Mbembe

Capitalism is the only religion without taboos humans have ever invented, one such taboo would be the idea that, endowed with an innate capacity for self-recognition, a human person is not a thing. Indeed, the idea that personhood is the antithesis of thinghood is central to the modern project of human emancipation and to our understanding of what alienation is all about. Countless historical struggles have taken place whose aim was to make sure that human persons were not turned into mere objects and that they be counted as human persons. 

By invoking waste in the book I was trying to draw attention to what has historically happened at the intersection of race and market mechanisms, especially when the later have not only been used to sort between productive and unproductive lives but also to target such presumably unproductive lives as objects of abjection or as killable objects.

Achille Mbembe