CityReads│Expulsions: the Brutal Logic of Global Economy

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Expulsions: the Brutal Logic of Global Economy

Saskia Sassen proposes the notion of expulsions as a way of capturing the pathologies of today's global capitalism, which can function as a window into major dynamics of our epoch.

Saskia Sassen,2014.Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Harvard University Press.

Source:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/charts-excluded-from-economy_b_6109496.html

How do we understand the shrinking economies in much of the world, soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, and accelerating destruction of the biosphere all over the globe?

Today's socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. In her book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, she argues they are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.

What matters in the current period is the specific mix of conditions that have made it so extreme and expelled so many from their habitual life.

We have seen a very different kind of expulsion, from the expulsion of the vulnerable and the poor from land, jobs, and homes, and to the expulsion of bits of the biosphere from their life space.

Expulsions 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 ware housed 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. In short, the character, contents, and sites of these expulsions vary enormously across social strata and physical conditions, and across the world.

The mix of cases of expulsion cut across the familiar divisions of urban versus rural, Global North versus Global South, East and West, and more, are the surface manifestation, the localized shape, of deeper systemic dynamics that articulate much of what now appears as unconnected.

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.

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.

The massive acquisitions of land in foreign countries by about since 2006 has expelled small farmers and rural manufacturers from their land. Over 200 million hectares were acquired in this period. These foreign acquisitions are for mining, developing plantations and accessing water.

Regional distribution of 2011 land acquisitions

Source:

Such expulsion dynamics are taking place both in the Global South and in the Global North, even if via different vectors. From 2004 to 2014, the Federal Reserve estimates up to 14 million residential properties have been foreclosed, with about 13 million households thrown out. It is a massive expulsion of people from their homes. It is also worth noting that such foreclosures are now happening in most European countries, especially in Germany.

One juxtaposition is that of the growing numbers of internally displaced in the Global South, and the growing numbers of the imprisoned in the Global North, particularly in countries such as the U.S and the U.K. The "displaced” are mostly never going back “home.” Home is now a plantation, a war zone or a luxury gated community. Similarly, many U.S. prisoners increasingly stay for very long stints or circulate between prison and neighborhood, back and forth. It is going to be very difficult to have a normal life in both these very distinct situations.

The following chart shows people mostly displaced by war.

Global Trends (2012) Displacement: the New 21st Century Challenge

We can add to these types of expulsions the growth of the long-term unemployed in advanced countries. In some countries, such as Greece, of the workforce is now unemployed. Significantly, they disappeared from all counts, enabling the IMF and the European Central Bank to declare in January 2013 that the Greek economy was back on track. I refer to this as a sort of economic cleansing, playing off the more familiar ethnic cleansing. It is, we might say, the expelling of the unwanted to achieve a positive, even if very partial, outcome.

World economy can simultaneously benefit some enormously and destroy unusually large numbers of others. This goes well beyond distributional factors such as inequality. The way the advanced economy has evolved is problematic at the structural level. This is an extreme kind of divergence and an extreme decimation of once prosperous working classes and large segments of the middle classes.

Capitalist system before 1980 had the capacity to generate the expansion of prosperous working and middle classes. By the 1980s, we saw the emergence of capacities that push toward concentration at the top rather than toward the development of a broad middle.

source: https://therationalpessimist.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/winners-and-losers-jpeg.jpg

We are seeing the making not so much of predatory elites but of predatory “formations,” a mix of elites and systemic capacities with finance a key enabler, that push toward acute concentration.

There has been a 60 percent increase in the wealth of the top 1 percent globally in the past twenty years; at the top of that 1 percent, the richest “100 billionaires added $240 billion to their wealth in 2012— enough to end world poverty four times over.” Bank assets grew by 160 percent between 2002, well before the full crisis, and 2011, when financial recovery had started— from $40 trillion to $105 trillion, which is over one and a half times the value of global GDP. The top 10 percent of the income ladder in the United States got 90 percent of the income growth of the de cade beginning in 2000.

The following graphs capture some of this divergence in the sharp rise in government debt. While corporate profits suffered only for about two years from the crisis, and the rise in corporate assets seemed overall untouched. Further, both corporate profits and assets grew even more sharply after 2008.

OECD Stat Extracts and World Economic Outlook Database of the IMF

FRED Economic Data, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank

These, and many other expulsions, take on specific forms in each location of the world, and they’re in diverse domains: economy, society, politics. It is difficult to see that they might be the surface manifestations of deeper trends that today cut across the familiar divisions.

For example, experts on the long-term imprisoned in the Global North do not really study the displaced in the Global South and vice-versa. And yet, at ground level, these displacements share a simple, common element: These are people being (usually permanently) cast out of what had been their lives. The people involved may never go back to normal, so to speak.

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 territory— for example, to grow food for its middle classes— even 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.

This mal-deployment of knowledge as a major issue in our current global political economy. 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 brutalities.

Together the diverse expulsions 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.

This coexistence of growth and these expulsions further add to the invisibility of those who are expelled from job, home and land.

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. The notion of expulsions takes us beyond the more familiar idea of growing in equality as a way of capturing the pathologies of today's global capitalism. They can function as a window into major dynamics of our epoch.

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