I don't have a problem with your characterization of decay; and perhaps in relation to the original context (I think you were making a point that there has been a lack of investment in new means of production, lack of continuing revolutionising the means of production) there is "decay" or less investment. I don't have figures.
But to elaborate some of what I am saying: This is a dialectical change because it is the advance in MECHANIZATION (masses of trucks, containerization, CAM/CAD, telecommunications, satellites, just in time delivery, synthetic raw materials etc, etc)
that makes it possible to "deconstruct" COOPERATION. The original combination turns into its opposite based on an internal contradiction , as mechanization negates cooperation.
The decision by the big bourgeoisie to "deconstruct" the original configuration of cooperation is a POLITICAL economic one. For it is in giant factories and workplaces, and attendent residential ghettoization that he workers get a sense of their power in numbers and organization. The capitalists have read Marx and Lenin , and know this. So, they are breaking it up now that technology allows them make up for the loss in squeezing surplus value that was originally had from cooperation in the shift from manufacture to industry ( See "Machinery and Modern Industry" in Capital Vol. 1).
Of course, there is greater integration of the overall world system of division of labor; or the classic increase in the division of labor or socialization of production. This is also more of the infrastructure for socialism being laid, just as the advent of imperialism is. The points of production are more spreadout geographically and yet perhaps more integrated or as integrated as when concentrated in a Detroit or U.S. Midwest.
Everybody knows there is a lot of new technology since the Industrial Revolution and since the advent of the Imperialist stage.
I'm trying to give a Marxist definition of a qualitative change in organization of production, by developing the basic concepts in the chapter entitled "Machinery and Modern Industry" in Vol. I of Capital. This also would be part of a Marxist interpretation of socalled globalization.
So what ? More of the same: Workers of the world unite even more than in 1848 . We use the new technology to help workers' unity catch up.
Charles
Charles Brown writes:
"With the revolution in transportation and communication of our times the capitalists, through long distant rapid and precise commercial transport, no longer need the old cooperation ( a lot of workers concentrated in one place; classic factory) to generate surplus value. Plus, the concentration of workers has always been a political problem. Thus, the territorial dispersal of the points of production , plantclosings and outsourcing from old industrial center cities and regions, smaller plants DO constitute a "substantial reorganization of production, " I'd even say a revolution in a dialectical sense of a qualitative change, as it reverses one of the defining aspects of the organization of production in capitalism at its ascent to prevailence. "
I would say that the downsizing and disaggregation of production was more indicative of decay than a new round of reorganisation. That said the one sometimes leads to the other. New points of production and new methods of production would be the indicator.
-- Jim heartfield