Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism

by Françoise Vergès

An antiracist theory of cleaning.

Every year, capitalism produces tons of goods that go right to waste. Mining, deforestation, social inequalities, racism, extractivism, and hyper-consumption add to this fantastic amount of waste. How is their disappearance and invisibility organized? Who cleans the world? Upon whose bodies rests bourgeois and white cleanliness?

Making the World Clean looks at the masses who daily clean the world to make it livable and comfortable for a few. That comfort rests on the exhaustion of non-white bodies and their exposition to dangerous chemical and premature death. Who cleans the world is thus a political question, with an anti-patriarchal, antiracist, and anti-capitalist frame. To explore this, Francoise Verges looks at the notion of cleanliness of white bodies and the cleanliness of cities in which they live and of the planet they wish to inhabit, stressing the naturalization and invisibilization of cheap labor. Racial capitalism produces waste, waste is the measure of its potency, and greening waste hides the fact that colonizing the planet and thus transforming life into waste is essential. Against this politics of wasted lives and wasted lands, Verges opposes the politics of antiracist and anti-capitalist cleaning, looking at works and actions of activists throughout the world.

Genres: Environment

283 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 21, 2025

About the author

Françoise Vergès (born 23 January 1952) is a French political scientist, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist and public educator. Her work focuses on postcolonial studies and decolonial feminism.

Vergès was born in Paris, grew up in Réunion and Algeria, before returning to Paris to study and become a journalist. She moved to the US in 1983, studying at the University of California, San Diego and Berkeley.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible

[Alison Veintimilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crazy crazy good. Verges elegantly and expertly intertwines different forms of media to give us a holistic lens on the climate disaster and the politics of cleaning. Her arguments are well built giving both anecdotal evidence as well as numerical. She gives us the capacity to look at an integral part of climate change that is way too often ignored - the role (I wish I could come up with a stronger word than this) of capitalism and racism.

I am only deducting a star (and truly it’s a half star) because even tho she mentioned she was trying to make the book readable - it still at times felt very dense with jargon.

But other than that I would recommend this to everyone - especially those interested in environmentalist/anti-racist endeavors.