on the rate of profit, just as it is under pressure from rising raw material prices and wages. This can have a direct effect, with the fall in the rate of profit causing firms to stop investing, so causing recession in the capital goods industries which then spreads elsewhere. Or it can happen indirectly if firms are successful in protecting the rate of profit temporarily by forcing down real wages. In that case, firms in the consumer goods industries cannot sell all their goods-or, as Marx puts it, they cannot "realise the surplus value" that they have exploited-and their profits fall, again producing recession.49
But the crisis in turn leads to some firms going bust and provides opportunities for other firms to buy up their equipment and raw material and take on workers at lower wages. If enough firms go bust, the crisis itself can work to completely counteract the long-term downward tendency of the rate of profit. In short, the decline in the rate of profit helps produce the cyclical crisis, but the cyclical crisis helps resolve the long-term decline in the rate of profit.
Marx's account of the falling rate of profit was not published until 1 1 years after his death and did not have a big impact on the analyses of his followers in the next two decades. It barely featured in the most important works of Marxist analysis by Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Nicolai Bukharin. It was accepted by Rudolf Hilferding but was not central to his analysis. 50 It was not until the 1920s that a concerted attempt was made to use it to analyse the long term trajectory of the system by the Polish-Austrian Marxist Henryk Grossman. He was reacting to the propensity of many Marxists to deny that capitalism was inevitably heading to a great crash, a "breakdown". He took up the argument in the form in which it had been put by the Austrian social democrat Otto Bauer, who claimed to show that capitalism could expand indefinitely, using schema from Marx in Volume Two of Capital depicting the interrelation between different sectors of capitalist production.51
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond