Presumably a massive economic crash. This has obviously never happened, it doesn’t even “fall” consistently over time due to the repeated capture of new markets overseas. Marx is just describing the consequences of “automation” under capitalism, or more generally the outsourcing of human labor to machinery.
I would research “tendency of rate of profit to fall.” No, automation is not socialism, though it is more viable with socialism than capitalism in the long term.
https://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/terry-martin
“Terry Martin is the author of The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the USSR, 1923–1939 (Cornell UP, 2001) and co-editor (with Ronald Suny) of A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford UP, 2001). In addition to questions of nationality and empire, he has written on religion, political and administrative history, Soviet neo-traditionalism, and the political police, as well as the Nazi-Soviet comparison. He is currently completing a book on the politics and sociology of state information-gathering in the USSR from the revolution through the death of Stalin.”
This guy does not strike me as serious. Don’t waste brainspace on his drivel.
I know it seems unfair to categorically dismiss someone’s thoughts like this, but it saves you so much energy. Any time you spend reading his historical fiction novels is time you could spend studying theory, or at least Soviet history from Soviet scholars. Or reading a better historical fiction novel, for that matter. Private publishing like this is frowned upon in academia for a reason. It allows you to say anything with a veneer of authority. The only reason you’re reading him is because he’s a Harvard professor, and that means less than nothing. It’s a finishing school for rich white kids, always was and always will be.
I highly doubt most local libraries carry a copy of Settlers. Where are you seeing this?
A couple things… firstly, there’s no way of actually knowing which country is going to have a revolution first or last, what that revolution would require in order for it to occur, or what outcomes would emerge from that revolution. Most everyone who’s tried to think this way has been wrong.
Also reforms are not “compromises.” Their functions are more similar to steam vents. Almost all reforms are phased out eventually or otherwise circumvented until a boiling point is reached again. There is no sliding scale. And there is no “socialist-sympathetic petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie.” Virtually no one would do the things you suggest. If they do, they’re probably tricking some local anarcho-whatever collective into throw bricks at striking autoworkers because they voted for Trump or something.
What you’re suggesting is called “accelerationism” and it’s not very popular. Turning up the heat doesn’t get you any closer to revolution unless there’s a preexisting socialist framework to replace and undermine the faltering structures of capitalism. That takes actual coordination and planning. Revolutions do not self-assemble like cell membranes. This is idealism.
Just hang around a bit, this stuff will become clearer.