REMAKING JUSTICE || AGAINST CRIME AND FOR SOCIALISM

AGAINST CRIME AND FOR SOCIALISMAuthor(s): Ian TaylorSource: Crime and Social Justice, No. 18, REMAKING JUSTICE (Winter 1982), pp. 4-15Published by: Social Justice/Global OptionsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29766161 .

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AGAINST CRIME AND FOR SOCIALISM

Ian Taylor

Bertram Gross's "Some Anti-Crime Proposals for

Progressives" (Crime and Social Justice 17) should be

broadly applauded on the Left. It is to be welcomed, first, because it presents an

explicitly socialist perspective on the crime problem in

America, linking the question of crime control to govern? ments' willingness to pursue economic policies that genu? inely work in the universal interest, rather than to the

repressive control of deprived and/or brutalized individuals. It is especially important that Gross's article was published initially in a large-circulation journal of public discussion like The Nation, because it is vital for socialists to try to

challenge the heavy domination of contemporary political discussion by the Right, especially in relation to questions of law and order. Popularizing a socialist perspective on law and order is vital at this time, since, as we shall see later, the

deepening economic crisis is going to have serious social consequences in nearly all capitalist societies, and those disturbances and disruptions to social order will almost

inevitably be interpreted in terms of the rhetorics of the

Right.l Gross's article is welcome, also, because it presents

the Left with a challenge as well as with a sense of possible points of intervention in the current "conjuncture"

?

especially via participation in community politics of the kind Gross describes in Santa Monica, where the initiative on local crime problems was taken, we are told, by a

"progressive coalition." The Left badly needs a point of

entry into the current political situation of this kind and, I would argue, it also needs a left-reformist vision of this

general order. For something like a decade, the Left has been preoccupied with theoretical work about a hypothetical socialist future and also with the excavation of people's history: it has gone close to losing any sense of the benefits and problems of "praxis" in the immediate present. It must also be said, I believe, that Gross's "left-reformism" comes as a welcome relief to the sometimes rather monolithic view of the capitalist state (as being impervious to change, by

* Ian Taylor is in the Department of Sociology, University of

Sheffield, Sheffield, England. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Sociology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada K1S 5B6.

virtue of its domination by capitalist interest) which has been extremely common and, I believe, paralyzing for individuals on the Left, especially in North America?a view which has not infrequently been displayed, indeed, in the pages of this journal. Were Bertram Gross participating in the rather theological debates which go on about the

Marxist theory of the state (which is quite obviously not one of his concerns), he would be arguing for a view of the state as having significant autonomy from capital and as

being an important arena of political and ideological struggle.

Third, Gross's piece is especially welcome for its concern with taking seriously popular anxieties about crime and then linking these anxieties (or their resolution) to progressive political positions. This is, of course, a

project which was prefigured in 1976 and 1978 in the pages of Crime and Social Justice (1976; Platt, 1978), but it is fair to say that Gross's program is constructed with two

very "realistic" preoccupations. He is interested in moving from people's present or immediate concerns (with the construction of effective neighborhood Watch Patrols) to the existing debates within the Democratic Party over economic and social policy. I think this is a very welcome realism, at least in mood and general perspective, although I shall want later to criticize something of the specific strategy it yields. But it is welcome, generally, because it

begins with popular anxieties as they are, rather than

dismissing them as the product of ideological manipulation by the organized Right, the forces of law and order, and the mass media (a response which is still far too common on the Left). It does not reproduce the elitism of liberal academics, either, in reciting the manifold problems involved in interpreting the criminal statistics as an excuse for not

confronting the immediacy and severity of the social crisis in contemporary capitalist societies.

All of these three features of Gross's paper? reconstructing the familiar forms of Left policy, thinking of new forms of Left politics, and taking popular anxieties

seriously?are vital in the current political moment. We live in almost impossibly difficult times for the socialist Left. The widely reported collapse of the revolutionary Left of the 1960s has made factional politics of that kind seem

quite absurd, especially given the immediate challenge to orthodox social democratic and welfare state institutions

41Crime and Social Justice



that is posed by Thatcherism in the UK and by Reagan in the United States. The bureaucratic, corrupt, and squalid condition of the leaderships of the Labour and Democratic Parties in these two countries has meant that these parties, in their present form, have not been able to provide any clear alternative economic or social policy to that put forward by the Right. The Left has remained reluctant to enter into these parties, in part because of the Left's

unwillingness to defend the authoritarian, bureaucratic and unpopular welfare state institutions which these

parties have constructed over the postwar period; and, as a result of this Left "abstentionism," the political debate that has been visible to the mass of people (in Parliament, Congress, and/or the mass media) has been that between the increasingly radical Right (full of moralistic rhetoric and apparently popular preoccupations) and a

defensive, amoral, and conservative Labour or Democratic elite (speaking, as it were, for the state and against the

people). 2

One of the effects of this, in the United States as well as in Britain, is that "progressives" have been seen to be

saying, along with state bureaucrats and academic liberals, that existing social arrangements are, in general terms, a

natural and inevitable product of the development of a "modern industrial society." Popular anxieties and dissatis? faction have been met with the authoritarian assertion that the dislocations or problems that people have been experi? encing are "the price of progress." This inevitabilism has been particularly marked in the response of many official Labour politicians in Britain to the rhetorics of the Thatcher

leadership.3 In the view of Merlyn Rees, Home Secretary in the Labour government of 1974-1979, crime prevention programs were desirable, as were some increases in the size

of the police force; but no great gains were to be expected in crime control, since crime was a product either of the fast rate of postwar technological progress or of factors over which we have no control. In this latter respect, crime is rather like the weather.4

