Marxism

Question 1

4 points

Answer 1

1) Capitalism is criminogenic

2) All classes commit crime, and crimes of the capitalist are costly

3) The law is made up of the capitalist elite

4) The state practices selective law enforcement

Question 2

Capitalism is criminogenic

Answer 2

Marxists believe that capitalism brews criminality.

Many Marxists think that crime is effectively caused by capitalism as we are outgrowing the system.

Question 3

David Gordon

Answer 3

Gordon believed that capitalist societies are ‘dog eat dog’ societies, in that each individual (and companies) are encouraged to look out for their own interests before the interests of others, the community, and even before the protection of the environment.

If we look at the Capitalist system, what we find is that not only does it recommend that we engage in the self-interested pursuit of profit is good, we learn that it is acceptable to harm others and the environment in the process.

Question 4

Pursuit of self-interest

Answer 4

In Capitalist societies, there is immense competitive pressure to make more money, to be more successful, and to make more profit, because in a competitive system, this is the only way to ensure survival.

In such a context, breaking the law can seem insignificant compared to the pressure to succeed and pressures to break the law affect all people: from the investment banker to the unemployed gang member.

Marxists theorise that the values of the Capitalist system filter down to the rest of our culture. Think again about the motives of economic criminals: The burglars, the robbers, and the thieves. What they are doing is seeking personal gain without caring for the individual victims.

Question 5

Materialism

Answer 5

Coca Cola and McDonald’s spend billions of dollars every year on advertising, morphing their products into fantastical images that in no way resemble the grim reality of the products. Advertising is a long way beyond merely providing us with information about a product; it has arguably become the art of disinformation.

Corporations benefit through advertising, and modern Capitalism could not exist without the culture of consumerism that the advertising industry perpetuates, and activities have pointed to many downsides. One of the most obvious is that the world of advertising presents as normal a lifestyle that may be unattainable for many people in British Society.

Question 6

Merton and Nightingale

Answer 6

Merton and Nightingale have pointed out that for some the desire to achieve the success goals of society outweigh the pressure to obey the law, advertising only adds to this strain between the legitimate means and the goal of material success.

Question 7

Capitalism, inequality, and crime

Answer 7

Rothkopf calls the ‘Superclass’, mainly the people who run global corporations, and at the very bottom we have the lower class (in the developed world) and the slum dwellers, the street children and the refugees in the developing world.

Bauman points out that the super wealthy effectively segregate themselves from the wealthy, through living in exclusive gated communities and travelling in private jets and armoured vehicles with security entourages. If people can afford it, they move to a better area, and send their children to private schools. However, this doesn’t prevent the poor and the rich from living side by side.

Question 8

Justified?

Answer 8

The visible evidence of mass inequalities gives the people at the bottom a sense of injustice, anger, and frustration that great wealth is being flaunted in their faces.

Chambliss even goes so far as to say that economic crime ‘’represents rational responses to the competitiveness and inequality of life in capitalist societies”.

Question 9

Parry - Island of Anuta

Answer 9

Parry visited the extremely egalitarian Island of Anuta and found that there was extremely lowered crime rate in these egalitarian societies.

Question 10

The law benefits the elite and works in their interests

Answer 10

Manheim writes that “The history of criminal legislation in England and in many countries shows that an excessive prominence was given by law to the protection of property. ”

Question 11

Evidence for the law benefiting the elite and their interests…

Answer 11

Property rights are much more securely established in law than the collective rights of, for instance, trade unions.

Property law clearly benefits the wealthy more than those with no property. William Chambliss has argued that ‘at the heart of the Capitalist system lies the protection of Private Property.

Consider the fact that there are roughly 100,000 people recognised as homeless in the United Kingdom, and 300, 000 houses lying empty.

The rights of the property owners to keep their properties empty are put before the rights of the needy to shelter.

Question 12

Health and Safety laws

Answer 12

Snider (1993) argues that Capitalist states are reluctant to pass laws which regulate large capitalist concerns and which might threaten profitability.

Having tried so hard to attract investment the last thing the state wants to do is alienate the large corporations. The state is thus reluctant to pass – or enforce – laws against such things as pollution, worker health and safety and monopolies.

