Teaching Criminology: Part III

Organized Crime: Part III of a Series especially written for graduate students in sociology by TRYoung, Director, the Red Feather Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.

A.  Definition: Organized Crime may be defined as the production and distribution of sacred supplies for profane use.

While organized criminal companies commit murder, assault, theft, arson, as well as hi-jacking, the central activity of organized crime is the business of selling drugs, sex, usury, gambling and pornography.

B.  Theory: One needs Marx, Weber, Durkheim and a lot of anthropology to understand the complexities of organized crime. Simplistic theories such as Sutherland, Merton, Hirschi, Lemert, Cohen and the usual theoretical suspects are not very helpful in that they tend to assume the political economy of organized crime; in that they tend to assume the sanctity of the goods and services delivered; in that they tend to assume the alienated sexuality and monochromatic versions of social life embedded in the protestant ethic.

C.  Durkheim is central to an understanding of organized crime. The very raison d'etre for organized crime is that the supplies they produce and distribute have been, for centuries and for millenia past, used in those dramas of the holy which call forth mechanical solidarity among men and women...mostly men.

1.  Psychogens: for most of human history, psychogens have been used as pathways to the holy. Their use for private, non-solidarity purpose has been and is being defined as sinful, corrupt, evil, criminal and pathological...depending on whether it is priests, politicians or physicians doing the defining.

2.  Corruption: there are several rules involved in definitions of corruption/crime/pathology which give organized crime a virtual monopoly on the highly profitable production and distribution of these otherwise sacred supplies.

a.  solidarity supplies are used in and only in those dramas of the holy in which the sacred is approached. Use by those who would otherwise be eligible in non-social/sacred times is defined as perversion/pathology.

b.  solidarity supplies are forbidden to non-persons: usually children, women, strangers and others with low/marginal standing in the sociology at hand.

c.  solidarity supplies used by other cultures to connect to other divinities are forbidden; their use is also defined as corrupt/criminal.

Most Christians use alcohol as the primary pathway to the holy; use of it outside depends not so much on quantity or incapacitation but upon the degree to which is threatens social solidarity activities. Since the time of Colubus, tobacco has been assimilated as a male solidarity supply...one of the few which Christians have added to their own inventory.

Islamic cultures define the use of alcohol as evil/corrupt/criminal. The pathway to the holy in Islam is, primarily prayer, meditation chanting and other physical activity which bring about 'natural' physiological changes which as with external psychogens, alter body states and thus, may be defined as proof demonstrative of the holy spirit...or as Durkheim put it, presence of the superorganic.

We define hashhish, coca derivatives, opium derivatives as well and marijuana, peyote and other psychogens as addictive drugs and ` proscribe their use even though alcohol and tobacco are more addictive and may be more harmful to physiology than these.

D.  The Political Economy of Organized Crime. Organized crime groups depend upon the sanctity of several solidarity supplies for its monopoly and its profit margins. The Protestant State acts in direct opposition to the capitalist state in this regard. The logic of capitalism is to commodify all, as Marx put it, all that is holy...but in their protestant incarnation, legislators define the non-social use; the non-person use; the non-cultural use of sacred supplies as criminal.

Corporate liberals want to decriminalize all solidarity supplies and let a much freer market work to eliminate the worse negativities of organized crime monopolies. The case is that the state could tax; the state could regulate purity; the state could replace organized crime and extract surplus value with which to manage its fiscal problems.

Organized crime depends upon the Protestant ethic more than the Spirit of capitalism if Weber will forgive me.

a.  Major Solidarity Supplies: The five solidarity supplies we Christian societies use and which we Christians qua christians want regulated to protect our own patriarchal dramas of the holy:

1.  Gambling. For most of human history, the throwing of stones and bones was used as a way to 'read' the will of god/gods. When we are in touch with the gods, the bones/stones/sticks fall in such a way that we win. Those who lose are, presumably, dis-favored of the gods.

2.  Smoking. Any number of plants carry enough natural toxins to alter body states and create altered consciousness. While smoking is traditional, injecting, ingesting, sniffing and absorbing such toxins can alter body/mind states. In the drama of the holy, one has visions which, after Durkheim, are defined as messages from the gods in answer to the central questions of being:

a)  who am I
b)  what shall I/we do about exigencies of life death, disaster, famine, drought and pestilence.
c)  where do we come from...and
d)  what is our destiny.

Now, modern science answers such questions and market liberals feel that the private use of such sacred supplies

3)  Drinking. Alcohol/wine/spirits. These are also toxins derived from plants altered a bit by bacteria to produce the necessary extra-ordinary body/mind states.

4)  Sex/sensuality. Sexual activity has been used as a solidarity suppy to sanctify several social forms: marriage, male solidarities, communal, and sometimes, congregations.

in the USA, males use food, sex, alcohol, violence and gambling in varying combination to solve solidarity problems...odd that police solidarities do so as much as those not charged with enforcing protestant values.

