expulsions: brutality and complexity in the global …saskiasassen.com/pdfs/asa expul trajectories...

Trajectories Expulsions

Spring 2016 · Vol 27 · No 3

Book Symposium

Expulsions: Brutality andComplexity in the Global EconomyHarvard University Press

Saskia Sassen

Editor's Note: The following text is based on

an author-meets-critics session that was

organized and chaired by Patricia

Ferndandez-Kelly for the Annual Meeting of

the American Sociological Association in

August, 2015. My thanks go out to Alejandro

Portes, Michaeline Crichlow, Joseph Blasi

and Saskia Sassen for agreeing to contribute

their comments to the newsletter. I would also

like to thank Patricia Fernandez-Kelly for all

her help in making this feature possible.

Review of Saskia Sassen’sExpulsions

Alejandro PortesPrinceton University & University of Miami

Sassen’s Expulsions is a great lament aboutwhat happened to the old liberal welfare projectof progressive inclusion and protection ofpeople in a world of de-regulations,globalizations, and the absolute domination offinancial capital.

Expulsions occur when former governmentemployees lose their jobs without anyalternatives and are forced into poverty; whenfactory workers are laid off from plants movingabroad and compelled to accept casual, low-paid work in the informal economy; or whenyoung people in American cities are arrestedand incarcerated even for minor offenses and

are subsequently removed from society andfrom the labor force. The main insight of thebook is that these and other forms of expulsionare systemic and have to do with the reversal ofthe Keynesian project of social and economicinclusions and the rise of corporate andfinancial profitability to the status ofcategorical imperative.

To save the multinational banks, millions areevicted from their homes and governmentsbecome bankrupt; no Work ProgressAdministration to alleviate the plight of thosemade redundant through no fault of their own.The financiers who have caused so much harmmostly escape consequences of their actions,and return with renewed vigor to the samedestructive practices. And all of this with theblessing of world leaders who sanctimoniouslyproclaim, following Thatcher and Reagan, that“there is no alternative”.

The global rise of inequality is well known bynow and one can say that there is even now aflourishing industry based on exposing thegrowth of this or that form of inequality. Whatmakes Sassen’s book valuable is thepainstaking documentation of a systemic shiftencompassing multiple fields and a consistentfocus on the precise moment whenunsuspecting people suddenly find themselvesthrown out – deprived not only of jobs andhomes, but also of their dignity. The bookoverlaps at many points with Piketty’s analysis



of capitalism and inequality in the twenty-firstcentury, but it is more sociological in theanalysis of the internal dynamics of the financeindustry and the processes of globalization thathave made the present situation possible.

Inside Sassen’s book, one finds real nuggets,such as the commodification of prisoners in theUnited States whose work is appropriatedthrough various subcontracting mechanisms bywell-known multinational corporations andwhose very bodies become valuable andtradeable for the benefit of the fast-growingprivate corrections system. We are informed,for example, that sheriff departments inLouisiana trade prisoners for the sake ofkeeping jail beds full and per capita paymentsby the Federal government coming. The sectionon foreclosures in chapter 1 is particularlypowerful and should be read in conjunctionwith the creation of the financial instruments inchapter 3 that made that social catastrophepossible.

Chapter 3 makes clear that it was not theinterest paid by families on mortgages that thefinancial industry was after, but rather theproliferation of mortgage contracts that couldthen be spliced, packaged, and sold to eagerinvestors. To secure those contracts, mortgagecompanies dispensed with down payments andcredit reports. In a country like Spain, bankseven gave people 10 and 20 percent over thevalue of their home in order to get theirsignatures on paper, setting the stage for whatwas to come. The financial crisis was triggeredless by massive defaults on mortgages than bygeneralized uncertainty in the financial worldabout the actual value of those packagedderivatives. This social uncertainty was whatmade them “toxic.”

I have only a few comments for expansion andstrengthening of future work. First, there is aneed for greater attention to the entire classstructure. Most of the contemporary literature

on inequality tends to focus on what happens atthe “heights” – the top 1 or 2 percent of thepopulation – and the “depths” – the bottom 10or 20 percent. This leaves out the majority ofthe population who are not engaged andprofiting from financial engineering, but who

are also not at the “systemic edge.” One mayargue that these middle four-fifths or so of thepopulation represents the core source ofeconomic and political continuity and stability,and the reason why the entire system does notcome crashing down.

In past work, I have tried to develop maps ofboth the American and Latin American classstructures, provide definitional criteria formembership in each class as well as numericalestimates. My map of the American classstructure criticizes previous Marxist analysis ofthe same topic for stopping with the proletariatas the bottom of the class structure, neglectingthe rapidly growing classes of petty informalentrepreneurs and redundant workers. Thelatter, in particular, consists of workers pushedout of employment by dint of dated skills, pastunion militance, or economic downturns andunable to get a foothold back into the system.This is precisely the social class on whichExpulsions focuses attention and correctly so. Itis important, however, to consider theeconomic situation and political outlook of theclasses above it and how they interact, both

What makes Sassen’s bookvaluable is the painstakingdocumentation of a systemicshift encompassing multiplefields and a consistent focus onthe precise moment whenunsuspecting people suddenlyfind themselves thrown out –deprived not only of jobs andhomes, but also of their dignity.



among themselves and with the top 1 or 2percent. Otherwise, we lose sight of what ishappening in reality, because the massivemiddle classes and their actions hold the keyfor long-term systemic continuity.

A second observation for future work is drivenby current events. It concerns precisely thepolitical behavior of that top 1 percent and itsramifications on American democracy. Therecent spectacle of the Koch brothersconvening a conclave of billionaires to decidewhat Republican presidential candidate to back,i.e. to buy, is a worrisome development. Itattests both to the hubris of the dominant class,empowered by free markets and the weaknessof government, and the looming transformationof the American political system into whatPresident Carter also recently labeled an“oligarchy”. A government by and for the top 2percent (at most) is what we may beconfronting as a counterpart of the growth ofthe redundant classes. This political corollary tothe analysis of the modern capitalist system inExpulsions certainly deserves attention in thefuture.

A final consideration is what can be done aboutall of this. In a sense, Margaret Thatcher wasright and “there is no alternative.” It would beuseless and counterproductive to try to set theclock back to the time of national hegemony,strong unions, and generous national welfareregimes. Capitalist globalization is a fait

accompli and is here to stay. However, as KarlPolanyi knew, the “disembedding” of marketsfrom society and the catastrophic consequencesthat it brings inevitably triggers new forms ofpopular mobilization and state activism seekingto bring these forces under new forms ofcontrol.

Pierre Bourdeiu was resolutely anti-globalization in his defense of the popularconquests and welfare protection achievedwithin national borders by France and other

developed countries. However, this is not thelikely path for future effective mobilizations.The global power of the billionaires must becounteracted by international alliances ofactivists and workers. The plight of those maderedundant by the expulsions that Saskia sovividly describes has to elicit solidarity andprotest beyond their national borders. Putdifferently, the long-held assumption that“capital is global, labor is local” needs to bereplaced by an increasing global alliance andmobilization by the subordinate classes.

We already have some examples of thesecounter-movements in the environmentalprotection field (Greepeace, etc.); in cross-country mobilizations against labor exploitationby the multinationals in third world countries;in the women’s rights movement; and in theincreasing and well-documented transnationalactivism of immigrant communities and theirhome country counterparts. These and otherincipient forms of “globalization from below”are worthy of attention as potential means ofachieving some form of re-balancing, somemanner of Polanyian “re-embedding” where thehold of runaway markets and the hubris ofseemingly all-powerful billionaires can bebrought under control.

Discussion of Saskia Sassen’sExpulsions

Michaeline CrichlowDuke University

In this short text, Saskia Sassen deploys theconcept of “expulsions” to perform two relatedtasks. The first is to make visible particulardestructive socio-economic phenomena thathave been trending since the 1980s (more orless) in the wake of the untrammeled emphasison growth. The second is to gesture to amethodological imperative - namely, to unthink



or rethink macro-concepts that may be servingto obscure the dynamics of post 1980sdevastations occurring across the globalizedworld economy.

