Expulsions

Saskia Sassen

• Editorial: Belknap Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674369825
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Sociologia

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today's socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. 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.This hard-headed critique updates our understanding of economics for the twenty-first century, exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. From finance to mining, the complex types of knowledge and technology we have come to admire are used too often in ways that produce elementary brutalities. These have evolved into predatory formations—assemblages of knowledge, interests, and outcomes that go beyond a firm's or an individual's or a government's project.Sassen draws surprising connections to illuminate the systemic logic of these expulsions. The sophisticated knowledge that created today's financial "instruments" is paralleled by the engineering expertise that enables exploitation of the environment, and by the legal expertise that allows the world's have-nations to acquire vast stretches of territory from the have-nots. Expulsions lays bare the extent to which the sheer complexity of the global economy makes it hard to trace lines of responsibility for the displacements, evictions, and eradications it produces—and equally hard for those who benefit from the system to feel responsible for its depredations.

CHAPTER 1

Shrinking Economies, Growing Expulsions

The aim of this chapter is to put some flesh on the idea that we may have entered a new phase of advanced capitalism in the 1980s, one with reinvented mechanisms for primitive accumulation. Today’s is a form of primitive accumulation executed through complex operations and much specialized innovation, ranging from the logistics of outsourcing to the algorithms of finance. After thirty years of these types of development, we face shrinking economies in much of the world, escalating destructions of the biosphere all over the globe, and the reemergence of extreme forms of poverty and brutalization where we thought they had been eliminated or were on their way out.

What is usually referred to as economic development has long depended on extracting goods from one part of the world and shipping them to another. Over the past few decades this geography of extraction has expanded rapidly, in good part through complex new technologies, and is now marked by even sharper imbalances in its relation to, and use of, natural resources. The mix of innovations that expands our capacities for extraction now threatens core components of the biosphere, leaving us also with expanded stretches of dead land and dead water.

Some of this is old history. Economic growth has never been benign. But the escalations of the past three decades mark a new epoch in that they threaten a growing number of people and places throughout the world. Such growth still takes on distinctive formats and contents in the mix of diversely developed countries we refer to as the Global North versus the mix of less or differently developed countries we refer to as the Global South. For instance, predatory elites have long been associated with poor countries that have rich natural resources, not with developed countries. Yet increasingly we see some of this capture at the top also in the latter, albeit typically in far more intermediated forms.

My thesis is that 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.¹ Concentration at the top is nothing new. What concerns me is the extreme forms it takes today in more and more domains across a good part of the world. I see the capacity for generating extreme concentration in some of the following trends, to mention just a few. 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.”² 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.³ In 2010, still a period of crisis, the profits of the 5.8 million corporations in the United States rose 53 percent over 2009, but despite skyrocketing profits, their United States corporate income tax bills actually shrank by $1.9 billion, or 2.6 percent.

Rich individuals and global firms by themselves could not have achieved such extreme concentration of the world’s wealth. They need what we might think of as systemic help: a complex interaction of these actors with systems regeared toward enabling extreme concentration. Such systemic capacities are a variable mix of technical, market, and financial innovations plus government enablement. They constitute a partly global condition, though one that often functions through the specifics of countries, their political economies, their laws, and their governments.⁴ They include enormous capacities for intermediation that function as a kind of haze, impairing our ability to see what is happening—but unlike a century ago, we would not find cigar-smoking moguls in this haze. Today, the structures through which concentration happens are complex assemblages of multiple elements, rather than the fiefdoms of a few robber barons.

Part of my argument is that a system with the capacity to concentrate wealth at this scale is distinctive. It is different, for instance, from a system with the capacity to generate the expansion of prosperous working and middle classes, as happened during most of the twentieth century in the Global North, in much of Latin America, and in several African countries, notably Somalia. This earlier system was far from perfect: there were inequality, concentration of wealth, poverty, racism, and more. But it was a system with a capacity to generate a growing middle sector that kept expanding for several generations, with children mostly doing better than their parents. Also, these distributive outcomes were not simply a function of the people involved. It took specific systemic capacities. By the 1980s, these earlier capacities had weakened, and we saw the emergence of capacities that push toward concentration at the top rather than toward the development of a broad middle. Thus the fact, for example, that the top 10 percent of the income ladder in the United States got 90 percent of the income growth of the decade beginning in 2000 signals more than individual capacity—it was enabled by that complex mix I conceive of as a predatory formation.

