Slavic, East European & Eurasian Collections - IAS Library

View Full Calendar

Zoom Workshop with Zsuzsa Gille: "Consumerism, Cheap Nature, and State Socialism: A Transnational Waste Regime Perspective"

Event Type
Conference/Workshop
Sponsor
Department of Sociology
Virtual
wifi event
Date
Apr 24, 2020   3:00 pm  
Speaker
Zsuzsa Gille (Professor of Sociology and Director of the Global Studies Program, University of Illinois)
Registration
Zoom Link
Views
2
Originating Calendar
Russian, E. European & Eurasian Center: Co-sponsored Events

For scholars, activists, and citizens concerned about the state of the environment, and global climate change in particular, the concept of the Anthropocene has emerged as a convenient shorthand to sum up the radical alterations humanity has inflicted upon nature. The concept has come under criticism from sociologists and other social scientists for its asocial view of environmental change. The most sophisticated critique has been developed by Jason Moore, a World-System scholar, who in return coined the term Capitalocene. In this talk I will carry the transnational and relational perspective of this theory to its logical conclusion by including the former Second World in this analysis. I introduce the term Socialocene, a transnational waste regime dominant through the Cold War-era. When extending the concept of waste beyond contamination to include opportunity costs, the Socialocene emerges as a transnational waste regime in which the modes of waste generation of Western capitalism and central planning are mutually determining. One key relation is the effect of communism on mass consumption and throw-away society in the West, the other is the use of centrally planned economies as “cheap nature,” in Moore’s sense. I will demonstrate the latter through several empirical examples and, in greater detail, through a case study of an Austrian chemical company outsourcing a toxic-waste-intensive product to a Hungarian chemical company in the 1960s.

link for robots only