No. 116 A MARXIAN THEORY OF CRIME T. R. Young The Red Feather Institute November, 1985 RED FEATHER INSTITUTE   Distributed as part of the TRANSFORMING SOCIOLOGY SERIES of The Red Feather Institute, 8085 Essex, Weidman, Michigan, 48893.

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A MARXIAN THEORY OF CRIME

Abstract

INTRODUCTION In the paper which follows, I would like to offer a short and clear outline of a Marxian theory of crime. The intention here is to present in one place a coherent set of ideas about the social, political and economic sources of crime. I will set forth some basic propositions and discuss each briefly in the body of the paper. Before beginning the central part of the paper, I will discuss theoretical perspectives used to understand crime. After that I want to spend a bit of time on the concept of crime. The last part of the paper will be given over to some general policy considerations. The paper stands in opposition to conventional theories of crime which locate illegal behavior outside the dynamics of the privatized accumulation of surplus values, the privatized use of commodities, as well as the privatized use of human beings. The paper begins with a methodological critique of conventional theories.

PART I. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES. There are several theoretical perspectives, each with variable validity which are used in American criminology to explain to the student and the citizen how to understand the dynamics of crime. Most of these theories are conservative in that they locate the dynamics of crime in personal or interpersonal characteristics and, thus, exclude dominant social institutions from critical investigation and policy considerations. The position advanced here is that crime is too serious a matter for any such privileged analysis. If the sources of crime are found in social institutions, then the criminologist, the student and the citizen should know that. A Marxian theory of crime locates the principal sources of crime in the ordinary operation of the day to day operations of the political economy of a society as one will observe from the proposition below. In the Marxian view, a sound policy for reducing crime must begin with social relations.

Of the major theories of crime differential association theory (D.A.T.) is, perhaps, the most commonly used perspective. But D.A.T. cannot be a theory of crime since it is also a theory of all kinds of socialization, learning and mutual influence in role relationships. Chinese are Chinese because, among other things, they differentially associate with Chinese people... as do French, German and the British. D.A.T. is equally a theory of ethnocentric behaviors. Physicians differentially associate with medical school professors, residents, interns, nurses and ill people. Physicians are constructed by and organize their behavior as if they were physicians through and only through such interaction. One cannot be a "physician outside such a social life world. D.A.T. is a theory of socialization generally. So while it is true that D.A.T. is important to the organization of criminal behavior it may not be used in a special theory of crime. That which is a constant across human behavior generally may not be adduced as a theory special to one form of human behavior.

D.A.T. begs the question of why young men and women are engaging in crime. It begs the question why it is that one comes to learn and practice crime as a way of life. Still less does it tell us why the total population of criminals increase and decrease in a given society or vary greatly in size across societies. In as much as it is a theory of all human behavior, D.A.T. cannot be a particular theory of crime.

The same is true for labeling theory and societal reaction. People labeled as thieves, prostitutes and criminals usually are, in reaction to such labels, more like to behave in ways compatible with those labels. But the same is true for doctors, police as well as criminologists. There is one additional disqualifier of labeling theory as a special theory of crime. Many people who routinely commit crime are never so labeled, never associate differentially with such criminals and still do crime. Political criminals, corporate criminals and white criminals are not so labeled and still systematically engage in crime over their careers. Yet again many people do not accept labels nor do they organize their behavior in ways consonant with labels even under the most difficult circumstances. I have in mind ethnic groups some members of which resist labeling ­­ "jews, niggers, wops, polacks, and japs." They try to maintain their dignity in spite of such labeling practices. It takes a very distorted research design to generate fundings supportive of D.A.T., labeling theory or societal reaction theory.

Control theory cannot be a theory of crime since, in terms of the research design theory, it does not predict, uniquely, upon criminal behavior. In the political crime of F.B.I. agents, C.I.A. agents, the military as well as corporate officers and organized crime employees, there are goals, rules, sanctions, hearings, adjudications, rewards, promotions: in a word, all the elements of social control exist!! These people are not left loose on their own and drift into crime because social controls have broken down. Control theory is doubly a mystification since the theory is used as an apology for a police state in which the crimes of the poor are differentially policed at the expense of the collective interest in a society safe from the predations of the powerful and oriented to democratic processes and the civil rights necessary to democracy.

When we examine stringently the wide variety of genetic, physiological, psychological as well as interactionist theories which are currently advanced to explain criminal behavior we find them flawed and we find them exculpating of the larger social, political, economic and historically variable factors which, in the Marxist perspective, are closely associated with crime.

Poverty cannot be adduced as a cause of crime in as much as there are many very poor societies with very little crime. People in China, in the Muslim societies, as well as most poor people in the U.S. do not commit crime. On the other hand rich people routinely commit crime in both rich and poor societies. Studies of corporate crime and white collar crime find such behavior endemic. Where there is poverty and where community or social solidarity is strongly supported, as in religious or socialist societies, the relationship between poverty and crime disappears. In privatized societies oriented to accumulation and with no dependable relationship to the means of distribution, one can be sure crime is high among rich and poor alike. When people are seen as stratified in systems of high and low social honor, one can be sure that the persons at the lower end of the system will be victims of a wide variety of crime and victimize each other.

And there are low­crime societies with all the factors currently used to explain high crime rates. Differentiation association, labeling processes, few controls, ethnic diversity, secularized, industrial, densely populated and genetically diverse. Switzerland and Japan are cases in point. A good theory of crime must have "causes" which vary with criminal behavior, must be uniquely associated with the form of crime under examination and must be useful to lower crime rates as social policy is based on them. Conventional theories are not much more than careless speculation. They have no place in a respectable criminology.

In the third part, I propose social conditions which do vary across societies, across time and across social groups within which crime does vary. They are radical propositions. A crime­ridden society concerned to develop good policy must consider radical transformations of society if, indeed, these propositions are valid. It is not enough to catch criminals and to punish them ... a good and decent society must change the conditions which subvert the moral capacities of our young people, our business people, our politicians and our own moralities as well. If criminology must develop better theory, it must first develop a better conceptual apparatus with which to apprehend crime.

PART II. THE CONCEPT OF CRIME. The definition of crime is one of the most political processes one may observe in criminology journals and texts. In this and other papers, I have proposed a wide ranging definition of crime based upon a theory of human rights. Specifically, I define crime as any act, any relationship, any social process and social organization which subverts the human project. In this definition is an assumption that one cannot develop as a human being nor function as a human being without the enabling social conditions. There is also the assumption that the unit of criminal action is as much a social relationship or a social institution as it is a given discrete individual person. A second major failing of contemporary criminology is the practice of defining the individual person as the unit of theoretical analysis. A Marxian approach to crime sets social relations, social practices, social organizations as the unit of theoretical concern. Racism, sexism, authoritarianism as well as the distortions of class privilege become crime under this approach. It is the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the capitalist corporation which should be the focus of social control and social policy. The single individual, acting alone, creating crime alone is unknown in the real world. If D.A.T. teaches us anything, it teaches us that.

