Eras of the economy range from subsistence farming, lordships, feudalism, mercantilism, and industrial militarism; and now, freshly articulated, is the epoch of monopoly finance capitalism. In The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction, Ali Kadri has gone to great lengths to situate the reader amid a rhetoric of survival. He draws conscious reasoning from the insanity of economic production under late-stage capitalism. Through analysis of the wealth centres in the global North, Kadri describes our current economy through multiple types of philosophy, and in doing so, uncovers the organic posture of this financial superstructure. In describing the incessant details of the economic form, Kadri personifies capitalism. He gives attitude, tone, and grievance to the maturing ecosystem in which we all engage.
In essence, this particular stage of monopoly finance capital had its genesis on the plantations on American soil during the era of chattel slavery, during which the country sponsored economic growth of unparalleled proportions, further deputizing the nation as the only supreme imperialist power.
As we consider the unprecedented wealth of our age, Kadri gives capitalism an astronomical dimension and considers the ironically stabilizing effect of imperialist war against the insane wastage of things and thingified humans. This kind of social science, even related to political economy, could be refashioned with mathematical language and rhetoric. He states, “As per entropy, every system is open-ended and reverts to equilibrium”(pg 307). From a rather Fanonian perspective, Kadri articulates the incredible balancing act enacted by the dollar as the supreme financial instrument in sovereign development paths, manifest in all commodities from the Coke bottle to the bomb. Over time, wealth accumulation, even through austerity, organically produces opportunity in homemaking and reproducing class. Despite the criticism of our adoption of modern Europe’s “kill for profit” class culture, American soil continues to sponsor global opportunities to engage with capital and the paradoxical nature of wealth under the burgeoning age of globalism.
The Marxist theory of historical materialism produces empiricist attitudes manifest in the conservatism of data that is often co-opted by media across fields. As a blossoming consumerist class, my peers must navigate the onslaught of ideological production supporting the bludgeoning of radical social theory. As many anthropologists have articulated, history is not only a set of homogeneous commercial relations; we all exist through a poetics of relations that sponsor activity through open-ended social ecosystems. From what we can salvage from a decimated social nature manifest in the digital and AI-enhanced age, we can infer a future characterized by oligarchic and fascist potential.
Dialectics as explored in Accumulation help navigate identity politics as a way to combat fascist tendencies. “Poetics” is another cognitive schema, articulated by scholars such as Edouard Glissant, that recounts a socially necessary way to realize oneself in relation to others from a phenomenological context, which is complementary to materialism. De-alienation as a concept to join the “self” with her “labouring personality” inspires agency over multiple dialectics or multiple literacies that produce social nature despite the autophagic conditions of oligopolic finance capital. As dialectics and literacies evolve, so do the forms of radical practice in concrete and abstract time.
The potential for internationalism lies in uncovering the recognizable paradigms of work. Global solidarity subverts dehumanizing attitudes around work by embracing organic and interrelated tendencies of the economy in its ontological right. Radical practice through material and spiritual expression tends to birth tastes that fashion surrogate culture. This causes any scholar to recognize the potential of culture as the signaling mechanism that price itself is slave to! As we automatically delegate our wages back into a necrotrophic system, we misremember our own fiscal potentials. Even though fleeting fetishes masquerade as culture, through conscious reasoning of the “dollar,” social nature eventually finds an avenue to re-imagine itself from such entropic disorder.
Throughout Kadri’s text, we are pressed to consider the potential of our revolutionary consciousness. The charge of the proletariat across space and time is the same as a seed. Every natural organism has to compete for resources in pursuit of proliferation of human life or Divine intention, and so we must interrogate the social mechanics of labour, and its ontological relation to equilibrium and the inevitable balance of forces in a material and ephemeral sense. In this way, we can question the paradox of all formal systems and find our own paradise amid perpetual dystopic conditions!
Get the book! The CUNY Graduate Center has a copy of The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction by Ali Kadri. You can check out the book there, or you can put in a request for it to be sent to BMCC’s library or to another CUNY library near you.
About the author Rain Marie Robertson is a Literacy Studies Major at BMCC. Hailing from Atlanta, GA, she is often seen around her neighborhood in Harlem and enjoying matcha lattes in Meatpacking (at her other job).
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