Prefiguring with Trash and Critiquing with Excess:
Theorizing Waste and Contemporary Anti-Capitalism
Abstract:
Recent anti-capitalist mobilizations challenge sociologists to
account for their persistence in the neo-liberal era and explain
their changing form. Although the political process social
movement synthesis provides insights into the former question, it
struggles with the latter: the transformation of tactics and claims
over time. It thus offers little analytical leverage for exploring the
empirical problem confronted by this paper: the surprising
prominence of “waste” in contemporary anti-capitalist discourse
and practices. I argue that we need to re-integrate macrohistorical change back into the study of social movements, which
I explore in terms of patterns of capitalist accumulation, statesociety-market relations, and discursive justifications. I show
how the production of “ex-commodity” waste by neo-liberal
capitalism has enabled a repertoire of “prefigurative politics” and
a framing of “ecological critique,” concepts I illustrate with
ethnographic data from two social movements that deploy waste
to criticize capitalism and experiment with alternatives to it.
Key Words: waste, anti-capitalism, neo-liberalism, social
movements, repertoires, strategic action framing, freeganism,
Food Not Bombs
Prefiguring with Trash and Critiquing with Excess: Theorizing Waste and
Contemporary Anti-Capitalism
Most social movement scholarship keeps the study of movements and
social structure separate, despite repeated calls from both inside and outside the
dominant social movement paradigm to integrate the two (see, e.g., Armstrong
and Bernstein 2008; Buechler 2000; Fligstein and McAdam 2011; Snow 2004;
Walder 2009). For example, although discussions of “capitalism” are central to
theories of the historical origins of the social movement, they have almost
completely disappeared from subsequent analyses (Hetland and Goodwin 2013).
Recent mobilizations provide an opportunity to bridge the theoretical gap
by examining how changes in capitalism shape the tactics and claims of anticapitalist movements. Elements of both the anti-Globalization Movement
(AGM)—emerging visibly in Seattle 1999—and Occupy Wall Street (OWS)—
in 2011—made explicitly anti-capitalist claims and challenged two processes,
globalization and financialization, which are central to neo-liberal capitalism.
These mobilizations, in turn, built on less visible networks, such as the two
groups, Food Not Bombs (FNB) and freeganism, on which this paper centers.
While, taken together, these movements demonstrate the persistence of
anti-capitalist movements in the neo-liberal era, the form these movements have
taken differs from our standard portrait. Tactically, the AGM and FNB focus on
creating direct democratic movement structures and non-capitalist communities
1
over influencing legislators or taking state power (Graeber 2009; Juris 2008;
Maeckelbergh 2011). And while Occupy and freeganism repeat long-standing
critiques of the exploitation of labor and income inequality under capitalism,
they also assert that capitalism is excessive, wasteful, and ecologically
destructive (Liboiron 2012; Yates 2011).
Although mainstream sociological approaches may be able to explain
how these movements mobilize, they offer little explanation of their content: that
is, why movements adopt particular framings and tactics in some historical
moments and not in others. This paper addresses one small piece of the broader
research program of reintegrating large-scale, macro-historical change into
social movement studies. It does so by focusing on a specific empirical puzzle:
why do contemporary anti-capitalist movements use “waste” as a material
resource in their tactical repertoire and as a symbolic device for framing claims?
To understand this shift, I argue we need to build on the mechanisms
most frequently analyzed by theorists of strategic action frames and tactical
repertoires: processes of evolution within movements and interaction between
movements and counter-movements. An understanding of contemporary anticapitalism must be grounded in an examination of capitalism itself, which I
conceptualize in terms of state-society-market relations, patterns of
accumulation, and discursive justifications.
2
I show how contemporary capitalist accumulation produces immense
quantities of “ex-commodities”: useful goods which are discarded because they
cannot be profitably sold. Anti-capitalists use ex-commodities to overcome two
acute challenges they face under neo-liberal capitalism. First, they appropriate
ex-commodities as a material resource for a repertoire of “prefigurative
politics”—direct interventions to build a post-capitalist figure in the present—
which responds to the perceived unresponsiveness of the state. Second, they
deploy ex-commodities as part of an “ecological critique” of capitalism, which
seeks to refute justifications for capitalism centered on the efficiency of markets
by uncovering its waste and excesses. I illustrate my argument by using
ethnographic data to show how two anti-capitalist movements—Food Not
Bombs and freeganism—have developed framings and tactics, respectively, that
respond to the particularities of neo-liberal political economy.1
Capitalism, Framing, and Repertoires in Social Movement Studies
Although macro-structural conditions were central to some of the
foundational texts of the political process model of social movements (see, e.g.,
McAdam 1999; McCarthy and Zald 1977; Tilly 1978), more recent work
brackets them out. The dominant synthesis instead focuses on internal
movement dynamics and interactions with elites and challengers (McAdam,
McCarthy, and Zald 1996). McAdam, Tilly, and Tarrow’s (2001) widely read (if
less widely adopted) theorization understands contention as built from discrete
3
mechanisms which can be “cognitive,” “relational,” or “environmental.”
Ultimately, though, the authors focus on cognitive and relational mechanisms to
the conscious exclusion of environmental—or, in their own words,
“structural”—ones (McAdam et al. 2001:26).