At the same time, acts labeled as crime may be emancipatory while activities deemed right and proper may be criminal under this view. Whoever controls the law­making apparatus controls the defining process. Slave masters, feudal lords, capitalist stockholders, nationalists, as well as racists, sexists, and bureaucratic elites all distort the concept of crime and justice to reproduce and extend their own special advantages at the terrible expense of workers, women, minorities and colonial subjects. Criminologists cooperate with this bent politics when such definitions are naively accepted.

Each exploitative regime, elite, or class adduces theories to justify and to gloss over these larger injustices. A decent criminology transcends the special claims of such privileged and powerful interests and asserts as a concept of crime, that behavior which needlessly alienates people from their full humanity. One has only contempt for a criminology blinded to the politics of definitions; blind to this power to define used to special advantage. One must never use only legal specifications of crime and only legal prohibitions of activity as the basis of theories and concepts of crime else one blind oneself to much injustice. Now I want to end this critique of contemporary criminology in the U.S. and set forth a more adequate history of crime.

PART III. MARXIAN PROPOSITIONS OF CRIME. The propositions set out below delineate some of the social conditions which a Marxian theory encompasses in the dynamics of crime. Most generally Marxists say that crime is a result of unjust conditions in society. There is the assumption that, of all the children born to women, by far the largest majority could become and remain decent, constructive, productive members of society if the social conditions were right. There is the assumption that genes, body chemistry, and childhood trauma count little in the calculus of crime. There is the assumption that a good and decent society allocating its resources for the collective good, making space for individual productive labor and tending carefully to the socialization of its young could create a low crime environment. There is the assumption that crime is not a part of the human condition but rather detracts from it. The explicatory propositions appear below.

Proposition 1. Crime Rates and Forms vary with Mode of Production. This is the central organizing principle of Marxist theory. Ways of thinking, acting and creating culture vary with the mode of production of a society. In egalitarian, collectivized societies everyone has a secure and significant relationship to the means of production as well as to the means of distribution. One's material wants are determined, in part, by the kind of ideological culture produced in that society and one is provided the resources needed for the role allotted one in that production. The production of ideological culture is the central human labor and all else is subsidiary. Ideological culture includes forms of religion, forms of family life, forms of political life, forms of socialization as well as all possible social relationships. It includes art, science, prose, music as well as sports and recreational activities. Architecture, civil engineering, city design and international trade systems are all human products growing out of ideological work. One's relationship to the means of production of culture is set by the logics of that mode­­not by genes or individual purpose.

In societies where the mode of production is organized to exclude persons from either the production of material and ideological culture or from the means of distribution of essential cultural resources, one can expect crime rates to increase. The kind of crime varies from pretheoretical resistance and rebellion to more coherently and theoretically organized rebellion and revolution. The basest and most pretheoretical form of resistance and rebellion is theft from others also excluded from the means of production. Theft from one's slave master, feudal lord or capitalist employer is a bit more theoretically sound but still is prepolitical. Political action which eliminates alienating modes of production and, most importantly, institutes participatory means of production and communal means of distribution are the most theoretically informed kinds of "crime." Behavior which transfers the alienation of a mode of production to others similarly situated in the class, slave, or feudal structure is the least theoretically informed. Mugging, income tax cheating or spouse abuse are examples.

There have been five generic modes of production in human history each of which has had its own forms of crime and its own rates of crime. The mode of production most common in human time and space has been a primitive communism. We shall speak of developed communism in Part IV.

1. Primitive Communism. In this mode of production, each person from the age of three or so has been assigned a role in the production of material resources. The gathering of firewood, the fetching of water, the making of building or wearing materials as well as the collection of food begins at an early age. Each cohort of young people is given material resources on the basis of need as the production of ideological culture requires. Each person is expected to produce on the basis of full ability (although ability often is limited by gender and occupational divisions as one grows older and thus alienating).

The means of production are collectively owned or there is no concept of private ownership of the means of production. Therefore there is no concept of theft. Most tribes and bands hold themselves to be part of nature rather than the owners of trees, lands, animals, or waters. One uses such tools as needed, lives in such housing as is available, eats such food as prepared with little regard to private ownership. The notion of privileged usage of personal items exists. Clothing, adornments, tools and space may be temporarily or primarily, used by one person, but the notion of private ownership with its exclusionary conditions: the right to use, the right to abuse and the sole right to the fruits of production are nonsense notions in this social formation. Tribes do claim territory from which other tribes may be excluded.

In such societies, one cannot steal fruits from trees, steal food from family or take insects from another. The notion of theft is a nonsense notion in communal society. The sky, land and water belong to no one person. There is occasional murder and violation of sexual rules as well as blasphemy but organized, career criminality is unknown. Political crime, and white collar or organized crime are unknown. Communal societies are low crime societies. To the extent that other tribes are viewed as nonhuman, there is predatory theft, murder and rape against outsiders but only rarely within the structure of community.

2. Feudal Societies. Feudalism begins with violence and survives by violence. It is a system of political and predatory crime in which an elite claims ownership to whole towns, provinces and peoples. A predatory band imposes its hegemony upon communal society and extracts surplus value from communities for a privileged life style. Whoever says feudalism says political and economic crime. We can see that clearly post hoc but in the midst of such a feudal society, one sees it as natural while resistance and rebellion are seen as crime.

In feudal society, laws are used to enforce a system of production and distribution that creates and sustains feudal relations. A law­making apparatus and a law­enforcing apparatus is needed to preserve such exploitative relations. The law­making apparatus is personal and the law enforcing apparatus is private to the feudal lords but both are necessary and both are held in contempt by the subjects of feudal or colonial rule. The history of Ireland is a history of such feudal conflict. To their credit, the Irish continue to resist and rebel even after 800 years of predatory British occupation. In a feudality, formal law arises to displace folkways controlling the distribution of surplus value.

The kinds of crime defined by feudal lords include withholding of feudal fees and services, leaving the land or hiding animals and crops from the "shire reeve" or hunting animals in the feudal domain. Such laws separate people from the means of production on the one hand and lock them into a forced labor system on the other. Crime also encompasses deviations from deference patterns in speech, body or clothing conventions. One may be legally beaten for insolent looks or words in that they challenge the hegemony of the aristocracy. One must bow and scrape, salute and look away in such a society. One must accept degradations, pass them on to one's children and accept a religious ideology which sanctifies such degradation. That is the law. Such is the character of feudality. The nature, focus and incident of crime is shaped by this mode of production.

3. Slavery. Throughout history, predatory economics has appropriated the labor of one tribe to use of another. Sometimes this entails raiding parties as in the case of the Vikings and sometimes it entails the taking of slaves as in the case of Turks, Greeks, Spaniards, Arabs as well as Jewish tribes. Both slave and slavemaster have secure and significant relationships to the means of production of material culture with a great inequality in the distribution of resources. However from birth 'til death the slave is, in principle, assured of the necessities for the reproduction of its labor power. In the production of ideological culture, the slavemaster reigns. Therein lies the greater crime. The potentialities of human beings are alienated to a iniquitous mode of production.

