Teaching Criminology: Part VI

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;

Notice I did not mention inequality as do most radical crimin- ologists. 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:

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.

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 crim 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