The limits of this approach become evident when we shift from
explaining movements’ emergence to their content: the tactical repertoires and
framings they deploy. In his final work on social movement “repertoires,” Tilly
(2008:125) argues that the tactics of the modern social movement—public
meetings, petitions, street demonstrations, or rallies—all emerged as
“byproducts of…great changes” such as “commercial expansion, proliferation of
communications, and parliamentarization.” Like other founders of the political
process tradition, then, Tilly acknowledges that the limited array of claimsmaking routines that political actors use “reflect and interact with the
organization of power within their own historical context” (2008:45),
particularly the rise of nation-state and capitalism (see, also, McAdam et al.
2001:15; Rudbeck 2012; Tarrow 2011:39).
Despite starting his analysis with historical context, though, it quickly
disappears. According to Tilly, since the early 1800s, the same repertoire has
“dominated public claims-making” (2008:145) in Western democracies. He thus
offers a relatively narrow vision of what social movements actually do.
Movements by definition seek change indirectly through public demonstrations
4
of “worthiness, unity, commitment, and numbers” directed at policymakers and
other elites. This repertoire, in turn, assumes the existence of a particular
configuration of state-society-market relations, particularly an at-least-somewhat
responsive state with the resources, legitimacy, and capacity to satisfy
movement claims (Buechler 2000:56; Voss and Williams 2012).
Subsequent work drawing on Tilly’s notion of a social movement
“repertoire” has elaborated on how movement tactics change over time.
Numerous authors have explored the importance of tactical innovation in
movement success and shown how tactics diffuse both within and between
movements (Andrews and Biggs 2006; McAdam 1999; Wang and Soule 2012).
Others have observed how tactics can differ substantially across regime types
and historical periods (Akchurin and Lee 2013; Clemens 1993; Tilly 2006).
Yet these studies still focus primarily on variations within the same
broad repertoire of indirect claims-making. Although some movements might
engage in disruptive and innovative tactics, like lunch-counter sit-ins, the goal
(at least, from political process theorists’ point of view) is always the same: to
influence elected policymakers, state bureaucrats, or other elites. The
presumption thus remains that “contentious politics” is always an extension of
“representative politics—however disruptive” (Tarrow 2011:98).2 Yet by Tilly’s
own theory, this assumption of a stable repertoire (albeit with shifting tactics)
5
implies that no “great changes” have occurred that might turn social movements
away from a focus on eliciting state action through symbolic displays.
If “repertoires” constitute the dominant way scholars have thought about
the tactics that movements use, “strategic action frames” have served as
sociologists’ primary analytical tool for conceptualizing the public claims they
make. Frames are “action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and
legitimate the activities and campaigns of a social movement organization”
(Benford and Snow 2000:614). Scholarship on movement frames started with
micro-level processes of interaction within and between movements (Snow et al.
1986), but frame theorists eventually joined with those analyzing repertoires in
acknowledging that “framing activity…[is] affected by the cultural and political
environment” (Benford and Snow 2000:626).
Within a given historical context, movements have a limited stock of
cultural meanings available to them and thus most claims fall within a dominant
“master frame” (Snow and Benford 1992). Unlike studies of social movement
repertoires, though, studies that look at how master frames originate or change
over time are rare (although see Babb 1996). As such, the “cultural and political
environment” is usually conceptualized as a static backdrop to which successful
movements must adjust their demands (McCammon et al. 2007; McVeigh,
Myers, and Sikkink 2004; Paschel 2010).
6
A number of scholars have criticized how the framing approach overemphasizes movement agency in adapting to this cultural context and downplays
the constraining role of less flexible movement ideologies (Oliver and Johnston
2000; Walder 2009). Offering an alternative concept, Steinberg (1999) argues
that contentious claims are always embedded within a larger “discursive field”
(see also Sewell 1980) While activists might have some wiggle-room to
repackage their message, how these constraints change over time is an
underexplored question. As is the case with repertoires, framing gives useful
categories for describing movement action but little guidance for explaining
long-term shifts in the content of that action.
Neo-Liberalism, Waste, and Anti-Capitalism
As recounted above, existing scholarship emphasizes short- and
medium-term shifts in movement frames and tactics, and treats strategic
decisions within movements or interaction between movements and challengers
as the source of changes to them. Missing is an explanation of how these microand meso-level interactions might channel movement repertoires or frames in
one direction over another. As I argue, an analysis of the particular features of
neo-liberal capitalism—which I conceptualize in terms of state-society-market
relations, discursive justifications, and modes of accumulation—provides a
window into the forces that have transformed contemporary anti-capitalism.
7
The dominant synthesis sees “social movements” as having emerged in
the 19th century in response to the increasing penetration of society by state and
capitalism, which created both new grievances and new opportunities for
addressing them. Yet the configuration of state, society, and market that
facilitated the “modern” indirect repertoire, closely tied to electoral politics, is
not set in stone. Neo-liberal restructuring since 1980 has entailed the increasing
power of market logics over state and society (Centeno and Cohen 2012; Evans
and Sewell 2013). While there is a lively debate over whether neo-liberalism has
really meant a “weaker” or “less interventionist” state in Western democracies,
it almost certainly has made them less amenable to the forms of market
regulation, restriction, or replacement advocated by many social movements
with an anti-capitalist bent (Voss and Williams 2012).