For Sassen, expulsion is a productive conceptfor ferreting out the subterranean “savage

sorting of‘winners and losers, ’” (Sassen 2010)that have occurred in the wake of the increasingontological and spatial complexity of economicglobalization manifest in the expansive andintensive devaluing of human social economiesand ecologies. Thinking of these material andsocio-political processes through the notion of“expulsions” demonstrates the need for, asSassen put its, “empirical research andconceptual recoding,” given that the destructiveforces under analytical scrutiny, “cut across ourconceptual boundaries-the terms and categorieswe use to think about the economy, the polity,the diversity of nation-states.” (Expulsions,21 5) Using a variety of case studies Sassenexplores in detail four manifestations of this“savage sorting”: 1 ) the emergence ofshrinking economic spaces; 2) the land grabsoccurring mainly in Africa; 3) the relentlessfinancialization of just about everything; and 4)the devastation of the biosphere in ways thatmake its capacity for self-healing doubtful. Inall these cases, irrespective of their location andregardless of the state forms - whether socialist,communist, or capitalist - a single patternwoven paradoxically from the complexity ofthe system emerges with the common locusbeing the myriad “expulsions” of people, placesand nature in brutal fashion.

This systemic unmooring which takes offduring the 1980s is coincident with the onset ofthe period commonly deemed neoliberalism,(though never named as such in the text). It isimplicitly contrasted with the earlier Keynesianorder which ushered in the bounteous yield,through the visible hand of the state, of growingeconomies and importantly expanding middle-classes, incorporating perhaps significant

elements of minorities, including women.Keynesianism also created the spaces for theflourishing of working class organizations, jobcreation, redistribution policies and other socialprotections accorded by strong welfare states,at least in the Global North. This era of statemanagement for growth and developmentseems to represent for Sassen a golden age, butshe certainly acknowledges its share ofdisorders such as the marginalization of womenand minorities.

Contrasted with the present moment, givenSassen’s cataloging of the devastations wroughtacross the Global North and South, one wouldbe hard pressed not to read the liberal state assomewhat of an aberration from an idealcounterfactual of alternative world orderings.But I will return to this point later.

Many others have analyzed the growingdisorders of the present mode of globalcapitalist accumulation, with Harvey (2004),for example, pointing to a heightened processof capitalist “accumulation by dispossession,”Piketty (2014) decrying the sharply growingincome inequality, Moore (2010) depicting aworld-ecological crisis, and various otherspositing the end of growth, more or less.Sassen’s text is unique in that it operates at amiddle range engaging in what she refers toelsewhere as a de-theorizing process that seeksto recover processes and projectsovershadowed by the sacred metrics of growth.Drawing diverse cases from across the globe,Sassen maps the precarity of place as expressedin the housing crisis brought on by theproliferation of subprime mortgages, the excessincarceration especially endemic in the US’sprivatized prisons, the growing detrimentaleffects of global warming, and agriculturaldegradation in areas as diverse as China, Kenyaand Bangladesh. In an extensive chapter called“Dead Land, Dead Water,” she discusses theanthropocentric recklessness producing thegrowing swaths of land and water that have



died through the excessive use of agro inputsranging from pesticides and fertilizers tooverdoses of antibiotics - all in the name ofproducing higher yields and profits. Of course,among nature’s revenge are the superweed, thebody’s resistance to antibiotics, and otherexistential backlashes.

Many of these alarming disorders are hiddenwithin such reassuring goals and metrics like“Growth and Development.” One illustration isthe idea of land sales in Africa - otherwiseknown as land grabbing - which appear withinGrowth and Development metric. What is notimmediately graspable under the notion of landsales, and perhaps hinted at in the idea of “landgrabbing,” is the sociocultural and economicimplications of such sales. Such sales,especially those that lead to the cultivation ofindustrial crops like biofuels, invariablyinvolves the eviction of fauna and flora, thedisplacement of villages, of food economies,the ramping up of poverty and hunger, theexpulsion of people who end up in cities – allunder some other obfuscatory category.Elsewhere, Sassen similarly asks whatrelationships a concept like urbanization reallyconveys. Certainly it does not convey theaggressive gentrification that repurposesneighborhoods, the struggles between theincoming (and invariably younger) tenants andthe previous (and usually older) residents, orthreats to the particular traditions of place.Thus, these projects of expulsion positioned at,and constituting, the systemic edge provide forSassen a window onto these predatory

formations.

Those disappeared, or, as she put it, “expulsed”in the Global North or Global South, no longercount, thus leading to constricted formaleconomies. This makes Sassen wonder “if thisbrutal restructuring was undertaken precisely inorder to achieve a smaller but workable[formal] economic space that would showgrowth in GDP according to traditional metrics-

even if it necessitates the expulsion from theeconomy, and its measures, of significantshares of the workforce and the small businesssector” (Expulsions, 43).

In this timely work, what are the alternativeoptions that Sassen gestures toward? Hervaluation of the regulatory dimensions of theliberal welfare state leads her to argue thatdespite its shortcomings, it nonetheless is amuch needed enabler of spaces for themarginalized to struggle for rights. Itfurthermore presided over an accumulationprocess that was rooted in capitalist formationsbased on real and not fictitious (production of)goods and services, and performed keyregulatory functions reining in the market. Inthis way, Sassen seems to implicitly suggestfixes by way of a return to the liberal welfarestate – a state which balanced, more or less, itspivotal components i.e. , the market and civilsociety, in ways which Somers (2008) similarlydeems necessary for a rebirth of the social.

But given Sassen’s own methodology adoptedin Territory Authority and Rights (2008,henceforth TAR), it would be safe to assumethat the seeds for accumulation by savagesorting, of the types that she exposes werealready sown within the welfare state, despiteits regulatory alertness. For using the logic ofTAR’s argument (concerned with how historicalassemblages of territory, authority and rightshave been reworked and remade and howcomplex systems change) one could well arguethat the seed for contemporary expulsions wasone of those dis-ordering continuities from the18th and 19th centuries that remained lodgedwithin the governing structures even of theredistributive state.

Can it not be said then that the root of today’ssavage sorting, lay in the fact that the politicaland economic rationalities of the 20th centuryenshrined a belief in an unbounded expansivecapitalist production? Is the complexity that

7



Sassen analyzes by the numbers not simply theevolved dynamic of high accumulation growthmodels sustained by optimistic Keynesianplanners and by discourses about the benefits ofa model of development rooted in crude butseductive promises of the needful destructivetransitions from tradition to modernity, andabout the benefits of particular forms ofrationally-calculative hegemony for progress?In other words, while Keynesian policiesarticulated the need for checks and balancesagainst the very possibility of the recklessunleashing of autonomous market logics, could

it not be said that given the geopoliticalcommitment to a modern market economy,regulatory devices would be too re-active,always too late, to forestall the growth of thesebrutal complexities? What then is necessary tothwart the relentless charge of this systemicedge? What really sustains the presence ofsystemic edges? And, finally, can well-intentioned institutional fixes carried out bysay, a post-welfarist state, remedy the situation-that ultimately returns a social that has beensavaged since the post-1 980s at least?

To begin to address the sort of queries that areprovoked by the rich detail of layers of crisesconfronting us in the global capitalist order, oneneeds to explicitly ask what kind of politics issustained by institutions and elites in creatingthis systemic edge. Is there another theoretical

twist to the story that might be told here, asSassen suggests, that takes us beyond what wehave grasped in the discourses alreadyavailable on crises and modern social spaces?Marxists, for example, point to the intrinsicnature of capitalism aided and abetted by statesthat have always been sympathetic to the needsof capital. For them, exclusions are intrinsic tothe system that thrives on class-basedexploitation of one sort or another. But what ofthe modes of violence held to be present inprimitive accumulation? Could that also be abasis for contemporary forms of predatoryformations - veritable carry-overs from itsearlier iteration in the 19th century? I refer hereto forms of coloniality as “states of exception”that apparently never died out with the demiseof formal projects of colonialism. CertainlyEscobar’s path breaking text, Encountering

Development (2011 ) chronicles the projects anddiscourses through which the then “ThirdWorld” were included further within thecapitalist world economy. Today, thedevastating outcome has not only been thedestruction of their food self-sufficiency(Africa was self sufficient up until the 1960s),but also, as Sassen’s statistics make palpablyclear, their disproportionate membership in thathighly-prized group of HIPCS, (HighlyIndebted Poor Countries) now paying 20 to25% of their export earnings toward debtservice.

