But in the essay ‘Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital’, which appeared in 2010 in the midst of the economic recession following the financial crisis of 2007–8 and rocketing unemployment rates (especially for young people) in North America, Aaron Benanav and John Clegg (2014) argued that capital’s long-term tendency to generate surplus populations had in actuality been inexorably working its way through the global capitalist economy. Populations evicted from agriculture were absorbed by industry, only for manufacturing itself to be done in by deindustrialization and the expansion of services, but at each step the re-absorptive capacities became more stretched, as ‘labour-saving technology’ was generalized across an ever growing number of types of production lines, and with increasing speed throughout a global economy. Debt had masked the downward pressure on wages and living standards, but bursting financial bubbles revealed it as only a temporary alleviation. ‘Any question of the absorption of this surplus humanity has been put to rest. It exists now only to be managed: segregated into prisons, marginalized in ghettos and camps, disciplined by the police, and annihilated by war’ (Benanav and
perfect machines, inhuman labour
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