While the lack of regulation in these areas is obvious in the third world, in most of Europe, there are many laws protection the environment and health and safety, but fines for them are relatively low.

Until 2007, no individual member of a corporation could be prosecuted for damaging the environment or endangering worker safety through corporate practise.

Question 13

People have unequal access to the law…

Answer 13

Having money to hire a good lawyer can delay trials, meaning the difference between being found not guilty or guilty, and influence the length of one’s sentence and the type of prison one goes to.

Thus for Marxists, punishment for a crime may depend and vary according to the social class of the perpetrator. Poorer criminals tend to receive harsher punishments than rich criminals.

Mark Thatcher received only a suspended sentence for assisting mercenaries in a military coup against a democratically elected government.

Question 14

Neo-Marxists

Answer 14

Neo-Marxists took onboard some of the criticisms, particularly concerning the apparent passivity of the working class. Neo-Marxists recognised that working-class criminals made an active choice to break the law.

However, they argued that sometimes this was a positive political act against the bourgeoisie: e.g. the Black Panthers – a radical black rights group in the US in the 1960s and 1970s who did engage in criminal activity in the course of their political activism. This neo-Marxist approach to crime and deviance became known as critical criminology or, sometimes, radical criminology.

Question 15

New Criminology

Answer 15

The New Criminology (1976) tried to establish the “fully social theory of deviance”.

When considering any deviant act, they argued that Marxists should consider:
> The structure of society and where power resides
> The structural “macro” background to the deviant act
> The immediate cause of the deviant act and the act itself
> The impact of the act (both immediate and on a larger scale)
> The societal reaction to the act (this links closely with interactionist explanations of crime, deviance, social order and social control)
> The impact of that reaction (both on the individual and on society)

This conceptual outline shows the clear influence of interactionism on their approach, despite their analysis being clearly Marxist. Concepts like labelling (to be explored in a future section) are key to this approach to crime and deviance.

Question 16

Application of theory

Answer 16

Stuart Hall (1978) applied the critical criminology approach to black muggers in the 1970’s UK. His arguments will also be considered when we explore the social distribution of crime by ethnicity and the media and crime; but some key findings were:

There was what Marxists call a “crisis of capitalism” (an economic recession).

The resulting unemployment had a disproportionate impact on black people, some of whom chose to enter the informal economy (aspects of which involved crime) rather than do “white man’s shit work”.

The ruling class sought to divide the working class to prevent anti-capitalist political activism: turning white workers against black workers was one approach to this.

A moral panic about street crime by black people was fostered, leading to a crackdown by the police and a crime wave fantasy (see the media and crime).

This was one means by which revolution or radical political change was prevented.

Question 17

Evaluation

Answer 17

Only a very small portion of crime could be considered as politically-motivated or part of anti-capitalist activism. While theorists might attach such a motive to all manner of crime (from burglary to vandalism), it rarely seems to be a motive that criminals themselves would claim.

Left realists point out that most victims of crime are working class. Therefore, Marxists should produce solutions to the problem of crime, rather than simply trying to understand (and, some would suggest, excuse) working-class criminals.

Some argue that Stuart Hall’s theory about black muggers is a conspiracy theory. Nobody could prove that anyone deliberately set out to divide the working-class to prevent revolution. Even Hall himself recognised that a significant factor in the media’s decision to sensationalise such crimes was because it sold newspapers rather than prevented revolutions.

Question 18

White-collar crime

Answer 18

White collar crime simply means crimes committed by the “middle class” (as opposed to “blue collar” workers it is generally used to describe the crimes most associated with the middle class, for example, fraud and tax evasion. There are less likely to be convictions in relation to many white collar crimes because they are harder to detect.

Victims are often diffused (e.g. there might be thousands of victims of a fraud, who may never be aware that a crime has taken place). The crime is often committed at a distance, perhaps by computer, rather than face to face.

Question 19

Corporate crime

Answer 19

Corporate crime refers specifically to crimes committed by companies rather than individuals, although individuals might well be found to have ultimate criminal responsibility, e.g. the CEO. Most commonly, corporate crimes will involve fraud or tax evasion.

