http://www.scdigest.com/images/misc/Manufacturing_Data.jpg

Worker productivity at an all time high, manufacturing worker's numbers at an all time low = more profits than they know what to do with. But now the workers don't have money to buy with, now whose fault is that?

What's going on with this graph? Is it looking at manufacturing globally? Is there a point at which there is a huge surplus population and only one exploited person?

It's US manufacturing data. We've been talking about crisis as an ongoing characteristic of capitalism. How commodity production and exchange always leads to surpluses, and results in massive job loss and (literally) deadly consequences for the working class.

Recession is usually defined as a function of negative economic growth, and the assumption is that when the trend is reversed, recession ends and the "good times" arrive once again, until the next crisis.

This chart shows how crises of capitalism are accelerated these days. Periods of surpluses arrive quicker and with more frequency as the gap between productivity and workforce widens. It's a surplus of production (although, if viewed as surplus population, the result may be quite similar). It's not recession or depression any longer, it's just business as usual.

I think you have correctly identified the ultimate logic of capitalism, except the surplus population is dead, and the one exploited person has one foot in.

What used to be Americans being exploited are now Chinese and Indian workers being exploited.

cannot lead to any good. The logical conclusion is within sight...

The chart is a little contrived because the two scales are independent of each other and not equivalents. Whoever drew the chart made the two slopes (one downward and the other upward) look similar, as if the increase in productivity caused the decline of industrial jobs as a percentage of the workforce. In truth, the industrial output curve has a much greater slope than the industrial jobs curve, because the scale is more compressed.

Nevertheless, almost all of the observations contained in the postings above are correct and are reflected to one degree or another in the chart. Industrial output does continue to go up even as the number of industrial workers goes down. The chart shows a relative decline but the number of industrial workers has also gone down absolutely. The number of people in the workforce would have had to more than triple for the number of industrial workers to remain the same. Even if that had happened (which it didn't), each worker would be more than 12 times as productive over the period of the chart. Wages would have had to rise proportionally just to maintain the national relationship between market and output in the industrial sector alone. Of course, the opposite has happened with wages depressed by the decline of jobs (not to mention the other forces at work).

So what does the chart show? All kinds of things. It shows changing organic composition, with more capital employed for fewer workers to create higher outputs. Once we know that mining and agriculture show similar trends, the chart shows that basic production forms a smaller and smaller base for domestic markets, and while the so-called "service economy" also produces commodities in part, nonetheless, the handwriting is on the wall for at least the national status quo. As many have noted, the chart is an invitation to look at similar criteria internationally.

Finally, we have been discussing "crisis". The chart, however, shows two lines which advance steadily in their own direction, largely defiant of political or economic "events". Here we see (in part), the underlying dynamic.

The "Business Cycle" is back... with a vengeance? No shit.