Karkottamisen logiikka - Brutaali ja monimutkainen maailmantalous

by Saskia Sassen, Mariko Sato (Translator)

Mitä yhteistä on pakolaisilla, finanssikriisissä kotinsa menettäneillä yhdysvaltalaisilla ja kaivosteollisuuden maananastuksilla? Saskia Sassenin mukaan nämä kaikki ovat esimerkkejä karkottamisesta eli prosessista, jossa ihmisiä, yrityksiä ja raaka-aineita työnnetään ulos työstä, kodeista ja maaperästä.

Karkottamiseen johtaa usein globaalin talouden monimutkaisuus - teknologiset innovaatiot, finanssitalouden rahoitusvälineet ja juridiset operaatiot. Niiden tulisi palvella yhteiskunnan kehitystä ja hyvinvointia, mutta aivan liian usein ne aiheuttavat epätasa-arvoa, tuhoavat luontoa sekä häätävät köyhiä mailtaan. Sassen jäsentää ilmiöitä täysin uudella tavalla ja löytää niiden väliltä yllättäviä yhteyksiä.
Saskia Sassen on sosiologian professori Columbian yliopistossa. Hän on tutkinut muun muassa globalisaatiota, maailmantaloutta, siirtolaisuutta ja globaaleja kaupunkeja.

Saskia Sassen on sosiologian professori Columbian yliopistossa. Hän on tutkinut muun muassa globalisaatiota, maailmantaloutta, siirtolaisuutta ja globaaleja kaupunkeja.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Sociology, Politics, Theory, History, Geography

285 pages, Paperback

First published May 5, 2014

About the author

Saskia Sassen (born in The Hague, January 5, 1949) is a Dutch sociologist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She is currently Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Sassen coined the term global city.

After being a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, Sassen held various academic positions both in and outside the USA, such as the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. She is currently Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial Visiting Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Sassen emerged as a prolific author in urban sociology. She studied the impacts of globalisation such as economic restructuring, and how the movements of labour and capital influence urban life. She also studied the influence of communication technology on governance. Sassen observed how nation states begin to lose power to control these developments, and she studied increasing general transnationalism, including transnationalhuman migration. She identified and described the phenomenon of the global city. Her 1991 book bearing this title quickly made her a frequently quoted author on globalisation worldwide. A revised and updated edition of her book was published in 2001. She currently (2006) is pursuing her research and writing on immigration and globalization, with her "denationalization" and "transnationalism" projects (see Bibliography and External Links, below). Sassen's books have been translated into 21 languages.

Reviews

[withdrawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished reading Expulsions by Saskia Sassen over a month ago. I have procrastinated on the review for numerous reasons. Foremost, was my sense that, although the book seemed to be illuminatingly clear to me, I doubted that I had the background to really do it justice. As a result, I took a step back to learn more of Sassen's thought. I started reading her Territory-Authority-Rights (2006). Whereas I had flown through Exclusions, T-A-R is a slog, if for no other reason than every paragraph leads me onto flights of analysis of my own. I'm progressing slowly.

I have little background in reading recent sociological/economic books. My reading in these areas has been at the philosophic level. I have had little patience with the social sciences as a whole. (Sociology 101 - Big Words; Sociology 201 - Obfuscation; Sociology 301 - How to Obfuscate with Numbers)

Expulsions has been as a great eye opener. Sassen is discussing various, I thought unrelated, topics (changes in our world) which have increasingly troubled me over the last 30 years. Expulsions seems to link them.

"We are confronting a formidable problem in our global political economy: the new logics of expulsion. The past two decades have seen a sharp growth in the number of people, enterprises, and places expelled from the core social and economic orders of our time." (Introduction)

It is Sassen's thesis that our modern economy, since the 1980s, has, through the use of increasingly complex instruments, developed new and more brutal mechanisms which have resulted in these expulsions. In the course of the book she sets out some of these complexities in extreme cases for the purpose of demonstrating her point. She looks at shrinking economies, the enormous land grabs taking place in underdeveloped countries, the financialization of everything, and ongoing environmental destruction. Each of these processes is creating massive displacement through expulsions. Through the metaphor of 'expulsion' Sassen is trying to "make the invisible visible".

In our current world, following the end of the Keynesian era of economics, roughly 1980, the globalization of markets, including labour markets, has changed not only international trade but also banking, national governments and the very nature of the way national governments interact with each other and with transnational corporations.