Historically, these crimes have not been routinely prosecuted and, even where companies have been held accountable for these crimes, it is often through arrangements outside the criminal justice system.

Question 20

These crimes are costly…

Answer 20

Marxists argue that although they are hidden from view, the crimes of the elite exert a greater economic toll on society than the crimes of the ‘ordinary people’.

Snider (1993) points out that the cost of White Collar Crime and Corporate Crime to the economy far outweighs the cost of street crime by ‘typical’ criminals.

Two contemporary organisations: Multinational Monitor and Corporate Watch, specialise in documenting the illegal activities of corporations.

Question 21

Cost of fraud

Answer 21

The General Accounting Agency of the USA has estimated that hundreds of savings and loans companies have failed in recent years due to insider dealing, failure to disclose accurate information, and racketeering.

The cost to the taxpayer in the USA of corporate bail outs is estimated to be around $500 billion, or $5000 per household in the USA.

Question 22

Ideological functions

Answer 22

David Gordon argues that the police mainly focus on policing working class (and underclass) areas and the justice system mainly focuses on prosecuting working and underclass criminals.

The system ignores the crimes of the elite and the middle classes, although both of these classes are just as likely to commit crime as the working classes.

Question 23

Disproportionate prosecution

Answer 23

Gordon argues that the disproportionate prosecution of working class criminals ultimately serves to maintain ruling-class power and to reinforce ruling class ideology (thus performing ‘ideological functions’ for the ruling class).

Question 24

3 benefits of law enforcement for capitalism

Answer 24

According to Gordon ‘selective law enforcement’ benefits the Capitalist system in three major ways:

1) By punishing individuals and making them responsible for their actions, defining these individuals as ‘social failures’ we ignore the failings of the system that lead to the conditions of inequality and poverty that create the conditions which lead to crime.

2) The imprisonment of selected members of the lower classes neutralises opposition to the system.

3) The imprisonment of many members of the underclass also sweeps out of sight the ‘worst jetsam of Capitalist society’ such that we cannot see it.

We may also add a fourth benefit, that all of the police, court and media focus on working class street crime means that our attention is diverted away from the immorality and greed of the elite classes.

Question 25

Strengths and weaknesses

Answer 25

The Marxist solution is simple yet monumental: capitalism creates crime, if capitalism is the problem, then the solution is clear, get rid of capitalism.

☹ Marxists tend to view the behaviour of individuals as largely governed by external forces. Thus their accounts are somewhat deterministic. Some theorists argue that individuals retain free will, which enables them to decide whether they want to commit crime.

☹ Marxists tend to represent working class crime as a creative response to oppression when reality is that much working class crime is directed at working class people. Moreover, they do not fully explain why all working class people do not commit crime.

☹ It seems to ignore the individual motivation. The stress is primarily on the nature of capitalism and how economic factors ‘force’ people to act in certain ways.

☹ It seems implausible to explain all laws in terms of the interests of the ruling elite; many laws appear to rest on general agreement.

☹ Socialist states also have high crime rates at least as great as our own.

Question 26

Madoff’s $65 billion fraud

Answer 26

Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 counts of fraud, theft and money laundering. The sentencing, in what has been one of the biggest frauds ever seen on Wall Street, was eagerly anticipated. Described by victims in written testimony as a “thief and a monster”, Madoff has become an emblem for the greed that pitched the world into recession. Nearly 9,000 victims have filed claims for losses in Madoff’s corrupt financial empire.

Madoff masterminded a huge “Ponzi” scheme. Instead of investing client’s money in securities, it was held with a bank and new deposits used to pay bogus returns to give the impression that the business was successful. At the time of his arrest in December, he claimed to manage $65bn of investors’ money, but in reality there was just $1bn left.

Corporate America has suffered a series of massive frauds during the past decade, including scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and more recently the financial empire run by Texas billionaire Allen Stanford. Former WorldCom chief Benrard Ebbers is serving 25 years for accounting fraud. Former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling was sentenced to more than 24 years in prison although the sentence was overturned. He remains in prison awaiting resentencing.