03 Section B Option 1, Key question 3 - Marxism and radical criminology (part 2)

Capitalism and pressures to offend

Marxist criminology asks how the organisation of economic life can encourage crime across social classes.

Capitalism is an economic system in which productive resources, such as businesses, are largely privately owned and production is organised for profit. Owners control resources that many other people must work for wages to access. A Marxist account therefore starts with unequal ownership, competing interests and unequal power, rather than assuming that crime is simply the result of defective individuals.

There are several possible connections. Insecurity and low income can make an illegal way of obtaining necessities appear attractive when lawful alternatives seem inadequate. An emphasis on material success can also encourage the pursuit of goods or status that legitimate earnings cannot provide. Frustration and lack of control may contribute to hostility, although a further explanation is needed to show why frustration becomes a particular violent act.

The argument also applies to people who have ample resources. Competition for contracts, profits or promotion can reward concealment and cost cutting. In an original teaching example, a profitable manufacturer can increase its margin by secretly using a legally prohibited cheap ingredient. Its managers are not stealing to survive: their organisational position supplies the opportunity, and pressure to improve returns supplies a possible motive. The causal claim is about the organisation of incentives, not the personal poverty of every offender.

Willem Bonger, in Criminality and Economic Conditions (English translation, 1916; original work, 1905), argued that economic relations could weaken solidarity and cultivate self-interest. He examined existing literature and historical statistics, rather than conducting a modern experiment. His argument gives an early account of why acquisitive wrongdoing could occur among both disadvantaged and privileged groups. Its historical material cannot by itself establish the causes of crime in Britain today. Bonger's original text

A useful distinction is between a pressure and a sufficient cause. A pressure may increase the attractiveness of an act, but it does not explain why two people facing similar conditions make different decisions. Nor does explaining an incentive remove the offender's responsibility for harm. These questions become important when comparing more structural explanations with radical criminology.

Law, powerful offenders and selective enforcement

Marxists examine both who commits harmful acts and who acquires an official criminal label.

Criminalisation is the process through which conduct and people are defined and treated as criminal. At the law-making stage, societies select which actions are criminal offences and how they are classified. Protecting private property also protects the ownership on which capitalist production depends. A Marxist asks whose interests have greatest influence over these decisions and which harmful practices fall outside criminal law. However, a lawful action is not automatically a crime just because a sociologist considers it harmful.

At the enforcement stage, police, regulators, prosecutors and courts apply existing law. Selective enforcement means that the likelihood of investigation or sanction can vary between offences and groups. Visible street offending may be easier to detect than wrongdoing hidden in complicated accounts. Organisational control of information and access to legal expertise can make investigation difficult. These are mechanisms to investigate, rather than proof that every difference in prosecution is deliberate class discrimination. Evidence, offence seriousness and reporting also affect outcomes.

William Chambliss's 1975 article, Toward a political economy of crime, argued for examining crime and law through political and economic relationships, including the state's uneven application of law. This is a conflict explanation: the interests of groups with unequal power may differ. It challenges an account in which every criminal law simply expresses an equally shared consensus. Chambliss's original article summary

White-collar crime, in its classic sociological sense, is crime committed by a person of high status and respectability in the course of their occupation. Corporate crime is offending committed through an organisation in pursuit of its interests. They overlap, but a senior employee secretly stealing from their employer for personal benefit differs from managers arranging an illegal practice to benefit the firm. Powerful actors may have access to forms of fraud or environmental offending unavailable to someone without organisational authority. Class can therefore shape the type and concealment of crime as well as the risk of being caught. FBI account of the classic definition

Power does not guarantee immunity. On 29 January 2013, BP Exploration and Production Inc. pleaded guilty to 14 criminal counts connected with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster and was sentenced to pay $4 billion in criminal fines and penalties. The counts included 11 of felony manslaughter. This is evidence of corporate criminal liability and prosecution; it is not a measure of all corporate crime or proof that profit caused each offence. It also contradicts an absolute claim that capitalist states never punish major companies. US Department of Justice case account

A more qualified Marxist response is that enforcing some protections can sustain public confidence and the long-term stability of the system. That response needs evidence about how regulation operates. If every prosecution and every failure to prosecute is automatically called proof of class domination, the explanation becomes difficult to test.

A fully social explanation of crime

Radical criminology combines unequal social structures with people's interpretations, actions and responses to control.

In The New Criminology (1973), Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young sought a fully social theory of deviance. The approach is often called neo-Marxist because it retains questions about class and power while drawing on accounts of meaning and social reaction. Agency means people's capacity to interpret situations and act within them. Social reaction includes informal responses by families or peers and formal responses by police or courts. Economic conditions constrain choices without supplying a complete explanation of every decision.

The following sequence translates their seven connected requirements into questions. It is a framework for investigation, not a claim that every event follows an inevitable route.

This sequence follows the connected requirements discussed by Peter Squires in his academic account of policing research, footnote 7. Squires's discussion, publisher's record of the original book

Consider an original teaching scenario. A young delivery worker has insecure earnings. A peer suggests stealing a customer's parcel. The worker wants money but also wants to appear bold to the peer. They choose a parcel they can resell, depriving its owner of something valuable. A neighbour reports the theft; the employer dismisses the worker. Suppose a local police campaign has prioritised parcel theft after pressure from influential retailers, making this report more likely to receive investigative resources. A conviction may restrict later job applications, although support from family or a new employer could also enable a lawful future.

A structural account locates insecurity in the labour market. The fuller account also explains the worker's pursuit of peer recognition, the actual theft, the neighbour's report and the employer's response. The retailers' influence on policing connects the immediate investigation to the wider distribution of power. The final link asks whether dismissal and conviction reproduce the worker's initial insecurity or whether a different future develops. In a real case, each link would require evidence; no retailer campaign or outcome described here is an empirical finding.