Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
913611579
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
LAC copy
Author
Samson, Melanie,
Title
Wasting value and valuing waste : insights into the global crisis and the production of value reclaimed from a Soweto garbage dump.
Degree
Ph. D. -- York University, 2012
Publisher
Ottawa : Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, [2013]
©2012
Description
4 microfiches
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
<?Pub Inc> This dissertation explores how the global economic crisis was produced and contested at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa in order to develop insights into both the crisis and the form and nature of capitalist value. Commodities are sent to garbage dumps to be stripped of their value and buried. Yet in polarised economies people pushed out of formal employment resurrect value by reclaiming items from waste and relaunching them into circuits of reproduction and formal and informal exchange and production. The recycling industry is highly globalised and was one of the first sectors hit by the crisis. I contribute to debates on the crisis and value by conducting ethnographic analysis of continuities and changes in how reclaimers at Marie Louise re-infused waste with value during the crisis. I argue we must theorise value as a social process and be attentive to how value, space, social subjectivities, social relations and meaning are forged in relation to one another. Understandings of how value is contested and transformed through struggle are occluded in structural analyses, yet are vitally important politically and analytically. In analysing how the global crisis became imbricated in the production of value at Marie Louise I engage with debates on the relation between waste and value, accumulation by dispossession, and the common. Through a social history of Marie Louise I explore how reclaimers transformed the dump into a site for value generation and prevented the neoliberalising state from enclosing it, yet established a hierarchy of claims to Marie Louise rooted in articulations of gender and nationalism. Departing from impact models I argue that the form the crisis took at Marie Louise was shaped by the social subjectivities, relations, institutions and meanings reclaimers forged through their value struggles, all of which were transformed as reclaimers engaged the crisis. While reclaimers' value struggles were animated by non-economic principles not rooted in the capitalist law of value, these were not necessarily emancipatory. Forging emancipatory value struggles requires reclaimers and other workers to acknowledge how they produce power-laden social relations and to engage in the hard political work of transforming them.
ISBN
9780494927663
0494927666