Week 14 - Marxist Criminology

Traditional Criminological Theories

Crime is caused by individual behavior, biology, environments, socialization, etc

• Often neglects social contexts to crime (SUCH AS POWER DYNAMICS)

What does labelling theory open the door to?

Critical theories of crime

• Looks at how the state criminalizes people (deviance as subjective)

Themes of Critical Criminology

Challenging positivist approaches

Identifying power structures

Analyzing crime as an outcome of inequality

Theoretical Orientation of Marxist Criminology

Crime can’t be understood without an analysis of the context of a society

• Looks at how social structures reproduce crime

• Causal relationship between crime and society

• Crime is dependent on how society organizes itself

Values of Society according to Marxism

MARXISTS DON’T ACCEPT THE IDEA THAT SOCIETY IS ROOTED IN CONSENSUS

• Society is inherently conflictual; classes conflict with one another

Crime and punishment are the outcome of the division of classes

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

German intellectuals, political economists, historians, and activists

“The Communist Manifesto” (Marx & Engels, 1848)

• Ideas shifted political theory, social/economic/intellectual thought

Historical Materialism

History and human social institutions (law, morality, social bonds) all emerged from a developing economic system

• Economic forces are the “motor of history.”

The economic system has the most influence over the way society is organised

Capitalism

focused as the prevailing economic system of the time

A system that is based on the application of labour to produce commodities to generate profit

• Produces social relations that explain why crime occurs

• Feudalism came before capitalism

Primitive Accumulation

Violent process where common land was taken from peasants and privatized

• Resulted in the shift from feudalism to capitalism

• Rural populations dispossessed of their lands

• e.x. Common land for peasants to fish was taken

Resulted in a new working class

• Sold labour for wages to survive

Capitalism originates from the crime of primitive accumulation

• Original “sin” of capitalism

• Capitalism is therefore inherently criminal