Evidence for the growing ascendancy of market over state and society
can be found in scholarship on social movements themselves. Tilly (1986:350)
himself concluded that, by the 1980s, the effectiveness of appeals to the state
appeared to be waning. Scholarship shows that some actors have responded by
“disavowing” or “avoiding” politics entirely (Bennett et al. 2013; Eliasoph
1998). Other have re-directed the repertoire once directed at the state, including
tactics such as mass meetings, petitions, or demonstrations, towards non-state
actors like corporations (Van Dyke, Soule, and Taylor 2004; King and Pearce
2010; Walker, Martin, and McCarthy 2008). As I show below, some anti-
8
capitalist movements have pursued a different path, adopting a distinctive
repertoire of “prefigurative politics.” This repertoire aims to build the power of
society vis-à-vis both state and market through actions that, as per the old
anarchist maxim, directly and immediately create the institutions of a new
society ‘within the shell of the old’ (Graeber 2009; Juris 2008).
The shift in state-society-market relations wrought by neo-liberalism is
coupled with a partial reframing of the discursive field in which anti-capitalist
movements make their claims. Economic sociologists reaching back to Max
Weber have argued that capitalism must have a moral “spirit” that drives
individual participation in production and accumulation (Bell 1996; Fourcade
and Healy 2007; Paretskaya 2010). Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) show how
the moral basis of capitalism and the critiques offered by anti-capitalist
movements have shifted dialogically over time, in line with Steinberg’s (1999)
notion of a discursive field constraining movement claims. In the 1930s, labor
movements and socialists offered a “social” critique of capitalism that both drew
on and negated capitalism’s promise to increase production and raise material
welfare. The critique was partly successful, as evidenced by expanding social
programs and increasing mass consumption. Finding that the social critique had
become less compelling, the student and identity-focused movements of the
1960s shifted to an “artistic”—or, one might say, “cultural”—critique that
asserted that the market squelched creativity and homogenized everyday life.3
9
Claims that markets would reduce “waste”—defined as the inefficient or
underutilization of raw materials, time, or labor power—have always been part
of the economic and moral justification for capitalism (Abbott 2014; Gidwani
and Reddy 2011; Goldstein 2013), although they receded somewhat in the postWorld War II era of prosperity, “acceptable” regulation, and abundance. Under
neo-liberalism, the discursive terrain set by capitalism once again emphasizes
scarcity and the need to reduce waste. Advocates for cut backs to social
programs or regulation, for example, have frequently asserted the
“wastefulness” of government relative to private action (Boltanski and Chiapello
2005:13; Thomas 1998:162). Manifestations of neo-liberalism as varied as land
grabs in the developing world (Borras and Franco 2012:45) or state restructuring
in Chile (Tomic, Trumper, and Dattwyler 2006) have also hinged on claims that
privatization, de-regulation, or retrenchment would reduce “waste.”
Discourses around “waste” are not just used to promote capitalism, but
also to delegitimize alternatives to it. Media portrayals of the former Communist
countries of Eastern Europe invariably point to how “wasteful” they were
relative to the “cleanliness, efficiency, and thriftiness of Western capitalism”
(Gille 2008:3). This profound discrediting of models for non-capitalist
societies—in which claims about “waste” have played a part—presents an acute
challenge for anti-capitalist movements. After all, the classic social movement
repertoire assumes that some alternative model exists that legislation or state
10
power could actually implement. Neo-liberalism has thus not just weakened the
power of the state to intervene, but also undermined the moral and ideological
basis for doing so, leaving activists with “no alternative in sight” (Centeno and
Cohen 2012:332). As I show below, this creates pressure for movements to
develop such alternatives themselves through a prefigurative repertoire.
While neo-liberal capitalism has not thus far produced its own
gravedigger, the patterns of accumulation under neo-liberalism have offered at
least one resource for those wishing to engage in “prefigurative politics” or
frame a challenge to neo-liberal’s discursive justifications: ex-commodified
waste. Critics have, of course, long argued that capitalism leads to “waste”
through unnecessary military spending, idle rich, or socially worthless
advertising (see, e.g., Baran and Sweezy 1966; Foster, Clark, and York 2010;
Veblen 1994). “Ex-commodity” waste, however, is more tangible. Excommodities are material objects which still have “use value” but which cannot
be profitably sold and are thus “wasted”—that is to say, placed in circuits of
disposal that are designed to prevent anyone from accessing them.
While data on waste is notoriously scant (see MacBride 2012), there is
evidence that ex-commodification has reached new heights under neoliberalism. As Brenner (2006) documents, the combination of increased
manufacturing capacity in the global south with falling wages and welfare
spending in the global north has led to significant overproduction. While this
11
problem has been partly papered over with debt, ex-commodification is another,
less-visible consequence, which I consider in terms of housing and food.4
As many have observed, the economic expansion of the early 2000s was
driven by a boom in housing construction; less noted, however, was that this
was coupled with and depended on the destruction and abandonment of old
structures (Byles 2005). The glut of foreclosed houses created by subsequent
crash was partly alleviated through banks’ decision to bulldoze some of the
surplus stock (Gandel 2011). Yet much of this “wasted” surplus is still useable:
despite a large homeless population and a near universally-acknowledged lack
of affordable housing, New York City in 2008 had over 60,000 vacant rental
units, many of which were habitable but deliberately withheld from the
market—that is to say, they were ex-commodified (Lee 2011:351).
