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In what sense can Marx's law of the falling rate of profit enable us concretely to predict the future course of capitalist development? Its author certainly made no such claims on its behalf. In formulating this law of tendency, he wished to draw attention to the fact that (a) the rate of profit was the regulator of the entire accumulation process and (b) that this very process was profoundly contradictory and must lead to periodic crises. But he never pretended that the precise forms taken by such crises could be predicted, nor even their exact magnitude or timing. As Marx makes clear in many places in Capital, each crisis was in a sense unique, determined by the whole past process of capital accumulation; it was therefore obligatory to examine each crisis in its concreteness and not by means of some simple formulae. Precisely because capitalist social relations were antagonistic — that is based upon the struggle of classes whose historical interests were diametrically opposed, that is qualitatively different — no predictions of a concrete nature about the evolution of economic categories was possible. More precisely, in connection with the movement of the rate of profit, Marx made clear that he was stating a general law of tendency, which, as in all cases, inevitably produced 'counter-acting' forces to its operation which modified its functioning in important respects. These included the strength and determination of the working class, the 'weight' of which could in no sense be known beforehand in that it depended upon both objective and subjective forces, amongst which had to be numbered the role which a knowledge of this law would have within the organised working class movement. Here Marx, was, in effect, warning against the old mechanical materialism which thought that the world could be understood in a purely contemplative manner.