The irrelevance and hopelessness of this account to residents of the vandalized and inhuman highrise flats and inner-city areas of Britain should be obvious. It is an account that emphasizes the "gains" of technological progress, which (if they are indeed benefits) have been most heavily distributed amongst the middle classes of capitalist society: it is silent on the fact that the costs of that progress have been borne quite disproportionately by working people, by the unemployed, by women, and by members of the various ethnic minority groups in the reserve armies of labor. And it is an account which sees as inevitable the high rates of vandalism, petty property theft, and interpersonal unpleasantness and harassment which make up daily life for many members of the under? class in Britain. Not for nothing did Conservative spokesmen before, during, and after the 1979 General Election in Britain insist on the possibility of waging a successful war on crime. It was precisely this pessimistic inevitabilism of the liberal Labour leadership which was targeted by the new Tory Minister of State at the Home Office when he observed, late in 1979:

It is so easy to become complacent and acquiescent and console ourselves by saying "Ah, well, it is a feature of urban life; no developed nation has

escaped it, and in any event it is no more than a

product of an increasingly acquisitive, materialistic

society." That is a temptation which we must

resolutely resist (Brittan, 1979: 2).

It was also targeted, rather less benignly, during the election campaign itself by Margaret Thatcher, who promised to confront the mugger (and, indeed, the striking trade

unionist) with "a barrier of steel,"5 and, of course, by Ronald Reagan in 1980, when he promised to protect America from "the human predator.

. . the habitual

offender."6 Given the continuing adherence of the Labour and Democratic leaderships to an inevitabilistic liberal

theory of crime and the worsening conditions of life for most people in both Britain and America, it is hardly surprising that the partisan commitment of Thatcher and Reagan to a successful campaign against crime should have evoked an electoral response from anxious working class populations.7

Bertram Gross obviously recognizes these popular anxieties and does not dismiss them as working class "false consciousness"; and he is also clearly aware of the impossi? bility of the official "progressive" or "social democratic" position (which amounts to a surrender of whole working class neighbourhoods and groups to a future of social and economic dislocation). Finally and most importantly, Gross urges the "reconstruction" of the official "progressive" position on the Left, initially via Left participation in local community action and politics.

I want to offer two comments on Gross's important

paper, by way of trying to further advance the argument about "reconstruction" of the Left position. My comments will derive almost entirely from my recent experience of

working within the Labour Party in Britain, but they will also be informed by an awareness of the problems confront?

ing the Left in the United States. These two societies have in common their current domination by governments of the radical Right, hell-bent on a real experiment in the applica? tion of monetarist economics; they also have in common, however, Democratic and Labour traditions (which are

currently very muted and unpopular but whose resilience ?

especially within the orthodox working class?should not be doubted) as well as a large and influential noncommercial middle class, whole sections of which are largely liberal and/or socialist in their general ideological orientations. I want to address the issue of community politics and the character of the Left's response to right-wing governments on the question of law and order.

COMMUNITY POLITICS AND ACTION

As Stan Cohen (1979) has pointed out, the recent

development of official talk about "community alternatives" to prison and juvenile institutions paradoxically arose at the

moment at which "community" was obviously failing to

prevent crime (and other dislocation) more than ever before

Winter 1982/5



in the postwar period. The rhetoric about "community" has disguised the deep dislocation of what had previously been much more integrated and organic working class communities. The Left has always been prone to a certain romanticism in this area, so it is even more important for us to recognize that "the community" might be a very fragile basis on which to build an "alternative" socialist crime

politics. Mention of Santa Monica, which, like Santa Cruz

and other Californian municipalities, is known outside America for having a socialist presence in its local govern? ment (Rotkin and van Allen, 1979) underlines the impor? tance of organized socialist party politics in many commu?

nity action initiatives. In Britain, those local city councils which have in recent years been "taken over" by the so-called "Bennite Left" are the staunchest defenders of

existing social facilities and the most imaginative proponents of new local policies on crime prevention, policing, and related issues. 8 Examples of these include South Yorkshire, Lothian (Edinburgh), and Lambeth in South London. The first two urban areas were among the few which escaped the riots in June, 1981, and they were also the councils which (unlike those with a Liberal or right-wing Labour

leadership) were most successful in resisting the attempt of the Thatcher government to curtail their activities through fiscal cuts via the central government Treasury.^

The kind of "socialist party organization" I have in mind here (and which the Bennite Left in Britain pursues) in no way resembles the forms of "democratic centralist"

party so beloved of the revolutionary Left. Instead, it is an

attempt to broaden and simultaneously democratize the

existing, official party of social democracy as presently constituted at the local level. In particular, the attempt is

being made to bring into the Labour Party all the various

"fragments"10 of the women's movement, the black

organizations, trade unions, and other workers' groups, lawyers, social workers, and teachers who have been es?

tranged by years of official Labour Party compromise, corruption, and inertia. To encourage this entry of the Left into Labour politics, there has been an essential assault on

the ideologies which are still very influential within the

party (but completely unpopular ouside it) and on the bureaucratic practices and traditions of parliamentarianism through which an increasingly undemocratic Labour Party elite has reproduced itself over the years.

