A View from the Margins: A Book review of Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy
(Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2014)
By: Clinton E. Stockwell, MUPP, Ph.D.
Director: Graduate Theological Urban Studies at SCUPE
Saskia Sassen (M.A.; Ph.D. University of Notre Dame) is the Robert S. Lynn Professor of Sociology and the co-chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. Her ground-breaking book, The Global City: New York, London, and Tokyo (Second Edition, Princeton, 2001) examined the nature of the global economy for today’s world from the center of the global economy. She found that cities had become the central engine of the global economy, defined particularly by its command and control functions. Global cities like New York, Tokyo or London have become the center for multinational corporations who manage the production of goods and information. In her latest book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard/Belknap Press, 2014), Sassen shifts her investigation from global city centers to the outworkings of the global economy at the margins.
What she finds and documents is most troubling. The chapters examine the shrinking global economies, the new global market for land, the triumph of finance capital, and the consequences for labor and indigenous people, and the environment. The growing inequality is due in no small part to the relatively unbridled rise of multinational corporations who, often in partnership with nation-states, exploit the land and its resources for expropriation and profit, while contribute to the degradation of land and the impoverishment of people. Human beings as well as all other living species, find themselves expelled from their habitats and from the benefits of the global economic system. The result is a dramatic increase of displaced peoples, a rise in homelessness due to foreclosures and underemployment, and the criminalization or incarceration of people as a form of social control. Sassen writes that at the system’s edge under Keysianism (which invited investments in people and infrastructure), more persons were included and brought into the economy. Under neo-liberalism, the current system that is characterized by the triumph of private capital, more persons are excluded and expelled from their livelihoods, many of whom have been forced to urban slums for survival.
Sassen documents this statistically as a result of her rigorous research. In the US, the top 2772 firms in 2010 owned 81% of all business assets. Combined profits have set world records, even as these same firms are reluctant to hire or to invest beyond their firms. Some scholars argue that the central problem of the global economy is due to a corporate “savings glut.” Politically, this means that global businesses have been able to purchase and set the political agenda of nations in favor of profits by way of the commodification of natural resources. The result is the growth of extreme inequality- meaning the loss of assets and income by the bottom four quadrants of the population in the US, and the escalation of the indebtedness of individuals and nations globally. Worldwide, the top indebted nations include the Ukraine, the Philippines, Egypt, and Pakistan, many of the places where there have been either political turmoil or violent conflict due to extreme inequality. Sassen documents the relationship between hyper-indebted countries and the cuts in social programs, and with it the impoverishment of people and the devastation of land. Between 1981-2003, 24% of the total global land area suffered land degradation, including the toxification or loss of topsoil. A related issue is land acquisition, accomplished by private companies and or by states. Land grabs are harmful in many ways, as they lead to the pollution and toxification of habitats and waste of precious water resources including aquifers. This is much more extensive than most people know. Water is used for fracking, the raising of beef, and for the exploitation for private sale via bottled water. Further, global agribusiness characteristically replaces crop diversity with monocrops, and with this the loss of a diversified means of survival. The result has been the expulsion of millions of families, and sometimes whole villages, from the rural areas to city slums for survival.
Sassen describes the collective impacts mining and agribusiness in case studies of numerous environmental disasters from the past few years, from mountain-top removal to disasters such as Bhopal and Fukushima. The degradation of the land and expulsion of peoples is often made possible by corrupted or weakened governments. “Expulsions from home, land and job have …had the effect of giving expanded operational space to criminal networks and to the trafficking of people, as well as greater access to land and underground water resources to foreign buyers, whether firms or governments (89).” The result of the commodification of water by companies such as Nestle has resulted in the draining of aquifers and the increased scarcity and escalation of the price of fresh water.
While finance capital in the past was distributive, via investments in manufacturing, infrastructure and jobs; today’s finance capital is primarily characterized as an internal investment in a firm’s own production capacity (known as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)), but not to jobs or necessary institutional services to people, and certainly not in ways that sustain the environment. This is aggravated by policies that entities like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have towards indebted nations. Money is lent to such places to abet the activity of global business, under the condition that such funds are not used for social programs such as education or poverty remediation. Global businesses are more interested in extracting minerals and or resources for financial gain, and are not interested in the consequences of practices such as mining, fracking or mountain-top removal. With little regulation in place, firms are able to operate globally with relative impunity. While what is needed is attention to what economists like Joseph Stiglitz calls the “triple bottom line,” in practice this is uniformly not the case.
Sassen does have suggestions for what needs to occur in the wake of the brutality and complexity of the global economy she describes. In response to the wholesale expulsions of persons and and the degradation of biological lifeforms from their own lands and ecosystems, direct intervention and regulations by governments are needed. First, governments must “reorient themselves… away from the global corporate agenda and toward global agendas concerning the environment, human rights, social justice and climate change (116).” Second, for those expelled, there is a need for them to become organized and to reclaim the sovereignty of a localized economy. Democracy and social justice is best achieved as governments align themselves with the people under their jurisdiction rather than multinational coroporations who exploit both. For Sassen, although expelled from the dominant political economy, the new spaces of hope can be found at the margins. “They are, potentially, the new spaces for making— making local economies, new histories, and new modes of membership (222).” For Sassen, the times we are living in are not just critical, but desperate. The fate of the planet is at stake! The impacts of an unregulated global economy are wreaking havoc on people and the global ecosystem. Though the 99% are expelled from the centers of power and excluded from the systems of gated affluence; they are the many not the few. In this respect, “the people” must now assert their voices and their power locally in order to develop more sustainable systems of inclusion and shared prosperity within the limits and diminished carrying capacity of the earth for all living creatures. The new reality is that not only might we perish together if we do not intervene, but we can only survive the expulsions we face if we are collectively organized as an earth community by challenging the power and institutions that dominate the global economy.
Dr. Saskia Sassen will be a plenary speaker at the 2014 Congress on Urban Ministry: Together Building a Just Economy.
The conference will take place June 23-26 at DePaul University in Chicago, IL.
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