Saskia Sassen - Entrevista Exclusiva

Oh the best years of the liberal state are finished I think we actually have to reinvent the algorithm of some version of a capacity a capability that represents a larger public that enables a larger public but the kind of liberal state we have today is not a good venue I think the the high point of the liberal state is really the 20th century and with all its horrors because it certainly had many horrors from Russia to the u.s. to be in the Europe etc but it was it had a project and the project was really

enabling some sort of making of a of a middle class a prosperous working class that was a distributed know it was a project that was about distributing distributing jobs returns now that's done beginning in the 1980s in an invisible way and now it's finally becoming brutally visible I would say in the last 10 years but it really is a history that starts 30 years ago you have a different set of alignments and it is linked to globalization but it is also linked to a recovery of very old corporate profit seeking logics and so you outsource

because it's cheaper you you know you try to have as low wages as possible you know it is so it is both globalization which enables firms to have a global geography of production and exploitation if you want and it is old logics of profit seeking of domination by firms so these two come together they have a devastating effect so what I find extremely interesting is that in these last manifestations that we have seen all over the world it is the modest middle-class who is the historic actor I mean that is a shock to most of

us who have always seen a roar actor of history the working class the exploited proletariat the sons and daughters of the modest middle classes they are the historic actor that makes me think and that to me comes really back to this relationship with a liberal state that the modern liberal state the liberal state of the 20th century is a state that flourishes in a very particular political economy it is a political economy dominated by mass manufacturing mass consumption workers mattered people mattered as workers and as consumers it was not a nice system just not because

they mattered because they were human beings no there are all kinds of expulsion discriminations violations abuses sufferings on the part of many people but at the heart of the system was a dynamic that needed people as workers and as consumers out of that comes a kind of happy marriage between the needs of a growing increasingly urbanized industrial workforce a petty bourgeoisie you know that whole setting now that story is over it's finished I think that today I mean this is sort of my take I develop this in a little book that I just finished that

I call explosions I think the logic today is a logic of expelling people if I put myself at the edge of the system 50 years ago I saw that the system brought in people as I said as workers and as consumers today if I look what happens at the edge of the system the edge of the system is not the border the edge of the system is a systemic edge it's right there runs in the middle of Wall Street in Mosul Paulo multiple edges let it sort of lets people go the way it expels them

the way it sort of pushes them out takes many many different forms so in the case of the United States an enormous amount of incarceration of minority workers a vast number of people who will never have a job we now have large numbers of young men who are well in their 20s late 20s and their 30s who have never held a job so it's sort of a mass of humanity that we no longer matters in the case of countries in the global south it takes other forms a crucial dynamic there is what we call land

grabs it's massive amount of land buying by foreign by about 17 countries and over a hundred firms that have bought you know tens of millions of hectares of land so the question is when a country wants to make a plantation to grow palm and it buys 2 million hectares somewhere in Africa in Brazil what happens it evicts Faunus flores villagers little small holder agriculture rural manufacturing they're expelled when they then migrate to the cities it's barely migration that's an expulsion and so they feed the favelas they feed the slums they feed the we just miss

areas so I think we have really entered an epoch where the liberal state is in in a decay we don't have to I don't want to throw out the state by the way we need strong states but the the epic of the strong liberal state that had a project it was a narrow project but still it meant a prosperous working class growing middle class public infrastructures public education public housing public transport all of that that has sort of come to an end look at any of our liberal states none of them has the money except

maybe Brazil you know there are a few too to do the kind of infrastructural work setting up whole vast spaces where firms could operate workers could operate schools could operate none of them none of our governments has that kind of money the Chinese are about to run out of money they have been doing it etc so I do think it's a very particular period in the manifestations have to be seen in that larger context I think I think there are the beginning of a history this is by no means over it's just the first little

appearance of a historic process when Castel says that these movements are about recovering public space I think they use the little bits of public space that are left and they grab spaces that have never been thought of as public space Tahrir Square is a traffic and they make it into public space because and that is why they are different these movements are different than then earlier demonstrations of the 60s and the 70s but the aim the aim is actually a very modest aim this is not the heroic revolutionaries involved of the Russian Revolution and not

nor is it the the heroic syndicalism you know at the end of the 1800s in the beginning of the 1900 this is very basic stuff and that is why the state is the interlocutor they are not against then are going against financial firms they are going to forget financial markets they're not going against the big multinationals as was the case in the 60s and the 70s they are asking the state give me a job make my education degree work make housing cheaper the state is the interlocutor and that is why for me it captures the