Nowhere is the divergence between neo-liberalism’s rhetorical promise
to reduce waste and its tendency to produce it more evident than with food. In
the mid-20th century, under the auspices of Keynesian economic management,
the federal government launched a series of interventions to mitigate agricultural
overproduction. The state required farmers to leave fields fallow, dumped
surplus products on post-War Europe and the developing world, and increased
consumers’ buying power through social programs (DeVault and Pitts 1984;
Friedmann 1982). The reconfiguration of the state under neo-liberalism,
however, has undermined all of these approaches to alleviating overproduction:
12
the value of food stamps has gone down, for example, and farm programs no
longer restrict production (Winders 2009).
As a growing sociological literature on food waste shows (for a review,
see Evans, Campbell, and Murcott 2012), retailers, manufacturers, and
producers have reacted to the intensifying competitiveness of neo-liberalism
through various strategies that “add value” to cheap foodstuffs and, in turn,
create waste. These mechanisms include constant introductions of new products,
escalating standards for appearance and freshness, and deliberate over-ordering
to ensure that shelves are always fully stocked. The result is that food waste per
capita has grown by 50% since the 1970s (Hall et al. 2009). Contemporary
advanced capitalism is certainly not alone in wasting food. What is distinctive,
however, is that much of the food wasted is discarded not due to rot and decay,
but because it cannot be profitably sold—that is, it takes an ex-commodity form.
In short, advocates for neo-liberal capitalism have created a discursive
field in which “waste” is used to discredit state action and the alternatives to
capitalism that social movements have historically promoted. On the other hand,
neo-liberal capitalism rests on the creation of ex-commodified waste in order to
sustain accumulation in a context of ongoing overproduction. These structural
features create openings for some social movement repertoires and frames, even
as they limit the effectiveness of others.
13
Food Not Bombs and the Prefigurative Repertoire
The history of Food Not Bombs (FNB) shows how one movement
responded to the shifting pattern of state-society-market relations under
capitalism by adopting a prefigurative repertoire, which was partly enabled by
the ex-commodities that neo-liberal capitalism itself was producing. The group
started in the 1980s in Boston among activists from the Clamshell Alliance, one
of a number of anti-nuclear groups that combined a “prefigurative”
organizational structure—decentralized working-groups and consensus-based
decision making—with more conventional tactics—symbolic civil disobedience
at nuclear plants (see Epstein 1991).5 The name “Food Not Bombs” stemmed
from the juxtaposition of growing poverty under Reagan-era cuts to social
services with increasing allocations to the military.
FNB’s first protest, according to Keith McHenry, one of its founders,
sought to dramatize risky investments that the Bank of Boston was making in
nuclear energy. McHenry and his activist friends concluded that the bank’s
investment “sounded a lot like the kind of stuff bankers were doing that led to
the Great Depression,” and, to drive the point home, dressed up as hoboes and
created an impromptu soup kitchen. Despite the fact that early FNB participants
proclaimed themselves anarchists, then, its first action fell safely within Tilly’s
conventional modern repertoire: a claims-making performance intended for an
external audience.
14
One feature of FNB was distinctive from the start, though: its use of
waste. The ingredients for the meal, McHenry said, were surplus that he took
from the organic grocery store where he was working, which produced
enormous amounts of still-edible ex-commodities thanks to the high aesthetic
standards and exotic tastes of its clientele. Using waste fit in with the general
ecological and do-it-yourself spirit of anti-capitalist subcultures around the time:
There was an entire culture around recovering things. At the same time,
we were starting the punk movement, and I would write articles in local
punk zines about all of this. So there was starting to be an ideology
around recovering garbage and using it.
Again, while the “ideology” of recovering garbage may have originated within
the movement, it only made sense as a political practice due to changes outside
it. De-industrialization was leaving hundreds of buildings vacant, which could
be turned into squats and community centers, while globalized and differentiated
consumerism created high-quality wasted goods, like food.
In the late ‘80s, McHenry moved to San Francisco and started another
FNB chapter. The San Francisco chapter, which was openly anarchist, frustrated
even the city’s liberal mayor with its unwillingness to apply for permits or
follow the post-1960s movement script in interaction with police. On August 15,
1988, forty-five officers in full riot gear arrested nine FNB activists; as the
police spokesman explained, “This [the meal] appears to be more of a political
15
statement than a program to feed the hungry” (qtd. in Parson 2010:74). In
subsequent years, the struggle escalated to the point where the San Francisco
Chronicle asked every mayoral candidate in 1995 what they would do about
FNB. By that time, more than 1,000 activists had been arrested and the group
had become the fourth-largest food service organization in San Francisco.
