Grossman claimed to prove, as against Bauer, that if these schema were applied over a sufficiently large number of cycles of production a point would be reached at which the rate of profit would be too low to allow production to continue without cutting into workers' real wages and the consumption of the capitalist class itself. This would happen because "the scope of accumulation expands . . .in proportion to the weight of the already accumulated capital" even as the rate of profit tends to decline. Eventually a point would be reached where sustaining accumulation absorbed all existing surplus value, leaving none for the luxury consumption of the capitalist class, and then beginning to eat into the value needed to sustain the working class.52
Alternatively, if surplus value was used on an increasing scale to maintain the rate of profit on existing investment, there would be a collapse in the mass of surplus value available for new investment. The industries catering for investment would not be able to function. There would be "absolute over-accumulation" and "a state of capital saturation in which the over-accumulated capital faces a shortage of investment opportunities and finds it more difficult to surmount this saturation" .53 In either case the system would no longer be able to reproduce itself.
There have been many objections to Grossman's arguments.54 It is not clear from his argument why the rate of expansion of investment has to remain constant from one cycle to another, rather than slowly decline in response to the decline in the rate of profit and in doing so reduce the tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise. In that case the "breakdown", it might seem, could be postponed for a very long time. Further, Grossman's book is ambiguous about whether his theory proves the inevitability of crisis or the inevitability of a complete breakdown of the system. He recognises that the crisis can counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, but still concludes that:
The Dynamics of the System
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