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janthonytucson's review
3.0
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.
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.
brishen's review
2.0
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.
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.
jasonkatz119's review
4.0
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.
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.
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