No doubt the critical purchase of Expulsions isits revelations of development’s unsavoryunderbellies - the “systemic edge” that Sassendiscloses. But this edge is an effect of thrivingpredatory tendencies, something that seemsbuilt into the system and perhaps is the fuel thatsustains it. The edge, then, is structural. Thediverse sets of elites - whether in government,the financial sector, or in computer softwareoperations - are caught up wittingly orunwittingly in producing processes thatengender these catastrophes. But is there asingle or plural logic that explains these

No doubt the critical purchase ofExpulsions is its revelations ofdevelopment’s unsavoryunderbellies - the “systemicedge” that Sassen discloses. Butthis edge is an effect of thrivingpredatory tendencies,something that seems built intothe system and perhaps is thefuel that sustains it.



developments, this systemic edge? Is the onsetof complexity at fault? Other analysts speak tothe onset of the extremes of neoliberalism, andcertainly the text gestures to this given itstiming and its dating of the onset of theseexpulsive formations. Yet nowhere in the text isthis concept named. Neoliberalism is notmentioned. Therefore, in this theoreticalsilence, one is either led to consider afresh or toseek to disclose what is the subterranean logicpropelling us towards these specters of death,and destruction. Why, for example, is systemiccomplexity retrospectively so malignant? Andhow can we escape this not-so-opaque journeyto the systemic edge, given our lived history ofthe present? Is this contingent and non-necessary historical trajectory partly a functionof the logic of a particular modernphilosophical underpinning that makesexpulsion the silent metric of our modernpower and rational faith? For example, the ideaof Homo Sacer, the eponymous title ofAgamben’s book (2003), argues that modernsovereignty is undergirded by the production ofbare life. Is there a link here, then, between“unrestrained profit maximization,” in theeconomic sphere and the production ofracialized spaces?1 Of course, suchracialization is tied to bodies as well as spaces,but not always the same visual cultures marksuch bodies as Sassen’s work palpablydemonstrates in a wide array of situations,geographies and people. For example, we maythink human trafficking, though now referred toas the new slavery, casts a wide net over allkinds of bodies in a way that differssignificantly from the chattel slavery of say the18th and 19th centuries or earlier. Differencesinclude the easy disposability and cheapness ofbodies and the responsibility of the abused fortheir own reproduction (not to mention theenormity of the profiteering).2

The “Development Project,” though alsounnamed in the text, seems to be anotherunderlying theme here, with an implicit thesis

that development a la growth seems to have runits course. Accumulation by savage sorting oraccumulation by dispossession is its systemicedge. The systemic edge is thus the price forpursuing infinite growth for a finite planet.Given this, and the brutish natural selectivelogic attending such metrics as GDP, the textimplicitly suggests that one should also bemoving away from these ways of assessing ourprogress, as Philipsen argues in his recent book,The Little Big Number (2015). In short, ahidden message in Sassen’s text seems to bethat we perhaps need to think more in terms ofthe principles underpinning the call for a post-development world even though governmentsand industry continue to channel those 20thcentury solutions toward re/solving currentplanetary catastrophes.

In Expulsions, what Sassen seems to gesture tois the idea that the complexity of primarily theeconomic system emerges out of a simplisticbelief in unlimited growth. There is anineluctable certainty that such a modelassumes. It is a model that has been in manyways imposed on the Global South by state-sanctioned agencies like the IMF and the WorldBank and also routed through parastatal andnon-governmental organizations (NGOs) thelatter of which have (and I will be generoushere) un/wittingly taken on the language ofneoliberalism - suggesting that neoliberalreason has taken over all our sensibilities morethan less. For example, the new organizationsof banana farmers (most owning less than 5acres of land) that have emerged in theWindward Islands to fill the void of retreatingstates and given the WTO mantra of “freetrade,” also speak the language of neoliberalismand refer rhetorically to the irrelevance of states(Crichlow, 2003).

Therefore if complexity is built on thesesimplistic singular models of certainty then itseems that our salvation lies in plural models ofuncertainty. What I am gesturing to here, to use



Sassen’s own words, is incompleteness. Mightwe instead find solutions in uncertainty-beingcontent with incompleteness? Might weconsider then incompleteness as a productivetension, that would lead to what HenriettaMoore refers to as more “collaborativeexperimentation,” more incomplete learning,more social political and economicexperimentation in order to build prosperity ona broader understanding of human nature?3 InSassen’s words in TAR, and elsewhere, we needto break the path dependency and jump tracks

on this model of growth, given “the fierceurgency of now”!4 Sassen has produced awonderful and concise book that brilliantlyoutlines, to recontextualize and readapt the Irishpoet William Yeats, the shape of the roughbeast, “its hour come round at last, slouchestowards everywhere, already born.” Things fallapart.5

Endnotes

1 . “Racialized” here is used in a broader sense than isgenerally understood in the U.S., and refers to a moregeneric production of a politics of the abject, though itencompasses U.S.-recognized divides.

2. See, for example, the comparisons between chattelslavery and “modern day slavery” made by Barnes(2004).

3 . Henrietta Moore, in the program “The End ofDevelopment,” argues emphatically for a pluralistapproach to development, whereby there are differentkinds of approaches to building human capabilities. Sheurges us to look at the various feasible experiments nowtaking place in the Global South. For example, theexperiments in agro-ecology involving some 500 millionpeople in those geographies. Listen here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02l0c1 r

4. This phrase, “a fierce urgency of now,” is appropriatedfrom Reverend Martin Luther King’s sermon, “ BeyondVietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” See:http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html

5. This is a slight adaptation of William Butler Yeats,“The Second Coming."

References

Agamben, Georgio. 2003. Homo Sacer: SovereignPower and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress.

Barnes, Kevin. 2004. Disposable People: New Slavery inthe Global Economy. California: University of CaliforniaPress.

Crichlow, Michaeline. 2003. “Neoliberalism, States, andBananas in the Windward Islands,” Latin AmericanPerspectives, 30, 3 : 37-57.

Escobar, Arturo. 2011 . Encountering Development: TheMaking and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton:Princeton University Press.

Harvey, David. 2004. The New Imperialism. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Moore, Jason W. 2010. "Cheap Food & Bad Money:Food, Frontiers, and Financialization in the Rise andDemise of Neoliberalism". Review (Fernand BraudelCenter) . 33 (2/3): 225-261 .

Piketty, Thomas, and Arthur Goldhammer (translator).2014. Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge,MA: The Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press.

Philipsen, Dirk. 2015. The Little BIG number. Princeton:Princeton University Press.

Sassen, Saskia. 2008. Territory, Authority, Rights: FromMedieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.

—. 2010. “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers:Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation,”Globalizations, 7, 1 -2: 23-50.

Somers, Margaret. 2008. Genealogies of Citizenship:Markets, Statelessness and the Right to have Rights.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Comments on Expulsions

Joseph BlasiRutgers University

Saskia Sassen’s book, Expulsions: Brutality andComplexity in the Global Economy, examinesfour areas of savage sorting that results in massexpulsions of persons from a sustainablesociety. The first area is shrinking economieswhere the losers are the unemployed, especiallywomen and minorities, who are sidelined byboth structural adjustment programs pushed byinternational economic institutions andfacilitated by the monopolization of complexknowledge and technologies by those whoconcentrate their ownership and control at the



top. The second area is the world market forland where the losers are the farmers, cohesivevillages, native peoples, and factories withroots in communities where free tradeagreements and open borders and globalizedland markets result in people being expelledfrom their own land and places of work. Thethird area is financialization where newtechnologies resulted in a financial collapse thatmade homeowners the losers by a groupmanipulating complex knowledge with the newtechnology of financialization. The fourth areais environmental destruction where theenvironment makes all citizens the losers as aresult of violent massive new miningtechnologies.

Sassen’s principal contribution is to assembleher erudite combination of powerfulargumentation and solid empirical evidence topersuade the reader that her use of such harshterms as “expulsion” (to express being thrownout forcefully), “losers” (to express the notionthat some other group is winning in a zero-sumsituation), and “brutality” (to express aneveryday savage and cruel attitude towardsmillions of persons), are all, well, entirelyaccurate. A lot of empirical research ismobilized in this persuasion. Is Sassenexaggerating and selecting these terms forshock value or it this a substantially newinsight? As a group, I think that humans like togild the lily and see the glass half full andaccept the social construction of reality as okrather than contemplate the sharp edge ofdisaster. Sassen asks: What if the evidencesimply does not justify an antiseptic way oflooking at the social violence in our world?She does this by looking at the “systemic edge”where the system is coming apart for largegroups of people. She deconstructs the tamelanguage of everyday acceptance of brutalitywith facts showing that no exaggeration istaking place. Based on the evidence,Expulsions is not an exaggeration but a creativeand new analysis to challenge us to heavily

discount our own socialization to buy into thecurrent social construction of reality. I wasreminded of a front page article in the Amherst,Massachusetts newspaper on a recent visit thatsaid, “Amherst to plug homeless meal gap.”No, Sassen will simply not allow suchdishonesty and escape from the brutal namingof social violence for what it really is.

