Abstract
An overview of a Marxian approach to crime and justice is set forth. The paper offers a brief critique of theory in American criminology in Part I as well as a critique of the distorted ways in which American criminology permits crime to be defined in Part II. Part III sets forth several Marxian propositions on the origins of crime in a variety of differing modes of production emphasizing the social sources of crime in capitalist systems. This section also lays out the parallel justice systems which protect sectors of the capitalist economy from the criminal justice system. Part IV suggests some features of low crime societies would be helpful as policy guides in high crime societies. |
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.