The slave master cannot steal the means of production. Land, tools, clothing, buildings, livestock and artifacts are the property of the slavemaster even as they are used by the slave. The slavemaster takes what he wishes as he wishes. Some petty theft, some flight from slavery as well as occasional violence within the slave population occurs but the kind of crime found in capitalist societies is inconceivable. In slavery the mode of production is the central criminal process. All else is incidental.

4. Capitalism. Capitalism is the only mode of production that separates production and distribution. Profit is the wedge that splits the economy into two sectors. Goods are produced but not distributed unless the "owner" can make a profit. In all other modes of production, resources are produced for the sole reason of distribution and redistribution. One produces food in order that one's family and friends may eat. One produces housing for the immediate use of a family on a solidarity. Religious occasions are created for and by the direct involvement of the communicants. Medicine, recreation, political knowledge, as well as art, music and other forms of ideological culture are produced in order to create and sustain social relatedness. Only capitalism transforms material and ideological culture into commodities produced by a few to be sold (or withheld) to the mass market. The very means to produce social life and cultural events and artifacts is problematic in capitalism.

If we accept that the production of culture in its manifold forms is the distinctly human labor that distinguishes people from other animals, then we begin to appreciate capitalism is, in its ordinary operations, a mode of production that routinely interferes with the human project. The essential crime in capitalism, whatever its many virtues, is the tendency to deny people the necessary resources for life and society. There is no other society which systematically excludes people from productive labor. Much crime is committed by rich and poor alike in the attempt to reunite production and distribution with the least cost or effort to the individual. There are other features of capitalism which promote different kinds of crime. These are treated in the following propositions.

5. Socialism. In socialist formations, the state holds title to the means of production and guarantees the distribution of those supplies necessary to the production and reproduction of cultural life. In fact, socialist modes of production have achieved remarkable results in providing a significant, secure and adequate relationship to the production and distribution of essential material resources, as well as an improved relationship to the means of production of ideological culture for the majority of people in a fairly short time.

There is a fatal flaw in socialist formulations, however. There is the tendency of state functionaries to control the means of production and to repress the production of ideological culture, especially politically significant culture. This tendency is a gross violation of the need of people to produce their own, historically located politics. The imposition of laws, policies, programs, projects, and institutions from a remote governing agency is a substantive crime. People are alienated from the production of institutions, roles, relationships, and from significant sectors of similarly situated others with whom they well might learn, might respond and might cooperate in some of the most fundamentally human labor to be done. With small exception whoever says socialism says bureaucracy with its concentrations of power and its politics of exclusion. Whatever the justifications for bureaucratic socialism (and there are justifications) still the human project suffers. Developed communism corrects this flaw but before that, discussing communism, I want to specify features of the capitalist mode of production which set the social, economic and political conditions conducive to crime.

Proposition 2. Capitalism Tends to Disemploy People. The separation of people from both creative productive activity and necessary distributive relations constitutes one kind of crime and sets the conditions for others. The tendency to disemploy people derives from the fact that short­term profit rates determine employment policy. Profit requires a reduction of the costs of production. Of all the major factors at the point of production, only labor costs can be reduced without immediate threat to other capitalist sectors. Supplies and raw materials are owned by other capitalists who resist reduction of their own profits. The owners of a given capitalist sector are few and close enough to set prices. The costs of land, buildings, and other capital goods also are in the hands of capitalists. It is the labor force which offers the greatest potential for reduction of costs and thus increase in profits as long as there is a reserve army of the disemployed.
There are several ways to keep labor costs down. From the point of view of the capitalist, the best way seems to be automation. The tendency is to replace high cost labor with machines. Machines don't strike, talk back, get pregnant, demand vacations and retirement benefits, take coffee breaks and require medical benefits. Machines don't want to control the labor process ­­scheduling, speed, quality, quantity, and kind of goods produced. Scientific management can go only so far in making workers as docile as machinery. In response to the drive to reduce labor costs, the long range tendency is to increase productivity with machinery and thus evade labor costs. For every high tech job created in 1985, ten production jobs are lost. The disemployed have only limited means to reunite production and distribution. Crime is one way.

Another tactic to reduce labor cost is to use a reserve labor pool to replace workers who do want jobs at equitable pay and humane working conditions. Children, women, Blacks, and other minority groups have been used to drive down wages. Any form of discrimination which justifies lower pay creates, in the same instance, a reserve labor force to compete with the established work force. Currently, the Reagan administration urges the minimum wage rate be lowered to $2.50/hour for teenagers. An adult cannot survive on $2.50 an hour in this economy nor can a teenager unless it is subsidized by the larger family system. Depressions, migrations, discrimination and automation all provide the capitalist with the political means to lower labor costs. Such use of alternative labor pools sets the stage for much racial violence and violence toward women.

The migration of capitalist firms to third­world countries where labor costs, taxes, pollution controls and energy costs are lower also disemploys workers. In recent years, some three million net jobs have been lost to capital flight from the U.S. according to Bluestone. The capture of U.S. markets by third world capitalists further disemploys U.S. workers and creates a surplus population of the disemployed. At present, in a population of 240 million, only 110 million people work at paid labor. Between 7% and 18% are disemployed and still look for jobs. The figure depends upon who is counted and who does the counting. The others use alternative economic practices to reunite production and distribution.

The first kind of crime created by capitalism, then, is the very disemployment itself. In Marxian theory, one creates oneself as a human being in the act of productive labor. If one is disemployed as a result of the ordinary operation of an economic system, one is denied a relationship to the means to produce oneself as a human. In the terms set here, this is a crime against human rights. Of course there is a lot of unpaid labor which is fully oriented to the human project ­­ but this is labor outside the logics of capitalist production. Mothering, nursing, playing, teaching and learning, friendship, a great deal of religion as well as creative art, music, writing, singing, helping and playing, are important human endeavors and count greatly in the self­production of one as a human being. It is only capitalism which deliberately sets about to disemploy or underemploy people.

Proposition 3. Capitalism Requires Parallel, Non­capitalist Systems of Redistribution. The disemployment of people sets the conditions for additional kinds of crime. When one is disemployed one must find some means to reunite production and distribution. There are several generic solutions all of which require one to establish a relationship to a non­capitalist system of distribution. First is, of course, the family relationship. A great deal of production and distribution in all societies is within the communal system of family. Production for use rather than profit; use on the basis of need rather than profit. Over half of the economy of the U.S. is outside the accounting categories of capitalist wage labor and market exchange.

But many families cannot supply all its members with all their wants and needs especially if the adult members are out of work. In a politically responsive capitalist society, the state itself taxes and redistributes on the basis of need. That redistribution is often meager and mean­spirited but is important to the millions of women, children and elderly people who must survive on the margins of the capitalist economy. In capitalist formations, there are many imperatives for the state to grow and this redistribution function is a major imperative. More on this later in Proposition 9.