Her contribution goes far beyond fitting bluntterms to systematic empirical evidence. Shehas elucidated some distinctively new socialprocesses in our post-modern world. One of her

ideas is that, while inclusion of more and morecitizens in the economy used to be profitableand build economic growth, now the expulsion

of large numbers of persons from the economycreates more economic growth for those whoown the economy. The notion that economicgrowth actually benefits from expulsions is agame-changing insight and also verydepressing. Another idea is that brilliantpeople, who we would love to have at ourdinner parties and marry our sons anddaughters, are the creators of a new science thatuses financial technology, computer

Sassen’s principal contributionis to assemble her eruditecombination of powerfulargumentation and solidempirical evidence to persuadethe reader that her use of suchharsh terms as “expulsion” (toexpress being thrown outforcefully), “losers” (to expressthe notion that some othergroup is winning in a zero-sumsituation), and “brutality” (toexpress an everyday savage andcruel attitude towards millionsof persons), are all, well,entirely accurate.



technology, mining technology, and what I willlabel “neo-liberal economic technology”(which manipulates the economy), in order toplan and execute the actions that make theseexpulsions happen and expand exponentially.The notion that brilliance and knowledge - notignorance and lack of science - is the newsource of the Frankenstein of neo-liberalism isvery disheartening, although carefully exposedin this book. The intellectual and scientificviolence underlying the technologies and thereasoning behind these expulsions has a lot ofwhat some in universities and many in theworld tell students and children to be: discoverthe new edge, be interdisciplinary, be empirical,be daring, be unique, “have an impact on yourfield.” But it surely lacks the norm of humandignity. I emphasize this to also underline thatit is easy - as Sassen sometimes does - to say“the 1%” is behind the problems that sheelucidates, but it is really the 20% and the 20%is an uncomfortably broader group. Theproblem of Sassen’s book is how to reclaim thehuman dignity to drive the project of society inthe future with new social and economic andpolitical structures to serve as home bases forindividuals whose efforts are compromised bythe current institutions.

Sassen puts a heavy finger on the people behindthe process and calls them “predatory elites”who combine in “predatory formations.” Forexample, in the area of finance it would includetech experts and financial engineers, and,unfortunately for us academics, many of ourcolleagues in economics and finance andcomputer science departments! It is this “armyof the smart” arraigned against the workingclass and the middle class that Sassen calls a“phalanx,” that are people at our cocktailparties, again, people we want our sons anddaughters to be or to marry, and yet, it has anoverall predatory effect. The subtext of thisbook is how does rational science and corporatemanagement now add up to the new brutalitywhen these people think they are all about

economic progress? The overall result of thisprocess, according to Sassen, is a “capacity toconcentrate wealth.” As a globalist, shefocuses on intra-country and inter-countryinequality in some enlightening discussions. Ithink that the moralizing about theseindividuals and “elites” and “formations” begsthe point of whether there are institutions tocontain their activity that would be morebeneficial for society.

Sassen’s melding of these diverse patterns ofpower, status and rewards/resources is a newsociology for our connected, knowledge-gluttedworld where intellectuals think they are on theside of the angels but somehow get caught upin the predatory phalanx without even knowingit. Her synthesis is, in my view, unique,creative, novel, and, as I said earlier, smashingof the linguistic conventions that would allowus typically to talk about all of this in acomfortable way. Realizing her insights is veryupsetting, it is very hard to read this book, andone regularly wants to escape to the claim ofexaggeration to not have to deal with all of herwell-arranged data. The book is worth thepatience.

An abiding strength of Sassen’s book is howshe weaves together her social analysis of theeconomy from various corners of society tomake her point. Some observers might look atthis as observations about disconnectedelements, but that is far from the case. Sassenpersuaded me that these various social spheresare all a homogeneous part of her story: the“enclosure” happening by financial firms inhow they have designed mortgage-backedsecurities and control the design of the taxsystem to their benefit, the stunning socialpolicy consensus that less rather than moresocial benefits are needed, the relatedworldwide focus on contracting governmentexpenditures (“an economic version of ethniccleansing”), the fact that the so-calledunemployment rate is a lie and excludes people



pushed out of the workforce, and the growingprison population. Nevertheless, while thedescription and analysis is helpful, identifyingclear causality across all of these spheres,remains a limitation of the work. What Sassenobserves is not simply a function of the“complex technologies” and “predatoryformations” that she describes in each of thefour areas of her analysis. These four areas arewell described but the description does notconstitute a persuasive causal analysis of whatunderlies them. A causal analysis identifieswhere pressure must be applied to stop the

causation and change the dynamic underdiscussion. To illustrate, the solution is not todeemphasize scientific and managerial elites orto stop developing technology. This is wherethe next book and the future stage of Sassen’swork begins. If she brings the same carefulanalysis to that, her next work will help mapout future social institutions.

Every grand project like this requires criticismso there are some issues that I would like toraise. Sassen, for all of her attack on neo-liberal economics, seems to not get beyond oneof its main strictures, namely, the focus on

wages and wage growth and wage inequality asthe central story of this economic inequality.The work of Thomas Piketty (2014) underlinesthat, while we know that real wages have beengenerally flat adjusted for inflation since 1989and low relative to economic productivity, thatthe real story of inequality is the stunningincrease in the concentration of both capitalownership and capital income. Both Sassenand Piketty emphasize the outsize share of bothin the hands of the top 1%. However, it isreally the top 5%, 10%, and 20% that is thegiant squid-like “predatory formation” thatSassen assails, not just the 1%. One empiricalfact will make this crystal clear: according tothe Urban Institute and the BrookingsInstitution Tax Policy Center, 86% of all capitalgains and capital income such as dividends andinterest on equities and bonds is in the hands ofthe top 86% of individuals in the United States.Yes, it is true that the top 1% holds 56.8%within this 86% and that the top 0.1% holds38.1% within this “capital formation,” butFigure 1 (located on next page) shows that thetrue divide happens where the middle classstarts with the fourth quintile of the U.S.population that has only 6.6% of capitalincome. I am sorry to say that many of ussocial scientists writing about the 1% areactually solidly in this top 20% “predatoryformation” and benefiting from it nicely, as arethe creators of the science and technologywhom Sassen assails. Bluntly, it is theconcentration of both capital ownership (amplycovered by Piketty) and capital income (shownin Figure 1 , next page) - not just wage income -that is behind this new wealth dynamic.1 Thegroup in control is really the upper middleclass, not just the 1%. This high concentrationof capital ownership and capital income needsto be addressed for the causation to be reversed.It leads to a domination of the political systemby elites and corporations and hollowing out ofthe middle class (Madland, 2015).

One needs to ask why capitalism has led to

...while the description andanalysis is helpful, identifyingclear causality across all ofthese spheres, remains alimitation of the work. WhatSassen observes is not simply afunction of the “complextechnologies” and “predatoryformations” that she describesin each of the four areas of heranalysis. These four areas arewell described but thedescription does not constitutea persuasive causal analysis ofwhat underlies them.



such high levels of concentration. Whileshrinking economies, the world market forland, financialization, and environmentaldestruction all play a role in this concentration,underlying the concentration is that thetechnologies to which Sassen alludes are moreproductive than human labor, they are replacinghuman labor, their owners are compensatedmore than the human labor involved with them,and these technologies are owned and largelycontrolled by the same 1%, 5%, 10%, and 20%.Sassen’s modern version of Charles Dickens’sdank factories are hyper-productive, tightly-owned mining operations whose dirtiness hassimilar patterns of capital ownership and capitalincome concentration as the “clean” hummingcomputers of financialized Wall Street. Theproblem is that workers and citizens do not own

enough capital and receive enough capitalincome from these operations. Concentratedcapital runs the “shrinking economy” whichSassen describes; this capital is driving bothwages and benefits down worldwide. Theevidence strongly suggests that technologicalunemployment and underemployment isbecoming a reality as part-time Uber drivers inthe U.S. replace full-time unionized workerswith the once-vaunted solid pay packages ofever increasing wages and expandingretirement and healthcare plans of much of thepost-WWII period. Underneath all of this isthat computers and technology and robots arebecoming more common, more productive,more controlled by an elite, less related tomiddle class wealth, and less a developmentmachine of middle class jobs (Frey and

Figure 1: Distribution of capital income by income percentile, 2011

Note: Figures are for calendar year 2011 , current law. Capital income includes taxable and non-taxable interestincome, income from dividends, realized capital gains or losses, and imputed corporate tax liability. The cashincome percentile classes used are based on the income distribution of the entire population and contain an equalnumber of people, not tax units.

