The post-2008 era saw a return of the manufacturing fetish, the idea that manufacturing constitutes the flywheel of growth without which no nation can thrive. Across the Global North and South, voices are calling to reverse deindustrialization and revive manufacturing. While today deindustrialization is met with anxiety, in the 1930s economists predicted deindustrialization but interpreted it as a liberating process leading to a post-industrial age based on material abundance and widespread economic security. Far from delivering this vision, deindustrialization actually produces a precarious economic order driven by labour precarity, economic stagnation and lost development opportunities for the Global South. What can be termed the Baumolian and Kaldorian frameworks, attribute this precarious reality to services’ inability to replace manufacturing as a growth engine given their technologically stagnant nature. However, this article argues that, by focusing on the technical aspects of service economies, such views overlook the social limits of the capitalist economy and its historically specific conception of wealth, value. As capitalism matures, productivity becomes an increasingly inadequate form of augmenting social wealth as it results in great increases in physical output but counterintuitively undermines the expansion of value. Capitalism is underpinned by a secular movement towards declining dynamism, as it increasingly struggles to maintain its former economic vigour. Stagnation and heightened labour precarity are not merely the product of tertiarization but symptoms of capitalism’s declining trajectory.

2008 年后的时代见证了制造业迷信的回归，即制造业构成了增长的飞轮，没有它，任何国家都无法繁荣发展。在全球北方和南方，人们呼吁扭转去工业化并重振制造业。虽然今天去工业化遇到了焦虑，但在 1930 年代，经济学家预测了去工业化，但将其解释为导致基于物质丰富和广泛经济安全的后工业时代的解放过程。远非实现这一愿景，去工业化实际上产生了不稳定的经济秩序，由劳动力不稳定、经济停滞和全球南方失去的发展机会驱动。可以称为 Baumolian 和 Kaldorian 框架的东西，将这种不稳定的现实归因于服务业无法取代制造业作为增长引擎，因为它们在技术上停滞不前。然而，本文认为，通过关注服务经济的技术方面，这种观点忽视了资本主义经济的社会局限性及其历史特定的财富、价值概念。随着资本主义的成熟，生产力成为增加社会财富的越来越不充分的形式，因为它导致物质产出的大幅增加，但违反直觉地破坏了价值的扩张。资本主义受到了走向衰落活力的世俗运动的支撑，因为它越来越难以保持以前的经济活力。