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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
A. Political crime seldom
appears in crim texts. Intro texts and social problems texts make mention of genocide but
mostly descriptive/exemplary cases are given. In this outline of a postmodern criminology,
I would like to define and list the forms of political crime.
Most of what appears in this section and prior discourse on postmodern criminology
presumes some substantive definition of crime grounded upon a very different social
philosophy than is ordinarily the case...I will go on to this more affirmative approach to
postmodern sensibility in the next series of lectures...which will appear on the Red
Feather Institute Home Page---with but a paragraph abstract posted on socgrad as promised
last Fall.
B. Definition: Political
crime is that use of power to reproduce structures of domination. there are five major
structures which inform/fuel most of the political crime in the 21st century;
| 1. Patriarchy | 2. Racism | 3. National Chauvinism |
| 4. Class exploitation/alienation | 5. Ageism | |
Notice I did not mention inequality as do most radical criminologists. I think
that some inequality may well be helpful to the human estate; I accept the notion of
necessary repression and as with Marcuse, prefer to speak of surplus repression in the use
of power inequalities.
IN the final part of this series, I will lay out a philosophy of science/knowledge which I
use to ground affirmative postmodern criminology....in it, there is the notion of a
bifurcation of key variables which tend to create new magnitudes and new forms of crime.
It is the point at which inequality [as one such key variable] bifurcates that we should
be looking for rather than inequality per se.
C. Forms of power.
I use four forms of power with which to sort out political crime. Note that different combinations of power are used with different forms of crime.
1. Social power...that power to shape the behavior of others who occupy/share
status-roles. Social power is essential to all social life. And power differentials are
essential to all socialization and all 'necessary' repression.
However, some uses of social power are oriented to surplus repression...to
exploitation...to degradation of the human project. When social power is thus used,
political crime takes substantive form.
Fraud, sexual harrassment, theft, and racism all have to do with social power;
its presence or absence.
2. Moral power. Even without specific social relationships, we can shape the behavior of
unknown others by recourse to moral power.
I define moral power as that response to the moral structure to which people are
socialized. Usually moral systems have a religious grounding. Even so, given moral systems
are, in part, criminal. Patriarchy is a moral system in which women are subordinated and
in which men arrogate social power to male domination.
Many religions support, in part, criminality. Those which permit believers to exploit
other peoples; to repress other religious forms; to gloss racism, sexist preferences,
slavery and economic exploitation take on a criminality not well registered in most crim
texts/theories.
3. Economic power. Those who control access to real or acquired needs have great power to
shape the behavior of others. In our time, economic power is registered in currencies but
there are many non-market goods and services which can be used to coerce people to demean
and degrade themselves and others.
Much of the crime in class inequality comes about through the deployment of wealth in such
a way to reproduce structures of domination.
I want to make it clear that capitalism, per se, does not fuel economic crime...market
systems, investment schemes, economic inequality could be harnessed to larger social
purpose than is now the case in the 20th century but one should not confuse between
economic inequality per se and the degrading uses of inequality itself.
4. Physical power. I disagree that all power reduces to
physical power; indeed, my view is that legitimacy, social peace and domestic tranquility
derives more from social justice and egalitarian norms than gun-powder, coercion or
battering.
Physical power can, indeed, generate short-term compliance and reluctant co-operation but
the social process, requiring belief, trust, faith and compassion is hostile to the tenure
of coercive systems.
Then too, those at the bottom of stratification systems; class, race, gender and
ethnic...retain physical power as a last resort to social emancipation.
Much street crime can be understood in these terms; middle class and/or dominant groups
have social, moral and economic power with which to meet desire and demand. Those in the
underclass retain physical power and more often then not, deploy it in pre-theoretic
ways...in ways we call street crime. That middle class people don't commit robbery,
burglary, mug or rape people does not yield moral superiority when they abuse trust to
embezzle, defraud, exploit or coerce.
It is true that high-tech systems of power--military power in particular are a problem to
the powerless...but even in the most racist, ethno-centric systems, there are people who
criticize the deployment/alienation of all forms of power.
D. Forms of Political Crime.
I usually make distinction between privatized political crime and
institutionalized political crime. Rape is an example of the first while warfare exemplar
of the second.
Personalized Political Crime: Assault, rape, battering,
beating, mugging, robbery, extortion, murder and threat of violence generally.
Institutional political crime: racism, sexism, religious bigotry; elitist forms of
governance, of work, of education and of communications.
Elitist forms of art, science, music, drama, dance, cinema, play, poetry and literature
generally are political crime when other, different forms of culture are denigrated,
discouraged and/or ranked using putatively universal norms and standards.
warfare deserves special attention in affirmative postmodern criminology. I identify six
waves/forms of warfare which interact and overlap in human history...most devoted to
exploitation of wealth and/or imposition of honorific stratifications:
1. Predatory warfare: from the raiding parties of clan
and tribe to the periodic excursions into gang warfare, predatory crime reaches across
history and bursts out in putatively modern societies.
2. Wars of Feudal Conquest: periodic predation converts into feudal domination when some
part of a victorious army is left behind to extract feudal taxes and labor.
3. Wars of Commercial Colonialism: Core countries send armies to far away places to
guarantee access to land, resources, markets and labor.
4. Wars of Capitalist Rebellion: from the time of Cromwell in 1640 to the German
revolution in 1840, capitalists join with peasants to over- throw feudalities.
5. Wars of Colonial Liberation: From the American Revolution to the present, wars against
colonial/capitalist core countries have marked the last two hundred years or so.
6. Wars of Socialist 'liberation:' From the October Revolution in Russia to the victory
last week in Zaire/Congo, marxist/socialist revolutionaries have sought state power in
order to change relations of production.
E. Most crim texts ignore most political crime;
especially warfare leaving it to political science and to history texts.
Most theories of crime focus upon low-level psychological variables/orientations.
Addition of political crime to the inventory/content of crim texts would require major
revisions/upgrades of theory.
Conclusion: More people die in warfare than any other form of crime; more property is
vandalized; more wealth stolen in warfare than in all other forms of crime combined. Why
it is ignored by most criminologists is testimony to the ideological flaws and defaults in
American Criminology inherited from socio-biology, physiology, reductionist psychology and
depoliticized social psychology.
A major task for postmodern criminology in the 21st century is to add content and theory
to the discipline.
Next and last, a postmodern criminology grounded upon the new sciences of
chaos/complexity.
TR Young