FNB now claims affiliates in hundreds of cities worldwide,6 but my own
discussions with FNB activists suggest that the locus of FNB’s activities have
shifted from a repertoire of public claims-making to prefigurative attempts to
build an anarchist society from the bottom-up. Partly, this reflected the
experience of the movement in San Francisco: that even authorities in leftleaning jurisdictions are not amenable to anti-capitalist claims, even when those
claims are advanced through a tactic (serving free food) that is not itself
particularly contentious. It also, however, responded to the realization that
contemporary anti-capitalist movements must both articulate a vision for a new
society and show its practicality through their own actions. One long-time
anarchist articulated why a prefigurative repertoire seemed to be a necessity:
If you tell someone they can live without capitalism, it’s like saying they
can live without oxygen—it’s instantly rejected…We realize that many
people see the system as their very means of survival. So we believe that
the only alternative is to build this new society within the shell of the
old.
16
At the same time, many FNB participants were dismissive of the conventional
repertoire. As one older participant in East Bay FNB, who had been involved in
mass demonstrations and protests in the 1960s, wrote:
Voting, writing letters, marching and protesting, even using the judicial
system, although necessary, hardly make an impact...It is by working
today to create sustainable ways of living that prefigure the kind of
society we want to live in that we build a vital and caring movement for
social change. Food Not Bombs serves food as a practical act of
sustaining people and organizations, not as symbolism (Gans and
Karacas 2000:69, 2).
From a prefigurative point of view, then, the very existence of the movement is
constitutive of political action. As one long-time FNB activist explained, “I used
to try to bring out literature [to FNB meals] and do outreach. Try to get the
message out. But then I realized: the food really is our message.”
FNB itself provided a platform to prefigure a more democratic mode of
social organization on a daily basis. Activists circulate resources and prepare
meals without any formally designated leaders or official structure. The
democratic way the meals were cooked—like the way group decisions were
made—was not just an instrument for political action, but political in and of
itself. At least hypothetically, it enacted a world without hierarchy.
17
The prefigurative logic behind FNB’s actions can also be seen in the
group’s place within the broader movement field. One East Bay activist
explained how FNB was part of a network of institutions that enabled an
existence partly outside of capitalism: “We’re all political in every part of our
lives. But we also need some stability…and for that, you need a place to live,
you need a reliable source of food. You have to create some kind of a structure.”
Along with squatted activist houses and community bike workshops, FNB
contributes to an alternative “geography of survival” (Heynen 2010) that
activists see as, hopefully, replacing capitalism from the inside-out.
FNB’s prefigurative challenge to capitalism, of course, depends on
capitalism itself, particularly the stream of ex-commodified goods that neoliberal capitalism produces. As one ethnographer reports:
Waste [is] the very stuff of Food Not Bombs. The food is donated or
dumpster-dived. The spaces themselves are often squatted or located in
shared houses on properties or in neighbourhoods [sic] whose value is
marginal, and which have been, in a sense therefore, partially abandoned
by the real-estate market. And the necessary equipment—kitchen
implements, bikes, sometimes vehicles—are either scavenged, donated,
or occasionally bought at low costs (Giles 2013:199).
Beyond providing the raw material for FNB’s prefigurative project, waste also
allows individual activists to withdraw from the labor market and devote
18
themselves to time-consuming prefigurative projects. One FNB activist claimed
that since coming to the East Bay he had lived on “no money,” adding, “My
backpack, all my pens, my notebooks—I dumpstered all of them.” He stayed
rent-free by squatting in one of the many abandoned buildings scattered across
Oakland.7 As he explained it, “Squatting is all about taking something that’s
being wasted and turning it into something useful…It’s like dumpstering a
house.” For many activists, their capacity to convert “waste” into “resources”
thus both enabled prefigurative politics and was prefigurative in and of itself,
insofar as it embodied environmentally sustainable worldviews and practices.
Although there is only limited quantitative data to support it (although
see Williams and Lee 2008), FNB’s seemingly idiosyncratic uses of waste as
part of a prefigurative repertoire may be representative of larger trends. FNB
served food at virtually all of the anti-globalization demonstrations sparked in
Seattle, 1999, and many of the primary organizers of that movement started as
FNB volunteers (Graeber 2009:236; Holtzman, Hughes, and Van Meter
2007:52). While some social movement scholars looked at these countersummits primarily as the traditional performative repertoire taken to a global
scale (Tarrow 2011:99; Tilly 2008:86), ethnographers embedded within the
movement found that many activists also perceived their network structure and
consensus-based decision-making as the ultimate goal (Graeber 2009; Juris
2008; Maeckelbergh 2011). A similar observation could be made about the
19
Occupy movement, whose encampments—designed partly as prefigurative
experiments in self-government—were, not incidentally, partly sustained by
salvaged food provided by FNB (Sbicca and Perdue 2013).
While these demonstrations themselves have quickly faded from both
public and sociological view, prefigurative experiments in creating countercapitalist communities and institutions within capitalist societies continue.
Carlsson (2008:181) describes a range of urban utopian projects across the US—
such as community gardens in abandoned lots or bike workshops using
discarded parts—that rely on a “politically-informed embrace of working with
waste.” Shantz (2005:12) similarly explores how a network of anarchist
“infoshops” and organizing spaces have been created throughout the US, many
of which are “almost fully outfitted with goods found in dumpsters.”
