by Julian Salisbury

Created on: April 22, 2008

We have too much crime, a burgeoning prison population and a level of disorder on our streets that is completely unacceptable. Criminality is damaging to society in a material sense, as well as in a social sense. Our property may be stolen or damaged and we can feel vulnerable in our communities and homes. So what solutions have sociologists offered to this seemingly insoluble social problem?

Marxism

Karl Marx offered both a structural and a moral explanation of crime. For him, the structural causes of crime would be remedied once the proletarian revolution had achieved the destruction of the capitalist system. Capitalism, with all its inequities, alienates man from his work and the productive process. The surplus value (profit) he creates is appropriated by a social class who privately owns the means of production (land, factories and machinery). This system places the subordinate class in a position where they sometimes have no choice but to break the law in order make ends meet. The fact that the law is made by, and for those who own property, is also made even more punitive through the biased administration of class based justice. In a classless society where all share the same relationship to the means of production, human nature would revert back to its altruistic and collectivist form and social control would largely become redundant. So, if we want a solution for crime, we need revolutionary change.

Although capitalism sits comfortably unchallenged radical ideologies like Marxism, Socialism or Anarchism, not all Marx's views sound so redundant. Marx argued that the Lumpenproletariat was responsible for much crime and he had no qualms about pathologising them. In fact, he referred to this group as a "passive, rotting mass, of social scum; a dangerous reactionary class whose highest form of political action was mob violence." Constituents of this group included prostitutes and brothel keepers: beggars, tricksters, rag pickers, bone collectors, discharged sailors, jail-birds and thieves. For Marx, they deserved no sympathy. So for Marx, there were those who had a moral and cultural deficit that were beyond salvation.

It is perhaps ironic that neo-conservatives like Charles Murray, Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher were echoing sentiments shared by Marx as recently as the 1980's. The New Right solution for these types of undeserving poor are forms of social control that seek to deprive them their welfare cheques (or Chip and Pin cards today), their cheap

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