The deaths of millions from war, genocide, poverty and famine are symptomatic of a crisis that extends beyond site-specific failures of governance, culture or economies. Rather than reiterate standard critiques of capitalism, uneven development and inequality, this article probes and maps a shift in both the global economy and logic of capital that posits death as a central activity of value creation. “Crisis,” then, is more than an accidental failure or inconvenient side effect of either global economy or political reality, but pivotal to both. Extending notions of biopower and necropolitics, I argue that, due to the extension of market logic, populations have been reconfigured and reconceptualized as “excess” - not only disposable but also fundamentally valued only in their negation. This devaluation of selected population is devalorization of living labor, thus creating a space for death as a generalized commodity, market and economic activity. Crucially, this shift exceeds the historic understandings of labor, value and politics, forcing a revaluation of biopower and of extant understandings of the global economic and political order. Death as a source of value marks an entirely new space in capital that exceeds its former limits. This process can be seen in examples of genocidal warfare, ethnic cleansing, environmental “disasters” and globalized poverty that function as industries of death, mining the accumulated stored value of life, as death, and as an activity itself, instead of the old extractive exploitation of living labor.

Community gardens are fertile fields of complex political, economic and social relations, on both a local and global level. From environmentalism to urban policy and planning, racial and gender studies, transnational migration, commodity chains and food studies, the garden in the city offers an abundance of research opportunities and analytical resources. This article seeks to contribute to the efforts to understand and contest hegemonic forces in the urban environment, forces that are rooted in what Foucault identified as a set of sacred binaries which underpin a host of power relations that are “given” and form the unquestioned framework of a given set of power relations. This is therefore a project which is bent on a “theoretical desanctification of space” by a disordering of one set of several sanctified oppositions which can be found in the space of the community garden. The article de-sanctifies space by exploring the historical context of the community garden in New York and Oakland California and posits that the work of the gardener is co-opted into a value regime by a process I call “conspicuous labor”. This process is similar to Veblen's conspicuous consumption except the value generated is not in modeling consumption but rather in emulating class patterns and re-configuring the urban poor as a productive, passive and pastoral.

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