When Destruction Becomes an Economy: A Reading of Ali Kadri’s The Accumulation of Waste

Ali Kadri’s The Accumulation of Waste offers a serious critical reading that reformulates international value theory through the geography of dispossession and geopolitical violence. The book advances a structural proposition that differs from mainstream economics: that systematic destruction and the shortening of lives in the Global South have, in the contemporary financial-monopoly phase, shifted from being side effects to becoming an existential condition for reproducing the relationship between capital and labor, and for protecting the accumulated credit bubbles and debts of the imperial North from their inevitable collapse by discharging them through wars and markets for waste.

How, then, does Mahed Jumhour^[1] read the concept of “waste,” and what does the book reveal about the relationship between capital accumulation and war in the Global South?

The theoretical significance of The Accumulation of Waste ^[2] lies, from the perspective of political economy, in exposing the mechanisms through which contemporary imperialism plunders the Global South. These mechanisms are manifested in the monetary dictatorship of the dollar and in international accounting systems. As for the monetary dictatorship of the dollar—that is, the mechanism of the international monetary system—Ali Kadri describes it as a dollar backed militarily by the force of the United States and NATO, whereby Washington prints the world’s reserve currency without genuine productive backing and forces countries of the Global South, through blockades, sanctions, and military bases, to accept this printed paper as their own reserves. In this way, the resources of these countries are appropriated in exchange for paper liquidity that costs the center little more than the price of ink.

As for international accounting systems, headed by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the author regards them as official ledgers designed to obscure consciousness and alter facts. Arms sales and pharmaceutical cartels are recorded as prosperous, high-profit economic activities in the accounting books of the center, while the bodies of victims, wasted lifetimes, and destroyed infrastructure in the Global South disappear from these calculations. Death is thereby transformed into a clean financial asset.

The book’s contextual and applied significance, despite its complexity and its abundance of abstract ideas and critiques of critique—including its critique of Marxism and post-Marxist schools—lies in the fact that it provides Arab readers and researchers with a highly precise interpretive tool for reading the disasters and ongoing wars of extermination in the region, such as those in Gaza and Lebanon. The book does not treat the erasure of cities and the poisoning of the biosphere as merely ethical mistakes; rather, it approaches them as destructive processes of social production embedded within the system of the Global North, whose function is to crush assets and absorb the vital energy of societies in order to feed the arteries of capital.

Waste as a Foundation Rather Than a Side Effect

Kadri begins from a critical premise regarding the dominant order, pointing to the transformation of capitalism in its present financial-monopoly phase from a mode of production that serves human beings into a mode for producing and recycling waste. In the context of the book, “waste” refers to a social relationship in which the war machine and the financial system combine to strip the peoples of the Global South of their sovereignty and the lifespans of their inhabitants in order to revive the profits of the “first world.” Kadri does not use the concept of waste in its immediate material sense, as the residue or leftovers of a production process. Rather, he reconstructs it as a social relationship connected to the relation of value itself. In his conception, waste emerges when human life and nature become fields for bearing the costs of capitalist accumulation; thus, shortening lifespans, damaging the environment, destroying assets, and war become forms of “waste production” that can themselves enter the cycle of value. Waste therefore ceases to be merely the opposite of production and becomes one of the forms taken by capitalist production in its contemporary crises.

The central problem of the book takes the form of an attempt to answer the question: Why do GDP and corporate profits rise while the entire planet is drowning in wars and disorder, particularly in the Global South? The answer is that machines do not produce new surplus value according to classical Marxist thought. In the North, the expansion of “dead labor^[3]” means a decline in structural rates of profitability, and the destruction of fixed assets and the killing or shortening of the productive lives of workers in the South become activities with higher profitability. The theoretical significance of the book does not lie in the claim alone, but in its serious attempt to ground it materially and historically—something the remainder of this review examines critically rather than descriptively.

From the Plunder of Centuries to the Arab Region as a Laboratory

Kadri builds his argument on the concept of “historical surplus value”: the infrastructure and scientific progress of the North were not built from the savings of its workers, but from centuries of plundering continents and monopolizing the seas since the fifteenth century. As the author argues, eliminating this history from the equations of wealth accumulation is not an oversight but an ideological function that legitimizes the rule of the colonizer. The author sees the Arab region as the clearest case through which to confirm his thesis, including the following examples:

“The Arab region is the arena in which sharp global contradictions explode.^[4]”

Kadri links the political economy of war and oil in the region to U.S. hegemony and describes war not as an incidental event but as the permanent production of a commodity:

“The output of war is literally the wasted human being who is produced, sold, and consumed.” ^[5]

The author returns to 1948 as a foundational point in this regional trajectory: the ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine in 1948 inaugurated major Arab defeats and the loss of land^[6], before moving through Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt as examples of what he calls a gradual process of exhaustion that does not resemble the mainstream binary of “failed/successful state.”