Private charity also provides for redistribution outside capitalist dynamics of profit and market exchange. Church groups, public agencies and nonprofit organizations solicit gifts and donations. These are redistributed on the basis of need after overhead expenses are met. United Way, Catholic Charities, Salvation Army and thousands of other groups give away billions. Without the family, the state and private charity, capitalism could not survive its legitimacy problems.

Finally, there is crime as a parallel, non­capitalist system of redistribution. Estimates vary but some say 8 to 25% of the gross national product involves crime. Robbery, burglary, theft, mugging and extortion involve the forcible reunion of production and distribution. In this form of crime, usually called street crime, there is no exchange, no pretence at reciprocity, and no social relationships, however superficial, created. The means of production include weapons, violence and coercion. In Marxian criminology, this is called pretheoretical resistance and rebellion. The capitalist property owner does not withhold property for purposes of profit; it is surrendered at the point of a gun.

Crime does several things to renew and redeem capitalism. In the first instance above, it reunites production and distribution for some few million people in our economy. Crime also renews demand. A theft of a car creates a demand for another as does the theft of a bicycle, television, stereo, or other goods. Crime provides flexibility in a system. Black-marketing, bribery and theft get goods to where they are wanted outside of pricing or territorial agreement among capitalists and outside of work rules. Street crime indirectly provides legitimacy for any society in which it appears in that it outrages those socialized to the norms of the society. The punishment of those caught satisfies those for whom the concept of justice is narrow and negative. Crime provides a veneer of legitimacy for policing and arbitrary actions of the state. If crime did not exist in a capitalist society, its contradictions would be more visible. More people would be destitute and more capitalists bankrupt.

In brief, the tendency of capitalism to disemploy people creates several parallel economic systems. One such system is street crime defined as the forcible reunification of production and distribution for those for whom the economy does not work well enough to meet real and false needs.

Proposition 4. Capitalism Separates Capitalists from the Means of Production. In capitalist societies, workers as a class cannot buy back 100% of what they produce since they do not get 100% of the value of that which, as a class, they produce. Some part; 5, 10, 15, 20% goes to the capitalist class. In modern times, the capitalist class is so concentrated that fewer than 1% of the population owns 25% or more of the wealth. Capitalists cannot personally use the surplus production. Even having so much wealth they cannot consume all the shoes, coats, food, computers, housing, health care, autos, radios or plastic cups the system produces. Surplus production occurs uniquely in capitalist systems. Several crimes arise from that characteristic. Capitalists have to separate production and distribution and then they have to reunite it. If they do not, they go bankrupt and have only their labor power left to sell. Much corporate crime and petty bourgeois crime is oriented to the reunification of production and distribution on terms favorable to profit.

First there is the crime of withholding necessities from those who are unable to pay the costs plus profits. Millions live in squalor, poor housing, ill health, malnourished and poorly clothed even when the stores, shops and warehouses are overflowing; even when houses and offices set vacant. This withholding is necessary in a profit­oriented society but is senseless in socialist, communist, feudal or slave societies. Unable to use or sell 100% of the wealth produced, the capitalists must lay off, cut back, or steal markets from other capitalists by bribery, by import quotas or by war. Depressions and wars both destroy needed food, goods and productive capacity.

Wars renew demand. Wars are used also to dominate foreign markets at the expense of other foreign capitalist firms. War is the crime of last resort for capitalism. Corporations which build airplanes and tanks in the U.S. must bribe foreign and domestic buyers. Multinational corporations, including American, must pervert the political process in other countries in order to buy, sell and repatriate profits. Multinational corporations produce and sell high profit goods in the poorest countries in the world thus distorting the local economies and extracting surplus value to be repatriated to the richest countries in the world. In the Marxist concept of crime, this is criminal. This is the nature of the capitalist system that produces more than workers as a class can buy back. Corporate crime arises, in part, in the effort to sell surplus production and thus realize profits.

Capitalists must disobey worker safety laws, product safety laws, environmental protection laws, tax laws, and import quotas if they are to avoid bankruptcy. Capitalists must use and discard workers, cheat customers and abandon communities if they are to survive. They must fix prices, bribe legislators and use fraudulent advertising. Honest capitalists don't long survive in a real competitive system. Capitalism must externalize the costs of production since no economic system can produce without a net loss to social and ecological niche in which it is found. Nobel prizes to the contrary, capitalist economics is a criminal economics.

Proposition 5. Capitalism Must Create False Needs in order to Realize Profits. Perhaps one of the most dangerous conditions creating the propensity to crime is the need of capitalism to create false needs. Disemployed workers cannot buy the surplus product. Underpaid workers can't buy the surplus product. People in other ecological niches have value to spend. Some workers have discretionary income. They could absorb a lot more than they need. Layer upon layer of false needs are created by a multi­billion dollar advertising industry. In addition to the distortions of the economy created by advertising, in addition to the creation of hundreds of thousands of unproductive workers, in addition to the misuse of the media or the debasement of art forms, the creation of false needs increases crime. Street crime, white collar crime and corporate crime are stimulated by spurious demand created by advertising as the paid servant of capitalist enterprise.

The best writers, psychologists, statisticians, actors, cinematographers, musicians as well as some sociologists are put to work trying to help the capitalist corporations dispose of "surplus" production and thus realize profit in a system where no amount of advertising can increase the capacity of all the working class to purchase 100% of that which it produces. Radio, T.V., newspapers, handbills, posters, junk mail, magazines all try to generate demand for the sake of profit.

All parts of a population are targets of the advertising industry­­not just those 30­40% of the workers with some discretionary income. Children, the disemployed, the marginally employed as well as the staid middle class professional are exhorted to consume on the basis of psychological want rather than on the basis of interpersonal and social need.

The children of the lower classes, the excluded minorities as well as the disemployed young males who internalize these false needs and do what needs to be done to satisfy them. Young urban minority males rob, mug, steal and hustle to generate income to purchase the goods advertised. Young urban girls, mostly minority girls, prostitute themselves, shoplift, write bad checks and join their male counterparts in mugging, hustling, and stealing. Part of the proceeds from street crime go to purchase the basics of life and part of the proceeds go to purchase the falsities of advertising campaigns.

The middle class also internalizes the false needs of advertising. Middle class professionals steal from the corporation for which they work in order to consume high profit, high energy, capital intensive, high status goods and services. White collar criminals steal to sustain a lifestyle. Automobiles, appliances, vacation packages, investment schemes as well as luxury items are advertised in a thousand exclusive magazines, mailing lists, and newspapers. The Yuppies have the discretionary income. A childless professional couple with combined incomes of 70, 80, 100 thousand can get by in their lifestyle without resorting to white collar crime if they work for one of the few thousand firms which pay well, provide health benefits, vacation and generous retirement packages. The rest of us must steal from our clients, firms, and cheat on our taxes if we are to provide for our children, our retirement, our divorced spouses and, at the same time, maintain our lifestyle.

