Marx and Engels as Criminologists |
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Born in Trier, Germany, and educated in Bonn and Berlin,
Karl Marx spent his early years as a radical journalist in socialist
circles in Cologne. Escape from repression by the authorities took him
to Paris where he teamed up with Frederick Engels. Active in the
communist movement, Marx and Engels were chased from one European
capital to another by police and censors. They finally settled in
England in 1849 where Marx, financially supported by his family and
Engels, devoted himself to his great work Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Marx is the towering figure of modern social theory. It is no exaggeration to claim that all subsequent social theory is a debate with his legacy. His influence extends far beyond the critique of politics, philosophy and political economy which is the foundation of Historical Materialism. Marx and his collaborator Engels were not Victorian philanthropists, seeking to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism in order to guarantee its survival; they were revolutionaries concerned to analyse the dynamics of 19th century capitalism for the purpose of understanding how it was to be superseded by a communist society. We should therefore not be surprised to find no proposals for crime reduction or legal reform in the manner of Bentham or Beccaria. The study of crime was peripheral to their main project. Marx himself wrote relatively little on crime and certainly nothing systematic on a par with his critique of political economy. Engels wrote more elaborately, with some acute observations on crime in the Manchester slums of the 1840s. Probably the best starting point for understanding the contribution of Marx and Engels in that of methodology. Marx followed the great early nineteenth century philosopher Hegel in a critique of abstract ways of thinking. Hegel (in 1817) had written a remarkable little essay in which he chose the example of the murderer on the way to the guillotine pointing out that the seemingly concrete label of 'the criminal' was in fact an abstraction obtained only by annulling ‘all other human essence in him with this simple quality’. Hegel thus turned on its head the common sense idea of abstract and concrete thought showing that 'concrete facts' – in this case the criminal - are often abstractions based on the suppression of numerous other characteristics and perspectives. Only through an investigation of the latter can we begin to approach the concrete character of phenomena Marx and Engels then turned Hegel on his head, replacing
'reason' as the motor of history with the material processes of
political economy and class conflict. But the methodological insight
remained and, like Hegel, they referred to crime as an example of
abstract thinking which remains only at the level of the immediate
appearances of things. In an early critique of German idealist
philosophy they wrote: ‘The same visionaries who see in right and law
the domination of some independently existing, general will can see in
crime the mere violation of right and law’ (Marx and Engels 1845: 358).
This perspective is crucial for a Marxist approach to crime. Firstly,
the notion that the criminal law is a normative system independent of
social forces and conflicts and crime simply its violation, is a case
of abstract thinking: of remaining at the level of appearances and
eliminating the social forces and conflicts which give crime and the
criminal law their real content. By contrast the essential nature of a
phenomenon is precisely something that can only be concluded as a
result of a detailed understanding. In the case of crime this involves
a study of how forms of criminal law emerge in specific historical
situations, whose interests they serve, the relationships between
various types of criminal offenders and the state, the victims and the
various groups in the rest of the population and the power relations
between them. And of course, secondly, the most important of such
relationships is the conflict between classes and in which "the ideas
of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas." (Marx and
Engels 1845: 60). [For further discussion of these issues read the first chapter of my book Crime and Modernity 2002] Marx started to develop this approach to crime in some early (1842) newspaper articles on the law on the theft of wood passed by the Rhineland parliament in 1842 turning what had once been a traditional right of forest dwellers to gather fallen wood into a criminal offence. He wrote that the law ‘has reduced the legislative power, administrative authority, the person of the accused, the idea of the State, even the crime and its punishment, to the evil instruments of private interests’ (Marx 1842). Thus the fixed abstractions of 'crime' and 'criminal' dissolve into the complexities of the class relations between, on the one hand, the aspirant Rhineland bourgeoisie in its attempts to extend the new capitalist relations of production to the forests and woodlands and, on the other, the peasants determined to exercise their traditional customary right to gather fallen wood. It can only then be fully understood how the relationship between the forest owners and the poor takes the particular form of crime and why certain activities should become criminalised As the historian Peter Linebaugh (1976) remarked, it was his investigation of the stolen wood episode that awakened the young Marx to his ignorance of political economy and it is of course in this direction that he moved. In Capital Marx developed his analysis of the accumulation of capital in which the latter appears on the surface in its monetary form as investment funds and profits but through increasingly detailed and concrete analysis (stretching to three volumes) he is able to show that what is at work is a complex social relation between capitalists and workers in which the source of the former's profit is the surplus labour of the latter. This relationship of class conflict, sometimes overt and
sometimes nascent, lies at the heart of the process of capital
accumulation which is the motor of modern capitalist society. Capital
was Marx's life's work and crime was certainly not its central focus.