In this challenge to bureaucratic party meetings and

procedures, the women's movement has played a vital role in showing how to democratize discussion within a previ? ously authoritarian structure, and also in demonstrating a commitment to the pressing and real concerns of women in the wider community (rather than resting content with what "the party" sees to be the pressing concerns). A similar democratization of policy formulation has begun to occur in relation to the question of racism in Britain (which is now clearly identified as institutionalized racism in Labour Party documents). The party is now openly com? mitted to the full use of the legal system against racist

political parties and to the firing of police officers found

guilty of racist practice. Perhaps most controversially, this democratization of Labour Party policy formulation at the local level has resulted in a determination to ensure that local police forces should become genuinely accountable in their actions. The accountability demanded is not just to the abstract judicial notion-the "community"?but quite specifically to the interest groups within the local municipal area that are most directly affected by the policy and

i^B^ C OVEHTHY

^tf COMMITTEE

jgd^\

AGAINST RACISM '

6 /Crime and Social Justice



practices of local police forces. The project of subjecting the police to the control of local authority police subcom?

mittees has, of course, been made much more urgent by the

experience of "retaliatory" police sweeps through the black community of Brixton, South London, in April, 1981; by the use of plastic bullets, CS gas, and vans driven at full speed at pedestrians by the Merseyside Police, and by the unleashing of the local "Tactical Action Group" onto the black population of Moss Side, Manchester, both in

June, 1981.11 The democratization of policy-making at the local level

has been paralleled by a campaign to democratize the

process of policy creation and adoption at the national level. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy has now been successful in pressing through one of its main demands, that every sitting Member of Parliament (MP) must submit to a process of reselection by his or her local party in the

five-year period between elections. In this way?for the first time ever in the history of the Labour Party?MP's who regularly vote in Parliament in defiance of their local party's democratically constructed policies can be refused the candidature in future elections. This consti? tutes a major check on the official elite's ability to retain power within Parliament via undemocratic demagoguery or

by outright manipulation. All of this process of democratization has, of course,

encountered a virulent reaction from the Right, from the

right-wing daily press and indeed from some state officials. The most famous example, perhaps, is the successful appeal made to the High Court by a ratepayers' association in Bromley, an outlying suburb of London, against the use of "rates" (city taxes) by the Greater London Council to subsidize cheap public transport for the mass of the London population. Another example is the attack mounted by the chief constable of Greater Manchester, James Anderton, on the representatives of the local Labour Party who are

subjecting local police policy to serious discussion. Accord? ing to Mr. Anderton:

There is a long-term strategy to destroy the proven structures of the police and to turn them into the exclusive agency of a one party state. ... I

see and sense in our midst an enemy more danger? ous and insidious and ruthless than any since the Second World War (quoted in Benton and Wintour, 1982: 6).

It is interesting to speculate on the intensity of these reactions. They are clearly not motivated by a principled determination to defend the proper constitutional division of Administration and Executive: no such fine legalisms have been invoked when the Thatcher government has gone on the offensive against local councils as a whole, divesting powers which they have possessed from the time of the Restoration. These reactions clearly indicate that the Bennite local Labour Parties are as determined to defend the interests of working people, broadly but not abstractly defined, as the Thatcher government is to defend middle class interests as a whole. Chief Constable Anderton's paranoid reaction to his own police committee is based on

an accurate perception that the Labour Party has a new

politics which, given Mr. Anderton's own commitment to Moral Rearmament, surely is "dangerous and insidious." It

is a politics that embraces a commitment to: fundamental reform of class hierarchy in Britain; an attack on patriarchy and the firm defense of women's interests in law, welfare, and social policy; an attack on the institutionalized racism that is all-pervasive in British society; and the democratiza? tion of the authoritarian forms of the state that have passed for "democracy" and "welfare" in the postwar period. It is a politics which prefigures a social order entirely different from that which is presently organized and governed.

