social relations. In addition, the state nowadays also employs a very large number of people earning incomes from activity that is often or mostly not oriented to profit making, analogous to a non-profit sector sustained by subsidies, grants, and donations, as well as some income-generating activity. The state is the largest sponsor and purchaser of the military industry supplying the armed forces. Ecology. Although he did refer to it, Marx did not analyze in detail the depletion of natural resources by capitalist production, where the depletion involves non-reproducible goods, or living organisms that are wiped out. If land is exhausted or becomes infertile, or if it is devastated by a natural disaster, or if the yield of mines, forests, and fisheries becomes too low, production can no longer continue. After a series of cycles of capitalist reproduction, environments may emerge that are no longer inhabitable by human beings because they are incapable any longer of sustaining life. International division of labor. Through mechanization and productivity increases achieved by capitalist production, the allocation of human labour between agriculture, manufacturing industries, and services (the so-called primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors of the economy) is altered nationally and internationally. In developed capitalist countries, the agricultural labour force has shrunk to only a tiny fraction of the total workforce, and manufacturing industries remain only as a minor part of total production; the large majority of workers are employed in service industries. This contrasts with less-developed countries, which retain a large agricultural workforce, and newly industrializing countries, which feature a large manufacturing workforce. Marx did not analyze the implications of these long-term effects of the expansion of production by means of capital accumulation. In assessing the effect of these "omissions", one ought to keep in mind that when Marx discussed the intertwining of the circulation of capital with the reproduction processes that occur in any kind of society, he was primarily concerned with the functional requirements of the capitalist mode of production and not with the reproduction of the whole of society. At any time, a fraction of the population is not working or "economically active" (children, students, the sick and disabled, the unemployed, volunteer workers, housewives, pensioners, idlers, etc.), and assets are maintained or accumulated that are unrelated to the sphere of production. These were generally outside the scope of Marx's analysis, even if he occasionally mentioned them. Economic reproduction, economic equilibrium, and economic