Deindustrialisation began in the US, where the share of manufacturing employment started falling in the 1960s before dropping absolutely in the 80s, but this trend was soon generalized to most other high-GDP countries, and even to countries and regions that are seen as “industrializing”. [In no country (with the exception of the UK) did deindustrialisation involve a decline in real industrial output. In 1999, manufacturing still accounted for 46 percent of total US profits, but only 14 percent of the labour force.] The explosive growth of a low-wage service-sector partially offset the decline in manufacturing employment. However, services have proven incapable of replacing manufacturing as the basis of a new round of expanded reproduction. 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

Services are, almost by definition, those activities for which productivity increases are difficult to achieve otherwise than on the margin. The only known way to drastically improve the efficiency of services is to turn them into goods and then to produce those goods with industrial processes that become more efficient over time. Many manufactured goods are in fact former services — dishes were formerly washed by servants in the homes of the affluent; today, dishwashers perform that service more efficiently and are themselves produced with less and less labour. Those activities that remain services tend to be precisely the ones for which it has so far proven impossible to find a replacement in the world of goods. 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

In the early post-war period, many countries turned to “Fordism” — that is to say, the import of methods of mass production, made possible by government-sponsored “technology transfers” from high-GDP countries. Fordism is often taken to be a national economic-development policy, based on an “agreement” between capital and workers to share the gains of productivity increases. But Fordism was, almost from the beginning, predicated on an internationalisation of trade in manufactures. Europe and Japan benefited the most from the resurgence of international trade in the 1950s and 60s: capitals in these countries were able to achieve massive economies of scale by producing for international trade, thereby overcoming the limits of their own domestic markets. By the mid-60s, capitals in low-GDP countries like Brazil and South Korea were doing the same thing: even if they could capture only a small portion of the rapidly expanding international export market, they would still grow far beyond what was possible in their home markets. Thus, in the period before 1973, the internationalisation of trade was associated with high rates of growth in all industrialising countries. 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

After 1973, the situation changed. Markets for manufactures were becoming saturated, and it was increasingly the case that a few countries could provide the manufactures for all of the world (one chinese firm currently supplies over half the world's microwaves). Thus the resulting crisis of the capital-labour relation, which is to say, a combined crisis of over-production and under-consumption, signalled by a global fall in the rate of profit and issuing in a multiplication of forms of unemployment and precarious employment. As the capital-labour accord snapped, having always been based on healthy rates of growth worldwide, wages stagnated. Capital in all countries became even more dependent on international trade, but from now on, capitals in some countries would expand only at the expense of those in others. Though they had not yet caught up to the high-GDP countries, the low-GDP countries took part in the same international crisis. Structural Adjustment Programs only accelerated their transition to a new, unstable international framework. Deindustrialisation, or at least the stagnation of industrial employment, set in almost universally among industrialising countries in the 1980s and 90s. 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

It should thus be clear that de-industrialization is not caused by the industrialization of the “third world”. Most of the world’s industrial working-class now lives outside the “first world”, but so does most of the world’s population. The low-GDP countries have absolutely more workers in industry, but not relative to their populations. Relative industrial employment is falling even as agricultural employment collapses. Just as de-industrialisation in the high-GDP countries entails both the exit from manufacturing and the failure of services to take its place, so also the explosive growth of slums in the low-GDP countries entails both the exit from the countryside and the failure of industry to absorb the rural surplus. Whereas the World Bank used to suggest that the growing surplus populations throughout the world were a mere transitional element, they are now forced to admit the permanence of this condition. More than a billion people today eke out a terrible existence via an endless migration between urban and rural slums, searching for temporary and casual work wherever they can find it. 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