The rapid growth of "Bennite" socialism in Britain has obviously been encouraged by the horrifying experience of Margaret Thatcher's election victory in 1979, very

significantly drawing on working class votes. The spectacle and then the reality of Thatcher has confronted the Left in Britain, engendering a new realism and urgency about immediate socialist "praxis." But the construction by Bennites of an explicitly socialist "community politics" has also been encouraged by the experience of other forms of "community politics" that have been practiced unsuccessfully in Britain, especially by local Liberal Parties, but also by the so-called Community Development Projects (CDP) established by the Labour government from 1964 to 1970. The Liberal version of community politics has tended to emphasize the participation of individual citizens and

(nonpolitical) community groups in existing local council activities: it has prioritized the experience of participation within existing political forms over the critique and trans? formation of those forms. The community activists of the CDP's went further and tried to activate previously unor?

ganized groups (for example, communities within decrepit working class neighborhoods) to demand improvement in local council provisions or to make demands on local

industry about wage levels, environmental protection, and the provision of community amenities. Both versions of

community politics reported some early success, but proved incapable in the medium term of marshaling mass support

within working class areas. The much-vaunted Liberal

experiments of community politics in the 1970s were most

heavily concentrated, irony of ironies, in Liverpool, which in the summer of 1981 was the scene of one of the worst breakdowns in authority-subject relations in the entire

postwar period in Britain. The CDP's (like similar projects in the USA) had in the meantime come up against the brutal reality that any real reform of environmental blight and any real amelioration of basic social and human condi? tions would require capital infusions which no one local council can afford and which local capitalist enterprises refuse to finance. The CDP's were quietly closed down by the government of James Callaghan in the middle of the 1970s, without any significant local working class protest or, indeed, much comment in the British mass media.

I want to suggest to Bertram Gross that "community action" (whether it is against violent crime or the fiscal cuts of a central government) can only be effective in

marshaling popular support if and when it is constructed

Winter 1982/ 7



"in class terms." As the radical Right has well recognized, unemployed and/or working people do not experience the existing forms of the local or national state as their "welfare state" or their "social democracy." The Right has marshaled this sense of popular alienation and reconnected

popular hopes and desires (for a livable, secure social order) to a campaign which would replace the welfare state with a refurbished system of moral and penal discipline. Calls for

"community action" against crime, mounted by progressives such as Bertram Gross, are a limited way of responding to this right-wing campaign because they do not specify how to unite the many interests in the (fractured and divided) community in "action" and, also, because they do not

specify what kind of new community (of interests) could be achieved by such action. In brief, there is no vision, in

"community politics" as such, of an alternative future for the various different interest groups within the dislocated

geographical and cultural area that once could be called "a

community." I propose that such a vision can only be arrived at via the democratization of the existing "progres? sive" party into a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist politics.

IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE

This argument might appear opportunistic to people who are wedded to a "pure" sense of community action. To a political realist like Bertram Gross with his sure-footed sense of "the possible" in contemporary American politics, it might seem premature to "polarize" the question of

community-level politics with an insistence on framing such

struggles within a socialist program. There are, however, two good reasons for "insisting

on socialism." First, we may not be able to unite working people, the unemployed, blacks, women, and the other

"fragments" that now make up the working class as a whole in capitalist societies via abstract appeals to "community."

We have to construct a socialist politics that succeeds in

reflecting the pressing and immediate needs of these differ? ent groups. This may be difficult because of the implications of the word "socialism" in the United States, especially in the current cold war atmosphere, but this is an inescapable problem that has to be confronted by the Left in America at some time.

Second, it is obvious that capitalism is in deep difficul? ties on a worldwide scale and that the strategies for capitalist recovery, constructed by the Reagan coalition in the U.S. and the Thatcherites in Britain, involve fairly desperate ventures. Both administrations are gambling on their ability to transfer state expenditures away from the mass of the

people to large capital and to other capitalist enterprises which can survive increasing competition, without encoun?

tering massive popular resistance and/or severe social breakdown.

Both administrations have been remarkably successful in preventing the outbreak of any significant protest or resistance by organized labor. They have managed this in part because of the coercive and disciplinary effects of the rise in unemployment, and in part by the presence of a ground swell of ideological support for radical changes

in government economic and social policies. This popular support for "reconstruction" has been created over the last

five or six years in both Britain and America by unceasing and widely based ideological campaigns, conducted by a

variety of groups of the radical Right. The campaigns have

significantly differed in form and in focus in Britain and America; the British "New" Right is quite limited in its actual social composition compared to its American equiva? lent, and focuses more on economic issues and on crime

than on moral issues (like abortion, equal rights, or homo?

sexuality) which the New Right in America has tended to

emphasize. I2

We need to understand the ways in which these ideo?

logical campaigns were initiated, expanded, and then articulated within the British Conservative Party and the American Republican Party as new forms of social and economic ideology?available and ready to challenge the "hegemony" of welfare state and social democratic

ideology. The successful articulation of radical Right ideology by the established right-wing political parties is precisely what distinguishes Britain and America from other capitalist societies in the last half-decade. The right wing governments in Britain and America have not only successfully avoided a unification of, and head-on confron? tation with, the labor movements in those two countries:

they have also prevented a polarization of civil society into

aggressively competing interest groups as a result of their

ideological defense of the national interests of "Britain" and "America." For all that Crime and Social Justice may speak, correctly at one level, of the "rise of the Right" as a worldwide phenomenon, it is important to recognize that the Right does not have an extensive social base within late capitalist societies, except insofar as it can construct

support for its economic and social policies through ideo?

logical campaigns around the interests of "the Nation" or "the people as a whole." In other countries experiencing the current capitalist crisis with more or less severity than Britain and America, the Right has not been so successful in the struggle over ideology: the people of France, Greece, Spain, and Portugal have all elected and (in the case of

Spain) re-elected social democratic governments in recent years, and the people of Australia will shortly do the same. In other countries, like Canada, the economic crisis has had very little effect at the level of popular politics. 13 The world is lived, as Marx well understood, through ideas and not in some unmediated "objective" relationship of the individual to his or her class or material position. There are no a priori guarantees for any new cohort of a

capitalist class that it will succeed in encouraging the reproduction in ideology of the conditions of existence of the capital-labor relationship.