In linking these processes, Sassen manages to make clear that what appear to be various separate phenomena are actually the various sides of a multifaceted die. Indeed, in the process of reading, I realized that other expulsions could also have been explored. (Indeed, other topics which came to mind are dealt with in T-A-R.) In particular I have been concerned with the widening democratic gap as power in Canada has been centralized around the Prime Minister. As parliamentarians have become almost totally excluded from the legislative process, citizens are being excluded from having any voice.

What is of greatest concern in all of this is that it is a vast unfolding process that will continue. The neoliberal discourse and logic that drive it have become dominant, not only in business and government, but throughout western society.

Sassen ends the book on an almost optimistic note that [the spaces of the expelled] are, potentially, the new spaces for making - making local economies, new histories, and new modes of membership." Perhaps small groups will attain this temporarily but I suspect any new village communities will eventually be swept up in the chaos that will surely follow any extended period of large numbers of displaced, unemployed, adrift people with no loyalties and no supports, living in an overcrowded, environmentally wasted world. But then, I'm just waiting for the apocalypse, never the revolution.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great research and presentation of the main 'expulsions' people are experiencing - expulsion from jobs, from homes, from land, and eventually, from the planet.

The author suggests that these more quantifiable trends are only some of the manifestations of expulsion, the greater reality remaining mainly 'subterranean'. Though the author attributes these trends to the neoliberal paradigm of 'parasitic elites' enabled by weak or complicit governments, I was a bit disappointed at times that this analysis did not plumb further into the contradictions of capitalism.

I was grateful, however, that the author refrained from a cheerful, feel-good, and hopeful ending - when the data clearly speaks for the opposite.

[Paul Wolinsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extremely timely book, which, while written in a kind of academic style, is nonetheless important to consider. I say "academic style" because there are times when its author Saskia Sassen (Columbia U.) uses words like "intermediation" "systematicity" or "instrumentalities." While none of these words is completely confusing, I suppose, I think such a book would be improved if its author were to explain what she means, rather than using this complicated jargon.

On the other hand, the issues that the author takes up are so important that they practically cry out to be considered. I finished the book last night, and the final chapter, the fourth, on "Dead Land, Dead Water" was chilling and terribly evocative of the struggle that will need to be waged if we are to clear up our future, from an environmental standpoint alone.

As for her analysis of the current crisis in the financial sector, I am no expert there, but much of what she says about finance capitalism clearly shows that we live in a Gilded Age "on steroids," as Joseph Stiglitz, one of her friends, presumably at Columbia U., has also shown. The concept of events cutting across our current analytical categories is important here, because she shows that in order to conceptualize how events around the globe are related, we need to understand expulsions from country to country, from being booted out of the middle class into poverty (due, often enough to the bursting of the mortgage bubble in 2008) and for those financial mavens actually benefiting from so much misery, going from being filthy rich to being stratospherically rich, we need to enlarge our way of seeing things. Univocal explanations for these events do not serve our purposes. "Complexity" is something Sassen is always guiding us through, though it is, alas, sometimes very difficult indeed to understand Sassen's elaborations of complex financial, geopolitical, and environmental relationships, or more to the point "inter-relationships".
All in all, I recommend this book, but I recommend that it be read in combination with two other books I have recently read; "The Betrayal of the American Dream," by Barlett and Steele, and Jane Mayer's "Dark Money," which tells an extremely gruesome and brutal story of rapacious capitalism at its worst, operating under the banner of "free-market" thinking.

[Hannah Vollebergh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saskia Sassen maakt in haar analyse gebruik van tal van voorbeelden. Die voorbeelden zijn voor haar een startpunt om aan te geven hoe de huidige vorm van wereldeconomie leidt tot uitstoting van mensen, gemeenschappen en het milieu. Ze wil voorbij de lokale problemen om zo het conceptuele systeem te vatten dat van al die problemen de oorzaak is. Het boek is rijk aan een enorme hoeveelheid van informatie, en toch over het algemeen goed te volgen. Had van mij nog iets meer op een abstract niveau de verbinding tussen de verschillende onderwerpen kunnen zoeken, maar desalniettemin zeker de moeite waard.

[Lorenzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

En el mundo hiper-acelerado en el que vivimos, una reflexión de vez en cuando no viene mal. La que nos ofrece Sassen en este libro viene muy al caso. Abstenganse de leer el libro todos los que creen que el hombre es el dueño de la creación, y que si hay algo permanente en el mundo es la crisis, y bla bla bla. Esta fotografía del mundo global en que vivimos que muestra "Expulsiones..." es demoledora. Desde Rusia a Estados Unidos, y desde el Ártico al Antártico, el mundo está jodido. Mucho. El cambio climático es una realidad contra la que no estamos sabiendo luchar. Todas las medidas que se toman van encaminadas a frenar su desbocado crecimiento. Pero nadie en la tierra es capaz de decir cómo podríamos volver a la situación previa en la que los climas locales y regionales eran más estables y menos extremos. Pero el libro no sólo trata sobre este tema. Aborda además dos aspectos del mundo global con los que vivimos todos los días y que son tan brutales como el cambio climático. El primero es el de las expulsiones económicas. En un mundo global, la economía se ha vuelto tan compleja que para determinados sectores de la población resulta incomprensible. Pienso, por ejemplo, en la declaración de la renta. Cada año es más complicada, las personas muy mayores entiendo que harán un acto de fe y la enviarán a ver qué pasa. Lo mismo se puede decir de los Bit Coin. Qué hay detrás de esta moneda virtual? Es tan compleja que divide el mundo en dos grupos: los que deciden vivir al margen de ella, y los que -sin entenderla del todo- deciden jugar a ver si tienen suerte. El último campo que trata el libro es el de las expulsiones sociales que causa la globalización: gente que por los motivos que sean deja de pertenecer al grupo en el que creció (su barrio, su pueblo, su ciudad, su pais). Igualmente brutal y esclarecedor.
No obstante, hay dos aspectos del libro que podrían ser mejorados, uno formal y otro más de fondo. El primero es la traducción. No es pésima pero sí muy mejorable. La lectura en muchas ocasiones recuerda a una traducción literal del inglés, con palabras inexistentes en español y con una dicción errónea en nuestra lengua. El segundo aspecto mejorable tiene más que ver con lo rápido que este tipo de libros se quedan anticuados. Escrito en 2014 y publicado en español en 2015, en los años que han trascurrido desde entonces el mundo se ha visto sacudido por el COVID, por la guerra de Ucrania, por la llegada de los populismos al poder (EEUU incluido, con Trump, y el Reino Unido con su Brexit). No es plan de actualizar el libro cada cinco años, pero en fin, siendo un libro tan nuevo es una pena que tan pronto suene viejo. Esto es también culpa de la Globalización. Hay que ver lo efímero que se ha vuelto todo últimamente...

[Martin Hoogeboom · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you still have faith in humanity and the future of our planet: do NOT read this book. Saskia Sassen teaches us how ecological and socially unacceptable practices provide so-called dead spots on our planet. If companies appropriate large pieces of land in weakened states, the age-old living area of indigenous groups with a great bio diversity will change into a plantation full of pesticides where people work for a starvation wage. When the soil is exhausted and polluted, a dead spot remains. A global elite, global corporations, abuse and expel without compassion people, countries and nature looking for the last percent return. It is a world without democracy & mercy. It took me 2 years to read this book ( I'm not that smart:)) only to process all these shocking facts.
It gives an excellent - but at the same time frightening - insight in the work of global 'predatory' capitalism. I think it's a must-read but don’t say that I haven’t warned you.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just chronicling, not synthetic

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recently, I have been trying to read books from the very last chapter first in order, this gives you the instant satisfaction of getting to know the points/theme/conclusions of the book. So this book gives me the instant image of Chris Hedges's inverted totalitarianism. Professor Sassen uses some interesting WHO, World Bank and IMF data to support her claim directly against the corporations. She stops short of "claiming" IMF, and World Bank are the culprits for the massive expulsions of the middle and low class from many countries. She stops short of "accusing" these so called public globalization policies are doing so much damage to many countries internal economies and the citizens' well being and social status. For example: speaking of water monopoly, she ONLY mentions Nestle as the evil company. Few of the interesting chapter are worth noted: such as global land grab by government and corporations: such as China and US are buying a lot of "lands" from other countries. And Philippines are selling a lot of their lands to foreign countries. Rare earth developments are also damaging the Earth environments. But again, the mindless consumerization are not well explained. Simply we should all know that we are killing the Earth the moment we buy or upgrade our electronic devices. Professor uses a lot of "sociological term" which seem sophisticated, but I find this technique hard to be understood by the readers. Simply, she uses fancy words. The chapter on financial securitization is nothing new. There are too many books about it. Overall, I think her chapters combined to express the wealth/poor gap has been widen due to the liberalization of our land, our government, corporations. BUT each chapters are fragmented. She tries so hard to write that liberalization IS the problem that drive us to our own demise (job loss, unemployment, etc), but she did not depict this as the recent; still this book gives readers a message that corporations, governments and globalization NWO policies are the problem..you get more fun by reading Chris Hedges'

