Two related processes are taking place in all "advanced" economies (and many "non-advanced" ones). The traditional manual working class is put under more and more pressure as capital tries to squeeze its directly productive labour so as to get more profits from it. At the same time, the new "non-goods-producing service" working class is subject to proletarianisation as capital sets out to reduce the costs to it of non-productive and indirectly productive functions.
Each crisis in the last four decades has involved sudden increases in unemployment-in some cases permanent-and the wiping out of old established centres of production (factories, docks, mines, etc). Capital and its apologists have then tried to take advantage of workers' feelings of insecurity to remould their lives around its own continually changing requirements. Its slogans have become "flexibility" in labouring time, methods of work and labour markets, all justified by the claim that "lifetime employment belongs to a past age". Much academic research has accepted its message, and "Third Way" social democrats and those on the "autonomist" left have taken it for an unquestionable truth. Typical-and excessively influential-is the sociologist Manuel Castells who argues there is:
Structural unstability [sic] in the labour markets everywhere, and the requirement for flexibility of employment, mobility of labour, and constant reskilling of the workforce. The notion of the stable, predictable, professional career is eroded, as relationships between capital and labour are individualised and contractual labour conditions escape collective bargaining.20
The claim about the ability of capitalism to destroy industrial jobs instantaneously is a vast exaggeration of what is happening with restructuring. As we have seen in Chapter Ten it takes time and effort for capital to liquidate industrial investment in one part of the world and shift it to another-and new investment is still predominantly within the triad of the advanced countries, although the emergence of China as a manufacturing centre is adding a new twist to that pattern. Even in the electronics industry, in which components and most final products are very light and cheap to move, there was not an unambiguous move from centralised production in the advanced countries to contracting out in the Global South in the 1990s and early 2000s:
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