beginning of a history which is really a late 1800 especially a 20th century history which is the emergence of these middle classes these vast middle classes and the middle classes have always kept a low profile you know they I mean I know I know they produce on revolutionary sense of whatever but you're the middle class is a very particular segment so I I don't see this as making public space I see this using public space to make claims against the state and to ask the state for a reasonable condition of life I mean I think

perhaps some of the most illustrative of these demonstrations were in Tel Aviv where for the first time you had a hundred thousand people manifesting and they were not trying to bring the government down he was saying you know I want to live and tell her you want to work in Tel Aviv have a job in Tel Aviv giveme cheaper housing make make it you know make it work so it's a very peculiar mode and what I find absolutely fascinating here is that they have the memory through their parents that the state wants gave them a

lot of stuff and that enabled for five generations you know - every generation gets a little better and now suddenly they are on the other side of the curve it's not happening you see and rather than going against the corporate economy going against going against you know the financial markets I mean the financial I think I think financial icing of the economy is what is the real problem here it you know that we can get to that later maybe but that sort of my take on this there is a sentence phrase that you hear a

lot in the world in the last 10 years it comes especially from certain sectors it's not a universal statement and that is that a billion people went out of poverty that has to be really examined carefully 600 million of those are in China 200 million of those are in India and they are mostly very prosperous middle class and then you have Brazil and that's about it the other thing is that something that has received much less attention is the fact that there is a monetizing of poverty so before these people may have owned a little

farm eaten rather well modestly modest lives sold in the local town the goods that they made but maybe more exchange but a lot of people now have become Sarika proletariat a very poor proletariat so suddenly from having no monetized income because they lived in a sort of a more an economy minimalist economy you know where they produce their own food etc and then they bought a few things and sold a few things so now a lot of these people are very poor laborers yes they have a monetized income they get money for their work but

they eat less they they don't have they don't sleep enough they're super exploited so this has to be taken with great care this these last 20 years were not a generous beneficent period in our you know in our history they were brutal yes you have a middle class that got richer than they ever thought they would get really rich in India in China in the United States in Brazil in equal or in Nigeria in South Africa you name it in everywhere and I was I was detecting these trends already way back in the 1990s because

the structuring of the economy helped in that so what you really have is an impoverished broad middle class you also begin to see that even in China but there it's going to take longer I know that in Brazil you have a prosperous no modest middle class and you have that in China as well but you know there are limits to that but in most of Latin America in most of North America in most of Europe in much of Africa you do not have that you have very rich elites a very very well of 20% rich

middle class and then the older traditional of middle class they are losing ground actually and then this question of some of the poor enter the money economy and suddenly they are classified as less poor I think that we really need far we need anthropological kind of study we need ethnographic study to establish that I think many people have made it out of incredible poverty and young people certainly prefer to be poor in cities with a very low income wage and unhealthy food then being back home with the parents on the small farm clean air better

food even the very modest and no and no money income so I think the question of what we humans prefer which is a certain kind of complexity in our life is one way of putting it so I'd rather be very poor in a city then have better food and better air quality in a little farm that be very isolated see these are all issues that come into the picture but I think the main point here is yes a billion people have left a non money economy and moved into the money economy they actually have money

they can spend but are they no longer poor or is it a different kind of and what is the trajectory of this poverty we now know that low wage workers will not achieve the kind of gradual you know bettering in their lives as they did for much of the 20th century when we look at the whole debate on surveillance by national states of its citizens I think that many many features come to the fore I would say the first one is the amount of material instruments buildings that are in play in order to have this

so there is something extremely visible and yet we do not see it let me in the United States there are over 10,000 massive buildings that have been there at least since - Oh 10 full time surveillance of citizens and firms and we now know what look beyond the borders of the United States it's so much materiality but we don't see it that to me is an extraordinary fact about our contemporary world you know that that because because it's an unknown zone we do not see it we are so bombarded with information with stuff etc that

if it doesn't come through certain channels we don't see it the second issue is the logic of the surveillance apparatus it does twenty-four-hour you know every day of the year year after year it's a gathering of data all our emails all our acts of communication etc etc the logic is in order to catch those two or three dangerous actors could be affirmed between individual every year we have to assume that everybody in the territory of the country is suspect that is the logic so I asked with this who are we the citizens there is a

huge apparatus on top it's very transnational up there it has you know mathematicians from all over the world good algorithm builders from whatever you know if your best algorithm builder is somewhere in Malaysia you bring it it's very international up there which I find very nice sort of nice part of it but the real question is given that logic given that in order to to secure the country from threats the first step is that all of those who reside in the country are suspect and hence we need to gather data about all of them that

is a very peculiar logic that is truly a rupture with with a French Revolution model and with the American model the state is me and I am the state now this is the state as a separate kind of actor and so and the third element is does this mode of securing a country or bringing security to a country does it work does it actually work it doesn't work very well really I mean we don't know that it's difficult to establish but for the the party that is a real winner I'm not sure the state is

