Saskia Sassen - Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

EXPULSIONS

EXPULSIONS

Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

Saskia Sassen

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2014

Copyright 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Jacket art by Hilary Koob-Sassen

Jacket design by Jill Breitbarth

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Sassen, Saskia.

Expulsions : brutality and complexity in the global economy / Saskia Sassen.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-674-59922-2 (alk. paper)

1. EconomicsSociological aspects. 2. Economic developmentSocial aspects. 3. Economic developmentMoral and ethical aspects. 4. CapitalismSocial aspects. 5. EqualityEconomic aspects. I. Title.

HM548.S275 2014

330dc23 2013040726

To Richard

Contents

Introduction:

Conclusion:

Introduction

We are confronting a formidable problem in our global political economy: the emergence of new logics of expulsion . The past two decades have seen a sharp growth in the number of people, enterprises, and places expelled from the core social and economic orders of our time. This tipping into radical expulsion was enabled by elementary decisions in some cases, but in others by some of our most advanced economic and technical achievements. The notion of expulsions takes us beyond the more familiar idea of growing inequality as a way of capturing the pathologies of todays global capitalism. Further, it brings to the fore the fact that forms of knowledge and intelligence we respect and admire are often at the origin of long transaction chains that can end in simple expulsions.

I focus on complex modes of expulsion because they can function as a window into major dynamics of our epoch. Further, I select extreme cases because they make sharply visible what might otherwise remain confusingly vague. One familiar example in the West that is both complex and extreme is the expelling of low-income workers and the unemployed from government social welfare and health programs as well as from corporate insurance and unemployment support. Beyond the negotiations and the making of new law required to execute this expulsion, there is the extreme fact that the divide between those with access to such benefits and those denied it has sharpened and may well be irreversible under current conditions. Another example is the rise of advanced mining techniques, notably hydraulic fracturing, that have the power to transform natural environments into dead land and dead water, an expulsion of bits of life itself from the biosphere. Together the diverse expulsions I examine in this book may well have a greater impact on the shaping of our world than the rapid economic growth in India, China, and a few other countries. Indeed, and key to my argument, such expulsions can coexist with economic growth as counted by standard measures.

These expulsions are made. The instruments for this making range from elementary policies to complex institutions, systems, and techniques that require specialized knowledge and intricate organizational formats. One example is the sharp rise in the complexity of financial instruments, the product of brilliant creative classes and advanced mathematics. Yet, when deployed to develop a particular type of subprime mortgage, that complexity led to the expulsion a few years later of millions of people from their homes in the United States, Hungary, Latvia, and so on. Another is the complexity of the legal and accounting features of the contracts enabling a sovereign government to acquire vast stretches of land in a foreign sovereign nation-state as a sort of extension of its own territoryfor example, to grow food for its middle classeseven as it expels local villages and rural economies from that land. Another is the brilliant engineering that allows us to extract safely what we want from deep inside our planet while disfiguring its surface en passant. Our advanced political economies have created a world where complexity too often tends to produce elementary brutalities.

The channels for expulsion vary greatly. They include austerity policies that have helped shrink the economies of Greece and Spain, environmental policies that overlook the toxic emissions from enormous mining operations in Norilsk, Russia, and in the American state of Montana, and so on, in an endless array of cases. The specifics of each case matter in this book. For instance, if our concern is environmental destruction rather than interstate politics, the fact that both these mining operations are heavy polluters matters more than the fact that one site is in Russia and the other in the United States.

The diverse processes and conditions I include under the notion of expulsion all share one aspect: they are acute. While the abjectly poor worldwide are the most extreme instance, I do include such diverse conditions as the impoverishment of the middle classes in rich countries, the eviction of millions of small farmers in poor countries owing to the 220 million hectares of land, or over 540 million acres, acquired by foreign investors and governments since 2006, and the destructive mining practices in countries as different as the United States and Russia. Then there are the countless displaced people warehoused in formal and informal refugee camps, the minoritized groups in rich countries who are warehoused in prisons, and the able-bodied unemployed men and women warehoused in ghettos and slums. Some of these expulsions have been taking place for a long time, but not at the current scale. Some are new types of expulsions, such as the 9 million households in the United States whose homes were foreclosed in a short and brutal housing crisis that lasted a mere decade. In short, the character, contents, and sites of these expulsions vary enormously across social strata and physical conditions, and across the world.

The globalization of capital and the sharp rise in technical capabilities have produced major scaling effects. What may have been minor displacements and losses in the 1980s, such as deindustrialization in the West and in several African countries, had become devastations by the 1990s (think Detroit and Somalia). To understand this scaling as more of the same inequality, poverty, and technical capacity is to miss the larger trend. Similarly with the environment. We have been using the biosphere and producing localized damage for millennia, but only in the last thirty years has the damage grown to become a planetary event that boomerangs back, often hitting sites that had nothing to do with the original destruction, such as the Arctic permafrost. And so on with other domains, each with its own specifics.

The many diverse expulsions examined in this book together amount to a savage sorting. We tend to write about the complex organizational capacities of our modern world as producing societies capable of ever more complexity, and conceive of this as a positive development. But often it is so in a partial way or holds for a short temporal frame. Expanding the range of situations and the temporal frame makes visible the fact of sharp edges that obscure what might lie beyond. This raises a question: is much of todays society tending toward the condition of brutal simplicity against which the great historian Jacob Burckhardt warned in the nineteenth century? From what I have observed, complexity does not inevitably lead to brutality, but it can, and today it often does. Indeed, it often leads to simple brutality, not even grand brutality of a sort that might be an equal, even if negative, to that complexity, as is todays scale of our environmental destruction.