[Brishen · Rating 2 out of 5]

My real problem with this book is that it is simply a collection of random things that have happened in the past few decades in the world without anything written to tie them together at all. I can only guess that the author felt that this juxtaposition of different stories would prove to be similar enough in different ways as to prove some sort of point. The trouble is, what's the point? I get that it is interesting that environmental devastating through mining has been somewhat constant in its brutality regardless of the type of government or the type of thing being minded, but what is trying to be said here? How does this link to the long chapter on financial instrument growth? It's never explained.

I'm not looking for some grand theory to unite the different processes in the world and would probably challenge the statement of one, but at least try and explain the links and how interactions are occurring. Is the growth of corporate profit as shown in an early graph (which doesn't take into account inflation and so the axis makes it appear that they were essentially zero until 1970) something that has influenced, or was influenced by, the increased financialization of the world, and if so how does that also flow through to land being bought and destroyed?

I also don't understand the point of throwaway lines such as "However, not everybody lost; investors such as George Soros made large profits by going against the trend." Why name the man in a book that really doesn't name that many people? I'll not even comment on bizarre suggestion that Greece was able to achieve growth through not counting those who were long term unemployed.

[Sara G. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sarà che ho già letto diversi libri sull'economia globale e mi sono fatta un'idea piuttosto chiara delle tendenze in atto, ma ho trovato questo libro - nonstante le ottime intenzioni - di una noia mortale. Scritto con l'asettica pedanteria di una tesi di laurea, sforna dati e grafici a fondamento della tesi (assolutamente condivisibile) delle "espulsioni", senza riuscire a costruire una narrazione che vada oltre il semplice elenco di dati. Siamo ad anni luce da Naomi Klein, per dire, ma anche da Bagnai, Giacchè, Rifkin, Sartori e altri che hanno scritto saggi illuminanti sul nostro tempo, rigorosi dal punto di vista scientifico, ma anche di piacevole lettura. Ciò non toglie che possa essere utile a chi si avvicina per la prima volta a queste tematiche e abbia bisogno di dati.
Come quasi sempre accade, anche in questa analisi si ignora "l'elefante nella stanza", ovvero la sovrappopolazione mondiale, causa prima, assieme al progresso tecnologico, della perdita di potere contrattuale dei lavoratori e, di conseguenza, dello strapotere di finanza e multinazionali. Un tabù duro a morire... ma per queste tematiche vi rimando a Sartori e Rifkin.

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing in this book is so dramatically different from Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages it is hard to imagine it is the same scholar!

Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages is a masterpiece. This book does not offer the same sort of rich insightful analysis. There are a few paragraphs in this book that shine, and show Sassen's true talent, but I walked away from this book thinking this was a sort of failed book.

I found her framing of the rapid rise of for profit private prison in the United States as a brutal form of expulsion of the surplus labor pool and its crucial place within the organization logics of the current global economic system as enlightening. I had never thought of the role for-profit prison play in absorbing the surplus labor pool and how that allows for the ever accelerating extraction of profits from increased productivity that only works with a shrinking labor pool. For-profit prisons derisks the social system in our current political economy.

[Lette Hass · Rating 4 out of 5]

La figura de "la expulsión"... quizá el término más adecuado para hablar de las brutalidades constantes que han evolucionado hacia formaciones depredadoras en la actualidad. Una lectura crítica a la desigualdad, el desempleo, la expansión de poblaciones de desplazados y encarcelamientos. La destrucción de tierra y CUERPOS DE AGUA, y las múltiples desviaciones en de la mirada hacia el otro. Todo tipo de abuso, ya no es solo eso, llego al nivel de todo lo que implica la gramática de la EXPULSIÓN... "desde el espacio vital, incluso desde la misma biosfera que hace posible la vida."

"Las expulsiones ponen de manifiesto hasta qué punto la complejidad de la economía global vuelve casi imposible el rastreo de líneas de responsabilidad, que lleguen a dar cuenta por los desplazamientos, los desalojos y la erradicación que produce."

[Eric Bottorff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll need to think on this book more before I really formulate a fully thought-out opinion. On the one hand, I'm bothered by the analytically vague argument at the heart of the book. And I'm equally bothered by the occasionally elementary mistakes and misleading choices and omissions when it comes to the presentation of her data. On the other hand, some part of me also thinks she is basically getting the big picture right, and that the aforementioned vagueness is actually justified and works to reshift or reframe ones thinking about global trends of the last 40 years or so.

In any case, definitely worth a read.

[Jason Katz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tremendous to have an overview, a theory from the margins, about systematized expulsion in varying forms (foreign land acquisitions and national debt burdens, financialization of nonfinancial economic sectors, and biospheric expulsion from areas of dead water and land.


On a positive note, this book tracks the "strategic participation of states in global processes that, guided by different interests, could reorient goals away from the global corporate agenda and toward global agendas concerning the environment, human rights, social justice, and climate change."

A good addition to the discourse.

[Alyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very enlightening as it connects many different aspects together from the economy to the land to incarceration rates. A great sociological read to find out what has been expelled from our knowledge and understanding on the way the world works.

[Iván · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un libro interesante que abarca temas que van desde la desigualdad a la pobreza o el cambio climático. Numerosas gráficas y bibliografía.

[Kimathi Muiruri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complex economies, simple brutality

[Neil H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capitalism, financial innovation, efficiency. These are the words we do not equate easily with negative connotations. But in Saskia's work, these words loom stealthily in subterranean and upwards. Pursuit of capital with financial innovation and efficiency in drawing the finite earth resources. All in the name of profits for mega companies looking at short-term goals which excludes those who are not in their corporate board, or shareholders. As enumerated, the 80s was the start of the new smaller government, attracting companies by providing tax breaks and no responsibilities towards the enlivening of the unaffected classes or the deadening of the land. It's not just a localized issue, one with its tentacles only this far. Rather a systemic religion that poisons us to only focus on the endemic and not what is a pulsing worldwide plague.

[stella mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for a class I am in, and the concept of expulsions was a very fresh take to a concept we had been diving into. I really enjoyed the highlighting of the expulsions done to the earth itself and I think as a society that message is really important, however within the class we talked about the lacking within the text. I believe a more comprehensive understanding of the expulsions made and how they, majority of the time, disproportionately effect people of color was completely lacking, this was seen in her terms "the global south" rather than acknowledging that these southern countries have deep tragic histories of expulsions.

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book overall, that weaves together a massive amount of core research in how we have scaled up into an age of uncontrollable and unavoidable mining and monetisation, and how this is creating the expulsion of people from their land worldwide. Told with a strong voice and academic rigour, this book is grim but important.

A bit marred by a confusing Chapter 3, that uses too much domain-specific language to make it easy to read (from a non-expert in banking).

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incisive, original and well-founded: essential reading for those coming to grips with 2017 reality. The lens of expulsion cuts away chaff and leaves only a stark clarity. Sassen leaves no stone uncriticized in the search for an overarching pattern of late-stage capitalism. If you like Zygmunt Bauman, you'll like this book.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sassens premise here is great (the movement from Keynesian to extraction economies) but I don't think this theme is really carried through the book. I thought the derivatives chapter was great!

[Martijn Van · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspirerend, belangrijk en deprimerend.

[Dora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy recomendable.

[Marta · Rating 1 out of 5]

pensaba q sería de teoría pero es muy analítico y centrado en economía, no es lo que quería :(

[Olivia Dannenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very depressing very important great data

[Antonio · Rating 3 out of 5]

After a little confusing introduction on the concept of "expulsion", the following chapters deploy that concept with data and clear examples. The first chapter focuses on shrinking economies in the Global North and how this is affecting the majority of working class people after the 2008 crisis especially; the change is evident when looking at rates on poverty, unemployment, suicide, displacement, and mass incarceration. The second chapter focuses on the Global South, debt and land acquisition as a mechanism to advance capitalism and debilitate local governments while losing their national sovereignty. The third chapter analyses the financialization and the mortgage debt--the "expulsions" derived from subprimes and superprimes credits. The last chapter is a catalogue of environmental disasters (land erosion, fracking, radioactivity, dead lands, climate change, heats, etc.) that may have a national source but global effects and thus need international regulation (?). PROS: the author includes a lot of data and charts to support her argument. CONS: her style is a bit too dry sometimes and she goes too far in her attempt to de-theorize inequality and concepts such as "complexity" or "membership".

