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From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary

Zsuzsa Gille’s excellent book breaks important theoretical ground, adds compelling empirical evidence in the area of environmental sociology, and demonstrates the power of multi-methodological designs for examining the interrelationships between technological change, political economic transformations and the natural environment. The book’s most compelling contribution is a new framework for conceptualizing and empirically examining the political economy of waste. Gille’s framework provides a fresh new sociological approach for examining the role of waste in society. She contends that waste and society are mutually constitutive, that the dichotomy between consumption and production is false, that waste is a hybrid category—part material and part social and that social transformations can be viewed through the lens of waste regimes. Gille’s synthesis of political economy and environmental sociology results in a new concept she calls waste regimes. Waste regimes are a lens through which one can examine how institutions determine what wastes have social value, and what wastes are a problem. Waste regimes differ in the way waste is produced, the politics surrounding the production, distribution, storage, and disposal of waste, and the way in which waste is represented in political and social discourse. Moreover, since waste regimes are dynamic, production, politics and representation vary over time in response to other aspects of social change and institutional transformation. Hence, waste regime analysis facilitates comparative research across nations and over time. As Gilles observes, research shaped by a waste regime framework moves away from a mode of production analysis to focus on the changing materiality and discourse of waste within a particular society over time or between different societies. Gille’s observations about the “spatiality” of waste are particularly interesting. Spatiality in this context means cognitive and rhetorical space, not geographic space. Accordingly, the sociological challenge is to understand the social processes that result in waste being placed (or dis-placed) into various categories, some of which like recycling are positively valued while others like toxic dumps are framed in a negative light. Classification, therefore, is social behavior, and waste is a both a material and a social category. Moreover, since society and waste are dynamic and mutually constitutive, social structures that regulate and manage waste change along with its rhetorical reclassification as being useful or non-useful, beneficial or dangerous. These representational distinctions expose relationships between waste and the social relations of production. In socialist societies, for example, managers often hoarded surplus resources as a hedge against future shortages. This frequently resulted in rot, rust, spoilage and evaporation as valuable industrial inputs were transformed into waste. In capitalist systems, by contrast, waste tends to result from surplus production and underutilized excess. Examining waste regimes in a comparative context questions the conventional wisdom that state socialism was inherently wasteful while market based systems are more efficient, less wasteful and more sustainable. Gille uses the waste regime framework to shape and motivate a skillful empirical examination of the politics of waste in Hungary between 1948 through 2004, from the beginnings of state socialism though accession to the European Union. Her multimethod research design utilizes meticulous archival research, interviews with historical actors in both production and waste management sectors, and field-based research conducted in a number of sites at different spatial scales. Some readers will recognize