Expulsions

6 ideas

1. Expulsion as the unifying systemic logic

   Sassen argues that foreclosed homeowners, displaced smallholders, long-term unemployed, incarcerated populations, and poisoned lands are not separate problems of inequality or exclusion but outputs of one process: expulsion from the core economy and biosphere. The shift from 'inequality' to 'expulsion' matters because inequality implies people remain inside a system at a lower rank, while expulsion means they are pushed out of it entirely and stop registering in its metrics.

2. Predatory formations rather than predatory elites

   The destructive force is not a small group of powerful individuals but a 'predatory formation': an assemblage of elites, legal instruments, financial innovation, technical capacities, and systemic enablers that together produce outcomes no single actor designs or controls. Seeing it this way explains why removing bad actors or reforming one rule changes little, because the capacity to expel is distributed across the whole arrangement.

3. Subprime mortgages as extraction, not credit

   The subprime instruments were built so that the mortgage served as an asset to be bundled into securities, and the borrower's ability to repay was secondary or irrelevant to profit. Because profit came from the securitized package rather than the household's payments, lenders profited even as millions lost homes.

4. Complexity in the system produces brutal simplicity at the edges

   Highly sophisticated knowledge in finance, law, and engineering generates elementary, crude outcomes: a family evicted, a community displaced, a river killed. The more complex and opaque the instruments, the harder it becomes to trace responsibility from the brutal result back to its cause, so complexity itself shields the process from accountability.

5. Global land grabs as de-nationalized territory

   Since 2006 foreign governments and firms have acquired over 200 million hectares, mostly in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, for food, biofuels, water, and minerals. Sassen reads these purchases as more than investment: they strip land from the national economy, expel smallholders and villages, and in effect partially remove territory from the sovereignty of the host state.

6. Look at systemic edges, not national averages

   Standard measures like GDP growth or unemployment rates count only who remains inside the system, so an economy can register recovery while expelling growing numbers who fall out of the statistics. Sassen proposes reading the 'systemic edge', where people, places, and firms exit the frame, as the real signal of what the economy is doing. Seen this way, IMF-driven debt restructuring that raises measured GDP while shrinking the population with livelihoods counts as expulsion, not success.

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