In short, FNB’s 30-plus year history highlights how neo-liberal
capitalism has made the state a less appealing target for claims-making and
created a perceived need for movements to prefigure alternative models of social
organization. It has, in part, provided the material resources for doing so in the
form of wasted ex-commodities. This prefigurative repertoire certainly predates
the neo-liberal era, with precursors in the civil rights, feminist, and even labor
movements. Moreover, as existing work on social movement repertoires
suggests, prefigurative tactics—such as the strategic appropriation of excommodities—are transmitted between movements and adopted through
20
strategic choices within them. They exist alongside more conventional tactics.
Nonetheless, it is only through attention to broader shifts in capitalist political
economy that we can explain why the prefigurative repertoire may be growing in
prominence.
Freegans, Frames, and the Ecological Critique
Compared to FNB, “freeganism” is a more recent phenomenon,
emerging in the late 1990s to describe individuals who limit their participation
in the capitalist economy through meeting a variety of needs through reclaiming
commercial waste. Self-identified freegans have been documented in cities
across North America, Europe, and Australia (see, e.g., Edwards and Mercer
2012; Gross 2009; Nguyen, Chen, and Mukherjee 2014) and online freegan
communities claim thousands of members. This research focused on one group
of freegans in New York City—organized around the website “freegan.info”—
who have achieved a high level of visibility, partly by framing their anticapitalist claims around waste.
Like FNB, freegan.info experimented with a wide range of prefigurative
projects, including a free bike workshop that used salvaged bike parts, “Really
Really Free Markets” where discarded goods were redistributed, and sewing
“skill-shares” that taught activists to repair their own clothes. Freeganism’s role
in the overall structure of New York’s radical community was evident in 2011.
The group was one of the first contacted by the organizers of Occupy Wall
21
Street, several freegans slept at Zuccotti Park the first night of the protest, and
freegans recovered ex-commodified food to feed the encampment before
donations rendered doing so unnecessary.
Freegan.info is best known, however, for its “trash tours”: weekly
events, posted on its website and open to both media and the public, where
freegans recover and redistribute ex-commodified food outside grocery stores.
For freegans, collective dumpster dives were prefigurative, insofar as they
directly and materially reduced activists’ need to work and buy commodities,
while simultaneously enacting the rudiments of a post-capitalist “gift economy.”
Unlike FNB, though, freegan.info also offered a carefully crafted message: an
“ecological critique” of capitalism that sought to refute the discursive
justifications of neo-liberalism by asserting that system’s unsustainable scale,
excess, and waste.
The particular form of freegans’ critique of capitalism was shaped by
their activist experiences prior to becoming freegans. Almost universally,
freegan.info participants’ first commitments were to more mainstream causes
such as the environment or animal rights. For most of them, their participation in
these causes hinged on purchasing “green” or “animal-friendly” commodities
under the auspices of “ethical consumerism.”8 In this respect, they followed a
strong social current: scholars have shown how capitalist firms responded to the
anti-capitalist movements of the 1960s by channeling their concerns into the
22
creation of niche markets and specialty products (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005;
Szasz 2007).9 In so doing, capitalism coopted the “artistic critique” by allowing
individuals to express themselves and craft a distinctive identity through
participation in stylized mass consumption.
The effectiveness of ethical consumption is predicated on the notion that
markets are efficient: that is, they take a consumers’ demand for vegan, organic,
or fair-trade goods and translate it into a change in production. This assertion
that markets work efficiently is, as noted previously, a central justification for
neo-liberal policies. Encountering waste, however, challenged freegans’ faith in
the transformative power of consumption decisions and, in turn, led them to
deny the justifications for neo-liberalism. As one freegan told me:
I’ve seen first-hand that if a bunch more vegans or health-conscious
people move into an area over a period of time, they [grocery stores] are
not going to sell less meat, they’re just going to sell more soy products.
They’ll add more products to their shelves, but when has a store ever
sold less meat? The place doesn’t not have meat soup because they have
vegans; they just have both. And if a package of meat isn’t sold, it’s
probably just going to get thrown out.
Another freegan reported how encounters with waste were destructive of his
previous presumptions about effective activism and the efficiency of markets:
23
All the time, I see vegans wearing t-shirts that say, ‘I saved 84 animals
this year.’ And I always think, ‘No, you didn’t. 84 more animals got
thrown in a trash can because you are vegan.’ There’s not some guy at
the store saying, ‘Bob went vegan this week, let’s order one less
chicken.’ There’s nothing that precise going on in terms of how stores
are ordering commodities.
The outrage these individuals felt at the way food commodities were produced
was only accentuated when they realized that a significant proportion of them
were destined not for a plate, but a landfill.
For many freegans, then, ex-commodity waste became a potent symbol
of everything that was wrong with capitalism. This same waste came to anchor
an ecological critique that drew on the dominant rhetoric, symbols, and ideals of
the discursive field of neo-liberal capitalism itself. As another freegan.info
participant explained:
Seeing all the waste exposes very clearly the priorities in our society,
that making a profit is more important than feeding people, than
preserving the environment, than making use of resources, than honoring
peoples’ time, labor, love, and effort. What we see with waste is that
once something cannot make money, it is discarded and of no value.
Freegans’ encounters with waste were particularly striking because they
undermined the common sense notion that underpins neo-liberal capitalism: that
24
goods are scarce and thus must be distributed through waste-minimizing
markets. At the same time, “waste”—or, more narrowly, useful excommodities—enabled freegans to, in their eyes, transcend capitalism by living
off of the system’s discards.