Source: Urban Institute - Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center



Osborne, 2013; Ford, 2015). It is important toexplore who will own the computer sciencealgorithms and robots of the future.

I will say more on how this affects Sassen’sanalysis of the prospects for reform below. Butbefore I do so, I would like to quibble for amoment with Sassen’s discussion of mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and credit defaultswaps (CRSs). I have praise and criticism. Asa sociologist of finance, I admire the accurate,fine-grained, well-informed, grounded-in-economic-research discussion Sassen lays out.It is superbly done. The financial collapse didin fact come down as she recounts it, but thereis a certain Luddite-ism in her portrayal of allsecurtitization as bad, as the following quoteillustrates:

We all need debt, whether we are afirm, a household, or a country. Butdo we need this level of debt? Moreimportant do we need such complexinstruments to finance basic needsfor firms and banking loans? (p 146)

Sassen has not proven that well-regulatedMBSs and CRSs could not have general benefitto society. The fact that Wall Street currentlycontrols elements of the political system thatregulates them does not establish that areasonable version of regulation cannot exist.The question is whether financialization can beharnessed rather than abolished.

Limitations of space restrain me from goinginto more detail about Sassen’s discussion ofthe shrinking economies, the world market forland, financialization, and environmentaldestruction other than to say that readingSassen’s detailed account is well worth thepleasurable effort. Sassen distinguishes herselfwith a vast interdisciplinary command ofconcepts, a truly admirable knowledge of manyfar-flung facts, and an exquisite sociologist’s artfor naming the essence of how all of this addsup to a particular distribution of the power,

prestige, and rewards pie. I would like to focuson the needed next step in her analysis. First, itwould make sense to draw out the linkagesbetween the four areas under discussion. Weare persuaded that land acquisitions driveenvironmental destruction, but doesfinancialization play a role in this process?Sassen’s prescription is often “do the opposite.”This approach works for raw material marketswhere she solidly makes the case that manypractices must be ended. But it is not clear howmany 1950s-type middle class jobs can becreated that way, nor is it clear that expandingthe welfare state or, as noted above, pursuingthe opposite of financialization (such asoutlawing MBSs and CRSs), would be the rightprescriptions for reform.

Admittedly, Expulsions focuses on the tragicoutcomes of what Sassen calls “the systemicedge,” not the policy reforms. That is forSassen’s next set of lectures and her next book.For now, I would like to suggest somedirections for further thinking about reform.Let’s take MBSs as an example. Before thefinancial collapse, mortgage lenders werepredatory of low income persons, they brokethe law with bad record-keeping and illegalapprovals of bad mortgages, they compensatedofficers for loan volume vs loan quality, theyused this volume to drive up stock prices soexecutive compensation could balloon based ongrants of equity and profit sharing to the 1% ofAmerica’s corporate elite, and they persuadedso-called independent third parties to rate theirMBSs with excellent bond ratings. This sectoris ripe for corporate governance reform morethan abolishment. Whether the current elitesare capable of having truly independent boardof director elections and a vastly differentcorporate governance system is a separatequestion. But Sassen can look to countries inthe European Union that do corporategovernance differently and even make room forworkers on corporate boards and workscouncils.



Sassen has an underlying perspective thateverything that goes wrong deserves to becalled “capitalism.” I would propose that whatshe is really observing is feudalism; namely, aneconomic system where status, notperformance, determines power and rewards.Capitalism was supposed to be performance-based, replacing an entrenched feudal elite. Itwas supposed to expand economies, broadenreal estate and property ownership, and makeraw materials and finance drive progress.Sassen labels the brutalities but does not callout many so-called “capitalists” who areactually feudal lords.

As part of her reform discussion, Sassen is nowwell-positioned to invent some new socialmeasurement statistics. For example, one canimagine a World Expulsion Index, a MiddleClass Index measuring its growth or decline,and many others suggested by her analysis.The test of an elegant social analysis of a socialphenomenon is often the ability to measure it,track it, and thereby, study it more carefullyinto the future. Moreover, Sassen’s initial ideason reform are worthwhile but need to be vastlyexpanded. Yes, national laws are insufficient toregulate multinational corporations, and yes, aglobal coordinating body of national Securitiesand Exchange Commissions is probablynecessary, but it is not clear that such reformswill allow corporations to broaden wageincome and wealth in the material economy forthe masses. Sassen can now turn to articulatinga UN corporate reform agenda. This is not tobe sneezed at. Look at what Eleanor Rooseveltaccomplished with the UN Declaration onHuman Rights.

Sassen’s reforms need to confront the politicalsociology underlying her analysis. She pointsto an “enfeeblement of local democracies” anda shift away from social and economicinclusion. What reforms are needed to channelthe power of democratic majorities? On onehand, she seems to be pointing to a certain

determinism, namely, that political powersimply is incapable of overcoming globalizedcorporate power. On the other hand, if shefinds a way to broaden capital ownership in the

economy, this new ownership force couldperhaps tame politics and corporate powermore effectively. In the future, she will need tofigure this out in a lot more detail.

As a result, a large challenge for Sassen is toarticulate what the next economic systemshould look like. If it is not failed communismand unbridled capitalism (I would say, it is now,essentially, reconstituted feudalism incapitalism’s clothing), well then, what will itlook like? Once democratic polities arewilling to regulate corporations more and oncecorporate governance is reformed and once wemeasure the Expulsions really well so we arenot forgetting the brutality under our very feet,how is property ownership and work life to beorganized in post-modern society? I willbriefly suggest two divergent paths that she hasto sort out. (Perhaps the solution is acombination of the two but that requires carefulanalysis.) One is to grow and expand and feedthe state so that it takes care of the middle classand the working class better. One version ofthis is Thomas Piketty’s annual global tax onwealth and annual high tax on incomes tofinance this expansion. Another might be tobroaden capitalism so that greater numbers ofpeople have access to capital ownership and

Sassen has an underlyingperspective that everything thatgoes wrong deserves to becalled “capitalism.” I wouldpropose that what she is reallyobserving is feudalism; namely,an economic system wherestatus, not performance,determines power and rewards.



capital income through broad-based workerownership or citizen ownership of citizen’strusts or wealth funds that pay income toindividual citizens worldwide. For example,might populist sovereign wealth funds be apossibility? Examples are Norway’s oil fundand the Alaska Permanent Fund that invest theircash in a diversified basket of non-carbonassets and use the capital gains and dividends tofund (in Alaska’s case) direct payments ofabout $2,000 a year to every citizen and (inNorway’s case) to stabilize the welfare functionof its state budget.

Part of this future discussion has to do withSassen’s ultimate prescription for howsociology must change to catch up with herinsights. One uncomfortable implication of heranalysis is that sociology itself requires reformand revision. As I have alluded to in thisreview, Sassen confronts us with theuncomfortable and highly inconvenient truththat a lot of science and research andtechnology are being formulated by middleclass elites to create the expulsion society. Shechallenges sociology to develop a more criticalanalysis of this phenomenon. In the recent past,sociology has also become dominated byidentity sociology, identifying, measuring,analyzing and articulating the bad distributionsof power, prestige, and rewards for differentminorities. This is correct, it is right, and it isjust, and it is evidence-based, and theseanalyses suggest what must be changed aboutour society. But what if our research andarguments about who is excluded get wayahead of our ability to recast and recreateinstitutions that are actually capable of broadlydistributing power, prestige, and economicrewards? My point is that modern sociologyand sociologists have not invested enoughstudy, empirical investigation, theory-building,and policy analysis to figure out what kinds ofsocial and economic systems might expandpower, prestige, and rewards for more people,including the aggrieved minorities. By Sassen’s

own analysis, the combination of the “shrinkingeconomy” and the fact that the middle classitself is becoming a giant minority, suggeststhat we have to focus simultaneously onstudying exclusion and expulsion whilestudying more inclusive societies andeconomies that are alternatives to the currentsocial and economic institutions.