Foreshadowing amid Accelerating Capitalism: The War of Extermination in Gaza

One of the author’s most important strengths is his connection of the book’s ideas to current events. He explicitly mentions the Israeli bombardment of Gaza as a contemporary example of what he calls the “imperial muscle”:

“Examples of imperial muscle include the American bombs that Israel drops on densely populated Gaza.”^[7]

Later, he uses the image of the Gazan child as a test of his thesis concerning power and direct knowledge of violence: “The child in Gaza who experienced the Israeli bombardment possesses a deep understanding of power because, in Kadri’s view, the unity of thought and action occurs in the very moment of bombardment itself.” ^[8]

These two passages give the book’s contemporary reading an added weight. The book was published in 2023, shortly before the escalation of the latest war of extermination in the Gaza Strip, and its direct references make its argument about structural waste appear closer to a prior diagnosis than to an abstract theory. This direct connection between text and event is, in my view, what most deserves to be highlighted for Arab readers today, since it focuses on social time more than on abstract philosophical quotations.

The Methodological Battle: A Critique of Harvey’s Marxism

Kadri devotes considerable space in Chapters Three and Four to opposing geographer David Harvey over the concept of the “spatial fix.” Kadri rejects Harvey’s interpretation that American-European imperialism has shifted eastward into multiple centers of domination^[9], arguing that this formulation removes the class and military agent in favor of space itself. For Harvey, he argues, “hegemony without imperialism is the building without the agent that transfers wealth (fixed assets) from West to East.”^[10]

The significance of this critique lies in the book’s rejection of any interpretation that substitutes the question of the class agent with abstract financial measurements that could attribute the quality of “imperialism” to any state investing abroad, including China, despite its lack of the military-monetary-ideological triad that Kadri identifies as a condition of actual imperialism.

In another related passage, in Chapter Seven, the fourth chapter, Kadri also criticizes dominant measures of growth as tools of non-neutral generalization:

“GDP in the United States does not calculate the death of social nature that it causes domestically or abroad. What is consumed for a price during one year of GDP is not only chocolate and apples, but also the premature death of the South.”

Social Time When Premature Death Becomes a Price of Profit

Among the book’s most provocative concepts is the struggle for time: the proposition that capitalism, in its accelerated financial dimension, shortens the biological lifespan of the South through exploitation. Here Kadri borrows a literary image rather than formulating the expression himself, a striking methodological choice for a political economist, citing Palestinian novelist Marwan Abd al-Al ^[11] to describe the condition of workers in the Third World as:

“They are saved from their lives by their premature deaths.”^[12]

This passage is a particularly condensed expression of the wasting of lifespans, more forceful than any abstract theoretical formulation of social time.

From the Origins of Capitalism to “Resist to Exist”

In Chapter Six, Kadri dismantles the narrative of the peaceful development of England’s industrial rise, arguing that pre-capitalist formations, including the Islamic world, through what he calls the “Asiatic mode of production,” were, in his estimation, more rational in the conservation of resources:

“Pre-capitalist formations were more rational in conserving resources, and therefore more progressive and less wasteful than capitalism.” ^[13]

He links this to what he calls the “burial of early Eastern development”: European colonialism redirected Islamic development toward extraction and trade rather than industry^[14], while warning that the rate of surplus value in the center must rise at the rate of the premature extinguishing of life in the South.^[15]

The book effectively concludes with a section titled “Resist to Exist”—the title of the final section of Chapter Seven—in which Kadri writes: “Unless resistance overcomes capital, the waste of human beings and nature on which profit rests will continue as it is.”^[16]

Structural Strengths and Analytical Gaps in the Book

The author’s ability to anticipate the present war of extermination in Gaza, as well as his invocation of contemporary examples such as the destruction of Iraq and the plunder of the Congo, gives the thesis an unusual degree of practical credibility for such highly theoretical writing. The author also refuses to separate military geography from value theory. When Kadri links war to national accounting, he gives the concept of contemporary imperialism a specific political address rather than leaving it at the level of academic abstraction.

The book, however, contains many metaphors drawn from physics—particularly entropy—without sufficient quantitative grounding or concrete environmental data to support these metaphors. At times, the argument also approaches a closed determinism that portrays global imperialism as all-powerful while reducing the weight of rising internal contradictions in the Global South itself, such as those involving China, Russia, and the BRICS. Although Kadri himself acknowledges that China lacks the instruments of American hegemony, his reading of the Asiatic mode of production and the early Islamic world sometimes tends toward a form of historical romanticism: he describes these formations as having been more rational. They may have been so, but the argument does not sufficiently address the internal class conflicts within them.

Despite the richness of the literary citations, as in the passage from Abd al-Al, the book remains closer to a dense philosophical-economic argument than to a field-based study. One of its methodological dilemmas lies in the distance between the breadth of its theoretical claims and the scale of the empirical evidence it provides. Kadri does not conceal his critical position toward empiricism; indeed, he devotes an entire chapter to discussing its limits. Nevertheless, this leaves an open question concerning how some of his central concepts—particularly the wasting of lifespans and the measurement of the relationship between shortened lives and value accumulation—can be tested beyond the theoretical level.

Finally, Kadri concludes with the slogan “Resist to Exist” more than he provides an institutional roadmap for how fragmented liberation movements might move toward actual international planning. This is a gap he implicitly acknowledges when he leaves the question unresolved at the end of the book. Here we can pose a pressing question: if waste has become a form of value, is resistance to the destruction of life sufficient, or is what is required a transformation of the value relation that makes the destruction of life convertible into accumulation?