The Left must begin now, in what do not appear to be

very propitious circumstances, to engage the Right in

ideological struggle?just as the Right, in earlier years and in apparently unpromising circumstances, began to struggle against welfare state liberalism and for a return to the "free market." So. with this in mind, let us now turn to Bertram Gross's article as an example of a left-wing intervention into the struggle over ideas. Gross (1982: 53) asserts that since




/Mocfo confront Reagan, New York, 1980 "there is a relationship between joblessness and crime ... we must link a serious anti-crime problem ... to a serious

full-employment program." Now there is very little doubt that there is a relationship between certain forms of crime and the joblessness of certain sections of the population: in Britain, "mugging" is, indeed, a form of self-employment (and maybe a primitive form of street-level anti-white

politics) that is disproportionately practiced by unemployed West Indians. Offenses against "public order" (as in riots) are also much more likely among unemployed youth than among other sections of the population. But there is no known relationship between mugging, bank robbery, and/or rape and the unemployment of the previously employed "respectable" working class or, indeed, the middle class executive. This point may appear precious, since crime will

clearly increase as unemployment increases, even if many unemployed people are not themselves involved in crime. But this is indeed to miss the ideological point-and it is a

point which is immediately seized on by the Right. At the

height of the summer riots in Britain in the summer, 1981, Margaret Thatcher was assailed by the press and by nearly all respectable liberal opinion in that country to admit that the riots were caused by the high levels of unemployment (which were, in part, a product of the policy pursued by her government). In characteristic style, Thatcher issued a statement of firm denial. There was, she said, "no excuse" for the riots, unemployment was "in no sense ... a cause

of the riots" (Margaret Thatcher, BBC-News, July 8, 1981). For the radical Right that is now in power in Washing?

ton and London, the reconstruction of capitalism is in part a moral project. The Reagan and Thatcher administrations (like their intellectual mentors, Milton Friedman, Ferdinand

von Hayek, and others) actually believe in the possibility of

ushering in a new epoch of capitalist expansion and of social order by freeing "respectable" and "moral" individuals from excessive regulation by the state in order to create

wealth, progress, and, indeed, jobs.I4 Freeing individuals to be entrepreneurial is "moral" because it encourages the ultimate good, the expansion of wealth within a bourgeois society, and is also a way of measuring human worth and

capacity. Excessive state intervention into the economy, education, and welfare in order to promote "equality" has prevented individuals from proving themselves by their efforts; and it also has encouraged the existing (and inevi?

table) class hierarchy to stultify, resulting in an inequality that is, indeed, unjust and inefficient (because it does not

represent a hierarchy of talent). There is a need to return to a "free market society" in which a more natural and

productive hierarchy can be established, which must then itself withstand the competition of talents in the market

place. In this essentially 19th-century "liberal" vision, there is

absolutely no reason why unemployment should "push" an individual unwittingly into crime. Why shouldn't a typical

member of the middle or working class who has been made redundant be creative and innovative, starting a business of his or her own, and entering the "free market" in his or her own right? Since, for this particular 19th-century theory of economics, it is "enterprise" and not labor or even capital by itself which creates wealth, there is no limit to what any such new entrepreneur could achieve if and only if the product he/she is offering can find a demand within the market.

So, for pure Thatcherites, the fact of the massive

Winter 1982/ 9



increase in unemployment in the UK has a completely different significance than what it has for social democrats. The increase is an effect of withdrawing the artificial and

counterproductive protection of some industries that was

provided by the social democratic state (in the name of a

policy of full employment): the situation of unemployment thus created is an opportunity for men and women of talent to begin a new phase of capitalist expansion. In the

meantime, as always, there will be sections of the working class and, perhaps, of the middle class which will respond less creatively and more "parasitically," in acts of riot or individual predatory theft. These sections should be dealt

with via the full force of the law.15

However much we may dislike this account of the causes of worklessness and crime, it is an explanation which has wide popular appeal and which also appears to answer certain questions. (For example, it appears to explain the

continuing social conformity of the unemployed "respect? able" worker.) It is also an account of crime which is

capable of explaining the failure of the previous period of concerted social reconstruction in Britain and America (the postwar welfare state) to usher in a crime-free Utopia. As James Q. Wilson plaintively and even angrily observed of America in the 1960s, there was more "crime among plenty" than there had been before. It is an observation which is also frequently made, in despair and confusion, by the older generations of Labour MP's in Britain and by

many older Labour voters (Seabrook, 1978). "Crime" here is not a product of worklessness, but of "affluence."