However the role of crime does feature in various places and very much
in terms of the methodology we have outlined. For example in the
treatment of the emergence of the historical preconditions for
capitalism by the pillaging of feudal estates and the enforced
commercialisation of common land Marx includes a concrete analysis of
the dynamics of criminalisation of the poor: "The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this 'free' proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as 'voluntary' criminals and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed (Marx 1867: 915)
Thus the violence of those powerful groups who organised the plunder of landed property and common land is not recorded as 'crime' while, at the same time, those forced off the land were transformed into criminals and then treated as if it was their own responsibility and wilful criminality to continue attempting the exercise of traditional rights. Crime therefore, like any other social or legal 'fact' has to be deconstructed into the detailed context within which it occurs. This is not to reduce criminality to the status of a distortion of reality but to rather provide a detailed perspective on how, in a specific context, particular social relations take the form of 'crime'. An important consequence of this methodology is the refusal of any general theory of the 'causes of crime'. Marx was interested in particular forms of criminality in specific historical contexts as a reflection of the socio-economic forces at work at the time. In recent times one of the most important applications of this method was the emergence of the concept of 'social crime' in the work of the British Marxist historians Edward Thompson and his colleagues during the mid 1970s (Hay et al. 1976) Inspired by Marx's brief essay on the Theft of Wood, they showed how criminal activity such as poaching and pilfering in18th Century rural England were forms of resistance to the advance of capitalist farming, the decline of traditional rights with the enclosure of common lands–very much as in the German forests about which Marx wrote. Critics argued this was simply legitimising crime (see Langbein 1983). But Thompson et al. argued that the blurred boundaries between 'good' and 'bad' crime reflected the context in which no clear alternative legal political method was available through which to resist the advance of capitalist property relations. As resistance to the determined suppression of traditional rights through criminal law 'social crime' was something quite distinct. The blurred boundaries, rather than showing an unwillingness to call a crime a crime, in fact reflected the complex and shifting social conditions of the time and the embeddedness of both criminal law and its violation in those conditions. It was not that what appeared as crime was 'really' political resistance. The point is that neither concept had yet clarified its boundaries in the context of the rural turbulence of 18th Century England (see Lea 1999 - you can read a version of this article here as well as a development of some of these themes by Trevor Bark). The establishment of modern urban capitalist society brings
the modern forms of criminality of the poor. Here Engels' famous study
of working class Manchester in the 1840s (Engels 1845) was a major
contribution. He gives a sophisticated account of the various
dimensions of criminality amongst a working class living an
impoverished, precarious existence in the slums of the early industrial
revolution with little means of political redress available. On
the one hand much theft can be seen as a primitive form of
pre-political rebellion, an expression of rage "The working-man lived in poverty and want, and saw that others were better off than he. It was not clear to his mind why he, who did more for society than the rich idler, should be the one to suffer under these conditions. Want conquered his inherited respect for the sacredness of property, and he stole...." (Engels 1845: 502-3) But Engels is careful not to fit all types of working class
crime into the straightjacket of rebellion. In particular he pays
attention to prostitution, sexual harassment and domestic violence as
features of working class family and working life which he sees as
forms of brutalisation resulting from the destruction of family life by
the long hours of work and intolerable living conditions which
characterised the early stages of industrialisation. (see Lea
1996) Nevertheless overall it is capitalism itself that has produced
the conditions for criminality in the form of a 'war of all against
all': "In this country, social war is under full headway, every one stands for himself, and fights for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calculation as to what is most advantageous for himself. It no longer occurs to any one to come to a peaceful understanding with his fellow-man; all differences are settled by threats, violence, or in a law court.... This war of each against all, of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, need cause us no surprise, for it is only the logical sequel of the principle involved in free competition." [Engels 1845: 427] From this perspective Engels also gives graphic accounts of
white collar crimes such as food adulteration, intolerable factory
health and safety conditions and workplace rape of female employees by
employers. What is important in Engels' analysis is that crime is not a
result of the breakdown of social relations, it is rather one of the
necessary forms they take in the circumstances of the time. As Steven
Marcus, in his biography of Engels, wrote, crime is "in the first place, much too intimately connected with the values and norms it violates to be considered as simply anomic in respect to them; and secondly, no behaviour that is both an inversion and a parody of another can be properly or fully understood as a deviant form of the latter." (Marcus 1974: 223) In short, the crime documented by Engels is an expression of
the social relations of early capitalism, part of its normality. In
recent years criminologists who conclude that crime has again become
normalised can usefully refer back to Engels' treatment. [for a more
extended treatment of Engels read my article here] Most schools of Radical Criminology would claim some affinity with Marx and/or Engels. (for an overview see Greenberg ed. 1993) Often this amounts to a rather general orientation stressing the role of class conflict and the economic depredations of capitalism in the causation of crime. An early example is the Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger whose studies of capitalism and crime at the beginning of the 20th century stressed the culture of egoism and self interest in a similar way to Engels. Another theme has been the power of ruling classes and elites as a factor in the dynamics of criminalisation and the effective decriminalisation of criminal actions by the powerful, including the state. Examples would be the work of William Chambliss (1976) and Richard Quinney (1977) However, probably the most important conclusion is that the general perspective on crime derived from the work of Marx and Engels has a particular salience for the present situation. One of the major features of global capitalism today is the progressive blurring of the boundaries between criminality, warfare, politics, legitimate business activity and other forms of human interaction. A similar process of blurring is evident in the relation between politics, law, state sovereignty and criminal responsibility. As far as criminology is concerned, all perspectives which start from an insistence on the unproblematic and fixed boundaries of crime and then proceed with the search for its general causes are increasingly unable to analyse these complexities and shifting boundaries. The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Illych Lenin summed up much of what has been said above about Marx's approach when he said that "the soul of Marxism is the concrete analysis of a concrete situation". Quite apart from the revolutionary associations of Marxism and its 'yet to be realised' aspirations, this approach is arguably more open to the fluid contours of 21st Century conflicts
Major Writings: Marx, K. (1867/1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (volume 1). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Bonger, W. A. (1905/1969). Criminality and Economic Conditions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. © John Lea 2009 |