5)  Violence alters body states and, among workers, students, soldiers, and small boys, is used as a solidarity supply. Football began as sport among workers otherwise competing with each other for jobs, sexual access to scarce females, status and attention. Today, large universities use football to create solidarity with which to cope with the alienation of massified education.

6)  Other. Eating, dancing, breathing, singing, chanting, jumping out of airplanes, skiing running, bungeing, and a thousand variations alter body states; produce testosterone, adrenalin and other natrual endorphins can create that sense of the 'other-world' which so many of us take to be proof of the super-natural.

E.  The Religiousity of Organized Crime. What bothers most of us about organized crime is that it shatters the process by which we sanctify each to the other...is that it profanes that which we have been socialized to view as sacrament to those dramas of the holy in which we invest so much as both persons and as societies.

A Durkheimian sociology of religion does not assume the facticity of supernatural world...but it does assume the facticity of the social process called, in pre-modern sensibilities, sanctification.

In brief, those of us who wish to reserve the possibility to sanctify peoples, places and processes take the view, erroneous, that profanation of the particular ways we create solidarity cum religiousity are essential to religion.

That is, in postmodern religious sensibility, not the case. It is entirely possible to 'be/being' religious without claiming corruptions about this that or the other supply used in social solidarity.

Nor does organic solidarity suffice to the purpose. Psychological states are essential to authentic religiousity pre-, post- or modern understandings alike. We need to believe, to trust, to hope, to love, to be compassionate and to be able to transcend our own private needs and worlds.

A postmodern social philosophy would be able to make those distinctions and define as crime and corruption all that degrades and debases; not just the privatized use of psychogens to escape a painful world.

F.  Finally, I want to focus on Weber and his great insights; and translate then to a theory of organized crime in more explicit ways than might he wish.

1.  Most of the time, when we think of Weber and the Protestant ethic, we think of how he connected it to capitalism...and in particular, upon the accumulation of wealth. And that is a most valuable in- sight not to be lost in the following discussion.

2.  Were we less protestant; less oriented to wealth and power, we might well focus upon the frugality and discipline which Weber says is the social psychology fostered by Protestantism. And, were we to transmute that to questions of the color of life; the sheer joy and great zest for life that is suppressed in this most bleak religious sensibility, we might find understanding of why the demand for sex, drugs, violence/risk, gambling and other sacred supplies continues and indeed is magnified by those whose must, perforce, live out their lives in the underclass; or those who must perforce, live out their lives in a sexually repressive work, school, church, and politics.

3.  Given the capacity of psychogens...whether we learn to define their effects as ecstasy or whether they provide natural highs as do running, violence/risk and perhaps some street drugs...given those capacities to produce highs in a racist, class-ravaged, repressive sexual social life world, recourse to alcohol, heroin gang violence and other putatively sacred supplies makes sense.

Protestantism in its more puritanical formulations, provides the grounds for escape to a more exhilerating spirit world...even though we must return; even though we must suffer the physical/ physiological consequence of our efforts to transform the ugli- ness of social life into the false richness of purely private divinities.

[I want to say that I've never used drugs...nor do I want to be understood or used to justify such use. I get enough natural highs from work, teaching and the love of friends to suffice. Please look at these passages as anthropological explanations rather than self-serving apologies. My own view is that one should never put anything in one's body which does long term harm. It is just that I can understand why, in the absence of a multi-colored social life world, one would be reduced to the pale horses provided by organized crime]

CONCLUSION: Organized crime now has a virtual monopoly over the production and distribution of psychogens which brighten and redeem the bitter imperfections of life for some of us. Many market liberals want to de-criminalize those sacred supplies and allow customers to buy whatever they demand; and look aside from the efforts of marketeers to use dramaturgy to expand desire and demand. Many social liberals agree but want to replace the monopolies of organized crime with the monopolies of the state...as a way to resolve the fiscal crisis of advanced monopoly capitalism

Most crim texts pass the economics, the theologies, the anthropolies of organized crime while they focus upon the micro-sociologies of group dynamics or a safely depoliticized symbolic interactional theory.

Most criminologists, especially those in Criminal Justice Programs join with their protestant brethen to push for more control and the infliction of more pain upon a world all ready stripped of too much joie d'vivre.

If we want to move toward a low-crime society, we must have social policy which reduces the great negativities of organized crime. Transferring monopolies in gambling, prostitution, drugs and violence to the state or to the market place is, in my opinion, a most narrow solution.

Far better, it seems to me, is to work toward a social justice which redeems the imperfections of social life by removing them...rather than profitting from the management and temporary escapes from those negativities. In a word, if we don't like the profanations of organized crime, then we have to think about the re-sanctifications of organized social life.

TR Young