Joel KimAPES 4 3/20/15What is Waste? A Vital Materialists StandpointCapitalist society is predicated off of the destruction of objects for power when people destroy objects, People gain power from them. For example, the worker is destroyed and consumed by lowering of wages and placing into horrible conditions. In the same way, the original exploitation of nature like the killing of animals and discarding of their bones or the use of chopped down trees illustrates this. The criticism of capitalism begins from the question of production rather than consumption of things, which means critics cannot resolve the existence of trash productive facilities will still exist. A Marxist analysis will never fully subsume the nature of what is waste.Each item has a story - the cloth shed from a wedding dress, drums shaken overboard by a strong wind, a telephone whose screws rusted and gave way to the sea - but in the moment of its destruction, a point of seemingly no-return to its value, it is rendered passive and cast. The capacity to trash beings and to annihilate their existence structure modern society. In destruction, the value created is much more intense, wherein this violence, the disposed are meant to disappear. It is the failure to evacuate their remains that forces a jettison of waste in order to falsify being. So what is waste? It is when something means nothing to you that it becomes garbage. Although litter is virtually always within sight (hidden in containers, garbage cans etc.) People are culturally trained to overlook it. People become culturally conditioned to adopt a negligent and ignorant attitude towards objects that people deem trash. Disposal thus is not only about throwing things away, it is also about how people manage and are managed by the absent. As already been touched upon, debris does have a powerful impact on society in many waysalso mentally. Garbage that has not been correctly discarded haunts us and imposes a degree of agency upon us.The question of what waste is thus an analysis of the root of what people deem waste and why it is polluting society today. What is needed to fully understand societys intricate relationship to its waste is not only a cultural investigation but also an ontological reorientation to what people deem waste. Waste, like everything in the world, is an object. That object has agency that acts upon and influences other objects. People must attempt to accept the inevitability of that agency to ameliorate the negative relationship people have to trash today.