Corporations must lie in its ads, must default on its guarantees, must bribe its customers, must cheat on its taxes, must violate worker safety laws, pollution laws, and consumer protection laws if it is to provide its stockholders and upper management with the salaries and dividends they need in order to meet their false needs.

If we set concern for nature­­conservation of natural resources, low levels of energy use as well as avoidance of unnecessary pollution as part of a theory of human rights, then the creation of false needs, the demand they generate for hard goods, all these lead one to add this indictment of advertising against capitalism. Living in harmony with nature, preserving the ecological integrity of the earth and thrifty use of existing supplies of exhaustible resources become an important social goal while reckless use and rapid exploitation become crimes against humankind. That these are false needs can be known by evaluating the life styles of Buddhists, Hutterites, or American Indian tribes which live in simple harmony with self, others and with nature. Future generations will pay dearly for this profligacy.

Another kind of crime laid against an economic system which deliberately creates false needs involves the distortion of the character structure of the individual human being. Exposure to the best efforts of the advertising industry from the earliest years throughout one's life mystifies one. One who is oriented to consumption as the test and aim of the good life loses to some degree the capacity to center oneself on one's sociality. One loses, to some extent, control over one's own value system. One is separated from the process by which one becomes human through reflexive self­criticism. One loses the capacity for a contemplation which takes one beyond one's possessions and through on to uniquely human concerns. One becomes driven by need for unnecessary acquisitions and display. The capacity to invest oneself in the quest for a world community of peace and justice is compromised. Capitalism creates false needs, some of which involve crime, all of which create the conditions for several forms of crime.

Proposition 6. Capitalism Requires the Private Accumulation of Wealth. In an economic system in which production is geared to individual profit, individual welfare and private estate, the common needs of a society are neglected. And the private accumulation of wealth is necessary for each since social accumulation is haphazard. For the individual lawyer, physician, shopkeeper, garage owner and independent entrepreneur there is the real need to build an estate for one's later years. Should one fail to do so one would have to rely on the miserly dole of the state or the half hearted generosity of sons and daughters. The ten million or so small business people must exploit their workers, clients and customers. Doctors must turn into business persons, prescribe unnecessary therapeutic regimes, perform unnecessary operations and unnecessary pharmaceutical regimes. Physicians must get together and form an effective and profitable monopoly over the production and distribution of health services. They must restrict competition from other, competing health and healing systems. They must split fees, take a percentage on prescriptions they write, have round­robin referral tactics as well as over­bill second and third party insurers. They must orient the medical system to therapy rather than to preventative health practices. It is more profitable to heal people than to prevent illness. In a word, medical practice must become criminal practice in an individualist society. The same imperatives of self protection and personal estate operate in auto repair shops, legal practices, real estate investment, rentals, and speculation, in local banking, in stock brokerage, in bars, restaurants and other service business. The owner must use and discard employees, deceive customers, bribe local inspectors, purchase the town council and bend the legal system to one's own private needs.

It is the foolish doctor or insurance broker indeed who fails to create a million dollar portfolio comprised of tax exempt bonds, high yield certificates of deposit, stable real estate rentals or mortgages. Lawyers must do the same. Dentists, stockbrokers, accountants, and developers as well must look to themselves and to their own futures in the one­sidedly individualistic society. Such a prospect is the source of much white collar crime. Solid middle class citizens, regular church goers, concerned parents and responsible citizens as they are, daily must deal with their prospects for the future. They must protect that future for themselves, their spouses and their children's children. It is in the capitalist system that one finds the dynamics of white collar crime not in the genes, the race, the childhood trauma, or in interaction with pathological criminals. These are decent people who steal from their workers, clients and customers. They went to college, they worked hard, they have lives of regular habit and are thoroughly ordinary. They commit crime.

The necessity to accumulate also fuels much corporate crime. Not only do stockholders depend upon and demand growth of profits and assets but top managers too must protect the position of the corporation in an increasing hostile world. Foreign competitors, organized workers, consumer interest groups, environmental protection groups, third­world suppliers as well as tax hungry legislatures all try to use the legal system or the market system to their individual advantage. The corporate officer on the make must engineer growth or else be replaced by another more ruthless, cunning, unscrupulous and effective manager. Such an officer must increase market share, manipulate price levels, increase income and reduce costs as a percentage of gross proceeds. To grow in such a savage environment is to control the law making process. To fail to grow is to die in the corporate world. Violations of the law forfend against failure.

In the pursuit of profit and growth, the corporation routinely violates labor laws, worker safety laws, consumer protection laws, tax laws, currency regulations, campaign contribution laws, environmental protection laws, trade laws, price fixing laws, and conflict of interest laws. The capitalist corporation is a habitual, hardened criminal. The corporation houses and protects professional thieves, scofflaws and cheats. Corporate crime is a product of a specific mode of production. The modern corporation is a device by which those who benefit from its illegal activities may escape justice. The most successful corporations, those which accumulate the most are those which are the most criminal and the most adept at becoming above the law. One cannot explain corporate crime on the basis of genetics, molecular biochemistry, differential association or control theory. It is the logics of capitalism which compel white collar and corporate crime. The drive to accumulate a private estate compels the rich to commit crime on an everyday basis.

Proposition 7. Capitalism Destroys Community. The less community, in a social sense, there exists among a given population, the more crime there is. It is not industrialization or poverty or population density which produces high crime rates in an urban area. It is industry without community, poverty without community, physical proximity without community which promotes crime. Capitalism destroys community. Feudalism, slavery, communalism and socialism promote community. Capitalism destroys community.

Capitalist dynamics funnel resources to high profit lines of production and distribution. Low profit lines of production or nonprofit lines of production are neglected. Low energy, low tech, labor intensive lines of production are starved for resources. It is just those kinds of labor which produce social relations, which produce community and collective well being and which are neglected in thoroughly capitalist systems. Child care and socialization, nursing and holistic healing, public transport and recreation, pastoral counseling and student centered education are all displaced by high profit mass production models of child care, health care, education, religion, and recreation. The individual and the community both get lost in such a cost­efficient system.

One can see that high profit, high tech, high energy systems of transport, therapy, warfare, banking, recreation or lodging garner the resources of a society. Developers build large, energy inefficient separated single family dwellings away from the crime, squalor, and pollution of the city. The rich don't care to live face to face with social problems they create. Manufacturers cater to the 30 or 40 percent of the population who have discretionary income while the information needs, the transportation needs or the health needs of the poor are given over to mass production tactics at school, play, or hospital where the interpersonal histories as well as social needs of the patient are inconvenient to the hustling physician, the harassed teacher or the competitive coaching staff.

