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A review by janthonytucson
Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy by Saskia Sassen
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.