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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the function of waste within contemporary processes of capitalist accumulation through considering the intersection of ecological waste and surplus population. Rather than being expendable, waste created by capital is productive of new modes of capitalist accumulation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is interested in the function of waste within contemporary processes of capitalist accumulation. From fast-fashion landfills to ocean islands of plastics, ecological waste is an inevitable product of capitalism. Some theories have posited surplus populations as equally inevitable human waste, expelled from a system that has no use for them. This paper draws on anthropological work on waste to outline the dialectical process through which waste is created by and integrated into circuits of capital. In doing so, it poses questions for conceptions of surplus populations as human waste, and of waste as unproductive or expendable.

It explores this through the intersection of ecological waste and surplus population against a backdrop of climate crisis. Through considering sites where ecological waste intersects with the carceral management of migrants – Rohingya warehousing in Bangladesh and Australia’s offshore detention on Nauru - it examines ways in which waste is being reconfigured as a productive component of capital within geographies of migrant management and detention. As capital finds ways to make devaluation a source of economic value, this is being folded into the circulation of capital as simultaneously a response to climate crisis and part of extractive economies of migration management. In this way, ecological and human waste created by capital are mutually valorised by capital.

By rooting the treatment of waste within processes of capitalist accumulation, this paper seeks to show how, far from being left-behind detritus, the creation and management of waste is productive of new modes of capitalist accumulation.