In the control needs of the capitalist firm and the capitalist state agency, one finds the sources of mass society. Workers, poor people, criminals, students, patients, clients and citizens are easier to control if they come before the boss, the cop, the clerk, the judge or the professor one at a time. If there were community between workers, they would act collectively for the welfare of each and all and thus be unmanageable. The same is true of prisoners in concentration camps, jails and work farms. Should students ever become organized as a collective, professors who teach badly would lose their jobs. Bureaucracies are the typical unit of social control in elitist societies. The structure of a bureaucracy provides control over workers, objectives, rules, and routines to a small elite. The rules require the individual confront the bureau and its rules as individuals rather than as collective.

Capitalism destroys community also by the tendency to transform all solidarity supplies into items for private use. Sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, violence as well as special kinds and forms of food are used as solidarity supplies in all societies to elicit and sustain community. When one or more of these are used collectively, they help the persons assembled to transform profane, everyday life into a sacred gathering. Such supplies in conjunction with music, dancing, costume and ritual constitute a sort of social magic by which members of the natural world elevate themselves into a supra­natural world...that of a human community.

In capitalist economies, these solidarity supplies become transformed into privatized commodities. Organized crime develops to produce and distribute such socially important resources for private use and private profit. The logics of capitalism do not stop at the boundaries of sacred social space­­they intrude everywhere. The profanation of life is the natural consequence of the commodification of production and distribution. In such a society even religion becomes privatized and becomes a money­making enterprise.

Capitalism and other elitist formations also use solidarity supplies for political and economic reasons rather than for social and cultural reason. Patriotism, holidays, athletic spectacles such as the Olympics, the World Series and the N.F.L. play­offs generate a thin, short­term solidarity which scarcely lasts beyond the game's end. Charity, personal tragedy, heroic feats and saintly actions are used by politicians and corporations alike to manage the abiding disquiet of a lonely life in which each is separated from all. The whole social process is subverted by market and by managerial usages of solidarity supplies.

The alienated use of such supplies, again, can bring a thin solidarity to a limited number of persons. The privatized use of food, drugs, alcohol, sex or risk and offer escape from a hostile workplace, a deadening classroom or a spiritless marriage. A few young males can find short term solidarity in drinking or in a visit to a brothel. Sports and sports violence can bring a city together for a while on Sunday afternoon on a sort of spurious solidarity. Drugs can create a destructive solidarity among young people. Therein lies some of the appeal of violence to alienated workers, students, men as well as women. Organized crime parasitizes on the remnants of and needs for solidarity in a mass society. Organized crime is the underground cousin of capitalist corporation. It produces drugs, gambling, violence and pornography for private use whether collective values suffer or not.

Proposition 8. Capitalism Tends Toward Fascism. There are several features of a capitalist society which encourage the growth of the state. These features require the capitalist state to control more and more of the private lives of its citizens. The boundary between public life and private life is obscured while the public sphere is displaced by state policy. These include: 1) the need to manage the surplus population; 2) the need to protect the social base of the capitalist class; 3) the need to regulate the worst excesses of big business and industry; 4) the need to coordinate among sectors of production; 5) the need to protect national capitalists from foreign capitalists; and 6) the need to control dissent and protest at inequality among the political intelligentsia.

While I focus on the actions of the capitalist state against its own citizens in this section, I want to mention that most repression in a capitalist society occurs in the private sector. The corporate bureaucracy closely controls what employers say and do and to whom they speak. A wide array of electronic devices monitor the productivity, organizing, and the socializing of employees, customers and competitors. A growing army of private police are busy creating and using a modern technology of repression. The capitalist state may escape criticism if repression is in the private sector. And, if a capitalist economy can bring profits and goods from Third World countries to share out to its working class, there is little dissent to repress. But as we shall see, the capitalist state today in the U.S.A. does indeed use fascist tactics.

In the effort to manage the problems below listed created by capitalist appropriation of surplus value from the working class, the state resorts to criminal activity. It violates the law and the Constitution to maintain order. A wide range of political underground structures and practices are used to manage resistance in the democratic state. In the authoritarian state (and most capitalist economies entail authoritarian states), there is very little state effort to regulate capitalism therefore very little need to secretly regulate the citizens of the state. Today, in the U.S.A., there are more than 35 federal agencies using a wide variety of new cheap electronic devices to snoop, monitor, bug and spy on citizens without probable cause. According to the Office of Technology Assessment, twenty­one government agencies say they are now using night vision systems, 19 say they are using miniature transmitters and radio scanners, while 13 said they use vehicle­tracking beepers. Twelve agencies said they use electromagnetic or acoustic sensors to monitor movements, seven said they monitor telephone transmissions, one reported intercepting electronic mail, and one said it was using a satellite for surveillance. The Border Patrol is using infrared night­vision devices and sensors to track illegal aliens crossing the border.

The agency using the widest number of new snooping technologies is the FBI, followed by federal agency inspector general offices rooting out fraud, waste and abuse in government programs. Other agencies are using state­of­the­art eavesdropping machines that monitor computerized mailings, satellite transmissions and conversations over radio phones. The survey of federal agencies excluded activities by the CIA and supersecret National Security Agency (Scripps Howard News Service, 25 Oct. 85).

All these illegal activities and more described in a series of books on the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. are made necessary for the reasons presented below:

1. The Surplus Population. All those disconnected or poorly connected to the means of distribution must be managed. Many will turn to welfare, kinship and charity in some varying combination to survive in a consumer society. Most need a huge and growing welfare system with all sorts of investigations and spot checks to control cheating. Some will turn to crime to reunite production and distribution. The variety of crime as well as the opportunity for crimes are so great a huge and growing police capacity is needed. Today that police capacity is labor intensive with police, telephone, automation and jails. Tomorrow the police capacity will be high­tech capital-intensive with T.V. monitors, computer monitors, remote sensing and remote control as well as behavioral modification technology. Drugs are used to control children with behavioral "disorders" in elementary and junior high schools now. Certain sex­related offenders are required to take drugs as are alcoholic and drug users who are processed by the criminal justice system.

Currently there are about 24 million in the surplus population. There are about 34 million aged. There are about seven to ten million disemployed and more underemployed. Capitalism systematically disemploys people in order to reduce labor costs and thus increase profits. But the surplus population subjected to advertising and imbued with a privatized ideology needs to reunite production and, one way or another, they will do so. In a culture of violence, the forcible reunification seems sensible.

2. Small Capitalists. The social base of the capitalist class are small businesses, farmers and privileged workers. Small businesses must be protected from the predations of street criminals as well as predations of large corporations which treat them as cows to be milked. Boys in blue are needed now for protection from street crime. Lawyers, inspectors, accountants, and regulatory agencies by the thousands are needed for the corporate predation. Workers and consumers must be protected from small capitalists, if the capitalist system is to maintain its legitimacy in electoral politics. Should small business, farmers and workers ever feel the full weight of competition and free market practices, capitalism would lose its social base very quickly. A federal control system makes sense in such a hostile world.

