We might begin by remembering that the miracle years of the previous golden age (roughly 1950-1973) depended not only on a world war and an enormous uptick in state spending, but also on an historically unprecedented transfer of population from agriculture to industry. Agricultural populations proved to be a potent weapon in the quest for “modernisation”, since they provided a source of cheap labour for a new wave of industrialisation. In 1950, 23 percent of the German workforce was employed in agriculture, in France 31, in Italy 44 and in Japan 49 percent — by 2000, all had agricultural populations of under 5 percent. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, capital dealt with mass unemployment, when it occurred, by expelling urban proletarians back to the land, as well as by exporting them to colonies. By eliminating the peasantry in the traditional core at the same time as it came up against the limits of colonial expansion, capital eliminated its own traditional mechanisms of recovery. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

For Marx, the fundamental crisis tendency of the capitalist mode of production was not limited in its scope to periodic downturns in economic activity. It revealed itself most forcefully in a permanent crisis of working life. The differentia specifica of capitalist “economic” crises — that people starve in spite of good harvests, and means of production lie idle in spite of a need for their products — is merely one moment of this larger crisis — the constant reproduction of a scarcity of jobs in the midst of an abundance of goods. It is the dynamic of this crisis — the crisis of the reproduction of the capital-labour relation — which this article explores. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt

Meanwhile, the wave of industrialisation that absorbed those who had been pushed out of agriculture came up against its own limits in the 1970s. Since then, the major capitalist countries have seen an unprecedented decline in their levels of industrial employment. Over the past three decades, manufacturing employment fell 50 percent as a percentage of total employment in these countries. Even newly “industrialising” countries like South Korea and Taiwan saw their relative levels of industrial employment decline in the past two decades. At the same time the numbers of both low-paid service-workers and slum-dwellers working in the informal sector have expanded as the only remaining options for those who have become superfluous to the needs of shrinking industries. Endnotes, Misery and Debt, On the Logic and History of Surplus Population and Surplus Capital, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt