In November 2008, while I was conducting field research in South Korea, a piece of news emerged that raised a number of eyebrows among my informants in Seoul: Daewoo, the South Korean chaebol, was attempting to lease 1.3 million hectares of farm land in Madagascar. More than 50% of all arable land was to be used for the growth of agricultural products for the Korean market. To top matters off, Daewoo was expecting to pay nothing in return for its 99-year lease signed with the Malagasy government: the Korean managers believed that investments in the infrastructure and local jobs created through their agro-business would be sufficient to keep the poor population in this distant country content.
Now, what caused particular consternation in Seoul in the fall of 2008 was not the land deal in itself. Instead, it was a rather damning Financial Times article (“Daewoo to cultivate Madagascar farm land for free”, 19 November 2008)Footnote 1 and an Op-Ed in the same issue (“Food Security Deal Should not Stand”)Footnote 2 in which the journalists compared the Koreans to pirates and spoke of neo-colonialism. The conservative newspaper Maeil Gyeongje Footnote 3, among others, responded angrily, arguing that perhaps the Western news outlet was pointing the finger at South Korea because the rapidly increasing amount of East Asian Direct Investment in Africa was becoming a real threat to the interests of powerful Western actors on the continent. “It’s our turn now”, seems to have been the sentiment expressed in between the lines. Malagasies tended to disagree with this Korean analysis, however, and within months of the large-scale land acquisition becoming known they overthrew the government that had signed the contentious deal, thereby scrapping the agreement with the Koreans in the most drastic fashion.
The Daewoo deal which floundered in such a spectacular manner is just one among many controversial land acquisitions currently being attempted or undertaken by foreign governments or corporations. Over 200 million hectares of land have similarly changed hands between 2006 and 2011, we learn in Saskia Sassen’s “Expulsions”, where she links the rise of such land acquisitions to the economic crisis of 2007/2008. While the term “land grabbing” has enjoyed much circulation among NGOs, until recently it has not featured too prominently in the social sciences. Several recent publications, however—a number of which have been published in The Journal of Peasant Studies (see, for instance, Borras et al. Reference Borras, Hall, Scoones, White and Wolford2011)—have sought to put the issue of land grabbing on the map. Saskia Sassen, too, dedicates a significant section of her book to this burning issue, and both the extensive statistical material she utilizes and the larger argument she makes are worth considering.
To provide an example, among the top 20 land grabbers that she lists we find five non-Western actors in the vanguard: China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, and South Korea are rapidly emerging as prime contenders in the current scramble for arable territories, with European and North American actors falling far behind the curve (p. 99). Sassen does not make too much of this curious reversal, however, as geo-political divisions that have long puzzled political economists are deliberately blended out from her analysis. Instead, her goal is to explore subterranean “dynamics that cut across the familiar and well-established conceptual/historical boundaries” (p. 216). What kind of processes, then, does Sassen seek to unearth?
By exploring a vast number of large-scale issues (such as fracking, land grabbing, finance capitalism and climate change), all of which are matters that can no longer be kept within the boundaries of nation-states, she describes emergent global tendencies that all lead down one particular road: toward expulsion. The Latin root of expulsion, “expellere”—to drive out—may already provide an indication of the potency of Sassen’s key concept: expulsions are of a forceful and deliberate nature, in which a moment of brutality is inherent. Expulsions, Sassen suggests, are also a major symptom signaling the dawn of a new era: we have reached a new phase of global capitalism, or rather, are finding ourselves at “the systemic edge” now, where both old and new still have a veritable influence on our lives. And “the key dynamic at this edge”, she argues, “is expulsion from diverse systems in play—economic, social, biospheric” (p. 211).
In our attempt to keep the growth machine running, we are increasingly making humans obsolete: for instance, when impoverished peasants are driven off their land to make space for foreign agro-businesses; or when ever increasing numbers of able-bodied populations are excluded from the labor market and instead warehoused in prisons, asylum centers or slums. During the economic crisis, 13 million people were evicted from their homes in the United States alone. However, Sassen does not stop with the violent expulsion of people from the capitalist system. She goes on to talk about the expulsion of entire economies, with the Greek case featuring prominently in her book. Greece provides a scenario in which a country’s economy contracted by 30%, after which it was declared to be in a “healthy state” again by powerful rating agencies and other actors. And finally, she tackles the expulsion of various physical matters from the biosphere: fracking and similar technologies facilitate the extraction of minerals in such a brutal manner that ever larger sections of “dead” land and “dead” water are left behind as an unfortunate byproduct. These vast stretches of uninhabitable terrains are a living reminder of growth-gone-awry, and it is the rise in complexity, Sassen believes, that is a key enabler for the large-scale destruction emerging all around us: “Our advanced political economies have created a world where complexity too often tends to produce elementary brutalities” (p. 2). And “the more complex a system is, the harder it is to understand, the harder it is to pinpoint accountability, and the harder it is for anyone in the system to feel accountable” (p. 215).
In one particularly rich paragraph, Sassen explains her idea of living at the systemic edge by comparing our current times with the onset of industrialization in England: a bird’s-eye view of England at that time, she argues, would have provided a kind of optical illusion, leaving the spectator with the impression of an overwhelmingly rural economy. However, the “sheep on the land were now feeding the machines in city factories. Both sheep and machines were at the systemic edge: they were moving into a new urban industrial era even though the larger visual order was that of a rural economy” (p. 212). Here, Sassen could have further discussed the enclosures that enabled the rise of the confusing rural/industrial landscapes underneath—a discussion through which such earlier forms of land grabbing could have been brought into a fruitful conversation with today’s accelerated land acquisitions. But historical lineages, cyclical modes of capitalism and the longer-term workings of what David Harvey (2004) has described as “accumulation by dispossession” unfortunately do not play much of a role in Sassen’s book. Readers interested in discerning how “expulsions” might be differentiated from earlier forms of dispossessions that have always been so integral to the workings of capitalism are only left with the vague response that “what might be different today is the complexity of key components” (p. 221).
Be that as it may––if the English vignette shows that an agrarian society was colliding with a decidedly industrial one at that particular moment in time, what might Sassen be pitting her new era of expulsionsFootnote 4 against? It is Keynesianism that is being driven out now. The most fundamental logic behind Keynesianism, Sassen argues, has been that of incorporation, which is in a sense the exact opposite of the current logic of expulsions: “The world we began to build in the wake of devastation, starting in the West in particular after World War II, was driven by a logic of inclusion, by concerted efforts to bring the poor and marginalized into the political and economic mainstream” (p. 212). Growth during that era was also a means to advance the project of the welfare state, while nowadays it only serves corporate interests at the expense of people. Ordinary individuals used to possess some kind of intrinsic value in the old days as potential consumers, Sassen claims, but the capitalist logic today only entails their brutal expulsion as ever larger numbers of people are no longer deemed useful to the workings of the system.
At this point in Sassen’s narrative, I could not help but feel that her understanding of Keynesianism misses out on several crucial aspects. She seems to disregard the fact that Keynesianism essentially evolved out of a truce between capital and labor. By leaving class and its discontents out of the equation one potentially fruitful trajectory that her book could have taken is barred from view––i.e. the question of what has happened to labor over recent decades that has allowed capital to unilaterally cancel the deal, so to speak. Another related line of reasoning that is also disappearing out of sight—and which is perhaps more relevant to the kind of argument Sassen makes—is how Keynesianism already had one crucial in-built flaw: the double-bind between unbound economic growth and the survival of our environment is surely not a recent invention. Keynesianism was to a large degree built on the naïve belief that somehow our planet would provide us with all the resources needed to lift every single human being out of poverty. Now that we are faced with the prospect of millions of Chinese citizens entering the circuits of global capitalism and its worlds of consumption we have to come to terms with the very real environmental costs of such an unconditional belief in growth. After all, environmental degradation is a “global scale-up”, Sassen points out, “which boomerangs back across the world and affects places and flows that never contributed to that destruction” (p. 221).
At the end of the day, Sassen’s focus on exclusion and expulsion, which clearly is a major dynamic in all-too-many areas of our globe today, cannot really account for many aspects linked to the momentous rise of East Asia as the new powerhouse of capitalism. For instance, the major game-changer that the tripling of the working class in China over just half a lifespan represents is essentially left undiscussed. And what is one to answer, to give another example, when faced with a South Korean citizen whose parents were still producing cheap garments for Western consumption for a handful of dollars a day a few decades ago, and who now claims that it is her turn to partake in prosperity––by taking the land, oil, and water of other people that is “up for grabs”? Keynesianism and its logic of inclusion has bred the notion that economic growth comes close to being a human right in itself—a reasoning that may be a key element in why we are seemingly in the process of getting rid of ourselves today.
Sassen is very right in pointing out that an analysis that respects the boundedness of nation-states is not bringing us any closer to solving the global issues currently endangering our planet. All the same, the systemic edge that Sassen identifies is also a moving target, and it is made, sustained and reshaped not just through global assemblages that arose recently, but also through more solid forces whose mechanisms can perhaps be better understood by keeping the longue durée in mind. However, the category of the future has more gravity in “Expulsions”: the undoing of the deadly logic of growth and expulsion, Sassen seems to imply at the end, may eventually come from the dead zones that she identified throughout her book. “More generally, the spaces of the expelled cry out for conceptual recognition. They are many, they are growing, and they are diversifying […] They are, potentially, the new spaces for making—making local economies, new histories, and new modes of membership” (p. 222). At the end of all savage sorting, there is hope to be found amongst the ruins. How the disenfranchised might come together, however, remains unclear. This exclusion is symptomatic of “Expulsions”, which is a fascinating read but one that ultimately leaves many questions unanswered.
