Capitalism is an agent of colonialism. People are conceptualized as waste, inorder to justify their oppression. They are turned into objects so that the moral consideration owed to them is ceased. Capitalism upholds colonial thought and colonial violence. It twists us into something inhuman. Under capitalism people become objects of waste. I think people might be able to fit into every one of Moore’s conceptualizations. But these 3 categorizations stood out to me. 

Waste as abject:

“abject posits waste as something that is expelled from the social body in order to shore up the boundaries that divide that which belongs from that which does not.” Positioning a people as some sort of disease, a virus that must be eradicated, cleansed. 

Waste as disorder and matter out of place:

“what the media presented along the US-Mexico border during 1991–1994 was an extreme portrait of ‘‘‘matter out of place’’ implicitly borne by the movement of people out of place: Mexican immigrants”… “it is impossible to dismiss the associations drawn between self-soiling Mexicans, mired in their own excrement, and the larger projection of the expanding border, seeping like a swamped septic system’s drainage field across the greater American landscape.” Those in power create a story, a theater. They put on a show, none of what they show us or tell us is real. They have forced migrants into this role. 

Waste as resource:

People are used for their labor, for their land, for their children. People are thought of in terms of what they can provide to an empire.