In advanced capitalist societies, the disconnection between discourses of
efficiency and waste’s material abundance is largely hidden, thanks to a range of
technologies, practices, and government services (Chappells and Shove 1999; de
Coverly et al. 2008; Rathje and Murphy 1992). Exposing this normally invisible
waste was the centerpiece of freegan.info’s political strategy. As one essay on
the group’s website explained:
If consumers became aware of this massive waste, this could pose a
serious problem for retailers operating under this model. Some might
choose to recover discarded goods rather than purchasing the very same
goods in the store. On a large enough scale, this could substantially cut
into profits. To prevent massive numbers of people from realizing that
they can obtain the same goods for free that they are forced to spend
money on, scarcity must be manufactured to maintain the value of the
merchant’s wares.10
Freegan.info’s ecological critique of capitalism reached its apex at the end of
each trash tour during the “waving the banana” speech. The group would pile up
the findings from the night’s dive and one member would use the ex-
25
commodities—such as bananas—to illustrate the group’s point. One speech
coupled a framing of capitalism as wasteful with an assertion of the immanent
prefigurative possibilities created by ex-commodities:
We’re here to reclaim all this [waste], because we view this as wealth.
What it is is [sic] that we're actually living amongst massive amounts of
wealth, and until we actually reclaim it and share it with everybody
around us, everything is going into the trash. Meanwhile, we have an
opportunity to live in abundance. It’s all actually there, we're just trained
to think that it's only valuable if it came from a store
On nights with particularly large finds, freegans would often redistribute
particularly appealing food on the sidewalk or subway, leveraging people’s
interest in free food to jump start discussions of capitalism.
The group’s decision to emphasize waste was a strategic one, of the kind
discussed within the framing literature. One activist observed that she realized
that “waste is offensive to almost everyone,” regardless of their political
persuasion, a point that could not be made for “mass consumption” or “income
inequality.” The reason why “waste” would resonate with a wide range of
audiences, however, requires that we think in terms of the broader social
context, within which freegans could repurpose a long-running cultural
celebration of thrift and neo-liberalism’s valorization of efficiency and nonwasting. In one speech, a freegan pointed out that, “One of the buzzwords of
26
capitalism is efficiency. We hear it all the time. But a really efficient economy
would be a cooperative economy…in which things are shared freely.” Another
freegan, flipping the stigmatization of those who are unproductive under
capitalism onto capitalists themselves, argued that “The real freeloaders and
scavengers...are the people who...compete and fight over it [the earth’s
resources], rather than sharing their time and possessions with others in need.”
Certainly, freegan.info is not the first movement to use “waste” to frame
its critique of capitalism. Marx himself claimed that “since nothing is done
according to a social plan” under capitalism, there is a “major wastage of
productive forces” (Marx 1978:252). But while the “waste” Marx referred to
was an abstract quantity—the difference between production in an actuallyexisting capitalist system and a hypothetical socialist one—the “waste” that
freegans identified consisted of concrete ex-commodities that people could see,
feel, and taste. The evident contradiction between the discursive justifications
for neo-liberal capitalism and the reality of neo-liberal accumulation made it
more relevant to many trash-tour attendees than more abstract discourses about
the exploitation of labor—the fulcrum of the social critique of capitalism—or
alienating consumer culture—the lynchpin of an artistic one.
Ultimately, freegan.info was only one small and relatively marginal
network of activists in New York. Nonetheless, there is evidence that an
ecological critique that frames anti-capitalism in terms of scale, excess, and
27
waste has become increasingly prominent.11 Yates (2011) describes how slogans
like “growth is madness” and “the world is full” captured the ecological
sensitivities of the anti-globalization movement. The alternatives the movement
promoted, too, aligned with freegan values, but were starkly different from those
of traditional productivist socialists: temperance of excess, conservation of
resources, preservation of the commons, prudence for the future, and frugality in
individual living (Yates 2011:551). Critiques of the excesses of the financial
sector abounded at Occupy Wall Street, too, as well as claims that “lives, futures
or degrees are ‘going to waste’ or ‘being wasted’ because of the corruption and
inadequacies of institutions meant to support them” (Liboiron 2012:400).
Certainly, these parallels could be partly explained through a strategic
framing approach that emphasizes frame bridging and alignment that leads to a
shared “master frame” between movements. But such an approach would miss
how the ecological critique plays out on a discursive terrain set by capitalism
itself. Both pro-capitalist advocates and anti-capitalist advocates see “scarcity”
as a problem, but argue over what it is that is scarce: economic products or
environmental resources, respectively. It is broader shifts in the discursive
justifications for the object movements challenge—capitalism—that make
claims about waste increasingly relevant, resonant, and intelligible.
28
Reconsidering Anti-Capitalism in a Neo-Liberal Era
The last decade-and-a-half has seen a number of movements in the
United States that make either explicit or implicit anti-capitalist claims. The
dominant political process synthesis may very well help to understand how this
mobilization was possible (although I have not considered this question here),
but it provides only limited theoretical tools for interpreting the form this
mobilization has taken: that is, why movements do one thing and not another. In
fact, by treating social movement repertoires as variations on a static theme and
framings as having little overarching historical logic, it may actually fail to
recognize contemporary anti-capitalist tactics and claims at all.
