At the Systemic Edge: Expulsions

I use the term ‘expelled’ to describe a diversity of conditions. They include the growing numbers of the abjectly poor, of the displaced in poor countries who are warehoused in formal and informal refugee camps, of the minoritized and persecuted in rich countries who are warehoused in prisons, of workers whose bodies are destroyed on the job and rendered useless at far too young an age, of able-bodied surplus populations warehoused in ghettoes and slums. But I also include the fact that pieces of the biosphere are being expelled from their life space – and I insist that the tame language of climate change does not quite capture the fact, at ground level, of vast expanses of dead land and dead water. My argument is that this massive and very diverse set of expulsions is actually signaling a deeper systemic transformation, one documented in bits and pieces in multiple specialized studies but not quite narrated as an overarching dynamic that is taking us into a new phase of global capitalism – and global destruction. As an analytic category, expulsion is to be distinguished from the more common ‘social exclusion’: the latter happens inside a system and in that sense can be reduced, ameliorated, and even eliminated. As I conceive of them,1 expulsions happen at the systemic edge. At this time, I see the proliferation of such systemic edges deep inside national territories as more significant than the borders of the interstate system – which are open for some and closed for others. In brief, the types of complex systems that are the focus of the larger research project of which the present article forms a part contain multiple systemic edges: they partly reflect the multiplying of negative conditions in the diverse domains contained in such systems, from prisons and refugee camps to financial exploitations and environmental destructions. None of this is new, but the sharp escalation towards negative outcomes since the 1980s in much of the world does invite a question as to the sustainability of it all.