This new sociology needs to ask a lot of newquestions that it has not traditionally been goodat asking. Given Sassen’s concern about theevils of finance, the sociology of finance as asub-discipline needs to be meaningfullydeveloped. Here are some of the new questionsthat have to be asked: Is the reform of thecurrent wage system enough to rescue theworking class and the middle class? Will therebe enough jobs and work organizations toemploy everyone with robotization? Whatmight social life look like if many citizens aresupported by either government programs orAlaska-type dividends and economic support isnot work-based? Under such circumstances,can forms of social interaction be developedthat are not based on work and wages but basedon pro-social behavior where people with a lotof “free time” help the dispossessed, work withthe elderly, pay attention to children andadolescents, etc.? In the end, Sassen’s majorcontribution is to shake up sociology itself sothat the discipline can conduct a more accurateand meaningful measurement of society andanalysis of society and evaluation of policyalternatives for the reform of society.

Endnotes

1 . For detailed data on this, see also, Mischel, Bivens,and Gould (2012) and related updates:http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/.

References

Frey, Carl Benedikt and Michael A. Osborne. 2013. TheFuture of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs ToComputerization? Oxford, England: Oxford University’sMartin School, September 17.

Ford, Martin. 2015. Rise of the Robots: Technology andthe Threat ofa Jobless Future. New York: Basic Books.



Madland, David. 2015. Hollowed Out: Why the EconomyDoesn’t Work Without a Strong Middle Class? Oakland:University ofCalifornia Press.

Mischel, Lawrence, Josh Bivens, and Elise Gould. 2012.The State of Working America. Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, ILR Press.

Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the 21st Century.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

At the systemic edge: anauthor and her critics

Saskia SassenColumbia University

The point of inquiry in this book is the systemicedge.1 The key dynamic at this edge isexpulsion from the diverse systems in play -economic, social, biospheric. I conceptualizethe systemic edge as the point where acondition takes on a format so extreme that itcannot be easily captured by the standardmeasures of governments and experts andthereby becomes conceptually and analyticallyinvisible, ungraspable. Each major domain hasits own distinctive systemic edge - thus theedge is constituted differently for the economythan it is for the biosphere or the social realm.This edge is foundationally different from thegeographic borders in the interstate system.

The core hypothesis is that we are seeing aproliferation of systemic edges originatingpartly in the decaying western-style politicaleconomy of the 20th century, the escalation ofenvironmental destruction, and the rise ofcomplex forms of knowledge that far too oftenproduce elementary brutalities. It is in thespaces of the expelled where we find thesharper version of what might be happeninginside the system in far milder modes andhence easily overlooked as signals of systemicdecay. In this regard, I posit that a systemicedge points to the existence of conceptuallysubterranean trends because we cannot easily

make them visible through our currentcategories ofmeaning.

In earlier work (Sassen 2007; 2008) Ideveloped methodological and conceptualelements to cut across the weakened categoriesof the inter-state system. There I identified avariety of vectors that allow one to trackprocesses whatever their geographies. Thus theintent here was not to contest the weight ofinterstate borders, but rather to study how agiven process scales globally. What are theinstruments - of law, the economy, the social,the cultural - that have been and continue to bedeveloped to enable the making of cross-borderprocesses?

In Expulsions (2014) I develop an additionalconceptual instrument - the systemic edge. Thisproject does not override or contest the earlier(2007; 2008) work. On the contrary, it oftenbuilds on that earlier work and takes it furtherboth theoretically and empirically by calling forthe need to de-theorize - to go back to “groundlevel” - in order to re-theorize. For instance, Icompare a highly polluting industrial complexin Russia and one in the US, and ask: Whatmatters more to understand the current period?that one has a long communist trajectory andthe other a long capitalist trajectory, or that theyboth have vast capacities to destroy theenvironment?

Inserting the environmental question serves totriangulate what is otherwise a merecomparison. Thereby it helps generate avariable that can go beyond traditionalcomparisons: we leave behind the cold war andorganize our research and interpretation interms of the environmental question. This kindof third dimension takes on specific contentsand meaning depending on the domain orvariables I focus on. For instance, I explore thegrowth and privatizing of prisons in the US andthe growth and privatizing of refugee camps.Both are growing, and both have private sector



interests increasingly at work that can profitfrom prisons and camps. My question becomes:Are these two very diverse formations, withsuch different specifics, actually systemicparallels, each adapted to its particularenvironment? I find in this mode ofinterrogating complex conditions amethodological and interpretive practice thatruns through Expulsions.

In what follows I address the comments andanalyses of Professors Crichlow, Portes, andBlasi. Each wrote extensive and smart piecesthat will stay with me for a long time.

Crichlow gets at the heart of the matter inExpulsions when she writes that I aim at “amethodological imperative - namely, to unthinkor rethink macro-concepts that may be servingto obscure the dynamics of post 1980sdevastations…across the globalized worldeconomy.” Yes, that is very much the case, as itis when she observes that for me “expulsion” isa productive concept” for getting at the“savage sorting of winners and losers” thatmarks the current epoch, one insufficientlycaptured through standard categories such asinequality and poverty.

What I think of as conceptually subterraneanconditions is one way of describing the fact thatthere is a reality that we are not capturing wellthrough our existing master categories -categories rooted in pre-1980s historicalperiods. By using the notion of subterranean Iam signaling that much, though far from all, ofthis conceptual work exists, but is not known oris being contested by those deploying well-established traditional categories. In myreading, Crichlow has developed categories foranalysis in her own work (Crichlow 2009) thatI would describe as fitting this argument.2

These are research practices I see as critical forstudying and theorizing a new period, orepochal transformations, or periods where theold conditions become increasingly unstable. I

found Crichlow’s observation that using thecategory “expulsions” demands empiricalresearch and conceptual recoding very useful:the notion that some categories push us to dothe work of discovering and interpreting whileother categories do not, or even keep us formdoing so.

To illustrate, critical in my work is the need tonegotiate between established paradigmaticcategories and the fact that the empiricalground on which they rest or from which theywere generated is unstable. For instance, well-established categories such as the national state,the middle classes, the economy, have allserved us well for decades, but today they areall unsettled or weakened by the instability ofthe conditions they seek to capture. Mostly,none of the conditions these categories seek tocapture can today be confined to the national,and, even if they can, they have each undergoneradical, even if partial, change.3

In the book I argue that the destructive forces Iseek to analyze, or to subject to criticalscrutiny, cut across our familiar and/ordominant conceptual boundaries. One empiricalway of putting it is that these forces anddynamics cut across the terms and categorieswe use to think about the economy, the polity,nation-states. This brings to the fore thedistinction between conceptual structure andthe conditions at ground level. I appreciateCrichlow recognizing that I am not arguing thatthese destructive forces are all interconnected,and that my point is rather different: theconditions at ground level cut across some ofour well-established conceptual boundaries.That is the issue for me.

Crichlow captures this when she says that thisis “manifest in the expansive and intensivedevaluing of human social economies andecologies.” I detect and/or construct conceptualspaces within which we can aggregate (notconnect) conditions that our categories of



analysis keep separate. Such a conceptualaggregator can be thought of as space thatallows us to cut across traditional conceptualboundaries.4

An example of such a conceptual aggregatorused in the book is that of two highly pollutingindustrial operations: one is the vast nickel-producing complex in Norilsk, Russia, and theother is one of the major gold miningcompanies in Montana. One has a deeplycommunist history and the other a deeplycapitalist history. But today, what matters most,I would argue, is their extraordinary capacity todestroy the environment. We can think of thisas a way of interpellating the older categories(Western democracy and RussianCommunism), making visible their limits intoday’s epoch. This means not taking them asgivens – as we so often do with terms such asthe economy, the state, etc. It takes us beyondour conventions, and becomes a way ofunsettling the ground on which thoseestablished categories sit.

