Abstract
Saskia Sassen’s latest book attempts to chronicle a new global logic in today’s capitalist world-economy, namely, the savage (re)sorting into haves and have-nots on an international scale. Here, Sassen asks us to put aside the usual emphasis on nation-states, to focus on the global dynamic of expulsions from the world-economy that increasingly characterize today’s capitalist system, in rich and poor countries alike. Such dynamics give us the world’s most expensive city, Luanda, Angola, capital of a country with double-digit growth rates replete with an international bourgeoisie, predatory elites and managerial cadres, overlooking city slums from their high rise hotels and office buildings, devoted to extracting billions of dollars of oil wealth from the country while fueling conspicuous consumption.
At the heart of the book is a contrast between a predatory present formation of brutalized capital accumulation and the previous ‘golden age of historical capitalism’, which for all its own injustices simultaneously allowed for the growth of working-class and middle-income sectors, and social protections from labor to environmental regulations. Today’s new regime, in sharp contrast, is dedicated to the logic of expulsion, from security, from housing, employment, from environmental protections – through austerity, deregulation, global and national financial crises – from life and livelihoods, via suicide and cuts to much needed social programs, and ultimately from the biosphere itself. The focus on these expulsions is part and parcel of Sassen’s thesis that underlying today’s global crises are systemic dynamics involving basic elementary processes that threaten individual and social well-being, albeit ones produced in complex ways. This complexity, operating through the logic of global finance, legal expertise, and the like, makes understanding who benefits from these operations simultaneously harder to trace and less visible.
In the first chapter, ‘Shrinking economies, global expulsions’, Sassen chronicles the massive increase in income and wealth inequality between the world’s 1 percent and rest of the global population, something highlighted recently by Oxfam, while simultaneously examining growing inequalities within states, notably the United States. Explored here is the ability of bourgeois classes and firms to evade taxation and the growing burden of budgetary and service deficits paid for by the increasingly financially strapped global majority. Here, an increasing number of economies are contracting in the face of austerity regimes, including the impoverished middle classes … living in their same nice houses, with their losses hidden behind neat facades. Increasingly these households have sold most of their valuables to afford payments, have started to sell their basics, including furniture, and are doubling up with grown-up children. (Sassen, 2014: 29)
In states undergoing austerity such as Spain and Greece, joblessness for youth in 2013 stood at 56 and 62.5 percent respectively, while recent reports from the United States indicate that upwards of some 93 million adults, or roughly one-third of the population, are effectively no longer in the workforce.
Putting aside what Mike Davis has dubbed the ‘planet of slums’ unforeseen by Marx or classical social theory, there are the millions losing their homes, particularly severe in Europe as these people are still responsible for their full loans even after eviction. According to the official statistics, some 119.6 million persons, nearly 25 percent of the population among the EU-27, ‘were at risk of poverty, severely materially deprived, or living in households with very low work intensity … 9 percent of the population were materially deprived, meaning that they had living conditions constrained by a lack of resources’ (Sassen, 2014: 51). Additionally, the combination of economic crisis and war has led to increasing numbers of displaced persons – over 40 million – and related migrants, whose catastrophic outcomes have been seen recently in mass deaths as refugees from the Middle East and North Africa seek to migrate in boats to Europe, with the callous decision to not encourage such migration by stopping rescues leading to predictable enough consequences.
In other locales, growing imprisonment, notably in the United States, along with police murders of unarmed black men in the nation’s ghettos, most recently in Baltimore, Maryland, can be seen as mechanisms for storage, elimination, or expulsion of unwanted surplus populations and the criminalized poor, like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, no longer needed for the operations of global capital. Sassen also devotes a chapter to land-grabbing and related resource exploitation on a global scale, as the rush for resources leads to new forms of primitive accumulation of capital, largely bereft of the people that formerly inhabited those lands. Here, indebtedness and other mechanisms have created a new global market for land acquisitions, dissembling national territory in a new global matrix of accumulation. While increasing numbers of persons are displaced from the land, the securitization of mortgages and the move to subprime saw the eviction of over 9 million in the foreclosure crisis, touching the lives of up to 35 million persons, most especially racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. Meanwhile, some two billion persons around the world live in extreme poverty.
Sassen’s final chapter, ‘Dead land, dead water’, chronicles the dying of the biosphere in the age of global capital, climate change and the environmental ravages of industrialization in the Anthropocene. Sassen outlines the question of land degradation, some 40 percent of the world’s total, notably in Central America, with infertility rates of 75 percent, degradation rates of one-fifth in Africa, and then in Asia, where some 11 percent of the land can no longer be farmed. Climate change threatens land use for agriculture further, albeit unevenly, across the globe. At the same time, ongoing mining for coal, oil, gas, and other natural resources is destroying or threatening to destroy livelihoods in the United States, Russia, India, Latin America, East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and across the globe. And of course, water, necessary for life, is threatened by water grabs and commodification across the globe, as the climate becomes ever warmer.
Here, we have a new form of what Sassen calls economic cleansing, with savage cuts in jobs, social security, livelihood, and the like. Here, complex knowledge is deployed to aid the dynamic of expulsion, in sharp contrast to the Keynesian logic of incorporation of persons into the global system as it was remade on new and enlarged social foundations after World War II, starting with the Korean War boom. The book ends with a call to analyze the differentiated spaces of the expelled, dead land and water, for these are ‘potentially, the new spaces for making – making local economies, new histories, and new modes of membership’.
Sassen’s analytical focus and empirical examples from across the globe offer a sharp challenge to various versions of developmentalism on the right and the left. Ultimately, the logic of destruction and expulsion that Sassen analyzes raises the age old question of socialism or barbarism, or if not socialism, then some new form of global solidarity beyond the present logic of global capitalism in a way that provides for the remaking of the global system on more just, peaceful, and egalitarian social foundations. Sassen’s fundamental analysis of the present is a wake-up call to scholars and activists, that time is running out and of what may come, in the absence of counterhegemonic movements that have real weight in challenging the powers that be and in offering alternative visions of the good, the true, and the beautiful that provide for real improvement in people’s lives and hopes for a better future.