From the "fall of the rate of profit" in the Grundrisse to the cyclical development of the profit rate in Capital

Marx’ s views on the “law” or “tendency” of the rate of profit to fall developed throughout his life from a law about the historical destination of the capitalist system as tending towards breakdown (the Grundrisse text of 1857-58), into a theory about the functioning of the capitalist mode of production as a (potentially) reproductive system (the 1864-65 manuscript of Capital III). The first view is compati­ble with a “naturalistic” and teleological philosophy of history; it presupposes a unilinear conception of time and implicitly posits a diachronic “exhaustion” of an originary rate of profit. The second view opens the way towards a type of “conjunctural analysis”, founded upon a cyclical notion of time as a synchronic intensification of contradictory articulations in a synchronically given system.