3. Coordination of Production. Capitalist firms compete with each other for workers, materials and markets. In order to make a profit, capitalists flood high profit markets and abandon low profit but necessary production. Transport companies abandon small towns. Doctors saturate high rent areas of the city. Child care, nursing and education in their democratic form are unprofitable in a class society. The state must enter into production itself to take over the lemons of capitalist. It then must regulate its own suppliers and customers. Strategic resources must be acquired from hostile foreign sources, stored and rationed to industry. Funds must be provided for research and development. Transportation systems must be coordinated as must communication and mail systems. Private capitalist corporations cannot be entrusted to do it since profit motives tend to exclude low profit but essential goods and services and thus delegitimate the system.

In later stages of development, the entire world capitalist system must be coordinated. State agencies must do this­­not the market. The market is far too erratic and irrational to coordinate all the needs of a society. Either the capitalist class must coordinate production or the capitalist state. The free market can't and won't no matter how insistent right wing economists are to the contrary. In both illegal and legal sectors, the capitalist state must grow. All control tends to be centralized. In the Reagan years, the agencies which regulate capitalist class crime are dismantled and deregulated but this does not mean the end of fascism, only the distorted use of fascism to regulate the poor, workers, the surplus population. However, Reagan is a minor aberration in the political economy of the democratic capitalist society. Sooner or later, the state must, once again, intervene to regulate the capitalist corporations.

4. National Capitalists. In the 20 or so rich capitalist societies, labor struggles have provided better wages and working conditions. In the 120 or so poor marginally capitalist societies, workers sell their labor power more cheaply. Labor intensive production in clothing, electronics, shoes, steel, automobiles is cheaper abroad. The capitalist state must protect its own capitalists for several reasons. Such protection further increases the fascist role of the state.

State functionaries have political debts to national industries. Their workers call forth aid and protection. A balanced economy requires protection. Changing animosities and friendships in the world capitalist system threaten supplies of essential resources in the international division of labor. Disemployment and disinvestment trends call forth state control of corporations as capital deserts high wage areas. Agriculture, mining and fishing, energy industries which can't be moved call forth regulation. The capitalist state must grow and gather all power unto itself. The modern version of this control is called corporatism . . . it is fascism.

5. Control of Dissent. Radio, newspapers, universities, television, plays, cinema and politics all need to be bent to the information needs and the ideological needs of a class elite. This means thought control in a wide variety of direct and subtle ways. Ultimately the iron fist of the state crushes critics of privilege, wealth and privatized power. For the most part, the state does not use force or suppression in controlling thought. Most of the time, in the democratic state, repression occurs in the private sector. Reporters, professors, union officers and clergy who criticize the class, race, gender or national chauvinism of a society are fired or not hired. Most of the intelligentsia benefit greatly from their favored position in the world capitalist system and defend capitalism. Most critics practice self censorship knowing job, tenure and promotion depend upon it. But there have been many waves of heavy handed police state tactics in the U.S. After the revolutionary War, those loyal to the Crown were repressed. After the Civil War, the South was repressed. In the 1880's union organizers and the I.W.W. were heavily repressed. In the 1920's workers' organizers were repressed as were their publications. In the 1950's we saw the McCarthy era. In the 1960's, the F.B.I. illegally repressed socialist movements, civil rights movements, anti­war movements as well as women's liberation activists in its illegal Cointel programs. Generally, in times of crisis, the capitalist state represses...all other times repression is left to the private sector which freely represses dissent in factory, shop, and store.

Summary of Part III. The general rule is that the 20 rich capitalist countries are liberal when times are good. Most of the routine repression is done by managers, bosses, supervisors, deans and colleagues in anticipation of reward or wrath from higher management. When times are bad, the state steps in, activates the militia and uses it on behalf of class, race and national privilege. It is not that police, soldiers, bosses and colleagues are hardened criminals; that they have associated with right wing thugs in other countries or corporations; that they have an excess of X or Y chromosomes or that they live in a culture of poverty. Rather they are thinking, judging human beings who act within the logics of racial and class privilege and repress in order to reproduce those structures.

In order to control the very real dangers of pretheoretical resistance and rebellion, especially in the form of predatory street crime, the capitalist state must adapt a tactic of more police, more prisons, speedier trials, easy standards on rules of evidence, of search and seizure laws, more invasion of privacy as well as tough sentencing and close supervision of paroled convicts. The Bill of Rights must be subverted. Given a commitment to unjust, exclusionary forms of economic, political and social life in these times, fascism for the poor and disemployed becomes reasonable. The U.S. simply cannot tolerate the forms of street crime found in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, or Houston. Capitalist states with electoral politics are pushed to control street crime else lose legitimacy. They are pushed by voters to control capitalist corporations. The incumbent regime do so or will be rejected at the polls. Such a situation calls for draconian measures. All sorts of theories and technologies are developed to facilitate fascism. It is not an Italian, German or Spanish trait to prefer fascism. It is an elitist imperative. Fascism is a reasonable tactic when the larger strategies of progressive social change begin to work in politics; begin to defeat power and privilege.

In societies without electoral politics, the state can rule by decree, deploy police violence at will and terrorize progressive social groups. Brazil, Chili, Guatemala, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa and Saudi Arabia serve up a different kind of justice to pretheoretical resistance and rebellion. Theoretically informed resistance is even more dangerous to the state without electoral politics. Such prepolitical states must call in help from the more developed countries since the state itself rather than the citizen is threatened. It is to the everlasting shame of the U.S. that it responds so generously to such repressive states to the postwar era. In the Reagan years, the U.S.A. has become a criminal state in the international scene in arms dealing, in subverting the political process in Third World countries and in withdrawing from the rule of international law.

Any society which reproduces social privilege in a conflict context must use force to do so. Slavery, feudality, capitalism as well as some forms of socialism define a monopoly of force for the state and use that force to suppress emancipatory social movements. Capitalism is a social formation which requires freedom from social controls for the capitalist corporation while at the same time heavy policing of workers, customers, the surplus population and social critics is necessary.

At home, the U.S. has developed a law­making and law­enforcement system which locates most of the policing of workers, customers, creditors, and white collar criminals in the private sector. Capitalist corporations­­banks, retail stores, accounting firms, factories and private universities are left largely unpoliced by the state sector. Under the Reagan administration, law and order for the capitalist class is set aside. Sector after sector of the market is deregulated. Such a distortion of law making and law enforcement is not an accidental feature of the capitalist system but rather an integral feature. The ordinary approaches of American criminology to crime ignores these discontinuities since structural­functional theory cannot handle them readily. Marxian theory easily accommodates them.

