Shrinking Economies, Growing Global Markets for Land

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible. This excerpt from Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (2013)—republished here with the generous permission of Harvard UP—complicates understandings of Global North and South by exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. The complex types of knowledge and technology we have come to admire are used too often in ways that produce elementary brutalities. These have evolved into predatory formations—assemblages of knowledge, interests, and outcomes that go beyond a firm’s or an individual’s or a government’s project. This essay illuminates the systemic logic of these expulsions, laying bare the extent to which the sheer complexity of the global economy makes it hard to trace lines of responsibility for the displacements, evictions, and eradications it produces—and equally hard for those who benefit from the system to feel responsible for its depredations.