Abstract

Bourgeois thought has been haunted by the idea of waste: waste land, waste persons, and wasted resources. Bourgeois law has facilitated the use of violence to eliminate this waste. This is especially the case with the early laws of war. In this sense, the fabrication of capitalist order was organized through nothing less than a war on waste. It is this war that has been at the heart of original accumulation. This can be seen historically in the work of a range of major and minor thinkers in the bourgeois canon, and remains with us in the present global war