The tendency of a profit oriented economy to disemploy people results in a surplus population. The desperate needs, real and false, of those disconnected from productive labor leads to pretheoretical resistance and rebellion. This tendency is a factor of great importance in the genesis of street crime. It also fuels the tendency of the state to exclude people from the political process ­­ since such participation would tend to eliminate privilege and power advantages. The exclusion of people from politics in an age of democracy generates political crime. Both forms of political crime, the state against its own citizens and citizens against their own state is made probable by the structure of capitalist economy. In summary, capitalism tends toward fascism for the reasons given above. Fascism is also called forth by the wide variety of crime endemic to capitalist logics.

Capitalism constitutes a privatized way of producing and distributing the forms of human culture. In so doing capitalism creates the objective conditions for five kinds of crime. These are predatory crime in which the weaker are victim to the robbery, theft, rape, assault and exploitation of the more greedy. Capitalism creates the conditions for corporate crime in which the welfare of workers, customers, suppliers and competitors­­indeed the political process itself are sacrificed.

Capitalism also provides the dynamics in which white collar crime thrives. Considerations of life style, animosity at employers, financial crises, as well as an insatiable drive for private accumulation drives otherwise decent people to violate the trust of the office or job they hold or professional service they offer. Doctors, lawyers, secretaries, professors and police alike violate the trust accorded them by others.

Organized Crime produces the solidarity of supplies and distributes them to create a thin and false solidarity for an alienated population. Sex, violence, gambling, drugs, money, protection, pornography as well as illegal control of everyday supplies constitute a second economy which, each year, grows in capitalist societies. Organized crime figures simply extend to sacred supplies, the same commodity mentality which long ago the respectable capitalist applied to food, housing, clothing, transport, and other mundane resources.

Capitalism creates two kinds of political crime. There is first the crime of the state against its citizens more or less openly to maintain an inequitable and unbalanced mode of production. There is, as well, the crime of citizens against the state apparatus in more or less theoretically informed resistance and rebellion. The role of the state in preserving an unjust system makes it the target of morally informed critique, peaceful resistance as well as direct physical assault.

The Social Location of Justice. In addition to the tendency of the forms of crime above to increase, capitalism must have separate and unequal systems of justice through which to process the many criminals it creates. American criminology, to its great discredit, concentrates on the criminal justice system to the exclusion of a full and adequate sociological analysis of the forms and locations of alternate justice systems. Just as capitalism needs parallel economic systems with which to externalize its negativities, just as it needs parallel and illegal control systems, capitalism also requires parallel justice systems within which to hide its essential injustice. Few standard American textbooks in criminology bother to examine these parallel systems. Still less is there any analysis or theory provided to explain why these systems exist in a putatively democratic and egalitarian society. There is a harsh and punitive criminal justice system for those who violate the laws of private ownership. Private corporations are treated gently for the many kinds of crime they commit. They are processed through an administrative or a civil justice system in the unlikely event they are policed, indicted or tried. Middle class professionals demand exclusion from the criminal justice system as well. They use a peer review or a medical justice system when they are found out. The criminal justice system is for the poor and the inept criminal. For the poor there is also a meager and mean­spirited welfare system which restores a little social justice.

And capitalism requires a huge private police force under control of the various private corporations. The intrusion of a publicly created police force into corporate affairs is far too dangerous to the everyday criminal activities which the managers and administrators of corporate capitalism commit on the public, the worker, the consumer or upon each other. In this system, there is no due process, no trial by peers or presumption of innocence. Workers, customers, and competitors are policed and disciplined.

Entirely new crimes, new laws, new justice systems, new policing forms and new kinds of control tactics arise and are peculiar to the capitalist mode of production. The most comprehensive proposition in a Marxian theory of crime is that the mode of production determines, significantly, the amount and kinds of crime found in each. It is absolutely essential that American criminology and the American public come to appreciate that low crime societies exist and that they are low crime societies because they are organized more for social justice and community needs than for punishment, control and private accumulation. A brief survey of these characteristics should help lay the foundation for a more comparative criminology.

PART IV. STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF LOW­CRIME SOCIETIES. The features of low­crime societies listed may serve as a basis for social policy. Features of concretely existing societies taken in some coherent and serious political project can serve the U.S. and other high crime societies well. Among the more important features I would include these:

1. A definition of crime which is oriented to a theory of human rights. Antisocial behavior, personal as well as institutional, necessarily must be repressed. I have elsewhere offered a set of Human Rights which might be helpful in such a task.

2. A secure and significant relationship to the means of production for every person in the society. This means jobs for those who can work and resources for those who are too young or too old.

3. Production and distribution must be oriented to enhance community. This means that communal accumulation preempts private accumulation. Private accumulation based on merit should be continued but not that of exploitation.

4. Production and distribution must be oriented to low energy, low polluting authentic needs. False needs and the advertising to generate false needs are inimical to a decent and rational political economy.

5. The top priority in a low crime society must go to the socialization of the young people of a society. Military expenditures, elite life styles and surplus production are low priority. In a society oriented to social justice, national defense is redundant. The highest priority must be our children . . . our children understood collectively.

6. Democratic participation and authentic political participation of all sectors of the population is necessary to a society which aims for reduction in political crime. Authoritarian societies with heavy emphasis on religion can lower crime rates but probably cannot free itself from political crime. The strong democracy of democratic socialism must replace the weak democracy of congressional or parliamentary democracy (see Barber's new book, Strong Democracy).

7. Policing needs to be located in the community at large with minimal division of labor. The suggestions of Peter Iadicola are helpful here. He argues for a change oriented community crime control program. Rehabilitation oriented programs are necessary transitional programs. Repressive policing won't work. The better solution is a society that combines control with progressive change.

8. The dialectic between the individual and community must vary in such a way as to promote solidarity, enable creativity, embrace autonomy and discourage parasitism. The Hutterites, the Muslim societies, as well as many other religious societies, are low crime societies but the necessary freedom of the individual to create and transcend is diminished.

9. Prevention of crime through social justice programs is preferable to a criminal justice proceedings. Jobs, low cost health care, housing, education, mass transit as well as non­competitive recreation should be promoted over efforts to imprison and punish.

10. Corrections activity should be oriented to productive labor, pro-social behavior and community supervision. Punitive systems of correction do not work nor are specialized parole and probation officers of much use in rehabilitation. Coworkers, supervisors, family and neighbors must work together.

Hutterites, Amish, Muslims and many other societies oriented to prosocial religions have low crime rates. Societies changing to a community oriented economy such as China, Cuba and Nicaragua have significantly lowered crime rates. Societies with adequate policing together with programs of social justice such as Sweden and Switzerland are low crime societies. Societies which exclude advertising and the expansion of false needs such as Muslim and Buddhist societies have low crime rates. Societies which use food, drink and psychogens for sacred instead of the private use have little substance abuse. These are low crime societies. They are either inspired by holy teachers or by socialist teachings. They have in common an emphasis on community and self­discipline. These societies offer the promise of a good and decent society in the U.S. However radical changes are necessary in the political economy of the U.S. in order to become a Low­Crime society. One day, the successes of crime as well as the failures of the criminal justice system will force us to consider such radical changes. I trust this presentation will be useful to such a task.