Capital and waste are often so tightly coupled, they should just as well be considered synonymous.
Capital, both through the effects of the extreme pressures it places on the working class, and the extreme competitive and expansionary forces that contribute to its explosive growth (so long as it remains unchecked by energetic and environmental limits), generates incredible material abundance, which, due to the structural peculiarities of this process, must be destroyed or otherwise withdrawn in great proportion.
This is because abundance itself destroys exchange value, the maximization of which is the raison d'etre of capitalist activity. And perhaps more insidiously, abundance destroys worker desperation, which is detrimental to capitalist power, and is to be avoided.
So it is that a grocery store has to dump shelves and shelves of unsold and expired product into the dumpsters, and then guard the dumpsters, the waste, with righteous intensity, at least in areas with active dumpster diving. If everyone could wait around to eat nominally expired food as the grocery store dumped it, who would choose to do so? How would this affect the balance sheets?
For the same reason planned obsolescence has been in effect across virtually every manufacturing industry. We could choose to ignore the material consequences of seizing upon a new iPhone every year, those of us who can afford such things anyways, though of course all of that matter won't simply melt into the air. We should look to certain vulnerable regions in Africa, where containers and containers full of electronic waste are dumped, which are marked "secondhand goods" to pass bureaucratic scrutiny.
Critics are right about the fact that capitalism requires the generation of artificial scarcity to survive, a paradoxical situation considering the common ideological justifications for the social system, one of the most important of which insists that capitalism produces great material abundance and feeds a huge population. But as always we must ask: material abundance for whom, and to what end?
And the nature of artificial scarcity is such that an actual material mass of abundance has to be sized down, and what else would we call this superfluous mass but waste, if it was not going to be used?
