Harman's job it was to pooh-pooh those in the S.W.P. foolish enough to go back to read Marx on crisis, when they ought to be reading Michael Kidron on the permanent arms economy. In Explaining the Crisis, Harman reproduced some of his catty dismissals of the marxist fundamentalists in his own orgnisation from the internal bulletin discussions - namely David Yaffe - who had been foolish enough to read Paul Mattick and Henryk Grossmann. Those Marxists were expelled from the SWP.
Later, some of them re-published Henryk Grossmann's Law of Accumulation with Pluto Press. Weirdly, the same Chris Harman who had been attacking the study of Marx's crisis theory in Explaining the Crisis, suddenly came over all fundamentalist Marxist in 'Economics Of The Madhouse: Capitalism and the Market Today' (1995). Now he was quoting Grossmann on the crisis and talking about the falling rate of profit again. Discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which had been a sign of dissident 'paleo-Marxism' in the seventies became a religious Mantra for Harman in the 1990s. Some weird calculations were made to show that the redirection of the surplus into arms spending no longer prevented the crisis tendencies from re-emerging. The imminent crisis of capitalism would keep the comrades committed to the cause - even if that meant pretending that there was no expansion of capitalism into the developing world after the collapse of Stalinism (after all, those countries had been capitalist all along, according to another SWP shibboleth).