I have to elaborate this generalized assertion in order to clarify it. In the first place, of course, there is no such unitary behavioral category called "crime." The term can

be used in reference to a street mugging, murder, a mishap in a hospital, the activities of Richard Nixon, the price fixing and capital export practices of large corporations, "mundane" vandalism by the young, the arms race, a

heartless local government, or predatory drug pushers. As Colin Sumner has argued, "crime" is pre-eminently a term of "ideological censure"?applied by one social group to another with more or less access, according to the degree of

political authority possessed by those groups in a variety of social and historical circumstances (Sumner, 1976). So the definition of petty vandalism, hell-raising on seaside beaches or promiscuous and subversive attitudes among youth as a serious social problem in periods of affluence, and the definition of street robberies as the most serious danger to social order during economic crises, are the result of hege?

monic and ideological struggles by police chiefs, powerful sections of the judiciary and the magistracy, and "law and order" politicians. These definitions are not transparent reflections of increases which might be occurring in such behaviors due to broader historical or social conditions; nor do these definitions identify or embrace the range of

injurious or dangerous behaviors which are less visible and not as heavily policed as adolescent crime on the streets.

The current economic crisis is undoubtedly producing a wide variety of self-interested illegal or quasi-legal re?

sponses by individuals or social groups throughout the

social structure, whether or not these behaviors are articu?

lated in ideological campaigns around "law and order." There are good grounds, for example, to suggest a vast increase in both the variety and number of corporate illegalities in the international finance market.16 National

governments and big capitalist enterprises appear to be

abrogating previous legal agreements (with local govern? ments and trade unions respectively) with increasing impunity: in Britain and America, the right-wing govern?

ments have explicitly and intentionally established laws

regulating the activities of capital in industrial relations and vis-?-vis the environment. The wide range of "illegal" initiatives apparently being taken by capital, by right-wing governments and by anxious individual members of civil

society (as some economists have recognized) are quite "rational" (i.e., self-interested) responses to the current

crisis within international capitalism (see, inter alia, Rose Ackerman, 1978). Our point, however, and that of many other socialist criminologists (Michalowski, 1981; Reiman, 1978; Pearce, 1976), is that the ideological campaigns conducted by the organized Right only make visible the criminal initiatives being taken by the unemployed or by working people: there is what Michalowski (1981: 31) calls the "dichotomization of social reality" between the real crimes of the poor and the imaginary crimes of the powerful. So illegality is produced by the conditions of economic crisis across the social structure, but only the crimes of the workless and the poor are made visible by the campaigners of law and order. Crime in general is not, therefore, a product of worklessness but a product of the way in which a capitalist mode of production sets man against man and "systematically" prioritizes individual self-interest as rational social practice. But especially in conditions of capitalist crisis, it is only the street crime of the poor which is identified as a danger to the social order.

Identifying "real crime" in this way has important ideological effects: a space is opened up in which a classical

theory of crime as evidence of moral failing of lower-class individuals can be inserted. This was precisely the effect of

Margaret Thatcher's reaction to the summer riots of 1981, and it is precisely this commitment to remoralizing amoral individuals that has been used to legitimize the return to

militaristic detention centers in the juvenile justice system in Britain (Taylor, 1981a: 24-29). The resurrection of classical theory also enables the Right to reverse the causal

logic of both sociological and socialist accounts by identi?

fying the source of disorder within contemporary capitalist societies as the criminals themselves, rather than the contra? dictions inherent in a capitalist mode of production (Young, 1975).

The articulation by the Right of classical theories of crime of this kind does not depend on the high rates of

unemployment now common in the West (although these are obviously fantastically powerful theories with which to explain the sense of threat and the real social disorder which high unemployment brings to civil society as a

whole). In bourgeois societies, whether in boom or in

slump, crime will always be "found" among the lower




classes, whether metaphorically via ideological campaigns or

materially via the routine practices of police and law courts, even if the crime is only mundane vandalism conducted by street-corner youth.

In this perspective, it is only by achieving socialism that the inequitable and inaccurate identification of the source and social location of real crime and real social injury that occurs in bourgeois society can be corrected. Crime in general, we repeat, is not a product of worklessness so much as it is a product of the fundamental social divisions of capitalist societies.

By these lights, therefore, Bertram Gross's reformist and "materialist" equation of crime and worklessness is flawed by its failure to understand crime in general as an

ideological construction. This is not to say that it is inaccu? rate as an account of the particular and deteriorating conditions encouraging the development of theft and interpersonal violence in working class communities. As against the only barely disguised racist arguments that are advanced by right-wing liberals like James Q. Wilson to explain the growth of "predatory crime" in working class neighborhoods, Gross's account is in the tradition which sees nihilistic and violent behavior as a product of brutalized environments and social relations. Inasmuch as crimes like mugging and theft were produced within deprived commu? nities even in conditions of affluence and plenty within welfare states at large, they tended to be concentrated in the most difficult and most deprived of families and local environments: they were evidence of the limited reach of both "affluence" and the "welfare state," as well as being evidence of the continuing inability of capitalist economics ?even in the postwar "boom" ?to provide all workers with a living wage.