An issue that recurs in both Crichlow andPortes, is my position regarding the Keynesianperiod. Perhaps I should clarify not only myposition regarding this period but also what Isee as the key features marking that period. Ido not see it as a golden age nor is this book alament about its demise. Both Crichlow andPortes list the positives I invoke, but both alsorecognize that I have critical elements. Indeed,Crichlow posits that I allow for the seeds of thepost-keynesian capitalism to be already presentin the Keynesian period given the methodologyI developed in Territory Authority and Rights

(2008). In that book I interrogate diversehistorical periods to understand how complexsystems change. They do not change viaerasure of the preceding period but rather bythe fact that capabilities developed in the earlierperiod (in this case Keynesianism) arerepositioned in different organizing logics.

As Crichlow puts it, “it would be safe toassume that the seeds for accumulation bysavage sorting, of the types that she exposeswere already sown within the welfare state.”Yes, I do find that at its best, that Keynesianperiod brought good things to many, even if notto all. Further, and as noted by Crichlow,particular negative components of the post-1 980s phase of capitalism began to growalready in that earlier period. For instance,inequality was already growing at that time inparticular ways: thus the income of corporateexecutives in major firms was increasinglygrowing distant from that of workers. But,unlike what is the case today, the income ofworkers in those corporations was alsogrowing, only at a slower pace.

The second feature is that the working classesoften were well organized, with unions thatcould confront corporations. Today both ofthese features are either severely weakened orsimply gone. This tells us something about theimportance for a larger society of enablingsome measure of power to contest and makeclaims by the more modest classes. That is thebest that liberal democracy can offer - notequality, but some voice, and having that voicerequires specific material conditions. Withoutthose conditions, there is no voice.

And yes, as Crichlow writes: “In all thesecases, irrespective of their location andregardless of state forms - whether socialist,communist, or capitalist - a single patternwoven paradoxically from the complexity ofthe system emerges with the common locusbeing the myriad ‘expulsions’ of people, placesand nature in brutal fashion.” And oneinstantiation is what I refer to as “economiccleansing” – the elimination from what ismeasured as “the” economy of growing piecesof the economy that are in deep trouble. Theresult is a formal economic space that can showeconomic growth, even as it rests on someserious economic cleansing. Why bother with



this? It creates a safe zone for investors andpoliticians and real estate speculators, and such.

Mine is then not quite a “lament” as Portes putsit, and, I imagine, with a smile. It is a projectthat wants to get at the innards of the Keynesianperiod and the ensuing “post-Keynesian”present. In a way, this comparison serves as anempirical staging for my insistence that weneed some new categories for analysis. Portesputs it well when he describes it as “…thepainstaking documentation of a systemic shiftencompassing multiple fields and a consistentfocus on the precise moment whenunsuspecting people suddenly find themselvesthrown out – deprived not only of jobs andhomes, but also of their dignity.” The project Ipursue in the book includes the work oftracking conceptually subterranean processes inorder to detect the extent to which what hasbeen categorized as very diverse and distinctconditions, often for good reasons, mayactually share key features that take on specialimportance in the current period. For instance,those who are confined to camps for theinternally displaced, on the one hand, and thosein long-term imprisonment, on the other, canalso be seen as different instantiations of asimilar basic fact: they are both expelled.

Portes’s comment leads me to address a second,easily confusing matter: the fact that mytransversal focus on very diverse conditions(that may share some key structural element) isdecidedly not predicated on connections acrossthese differences. In his comment, Portesrecovers the diverse empirical moments in thebook. And in fact, in many ways it is empiricalconditions that enable the larger conceptualproject. They do so, as Portes writes, in twodifferent ways. One was finding empiricalaspects that supported my hunches and thesecond was to mark or feed the specifics of myconceptual work.

I need to emphasize this given the locus of

“connections” as one of the all-dominant termsin discussions about globalization: everythingis connected now. It is not at all. It is ratherabout how we the social scientists have gone

about understanding our world. Much good hasbeen done conceptually and empirically indetecting specificities. This accumulatedknowledge enables me to ask a transversalquestion: not more detail about the differencesor similarities, but rather detecting a systemiccondition that recurs across very diversedomains which we, in turn, have constructed asvery different “bodies” of knowledge. Theoutcome is silos. But what if, to repeat anearlier example, long-term imprisonment, long-term homelessness, and long-term displacementcamps can be conceived of as all sharing a keyfeature no matter their significant differences? Iname that feature expulsion.

At the other extreme we might find a case thatalso shows a shared feature across enormousdifferences: the increasingly international classof top-level economic actors in the globaleconomy - executives, lawyers, managers, andsuch. We can select their diverse nationalitiesand emphasize that type of internationalism, asis typically done. Or we can, as I would argue,find that at that level, regardless of nationaldifferences, they are also, and perhaps aboveall, a global corporate actor. In both examples I

The project I pursue in the bookincludes the work of trackingconceptually subterraneanprocesses in order to detect theextent to which what has beencategorized as very diverse anddistinct conditions, often forgood reasons, may actuallyshare key features that take onspecial importance in thecurrent period.



seek to interpellate the conventional category inorder to get at some basic ground level that isemerging. This is also the analytic operation inthe comparison of Norilsk and the gold minesofMontana.

In short, it is not so much about sharing andconnecting as it is about stepping into a specifickind of operational space - the space of thosewho are expelled, in the first case, and thespace of those who are running much of theglobal economy, in the second case. It is moreabout a spatial formation than the features ofthe individuals: many who could easily havebecome prisoners or displaced wound upavoiding it and many who could have been inthat top global capital space are not. Myemphasis is on the making of such spatialformations and what it tells us about theusefulness of some of our categories foranalysis in the social sciences: these often focuson the attributes of individuals and assume asomewhat fluid open space of upward anddownward mobility. Mostly western economieshave functioned in that mold, albeit withmultiple types of visible and invisible walls.Today we see new kinds of alignments, andthese are not easily captured with our existingcategories of analysis – perhaps especially inthe case of the most extreme alignments,notably the spaces of the expelled and those ofleading economic deciders, investors andinnovators.

Finance is often seen as a major instance ofconnection across sectors, places, and such. Butin my own research I find little interconnectionamong the clients of finance (governments,investors). Finance circulates its instrumentsand advice across multiple borders. But thisdoes not mean it institutes an interconnectedspace for its clients. In fact it does not. It caninstall its preferences in diverse financialcenters but does not necessarily promoteconnections among its clients (whethergovernments or investors). Thus in Expulsions I

conceptualize finance as marked by a logic ofextraction.5

In his conclusion, Portes calls for work that canexpand and strengthen the analysis of ourcurrent period. He notes that a populationsector left out of the many discussions aboutclass is the majority of those “who are notengaged and profiting from financialengineering, but who are also not at the‘systemic edge.’” He further adds that “onemay argue that this middle four-fifths or so ofthe population represents the core source ofeconomic and political continuity and stability,and the reason why the entire system does notcome crashing down.” I agree with this. InExpulsions and elsewhere in my work I haveargued that the top 50 or more of the residentsin a city who are doing very or reasonably wellare a key force in the upgrading of our citiesand the general sense of an expandedprosperous population. They also keep us fromnoticing the other half that is losing ground.Portes is right: the more modest success of thistop 50% is a significant force that keeps oureconomies going and keeps our societies fromcollapsing. Portes has made significantcontributions to the debate about class intoday’s US and Latin America (Portes 2010).And yes, I also agree with his call forexamination of where the political system isgoing, a subject that led me to a 9-year researchproject (Sassen 2008). One central issue forPortes in such a revisiting is that “the long-heldassumption that ‘capital is global, labor is local’needs to be replaced by an increasing globalalliance and mobilization by the subordinateclasses.”

Blasi’s comment is long, picky, brilliant. Itdeserves an extensive set of responses, and theconversation will, thus, have to continuebeyond the space of this text.

Blasi gets at just about all the key efforts in thebook. It would not be possible to comment on



them all here. I will focus on a few. First, aframing proposition, and I quote, “the notionthat brilliance and knowledge not ignoranceand lack of science is the new source of theFrankenstein of neo-liberalism is verydisheartening, although carefully exposed inthis book.” He notes my effort to lay bare “theintellectual and scientific violence underlyingthe technologies and the reasoning behind theseexpulsions.” He criticizes the far too easyinvocation of “the 1%” as the source of manyof the problems I analyze in the book, and thatthe focus should be on the top 20% , which hedescribes as “an uncomfortably broadergroup.”6

I agree with all of this. And let me add that Iactually often speak of the top 20% in mywork. I am far less in the top 1% camp thatremains dominant. Most of the charts in thebook show distributions across different levelsof income. But the most important aspect ofBlasi’s statements is that they are spot on.