As currently deployed, political process theory provides little analytical
leverage for understanding the specific empirical problem on which this article
focuses: namely, the appropriation of useful goods that have been discarded—
ex-commodities—for anti-capitalist repertoires and frames. I have examined the
contemporary form of anti-capitalism through a framework that focuses on the
challenges and opportunities posed by the present balance of state-societymarket relations, discursive field of justification for capitalism, and mode of
accumulation. In particular, I show how the decreasing effectiveness of statecentered tactics and neo-liberal discourses about waste and efficiency have
driven participants in FNB and freegan.info to adopt a “prefigurative” repertoire
and “ecological” critique, both drawing on the “ex-commodity” waste produced
29
by neo-liberal capitalism. I have emphatically not asserted that these tactics and
framings are necessarily more effective than their alternatives, only that their
adoption is an intelligible response to changes within capitalism itself.
In attempting to answer the “why” of social movements through analysis
of macro-structural changes, my argument has some affinities with the “New
Social Movement” (NSM) theories that flourished in post-1960s Western
Europe (for reviews, see Buechler 2000; Pichardo 1997). But while NSM
theorists saw the submersion of anti-capitalist claims in the “post-materialist”
politics of 1970s, I highlight the persistence of anti-capitalist movements, albeit
in a form shaped by the particular challenges posed by neo-liberalism.
Moreover, unlike some NSM theorists I do not claim that this framework
accounts for all movements across all domains of society. Instead, I am only
making the much narrower—and, fairly intuitive—argument that changes in the
object movements challenge should be connected to changes in movements
themselves: that is to say, as capitalism evolves, so does anti-capitalism.
Finally, I make no claims to the “newness” of the repertoires or framings
I have identified. In fact, some surprising parallels to the frames and repertoires
described here can be seen in the anti-capitalist movements of the early 19th
century.12 Early labor movements, for example, derided capitalists as “idle,”
“parasites,” and “opulent” (Babb 1996:1093; Voss 1993:99), before Marxian
notions about the extraction of surplus value took hold. Working class actors in
30
France and even the Social Democratic Party in Germany focused initially not
on seizing the state but on building alternative institutions—like worker’s
cooperatives—that prefigured a post-capitalist future (Aminzade 1981; Sewell
1980). The constituencies of these movements were often not the classic
industrial proletariat, but lower-middle-class artisans facing growing precarity.
When we consider the parallels between the “capitalisms” of these two
periods, these similarities become less surprising. Like anti-capitalist activists
today, early labor activists had to confront a capitalist system that was rapidly
expanding into new arenas of social life, and did so without recourse to a
responsive state or clear blueprint for a socialist society. Although I have not
discussed the demographics of FNBs or freegan.info here, those movements also
drew heavily on the economically insecure middle-class.
The fact that movements reacted to broadly analogous situations in
roughly comparable ways by mobilizing similarly positioned populations
provides some additional support for developing social movement theory’s
analysis of structural conditions alongside inter- and intra-movement dynamics.
Putting these claims on firmer footing will almost certainly require more
extensive event counts and movement messaging content analysis—the bread
and butter of political process research. Qualitative analysis of contemporary
movements reminds us, however, that what counts as a movement “event” or
“message” should not be assumed a priori, but seen as historically variable.
31
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Endnotes
1
This study builds on 20 months of participant observation with freegan.info
between 2007 and 2009, as well as 25 semi-structured interviews, and 12
months of participant observation with East Bay Food Not Bombs in 2012.
2
A variant on this state- and democracy-centered approach is articulated by
Amenta et al. (2012).
3
Canonical statements of the “artistic critique” include Marcuse (1964) and
Debord (2000). This shift in modes of critique is documented by scholars in the
New Social Movement tradition (see Buechler 1995; Pichardo 1997).
4
Horton (1997) offers an extended explanation of how the destruction of usevalue can maintain profits in the face of overproduction.
5
Some authors describe prefigurative politics as composed of “direct actions,”
or “a form of action in which means and ends become effectively
indistinguishable; a way of actively engaging with the world to bring about
change, in which the form of the action…is itself a model for the change one
wishes to bring about” (Graeber 2009:210). Because others collapse “direct
action” and “civil disobedience” (Epstein 1991; Gitlin 1981; Heynen 2010),
while I see them as belonging to fundamentally different repertoires (the latter
one demonstrative and indirect, the former material and direct), I avoid the term
in favor of “prefigurative politics.”
6
A listing of cities in which FNB has had chapters can be found at
www.foodnotbombs.net, although many groups appear to be dormant.
7
For more on squatters movements, see (Smith 1996).
8
Itself, arguably, an increasingly prominent repertoire of not-so-collective
action that is not well-captured in a political process framework.
9
This diversification of products is, itself, a potential source of increasing excommodification.
10
http://freegan.info/what-is-a-freegan/freegan-philosophy/freeganismliberating-our-consumption-liberating-our-lives-2/
11
This section is particularly inspired by Burawoy (2010), who suggests that
resistance to the third-wave marketization of neo-liberalism would focus on the
commodification of nature.
12
I am indebted to Cihan Tuğal for this observation.
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