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The Accumulation of Waste: A political economy of systemic destruction
In the waste masquerading as wealth, nature is the principal commodity on offer. Waste sells and, like everything under capital, is financialized, This work attributes the emergence of waste to the intrinsic workings of the Marxian value relation.
584 pages, Hardcover
Published August 24, 2023
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About the author
Ali Kadri
12 books40 followersDr Ali Kadri is a Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy at LSE. Prior to his present position, he was a visiting fellow at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and the principal author of several United Nations reports addressing the right to development in Western Asia. In his current as well as his previous works, Kadri has focused on the issue of accumulation through destruction, the production of waste and militarism. He had argued that alongside war for strategic control of oil, war is also a form of production and an end in itself
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December 12, 2025
This is probably the most important theoretical intervention into the collective project of dialectical and historical materialism to have occurred in the 21st century.
In this book, Ali Kadri argues that class struggle and value creation are much more holistic than Western Marxists tend to theorize.
From the standpoint of social reproduction, the majority of value created is not from ripping Western workers off at their 9-5 jobs. Imperialist wars that reconstitute global power structures are the necessary precondition of all civilian-end use commodity industries, and make up the biggest components of their values. Further, production for dis-use values, or waste production, poisons consumers, and shifts the costs of production further onto society. For instance, when you buy a can of Coke, the metal of the can was bought cheap due to imperialist wars that reduce the wages of Congolese workers, the product itself is made of toxins that reduce the health of society, and the cans after consumption poison the environment. In this case, the poisoned environment poisons humans, reducing their life span. This means less money to upkeep workers, more money allocated towards pharmaceuticals due to sickness, and the degradation of Labour’s standing in the class struggle. Kadri theorizes the poisoned environment as a machine, which emits value and reduces the lives of workers. More generally, any life activity that reduces the life expectancy of Labour to fit to Capitalism’s imperatives is value forming: in this sense, the most accurate measurement for the rate surplus value (the rate of exploitation) is the life expectancy differentials between global north and south. The rate of profit mirrors the rate of killing.
Many Marxists with knacks for formalism get caught up in prices and economistic analyses of capitalism, but prices are power symbols that obscure the social practices that undergird them. There is no “transformation problem” from value to prices—or socially necessary labour time to dollars—prices are formulated via superstructural mediation, according to the relative balance of forces in the class struggle.
The workers in the Global North that cast votes for candidates who all carry out imperialist wars are organically linked to Capital—they reproduce Capital. The divided working class infighting reproduces Capital. The proletariat are the working class imbued with revolutionary consciousness. While all social classes are subjects of history relative to their forms of thought and the balance of forces in the class struggle, in a more structural sense, history can also be seen as its own subject auto-differentiating under the spell of the commodity. (History unfolds at the intersection between determinacy and contingency.) The stock of surplus value also includes the West’s historical surplus value, which is the ideological weight accumulated from colonial wars over the last 500 years.
Ali Kadri suggests that it isn’t helpful to theorize there being pre-capitalist social formations in the contemporary era, because capitalism is a global system whose primary industry is the production of waste--the wasted lives of the majority of humanity that are cut short (by social murder and murder proper). In this sense, the most advanced capitalist countries are the ones where the most are killed from imperialist wars, whose resources and labour power are put up for grabs on the cheap. The section of the proletariat socialized under the guns of imperialism are more revolutionary than the cannibalistic working class of the global north that only fights for better working conditions in the metropole. By only fighting for wage increases, Northern workers want to intervene in the sphere of circulation without altering production; ultimately, this amounts to a mere fight for a larger share of imperialist loot that is composed of the shortened lives of Southern workers.
The true revolutionary consciousness of the contemporary era consists of the understanding that capitalism is systemic genocide, both structural and overt. Cultural symbols of the global south don’t preclude revolutionary consciousness, or make them any less proletarian. The global south’s anti-colonial nationalist movements are class war by dialectical inversion: they are fighting against the institution of private property as it exists in the material world.
In a holistic sense, in the vein of Lenin, imperialism is a relation with a social subject and historical weight, rather than mere “spatial fixes,” capital flows, etc., in the abstract. US-led imperialism is the only imperialism. Dismissing China as “state capitalist” is an imperialist class position, typically adopted by the (ideologically) white classes. In the capitalist world system, all modes of production on a national scale could be designated "state capitalist"; this neglects the differentiation between opposing forces, and is a political position meant to delegitimize the process of socialist construction. The PRC is the only social formation to fundamentally threaten Western hegemony on a world scale; it offers opportunities to the global south for sovereign development and people's war preparedness, counteracting the primacy of waste production.
The destruction of social nature (humans and nature which are a unity) is capitalism’s auto-destructive process driven by unconscious imperatives whose logical end is the pure waste of the planet. Environmentalists ought to care more about destroyed humans, whose lives are wasted in imperialist wars. Capitalism and environment-saving technologies are “a meat grinder with band-aids.”
Kadri also has really useful insights about value from the standpoint of social reproduction. From the point of view of social production, only commodity production is value forming. However, social production is only a part of social reproduction, and in the conjuncture where everything is commodified, all labour that goes into reproducing society is value forming. Marx argued otherwise briefly only as an argumentative way of making a point at a distinct historical period, while also acknowledging that all labour is productive elsewhere. Productive and unproductive labour are two moments of the category of living labour.