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Espulsioni è un testo fondamentale per provare a capire come sta evolvendo il sistema capitalistico. Attraverso un’eccellente bibliografia il libro costruisce una solida ipotesi servendo di una “cassetta degli attrezzi” decisamente utile a chi è interessato ad indagare le recenti evoluzioni dell’economia globale. Poiché le parole sono importanti, la ricerca di termini che possano dare significato ai mutamenti socioeconomici in atto, è in realtà difficoltosa e spesso insufficiente, e Saskia Sassen ha il merito di saper trovare le parole “giuste” che anticipa già dal titolo: espulsioni avvengono nelle più disparate sfere della società ad opera di formazioni predatorie che generano una “forma di accumulazione sempre più primitiva”. La brutalità di tale meccanismo socioeconomico genera esclusione, rappresentando la più vistosa differenza con il capitalismo novecentesco, eppure “la complessità concorre a determinare l’invisibilità”: si tratta di forze concettualmente sotterranee.

Saskia Sassen per rendere visibili tali movimenti indaga il margine sistemico, “il luogo in cui si estrinseca la dinamica chiave dell’espulsione dai diversi sistemi in gioco: l’economia, la biosfera, il sociale”. C’è un sottile file rosso che lega questioni apparentemente lontane, che vanno dalle foreclosures seguite alla crisi dei subprime e dei CDS (credit default swaps) allo scioglimento del permafrost, dal frackling ai contadini che vengono allontanati dalle loro terre per fare posto a piantagioni di palme da olio, dai profughi alle carcerazioni.

In riferimento alle carcerazioni, si fa un inquietante collegamento con quelle perpetrate dai regimi dittatoriali e si sostiene inoltre che le popolazioni carcerarie, in particolare negli Stati Uniti e nel Regno Unito, dove si va diffondendo la loro gestione privata, sono “sempre più simili alla versione attuale della manodopera eccedente che caratterizzò i brutali albori del capitalismo moderno”.

In questo contesto nord e sud globale subiscono, seppure in forme spesso diverse, le stesse brutalità. Nel nord si chiama austerity mentre nel sud “programmi di aggiustamento strutturale” ma il risultato è la stessa contrazione dello spazio dell’economia di un paese, che allo stesso tempo non intacca la redditività delle imprese. Inoltre tali programmi sono correttamente definiti “regimi destinati a imporre disciplina“. Illuminante al riguardo il riferimento al caso greco:

la Grecia è soltanto un caso particolarmente semplice e accelerato di tale ristrutturazione, che in altri paesi è semplicemente più mediata e quindi più lenta.

Ciò che avviene è una sorta di “pulizia economica” per cui sistematicamente, sempre più frequentemente e in diversi punti del globo viene espulso ciò che è considerato molesto. Sassen si spinge al punto di riconoscere che non si tratta di anomalia o di una qualche crisi ma esattamente “l’attuale approfondimento sistemico dei rapporti capitalistici“.

Tra le conclusioni degne di nota emerge anche la chiamata alla correità degli stati nazione, sì in crisi d’identità ma non semplici vittime della globalizzazione, in quanto “è di fatto il ramo esecutivo del governo che si allinea sostanzialmente al capitale delle società multinazionali”.

Saskia Sassen comunque non mitizza la fase keynesiana del capitalismo, anzi la pone correttamente in prospettiva: si è trattato di un periodo in cui l’inclusione era conveniente e dunque necessaria per lo sviluppo economico.

Proprio da questi assunti nasce uno dei quesiti che restano al termine della lettura: se il periodo migliore del capitalismo è stato tale per una pura logica economica, se la sua configurazione attuale non è un’anomalia né una semplice crisi, perché non mettere in discussione il capitalismo in sé? Il secondo quesito è posto tra le righe dalla stessa autrice quando afferma la necessità di concettualizzare lo spazio degli espulsi, perché è lì che sarà possibile agire. Un compito ancora enorme anche se agevolato sicuramente da questo testo. In realtà ritengo che i due quesiti siano collegati e le risposte potrebbero essere trovate più facilmente con il soccorso di qualcuno da Treviri.