This does not preclude disagreement with someof Blasi’s observations. Thus he writes that “forall of her attack on neo-liberal economics,” I donot seem to “get beyond one of its main

strictures, namely, the focus on wages and wagegrowth and wage inequality as the central storyof this economic inequality.” I would disagreewith this. I think of myself as a systems

researcher, probably most evident in Territory,

Authority, Rights (2008). I see wages as makingvisible larger worlds, and want to get at thoselarger worlds. I would agree that concentrationat the top is very important, but my focus is ona larger set of dynamics that go well beyondincome concentration.

For this reason, I give a “yes” to Blasi’s quotehere, but would also add that it is not enough:“The work of Thomas Piketty (2014)underlines that, while we know that real wageshave been generally flat adjusted for inflationsince 1989 and low relative to economicproductivity, that the real story of inequality isthe stunning increase in the concentration ofboth capital ownership and capitalincome…Both Sassen and Piketty emphasizethe outsize share of both in the hands of the top1%.” I agree with this, but I also agree withwhat Blasi says next, and that is in fact closerto how I work the evidence: “However, it isreally the top 5%, 10%, and 20% that is thegiant squid-like ‘predatory formation’ thatSassen assails, not just the 1%.”

Most related to the effort to specify a largersetting than the 1% is my emphasis that theworking category for me is predatoryformations, not simply predatory elites - eventhough the latter are certainly presentworldwide. The argument I make is that even ifwe managed to get rid of the very rich - whichis not a realistic option - we would not succeedin crashing the current system.

These formations include mixes of elites,technical capacities, global networks, laws,accounting rules, government policies. Capitalowners and managers matter, but by themselvesthey could not have achieved the extremeconcentration of wealth and unaccountablepower they now have across the world. Thismix produces massive capture at the top,environmental destruction on a scale we havenot seen before, and the growing expulsion of

I think of myself as a systemsresearcher...I see wages asmaking visible larger worlds,and want to get at those largerworlds. I would agree thatconcentration at the top is veryimportant, but my focus is on alarger set of dynamics that gowell beyond incomeconcentration.



people from survival options even in richcountries. Getting rid of one element in this mixis not enough.

One feature of these predatory formations is aroving capacity for liquefying and capturingwhat there is to be captured, all done with aminimalism of sorts. This is not the oldimperial mode: no interest in controlling vastterritories, just extracting what is needed. Thisefficiency requires complex tools.

A major supplier of such tools is high finance.These are tools that are well beyond violationsof the law (as in the Libor scandals, forinstance). They involve a far more difficult tocombat autonomous effect of interactingelectronic networks. Yes, the decisions aretaken by individuals and the algorithms areconstructed by physicists. But when they aresent into electronically interacting markets,there are unexpected outcomes. To this we needto add to that computer driven high-frequencytrading and the new types of private tradingnetworks referred to as “dark pools” - allsubjects engaged in Expulsions.

Here is an instance of a predatory formation atwork whose details we now know thanks to afreedom of information request by BloombergNews: the secret “necessary” use of US$ 7trillion of taxpayers money to support theglobal financial system in order to rescue theeconomy. While the US legislature was havinga passionate public debate about whether togive US$ 300 billion to the major US banks,the Fed was designing a “facility” to pass onthose US $7 trillion to US and foreign banks.Blasi’s slightly wicked observation seemsespecially relevant here, and I cannot resistquoting it at length:

It is this “army of the smart”arraigned against the working classand the middle class that Sassen callsa “phalanx,”7 that are people at ourcocktail parties, again, people we

want our sons and daughters to be orto marry, and yet, it has an overallpredatory effect. The subtext of thisbook is how does rational scienceand corporate management now addup to the new brutality when thesepeople think they are all abouteconomic progress?

This observation also segues to Blasi’s notionof the need for a new sociology, which I ofcourse endorse: “Sassen’s melding of thesediverse patterns of power, status andrewards/resources is a new sociology for ourconnected, knowledge-glutted world whereintellectuals think they are on the side of theangels but somehow get caught up in thepredatory phalanx without even knowing it.”

Blasi also makes a critical observation, which Ifully agree with, about technologies and robotsthat are not only replacing human labor and“owned and largely controlled by the same 1%,5%, 10%, and 20%” but are also ”becomingmore common, more productive, more

controlled by an elite, less related to middleclass wealth, and less a development machineofmiddle class jobs.” To this I would add that Ialso bring a range of additional variables wemight summarize under the notion of a massiveloss of habitat partly produced by thesedevelopments and the enormous demandsgenerated by the technical/electronic revolutionon land and water - to develop mining to get atthe new components demanded by electronics,

I find that the language of“climate change” is almost toobeautiful. I want language thatcaptures the brutality of thecondition, and what it took toget at this vast level ofdestruction.



water to keep cooling all those machines, andso on. There is a parallel history in the makingthat gradually replaces the older histories ofenvironmental destruction. This became acrucial part of the book. I named the chapter,the most intense one for me, “Dead Land, DeadWater.” I find that the language of “climatechange” is almost too beautiful. I wantlanguage that captures the brutality of thecondition, and what it took to get at this vastlevel of destruction.

Finally, Blasi finds that I do not documentcausality. This is correct. Establishing causalityrequires a specific process and given the mix ofvariables I focus on it would have meant awhole other book. Further, I was not quiteready to sacrifice elements which are almostimpossible to establish causally. My wholeeffort to de-theorize in order to re-theorize in away was in tension with the notion ofsacrificing empirical elements in order todemonstrate causality. I have not yet resolvedthis issue in my own mind. I do find Blasi’sway of describing such work very compelling:“a causal analysis identifies where pressuremust be applied to stop the causation andchange the dynamic under discussion.” On thispoint, I am in basic agreement that the solutionis not to give less weight to “scientific andmanagerial elites or stop developingtechnology.”

I am not against knowledge, though I couldobject to the notion we need knowledge in theshape of elites. But the point about causalitybrings me to what is a key logic in my work:discovering trajectories, whether these aremarked by causality or not. I do not prioritizecausality, partly because the complex and long-term trends I tend to examine are often markedby multiple causalities depending on what pointin time one examines. What runs through thebook Expulsions is a logic of discovery and ofdetecting the limits of some of our keycategories when it comes to explaining somemajor emergent conditions.

Endnotes

1 . I want to start by expressing my deep gratitude toProfessor Fernandez-Kelly for organizing and chairingthis panel and to Matthew Baltz for inviting us to publishthe session in ASA’s Comparative and HistoricalSociology Section newsletter, Trajectories.

2. See also the debate about Expulsions that appeared inCultural Dynamics (2015, Vol. 27,No.1 )

3 . Elsewhere (2008), I have developed an analysis thatposits that change of, and in, complex systems functionsmostly by shifting old, established capabilities to neworganizing logics. Thus in the case of these threecategories, they are still valid but the ground, and hencekey organizing logics with which they function. havechanged. Thus much of the familiar is still there, but itinhabits or is shaped by a different organizing logic.

4. I see the detecting of such a specific transversalconceptual space also in diverse interpretations thatPatricia Fernandez-Kelly makes in her recent book(2015).

5. I also address this point elsewhere (Sassen 2013).

6. This is also a subject that Blasi and his collaborators(2014) develop.

7. I don’t think I do, though I could have. I stick with theconcept of predatory formations, which is harsh enough.

References

Blasi, Joseph R., Richard B.Freeman, and Douglas L.Kruse. 2014. The Citizen’s Share: Reducing Inequality inthe 21st Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Crichlow, Michaeline A. with Patricia Northover. 2009.Globalization and the Postcreole Imagination: Notes onFleeing the Plantation. Durham and London: DukeUniversity Press.

Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia. 2015. The Hero's Fight:African Americans in West Baltimore and the Shadow ofthe State. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Portes, Alejandro. 2010. Economic Sociology: ASystematic Inquiry. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.

Sassen, Saskia. 2007. A Sociology ofGlobalization. NewYork: WWNorton.

—. 2008. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval toGlobal Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.

—. 2013. “Global Finance and its Institutional Spaces”In Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda (eds) The OxfordHandbook of the Sociology of Finance. New York:Oxford University Press.

expulsions: brutality and complexity in the global …saskiasassen.com/pdfs/asa expul trajectories...

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