[...] for most of the postwar era, US capital was mainly focused on extracting “relative surplus value” — i.e., generating profits by relying on increased productivity. The key inflection points for us are in the late 1960s through the 1970s, a period of intense industrial conflict in the United States, largely in resistance to capital’s enormous speedup of production. This was the era of rank-and-file rebellion, in which blue-collar workers went on the offensive against their bosses (and often their union leaders as well) in a fight against deteriorating working conditions, while millions of public-sector workers joined unions for the first time. Partly as a result of these high levels of conflict, productivity growth during the late 1970s virtually collapsed, leading to a decline in profit rates. The rebellion came to an end with the recession induced by Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker’s sudden increase in interest rates in 1979, which announced the start of the neoliberal era.