Evaluation of traditional Marxism Flashcards
Strengths 1
✓ Offers a useful structural explanation of the relationship between crime & capitalist society & shows the link between law making & enforcement for the interests of the capitalist class.
✓ It usefully puts the insights of labelling theory into a wider structural context regarding the selective enforcement of the law and power issues within society.
✓ It usefully helps to explain why people commit crime from all social classes – e.g. the working class because of poverty & the ruling class because of greed.
✓ It usefully helps to explain both utilitarian and non-utilitarian crimes – e.g. stealing because of relative deprivation & drunken violence because of frustration due to exploitation.
strengths 2
✓ It is true that health & safety laws are frequently ignored & the benefits are few, yet these fool people into thinking the government has their interests at heart, which is a means of social control through false class consciousness.
✓ Fewer people are victims of street crime than of corporate crime and although the poor do commit crime, more effort should be made to reduce corporate crime, which involves larger sums of money and arguably does more damage to society.
✓ Marxism has usefully influenced recent approaches to the study of the crimes of the powerful, e.g. Slapper & Tombs argue that corporate crime is under-policed & rarely prosecuted or punished severely which encourages companies to use crime as a means of making profit.
weaknesses 1
× It largely ignores the relationship between crime & important non-class inequalities such as ethnicity & gender. Feminists would argue traditional Marxism is ‘malestream’.
× It is too deterministic & over-predicts the amount of crime in the working class – not all poor people commit crime, despite the pressures of poverty.
× Do all laws exist primarily for the bourgeoisie? What about laws against drink driving & GBH? Laws protect all social classes, not just the rich. The poor are particularly helped by health & safety laws and the benefits system.
weaknesses 2
× Not all capitalist societies have high crime rates, e.g. Switzerland has much less crime than the USA (e.g. the homicide rate is about 4 times less), so capitalism cannot be the only reason for higher crime rates. (However, as Marxists point out, societies with little or no state welfare provision, such as the USA, tend to have higher crime rates.)
× Street crime is more frightening to victims than fraud, which is not face-to-face, so it should be punished more harshly.
× It is inconsistent to imply that police unjustifiably target working-class areas & at the same time admit that poverty leads the proletariat to commit crime. Are the working-classes committing more crime or are the not?
× Left realists argue that Marxism ignores intra-class crimes (where both the criminals & victims are working class) such as burglary & ‘mugging’, which cause great harm to victims.
