From the late 19th century onwards, Britain’s ruling class benefited from the rising productivity in the factories, imperialist domination in the colonies, a gendered division of labour in the home, and the relentless exploitation of cheap natural resources everywhere. These combined to facilitate a series of different class compositions that successfully subjugated the working class, despite moments of revolutionary potential. Each time the rising costs of natural inputs (principally labour, food, raw materials and energy) began to place limits on accumulation, a combination of geographical expansion, enclosure, and new scientific revolutions opened up a new ecological surplus that could be exploited. These surpluses offered the ruling class room for manoeuvre and allowed it to use working class struggles to drive new processes of development, thereby cutting off routes that led towards revolutionary situations. But now in the 21st century, that new surplus isn’t forthcoming - and, in fact, the bills run up through past exploitation are coming due. In the language of Jason Moore, we have witnessed the transition from the accumulation of surplus value to the accumulation of negative value.