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The ‘cops guarding trash’ stage of capitalism
It’s here.
When I was in college, I saw a picture in a textbook of small children picking through a gigantic trash dump in Brazil. Known as catadores, these kids scour the garbage looking for food, recyclables and items to sell. According to the caption, the owners of the landfill hired armed private guards, who would sometimes shoot the children — the trash had monetary value because it could be rendered into pig feed and sold.
That little bit of text in the margins of a sociology book always stayed with me. I was struck by how sick, surreal and absurd it was that the lives of poor children in the Global South had been devalued to the point that they worth less than literal garbage.
In addition to sadness and pity, I felt a conditioned response as someone raised in relative comfort in a global empire: I was relieved that I lived in a “developed” country where these sorts of nightmare scenarios aren’t happening.
But recently, amid the winter storm that has devastated much of the country, I came across a news story that called to mind that image that I encountered more than a decade ago. Police in Portland were ordered to guard the dumpster of a Fred Meyer supermarket to keep people from taking discarded food.
