The Accumulation of Waste

A political economy of systemic destruction

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Phenomenal waste has surfaced as the social form and substance of value. In capital’s totalizing process, which commodifies all that comes in its way, wasting classes consume the wasted classes. This book addresses the metamorphosis of value into waste and it focuses on wars as industries of perfect waste. Whereas wasted man is visibly the prevalent commodity on sale, this central element in the commodity relation is rarely mentioned. In line with this, the book examines how waste, as a surrogate value, eludes the crises of capital and maintains its resilience.

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Ali Kadri teaches at Sun Yatsen university. His recent books include The Cordon Sanitaire: A Single Law Governing Development in East Asia and the Arab World, Imperialism with Reference to Syria, and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism.
Series Editor
Immanuel Ness, Brooklyn College, The City University of New York (USA) and University of Johannesburg (South Africa)

Editorial Board
Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (India)
Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)
Jeannette Graulau, Lehman College, The City University of New York (USA)
Yu Huang, Minzu University of China (China)
Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History (The Netherlands)
Trevor Ngwane, University of Johannesburg (South Africa)

1 The Accumulation of Waste
 1 Introduction
 2 Situating Waste in Imperialism
 3 De-reproduction as Accumulation
 4 The Bomb as Pure Waste
 5 Absurd and Sane Alternatives
 6 Apportioning Waste
 7 Whither Subject
 8 Issues of Waste Measurement
 9 Class-Unmeasured
 10 Eurocentrism
 11 Conclusion

2 Imperialism and Waste
 1 Imperialism with Reference the Arab Region
 2 History Omitted
 3 War and Historical Surplus Value
 4 Brinksmanship without Organised Labour
 5 Militarism versus Military Spending
 6 The War Event
 7 On Imperialism and Essence
 8 Money or the Veneer of Value
 9 The Military Landscape and China
 10 Actual and Potential War
 11 The Western Marxist Position on War
 12 Closing Comment

3 Against Empiricism
 1 The Empiricism of Harvey
 2 Diluted Imperialism
 3 Concretising Some Forms of Capital
 4 Excessive Entropy
 5 A Periodised Imperialism
 6 The Persistence of Waste
 7 Lenin’s Imperialism
 8 Misinterpreted Imperialism
 9 Imperialism and Nature
 10 Imperialism and Dead Labour
 11 Waste and Living Labour
 12 Waste in Social Time
 13 Waste and Technology

4 Value and Space
 1 Forms of Exploitation
 2 Substance and Value
 3 The Terms of Trade and Value
 4 From Value to Waste
 5 Imperialism Thingified and Actuated by Price Signals
 6 The Physical Limits of Value
 7 War as Social Production
 8 Waste and the Global Division of Labour
 9 Excess Population and Carrying Capacity
 10 The Not So Innocent Omissions
 11 The Negativity of Capital
 12 Revisiting the Elusive Measures of Value
 13 Class and Space
 14 Overproduction and Space
 15 A Portrait of Control

5 US-led Capital is the Only Imperialism
 1 Re-Theorising Imperialism
 2 Value Reconsidered
 3 Philosophy contra Value
 4 The Time in Value
 5 The Struggle for Time
 6 Abstract Time Mis-Defined
 7 Productivity and Productive Labour
 8 The Positivist/Pragmatic Method as Rationale for Imperialism
 9 Value and the National Boundary
 10 Class Institutions and Waste
 11 Dollar Hegemony and War
 12 The War Terrain
 13 China Is Not Imperialist
 14 Reproduction by Waste

6 Waste is at the Origin of Capital
 1 Development Redefined
 2 The Origins of Equity in Development
 3 Equality and Development in Islam
 4 Expansion by Economic as Opposed to Religious Zeal
 5 The East in the Economic Backwater
 6 The Consumption of Commodities by Commodities
 7 Involution and the AMP
 8 England Piloting Capitalism
 9 Production Relations Define Exchange
 10 A Restless Islamic World
 11 The Infanticide of Early Eastern/Islamic Development
 12 Thingified Institutions
 13 Islamic Wealth and the Transition
 14 Moneyed Capitalism contra Feudalism
 15 Islam’s Cosy Relationship with Materialist Philosophy and Commerce
 16 Closing Comment

7 The Absurd is Real
 1 The Negative Dialectic
 2 Waste as Entropy
 3 Waste in Social Reproduction
 4 Self-Reinforcing Waste
 5 Waste as Essence-Appearance
 6 False Value
 7 Class Cannibalism
 8 The Analytics of Resistance
 9 Back to Basics
 10 Resist to Exist

Index
This book is intended for academic and more informed readership.
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