If nihilistic and violent behaviors were produced in conditions of economic boom, when workers and their families were receiving some benefits from a "welfare state," so much more are behaviors of this character to be produced in conditions of economic austerity and withdrawal of welfare. The riots of unemployed youth in Britain in the summer of 1981 (an expression, above all, of the sense of desperation now experienced by larger sections of the working class?and especially working class youth-in the larger British cities) were the portent of other social disorders in capitalist societies which are dominated by right-wing governments embarked on the reconstruction of their national economies and state apparatuses.

The evidence is already clear for the United Kingdom. In the last two years of the Labour government headed by James Callaghan (1978-1979), the overall rate of crime known to the police had been declining, by some 3% per year.I7 In the first two years of the Thatcher government, the overall crime rate increased by nearly 6% and then 10% respectively. In the Metropolitan Police area, the number of offenses of "robbery and other violent theft" rose 34% in 1981, break-ins by 15% (to an all-time high of 144,678) and crimes involving motor vehicles (excluding driving offenses) by 12% (Shirley, 1982). In March, 1982, the daily prison population in England and Wales reached 44,073 and

once again went beyond the limit (of 42,000) set by a recent Home Secretary as a humanly acceptable maximum population?a figure that was, even then, four times the size of the prison population of 1945.

Similar tendencies are clear in the USA, as a wholesale withdrawal occurs from welfare state expenditure, liberal sentencing policy, and rehabilitative ambitions in penal institutions and in social work practice. The statistics for crime and the size of the prison population have both escalated significantly since the election of Reagan and show no sign of reduction.

Gross's general argument links the development of anti-social behavior within the working class to the pursuit of economic policies which work against working class interest, particularly with respect to job creation. But the argument can now be extended. Thatcherism and Reaganomics, while they may be rational as ruling class solutions to the existing crisis of capital, cannot by defini? tion work to the advantage of labor. The freeing of market forces in Britain ?so far from resulting in a disciplined individualism?has resulted in the further fracturing of a

wide variety of social relations. Collective insubordination has occurred in the inner-city and outright rebellion among many black communities, while most ominously there has also been a massive escalation into the two fascist groups which are active in that country. We are witnessing a fundamental dislocation of the traditional institutions and social solidarity of the working class community in Britain (Seabrook, 1978). The pessimism, internal infighting and alienation from community of a fractured working class has been temporarily assuaged, it seems, by the Thatcher government's attempt to conjure a lost historical sense of "Nation" by its adventures in the South Atlantic; but the inability of emergency ruling class economic policies to provide the basis of social order for all will be inescapable over time. The Thatcher government's law and order rhetorics of the 1979 election, and Ronald Reagan's insistence on the absence of "social cost" in monetarism,

must both become transparent.!8 It is in the context of the failure of monetarism both as

economic and social policy that the need for a specifically socialist alternative strategy (and the inadequacy of liberal calls for "cooperation" or community participation) will become most obvious.

Socialist economic measures will clearly be required to rebuild the industrial base in both Britain and America, destroyed as much as this industry has been by the cold wind of free market economics. Industrial production in the United Kingdom, outside of oil and gas, declined by 14% between 1979 and the middle of 1981 (Rowthorn, 1982)?twice the range of decline of any similar period during the Depression ?resulting in over 1 million redun? dancies among manufacturing workers. This process of de-industrialization has substantially reduced the variety of socially useful products that are available for use internally within individual societies, as well as for export to the Third World; and it has also destroyed the material basis of whole communities.

Partly as a result of government fiscal policies in

Winter 1982/ 11



relation to state systems of education, health, and welfare, there has also been a massive reduction in employment within the state itself. This last development has had

particularly severe effects on women, as the women's labor

market has substantially collapsed in many areas. Unem?

ployment has also been visited on black communities as a whole to a disproportionate extent and on young people leaving school at the age of 16. Both black and white youth cultures in the United Kingdom assume "worklessness" as the only foreseeable future. Overall unemployment in Britain rose from 1,328,000 (or 5.4% of the labor force) in the second quarter of 1979 (the moment of Thatcher's

election) to 3,190,621 in July, 1982 (13.4% of the labor

force). There is no current prospect of reversing the process of overall de-industrialization with its accompanying high levels of unemployment: the Thatcher government contin? ues to focus on the increases in productivity of the industry that does survive and on the reduction of the rate of inflation in the UK economy as a whole.

The only answer to the economic havoc (and associ? ated heavy social costs) produced by such a policy is a socialist one, stressing the need to organize production in order to fulfill continuing and unmet social needs for

goods, services, and employment. Many initiatives have

already been taken by socialist local councils in funding worker cooperatives and other groups to provide new

industry and work in local areas. This conception of the state being used as both an arena of job creation and the source of investment for production organized for social need is also the basis of the so-called Alternative Economic Strategy which the Bennite Left is urging on the Labour Party as the only meaningful strategy with

which to fight the next General Election and the one after that.