[Annick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book following two friends' suggestion. I have a particular interest in the fourth chapter as it has a direct link with my research on resource territories and waste territories. Saskia Sassen poses the question of exclusion at many levels: socio-economic, political and biospheric. The first ones are a classic if you're a reader of her books. The last one, the biospheric, is new but it reflects a new trend that will be playing a significant role in this new era. Yes the very concern will be, as architect Paulo Tavares, says, the Earth-Political since we'll be facing the by-products we have produced through our increasingly activities. I let the question of scarcity aside this is not the point of this book but the issues of contamination, toxicity, pollution, sea level rising, ice melting, permafrost thawing, and so on are the result land grabbing and intensification for industrial and agricultural uses, resource extraction, military-related degradation, waste processing. What we are producing is a venomous earth, a toxic earth which timescale goes beyond our lifetime (see Timothy Morton's The Ecological Thought and Hyperobjects). She takes interesting examples like Sumgayit (Azerbaijan), or La Oroya (Peru), Chernobyl, Fukushima, or Norilsk (Russia), Haina (Dominican Republic), or but not cited in this book, Athabasca (Canada) as dead land that are indicative of the earth transformation into a toxic earth. She also poses the question of, while not really mention the word, the urbanization of the ocean. What do I mean with the urbanization of the ocean (see Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's Implosions/Explosions)? Ocean is becoming a contested landscape for many uses, first for trading, second for resource extraction, third for fisheries activities, fourth for leisure and sports, and fifth for military use. These human activities force natural systems — fishes, marine mammals, water birds, aquatic plants) to coexist with the risk of destroying the second, and causing an acidification of oceans. With these issues, a new form of migration will emerge, a population expelled from their becoming-toxic lands, losses of vegetation and wildlife (or a mutation of vegetation in highly nuclear-affected landscapes like Chernobyl or Fukushima).
This book is a very good book as an introduction of (at least the fourth chapter) ecological politics or, better, earth-political. This book should be in the library of the landscape architect whose scale, toolbox and business model are expanding with new tasks, new complexities, new challenges such as remediation of nuclear, pollution (and so on)-affected landscape.

[Behrang · Rating 5 out of 5]

افزایش نابرابری، بیکاری، محرومیت، جمعیت آواره، تخریب زمین و نابودی آب‌ها. به گفته خانم ساسکیا ساسن، جامعه شناس هلندی و استاد دانشگاه کلمبیا، همه این نابسامانی‌های اجتماعی، اقتصادی و زیست‌محیطی که در بالا نام‌برده شد را دیگر نمی‌توان با عبارت معمول بی‌عدالتی و فقر درک کرد، ما نیازمند زبان و مفاهیم جدیدی هستیم که بتوانیم عمق این مسائل پیچیده را با دقت بیشتری بکاویم. این مفهوم جدید «expulsion» به معنای«رانده شدن» است. این مفهوم درک ما را از اقتصاد قرن بیست و یکم به‌روز و عواقب ویرانگر سیستم سرمایه‌داری معاصر را برای ما فاش می‌کند. همانطور که نویسنده کتاب در مقدمه بیان داشته، ما با مشکل بزرگی در اقتصادسیاسی جهان خود رو‌به‌رو هستیم: ظهور منطق‌های جدید رانده شدن. در دو دهه گذشته، تعداد افراد، شرکت‌ها و مکان‌هایی که از نظم اصلی اجتماعی و اقتصادی عصر بیرون رانده شده‌اند رشد چشم‌گیری داشته است. این رانده شدن با کمک انواع پیچیده دانش، هوش، فناوری، امور مالی، استخراج و همراه با روش‌های خشونت‌بار بوده است. به همین دلیل عنوان فرعی کتاب وحشی‌گری و پیچیدگی در اقتصاد جهان نام‌گذاری شده است.
چنین مبحثی(expulsion) نه تنها در کشورهای جهان شمال بلکه در کشورهای جهان جنوب و حتی در ایران به راحتی قابل مشاهده است. آنچه که امروزه در کشور ما با عناوین مختلف مثل دستکاری بازار سهام، سلب مالکیت زمین و مسکن، جابه‌جایی جمعیت درون بافت‌های فرسوده، افزایش بدهی طبقات کم‌ درآمد، بحران‌های صندوق بازنشستگی، کوه‌خواری، زمین‌خواری، مازوت سوزی نیروگاه‌‌ها و... مشاهده می‌کنیم همان «expulsion» است.
کتاب در چهار فصل یک مقدمه و یک نتیجه‌گیری توسط انتشارات دانشگاه هاروارد در سال ۲۰۱۴ به چاپ رسیده است.