the winner I'm not sure we the citizens are winners but the party that is a real winner are the big tech companies this is huge superstructure technical superstructure in order to find that possible terrorists clearly one of the key spaces for people in the world our cities and increasingly so that is happening everywhere and and the question then is what is a city and one of my arguments is that a lot of built-up terrain is not a city it is just built up terrain if you have row after row after row of office buildings that

is not a city that is just a densely built-up terrain if you have row after row like outside Shanghai no 5000 will high-rise buildings with just residences and nothing else that is not a city so one issue in in addressing some of the major challenges you know that that we that we face when it comes to the built environment is can we secure what London has for instance someone has about thirty seven little centers in its you know in its city space New York is not as good as that Paris is also quite bit but

not as good as long the London is quite extraordinary in that sense and so they have succeeded in having smaller communities which are more govern Obul where the the residents feel that this is my community I I am a constitutive member of this community and and and and so it just works better it's more civilizing condition then these mega cities we have one huge Center and then the rest becomes a huge back area now if I had the power to redesign a few of these situations and I absolutely don't have it nor do I have

the technical skills then I would say that scaling is critical so yes you want density yes you want in many cases of complex large space London is huge but you wouldn't know it it's very low right make it so that there are these centers these notes because those notes civilize urban space where you have begin to have to decay of urban space is if you have excessive high-rise buildings in all concentrated like I would say certain parts of Manhattan are just too much and at night that dead space that's not good that's not City right

but the other end is of course very poor neighborhoods the slums the favelas the we just miss areas and all of that now we I think again if I had my eye I would say this is a time to make no cities why does it have to be this huge mega spaces build new cities create a center create you know but many many many not luxury not what the Nigeria did they wanted their own rich City for the rich so they built Abuja which is so expensive that only the rich can live that I mean

the middle classes are there too and they threat Lagos is too big we're leaving that is not a solution you would just raise the quality of life of a lot of people and you would have a chance to build green cities you know we have underestimated how the city every part of the city is a is a combination of elements that can work with the biosphere in a way that a plantation cannot a plantation is elementary a plantation means you have to push out phonus and Flores make it very and then you bring in all

the chemicals so I let me just give you a little example of how the city having multiple cities and having green cities would be absolutely fantastic and it would keep it would create again a prosperous working-class and a modest middle-class so I have done a lot of work on how biology knowledge of biologists and I think it's just phenomenal it's happening there but it's all in the laboratories I mean there are some applications so one of them is a bacterium that they discovered that if you put it in brown organic waters what we produce in

kitchens and bathrooms no it actually produces a molecule of plastic but it's a plastic that is biodegradable so it's durable resistant but biodegradable plastics are something we need in everything we do imagine what is now a real negative for cities all those brown waters often disposed off in non environmentally sustainable way like putting it into landfills and it becomes methane gas and now we have explosions and golf courses and that kind of so you know it's not good or trucks you know becomes actually an export industry for cities they export a plastic or export the

waters so that they can make a plastic will export the plastic city after city and there are many other the other one that I love is a bacterium that if you put it in concrete it actually seals off the walls seals of greenhouse missions stops them and eventually actively purifies the air around it that means that a city yes it is producing environmental damage by definition but it also can activate its own particular formats lots of concrete lots of brown water to actually work with the biosphere so when I think of making all those new

cities I think jobs I think greening I think bringing scientists technologists etc into the making of the cities not to make these high-tech smart cities which I don't believe in but to make a working city where every citizen knows that they are contributing their part that is right and they would have to be fairly small but there would be cities rather than endless rows of slums endless runs of roll in office buildings this notion of a decentralized making of energy and enter when edison you know in the united states he thought every household would have

its source but from the perspective of an emergent corporate economy as was the case in the united states this was not a good idea the big corporates wanted to centralize and so i think that if we work with the environment if we work with the biosphere with biologists with technologists who are interested in the environmental question we could actually achieve a far more distributed making of energy every building every little house has multiple ways in which it can generate energy every household could be quite self-sufficient and then through a very simple device is like the

famous plastic bottles you know get the you know you know they're I think it's it's from Brazil actually you know these are very elementary that is not so much making energy as using very elementary things that every household has even a poor household so there is a kind of knowledge that exists but that has to become far more widespread you know because when people become aware that right now that we could be doing far more than we do we exist in old environment built environments where it's not easy but building new cities to address the

slum question and all of that it just could be a revolution and you know what it would bring back a prosperous working-class but prosperous middle-class and I think some version of a democratic state with a lot of distributed sources of energy and with politics you you