In the first section of this chapter I elaborate on how economic growth can get constituted in diverse ways with diverse distributive effects. I find that in our global modernity, we are seeing a surge of what are often referred to as primitive forms of accumulation, usually associated with earlier economies. The format is no longer something like the enclosure of farmers’ fields so that wool-bearing sheep can be raised there, as was done in England to satisfy textile manufacturers’ demands during the industrial revolution. Today, enormous technical and legal complexities are needed to execute what are ultimately elementary extractions. It is, to cite a few cases, the enclosure by financial firms of a country’s resources and citizens’ taxes, the repositioning of expanding stretches of the world as sites for extraction of resources, and the regearing of government budgets in liberal democracies away from social and workers’ needs. I return to these subjects in the third section.

The second section examines global inequality through this critical lens. Inequality, if it keeps growing, can at some point be more accurately described as a type of expulsion. For those at the bottom or in the poor middle, this means expulsion from a life space; among those at the top, this appears to have meant exiting from the responsibilities of membership in society via self-removal, extreme concentration of the wealth available in a society, and no inclination to redistribute that wealth. Building on the discussion of extreme instantiations of inequality, the third section focuses on familiar situations that, when taken to extremes, become unfamiliar—the other side of the curve. To render visible today’s accelerated systemic capacity to make the familiar extreme, I focus on the developed world. Greece and Spain particularly have entered a phase of active shrinkage of their economies to a point we would not have thought possible in the developed world only a few years ago.

These first three sections of the chapter bring out the speed with which what was experienced as more or less normal can evolve into its opposite. The final two sections focus on acute types of expulsions that are likely to become more widespread in particular areas of the world. One is the growth over the past two decades of the displaced population, mostly in the Global South, and the other is the rapid increase of the incarcerated population in a growing number of countries in the Global North. These and so many other old but mutating conditions point to a multisited systemic transformation. In the Global South, both the diverse causes of displacement and the futures of those who have been displaced are calling into question the United Nations’ formal classifications of displaced persons, because mostly such people will never go back home—home is now a war zone, a plantation, a mining operation, or dead land. An equivalent shift is evident in the Global North, where what until recently was incarceration as response to a crime (whether the crime was actually committed or not) is now becoming the warehousing of people, which, furthermore, is increasingly done for profit—with the United States in a vanguard all its own.

UNSUSTAINABLE CONTRADICTIONS? FROM INCORPORATION TO EXPULSION

The ways in which economic growth takes place matter. A given growth rate can describe a variety of economies, from one with little inequality and a thriving middle class to one with extreme inequality and concentration of most of the growth in a small upper tier. These differences exist across and within countries. Germany and Angola had the same rate of GDP growth in 2000 but clearly had very different economies and saw very different distributive effects. Although Germany is reducing the level, it still puts a good share of government resources into countrywide infrastructure and offers a wide array of services to its people, from health care to trains and buses. Angola’s government does neither, choosing to support a small elite seeking to satisfy its own desires, including luxury developments in its capital city, Luanda, now ranked as the most expensive city in the world. These differences can also be seen in a single country across time, such as the United States just within the past fifty years. In the decades after World War II, growth was widely distributed and generated a strong middle class, while the decade beginning in 2000 saw the beginnings of an impoverished middle class, with 80 percent of the growth in income going to the top 1 percent of earners.

In the post–World War II era, the critical components of Western market economies were fixed-capital intensity, standardized production, and the building of new housing in cities, suburbs, and new towns. Such patterns were evident in a variety of countries in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, most prominently Japan and Asia’s so-called Tiger economies. These forms of economic growth contributed to the vast expansion of a middle class. They did not eliminate inequality, discrimination, or racism. But they reduced systemic tendencies toward extreme inequality by constituting an economic regime centered on mass production and mass consumption, with strong labor unions at least in some sectors, and diverse government supports. Further deterrents to inequality were the cultural forms accompanying these processes, particularly through their shaping of the structures of everyday life. For instance, the culture of the large suburban middle class evident in the United States and Japan contributed to mass consumption and thus to standardization in production, which in turn facilitated unionization in manufacturing and distribution.⁵

Manufacturing, in tandem with state policies, played a particularly strong role in this conjunction of trends. As the leading sector in market-based economies for much of the twentieth century, mass manufacturing created the economic conditions for the expansion of the middle class because (1) it facilitated worker organizing, with unionization the most familiar format; (2) it was based in good part on household consumption, and hence wage levels mattered in that they created an effective demand in economies that were for the most part fairly closed; and (3) the relatively high wage levels and social benefits typical of the leading manufacturing sectors became a model for broader sectors of the economy, even those not unionized nor in manufacturing. Manufacturing played this role in non-Western-style industrial economies as well, notably in Taiwan and South Korea, and, in its own way, in parts of the Soviet Union. It has also played a significant part in the growth of a middle class in China since the 1990s, though not as consequential a role as it did in the West in the twenti...