This whole piece, about what happens to the waste our modern economy produces by the billions of tons, is fascinating. But I particularly liked this bit as a novel and useful explanation of something I’ve thought about before, but not in these terms:
“Three other insights about value from political economy are helpful here. The first is that use value and exchange value are not equally important under capitalism – or, more precisely, are not of equal importance to capitalists. Marx showed that where the two are in tension, as they often are, exchange value overrides use value: the imperatives of competition and accumulation mean that commodities must be produced principally for sale. What counts as ‘waste’ comes to be decided by reference to wealth creation and preservation. This is what Locke was doing when he justified the European annexation of Indigenous territories on the grounds that they were not being used ‘productively’: the land was, in other words, being wasted, and should be brought into the ambit of capitalist modernity and its calculus of value. In a present-day example, Franklin-Wallis describes seeing a batch of unused TVs from a major manufacturer at a US electronics ‘recycling’ plant waiting to be destroyed in order not to act as competition for the same manufacturer’s new line of products. In 2020 Apple sued a Canadian recycler for selling off some of the half a million unsold devices it had sent to be shredded. In July 2018 it was reported that Burberry had incinerated ‘deadstock’ worth £28 million in the previous financial year to prevent its being sold at discounted rates. And so on.”
