chat

But will the rate of profit falling, which is a tendency and not a law, actually end empire if no one takes action?

The laws of thermodynamic are "tendencies and not really laws" either, yet as any physicist worth their salt will tell you it is a certainty that entropy will increase over time. Don't mistake the difference between law and tendency with uncertainty, a tendency can be as certain as a law of physics if the phenomenon it describe has the right statistical properties.

Also, yes, that can and will end capitalism and any empire that still practices it by the times it reaches the critical point. Capitalism necessitate profit, if profits can't be made, capitalism stops working, it's that simple. As for people taking action, well, they will have no choice but to take action eventually because if capitalism breaks before they have a replacement ready, it will end badly for everyone involved. And by that I mean, if there is no mode of production handling production and distribution of food, water, and all that, peoples will start starving to death very quickly.

What actions will people take in the core?

It's difficult to predict. We can say for pretty much certain that the core will keep getting increasingly economically and politically unstable until it cannot sustain itself anymore, but how the local population will react the this decline is hard to tell at best.

Will the global south actually do the magical thing you suggest? I don’t understand what we gain by painting this telelogical end unless we are so hopeless, weak, and vulnerable that we need a heaven/salvation myth forged from a religion of economics to cope with the reality that we have no real grip on history.

First, I suggest that you read theory, genuinely. If you think the Marxist prediction that revolution is unavoidable is some Cristian rapture-like prophesy of salvation coming for the believers, you don't understand Marxist theory.

It's not magical or theological, it's logical. I'm not gonna go through all the theory that explain this conclusion here, again, go read about all that yourself, but here's a bit of a TL,DR.

One of the benefits Imperial nations get out of imperialism is that some of the contradictions of capitalism get effectively offloaded to imperialized countries, they get cheaper and more exploitable labor that at home to make the things they sell back home for example. This exploitation of the imperialized nation by the imperial nation makes quality of life in the imperialized nation worse as exploitation keeps intensifying.

This will inevitably make the peoples of the imperialized nation revolt because that's what happen when the standards of leavings of an entire population get unacceptably low at the hand of a greedy ruling class, just look at any popular revolt of a people against their ruler throughout history for examples of this.

These revolts will necessarily be working class revolts, because the capitalist class is already the ruling class under capitalism, and there is no third class beside these two. Therefore, if these revolts succeed in overthrowing the capitalist rulers, they will put a working class government in its place because why would they overthrow capitalists to replace them by capitalists?

Thus, socialist revolution will happen. Not "by magic" but because it is the logical conclusion given the way capitalism and imperialism function at their core.