By citing Marx, Lenin, Hegel, Luxemburg, Meszaros, Ilyenkov, Althusser, and many others, Kadri proposes that we must decolonize Marxism from its Western perversions. Only through socialist revolution can a more sane metabolic order of social reproduction be realized.
In this book, Ali Kadri argues that class struggle and value creation are much more holistic than Western Marxists tend to theorize.
From the standpoint of social reproduction, the majority of value created is not from ripping Western workers off at their 9-5 jobs. Imperialist wars that reconstitute global power structures are the necessary precondition of all civilian-end use commodity industries, and make up the biggest components of their values. Further, production for dis-use values, or waste production, poisons consumers, and shifts the costs of production further onto society. For instance, when you buy a can of Coke, the metal of the can was bought cheap due to imperialist wars that reduce the wages of Congolese workers, the product itself is made of toxins that reduce the health of society, and the cans after consumption poison the environment. In this case, the poisoned environment poisons humans, reducing their life span. This means less money to upkeep workers, more money allocated towards pharmaceuticals due to sickness, and the degradation of Labour’s standing in the class struggle. Kadri theorizes the poisoned environment as a machine, which emits value and reduces the lives of workers. More generally, any life activity that reduces the life expectancy of Labour to fit to Capitalism’s imperatives is value forming: in this sense, the most accurate measurement for the rate surplus value (the rate of exploitation) is the life expectancy differentials between global north and south. The rate of profit mirrors the rate of killing.
Many Marxists with knacks for formalism get caught up in prices and economistic analyses of capitalism, but prices are power symbols that obscure the social practices that undergird them. There is no “transformation problem” from value to prices—or socially necessary labour time to dollars—prices are formulated via superstructural mediation, according to the relative balance of forces in the class struggle.
The workers in the Global North that cast votes for candidates who all carry out imperialist wars are organically linked to Capital—they reproduce Capital. The divided working class infighting reproduces Capital. The proletariat are the working class imbued with revolutionary consciousness. While all social classes are subjects of history relative to their forms of thought and the balance of forces in the class struggle, in a more structural sense, history can also be seen as its own subject auto-differentiating under the spell of the commodity. (History unfolds at the intersection between determinacy and contingency.) The stock of surplus value also includes the West’s historical surplus value, which is the ideological weight accumulated from colonial wars over the last 500 years.
Ali Kadri suggests that it isn’t helpful to theorize there being pre-capitalist social formations in the contemporary era, because capitalism is a global system whose primary industry is the production of waste--the wasted lives of the majority of humanity that are cut short (by social murder and murder proper). In this sense, the most advanced capitalist countries are the ones where the most are killed from imperialist wars, whose resources and labour power are put up for grabs on the cheap. The section of the proletariat socialized under the guns of imperialism are more revolutionary than the cannibalistic working class of the global north that only fights for better working conditions in the metropole. By only fighting for wage increases, Northern workers want to intervene in the sphere of circulation without altering production; ultimately, this amounts to a mere fight for a larger share of imperialist loot that is composed of the shortened lives of Southern workers.
The true revolutionary consciousness of the contemporary era consists of the understanding that capitalism is systemic genocide, both structural and overt. Cultural symbols of the global south don’t preclude revolutionary consciousness, or make them any less proletarian. The global south’s anti-colonial nationalist movements are class war by dialectical inversion: they are fighting against the institution of private property as it exists in the material world.
In a holistic sense, in the vein of Lenin, imperialism is a relation with a social subject and historical weight, rather than mere “spatial fixes,” capital flows, etc., in the abstract. US-led imperialism is the only imperialism. Dismissing China as “state capitalist” is an imperialist class position, typically adopted by the (ideologically) white classes. In the capitalist world system, all modes of production on a national scale could be designated "state capitalist"; this neglects the differentiation between opposing forces, and is a political position meant to delegitimize the process of socialist construction. The PRC is the only social formation to fundamentally threaten Western hegemony on a world scale; it offers opportunities to the global south for sovereign development and people's war preparedness, counteracting the primacy of waste production.
The destruction of social nature (humans and nature which are a unity) is capitalism’s auto-destructive process driven by unconscious imperatives whose logical end is the pure waste of the planet. Environmentalists ought to care more about destroyed humans, whose lives are wasted in imperialist wars. Capitalism and environment-saving technologies are “a meat grinder with band-aids.”
Kadri also has really useful insights about value from the standpoint of social reproduction. From the point of view of social production, only commodity production is value forming. However, social production is only a part of social reproduction, and in the conjuncture where everything is commodified, all labour that goes into reproducing society is value forming. Marx argued otherwise briefly only as an argumentative way of making a point at a distinct historical period, while also acknowledging that all labour is productive elsewhere. Productive and unproductive labour are two moments of the category of living labour.
By citing Marx, Lenin, Hegel, Luxemburg, Meszaros, Ilyenkov, Althusser, and many others, Kadri proposes that we must decolonize Marxism from its Western perversions. Only through socialist revolution can a more sane metabolic order of social reproduction be realized.
Displaying 1 of 1 review