This chapter in part provides an assessment of an additional explanation for deindustrialization, namely that it has occurred through slow growth and investment in the context of manufacturing overcapacity. But it goes beyond this to examine some wider questions about contemporary global capitalism, which takes us beyond a consideration of deindustrialization in itself. This is because the claim made about deindustrialization in effect draws on some wider contentions, most notably that capitalism entered a period of a long downturn in 1973, from which it has not recovered (Brenner 1998, 2002). Therefore, in order to fully assess the specific claims made about deindustrialization, we need to consider these wider claims. A consideration of these arguments then form the basis for a further examination of the previous accounts explored in the previous three chapters, and then forward to an assessment of more overtly geopolitical questions in the next chapter.

The chapter starts by further investigating the claim that deindustrialization is a product of slow growth, relative stagnation and manufacturing overcapacity, which we discussed in the previous chapter when focusing on the work of Aaron Benanav (2020a), and it also alludes to the wider arguments that this account draws on. Part of Benanav's claim is that capitalism entered a long downturn in the 1970s from which it has not recovered and it is this contention that is the main focus of this chapter. The next section further develops and explores this contention, through an assessment of another version of the “stagnationist” thesis, which links it to global imbalances, trade surpluses and deficits, and underconsumption (Klein & Pettis 2020). Although the approaches explored in the first two sections are very different (Benanav 2020b), both characterize the current era of global capitalism as one of stagnation, of which deindustrialization is one part. The three sections that follow challenge this thesis, by focusing (in the third and fourth sections) on two manifestations of financialization, and how this hascontext of what we call “assetization” (Birch laid the basis for capitalist expansion in the neoliberal era. The first of these (third section) considers the question of debt but centrally places this in the 2015; Adkins et al. 2020) and the rise of the asset economy, while the second (fourth section) examines financialization in the context of changes in global production and the rise of global production networks.