Crisis and the Rate of Profit in Marx’s Laboratory Peter D. Thomas and Geert Reuten Karl Marx’s notion of ‘the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ has long constituted one of the most contro- versial elements of Marx’s and Marxian theory. It has given rise to ongoing conflicting interpretations and opposed theoretical ‘reconstructions’. This chapter will not seek to resolve these interpretative and recon- structive controversies. Rather, we propose to examine the role played by ‘the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ at a decisive stage of Marx’s development of the notion of the capitalist mode of production; namely, in the 1857–8 notebooks subsequently published as the Grundrisse. Written at the onset of a major world-crisis of the capitalist mode of production, these incomplete yet internally systematic notebooks provide us with a unique window onto Marx’s theoretical laboratory. This is not primarily because, as various commentators have supposed, the Grundrisse is a ‘work of transition’ from a ‘youthful’ to a more ‘mature’ paradigm. This view has issued in equally various positive and nega- tive assessments of this transition e.g., on the one hand, a transition from idealism/ideology to materialism/sci- ence, for the Althusserian school; on the other hand, a transition from politics to ‘economism’, or the ‘dead- end of political economy’, for E.P. Thompson. In both cases, the reading and interpretation of the Grundrisse itself is subordinated to its ‘exemplary’ role in a prede- termined tale of purification or degeneration. Rather, the significance of the Grundrisse consists in the dramatic form in which it enables us to observe 311-328_BELLOFIORE_F16.indd 311 4/1/2013 1:08:45 PM