It is self-evident that the adoption of the AES (de emphasizing as it does the profits of capitalist enterprise and indeed the whole postwar tradition of "corporatism" in the capital-labor relationship) would place the Labour

Party in a much more radical posture over economic policy than it is in at present, and that massive opposition would confront any Labour government which attempted to

pursue any such strategy (Rowthorn, 1982). But it is also clear that an economic strategy of the kind would stand far more chance of mobilizing a presently very confused, defensive, and anxious working class than would any re-assertion of the Labour Party's familiar appeals to

corporatism. The point is well put, paradoxically, in a recent socialist analysis of strategies for surmounting the crisis in the American economy, where the problems for the Left are at least as severe as they are in the UK:

There are . .. some fundamental points to be

made in favor of the democratic-socialist strategy to the current economic crisis. Insofar as a period of austerity is really essential in order to release resources for productive investment rather than

consumption, it would be politically much more feasible to get people to tighten their belts if the

overall economic environment were much more

equitable than at present, and if people would have that much more reason to believe that both

present burdens and future benefits might be

equally shared. Finally, one might reasonably argue that in a democratic-socialist society people's real needs would not have to be met so largely by rapid growth in material output. Without the insistent corporate capitalist drive for economic

expansion, a new ethic of conservation could

develop . . . (Weisskopf, 1981: 45).

A program of this kind might seem Utopian and idealist, in the conventional Marxist sense of those terms. But closer reflection on the character of the social crisis (and, specific? ally, on the composition of the unemployed and/or "immis erated" population)!9, suggests that an economic policy prioritizing social need rather than private profit or the interests of national capital might have a very widespread

material basis in the class structure (both in Britain and North America). As suggested earlier, the economic crisis has had its most severe effects not on the working class as a whole (some sections of the class?some types of engineers, technicians, have had their positions improved) but on

women, youth, and manufacturing workers, and on state

workers in health, education, and welfare. These groups constitute no small section of the popula?

tion in any of the advanced countries, and it is an indication of the unimaginative and rigid character of orthodox Labour politics that it has been largely unable to win these

populations to a democratic socialist understanding of the renewed need for rapid social reconstruction of capitalist economics. What is quite obviously required in this project of social mobilization are policies, constructed in a popular and democratic fashion, across the broad range of areas of social need.20 Social policies have to be constructed, for example, to take account of the needs of women outside as well as inside families, in the labor market and at leisure. Earlier "socialist" policy has been almost irretrievably patriarchal on the question of women. The family itself has to be taken seriously (rather than merely dismissed as a bourgeois irrelevance): for many working people, as the New Right well recognizes, the family is one of the few sources of solace in a harsh world. Anna Cooke has formulated the problem here as being that of prioritizing the idea of a household (where there are children and/or other dependents in need of care) over that of the patri? archal family. Socialist "family policies" would have to be complemented by socialist policies in relation to the organization of the labor market (work like goods to be distributed according to a principle of social need, on a full-time, part-time, and/or shared basis); in relation to taxation policy (raising funds for popularly needed industrial and social investment) and in relation to the provision of a fabric of support facilities (daycare, playgroups, etc.) throughout the local community. Most difficult of all, perhaps, in current circumstances, is the formulation of new socialist policies on the economic role and citizenship rights of youth, given the impossibility of a return to a

12 (Crime and Social Justice



tWI

vigorous labor market for youth in Western capitalist society.

A vast amount of work needs to be done on the reconstruction of orthodox socialist policy. But the required features of any reconstructed social democracy are clear: the fragmented working class will only be mobilized when it sees an economic and social strategy which transparently (and therefore democratically) fulfills its immediate, pressing social needs (which do include, as Gross so correctly observes, the reduction of predatory crime in the immediate

environment). The socialism which does this must obviously be clearly distinguishable from the authoritarian state form

of "social democracy" of the earlier period, constructed in

defense of an allegedly equal partnership of capital and labor. But it must also transcend the bland assertion of the interests of "community," since "communities" are

likely to be even more dislocated at the end of the mone tarist experiment in Britain and America than they are now. A popular desire for such a socialism may emerge out of the

process of community dislocation, which is now in full flow in capitalist societies, but it will require socialists working in political parties and engaging openly and publicly in

ideological struggles against the Right in order to sustain and advance it.

FOOTNOTES

1. Popularizing a socialist perspective on crime and on crime

control is a project I have also been attempting in Britain, in response to the first two years of Thatcher government. See Taylor, 1981a; 1981b.

2. This characterization of official "social democracy" as "authori? tarian statism" (speaking for the state and against the people) derives from Stuart Hall, 1979; 1980.

3. The inevitabilism of crime is given academic credence, above

all, in Radzinowicz and King, The Growth of Crime: The Interna?

tional Experience (1977). This functionalist account was heavily drawn upon by the Labour Party Research Department in preparing the section on Law and Order in the campaign handbook distributed to all parliamentary candidates prior to the General Election in

1979.

4. Merlyn Rees, M.P., interviewed on BBC-1 Campaign Report,

April 20, 1979. For further analysis of this program and parallel ITN special on law and order, see Clarke and Taylor, 1980.

Winter 1982113



5. Margaret Thatcher, speech at Birmingham, April 19, 1979.

6. Ronald Reagan, speech to American Police Chiefs, October, 1981.

7. I am obviously aware that some of the popular anxiety about the prevalence of crime is inaccurate "statistically": the anxieties almost always exaggerate the real possibility of any one individual

being the victim of street crime, even in urban areas with very high official crime rates. But this is only part of the story. There is certainly no justification for the smugness which sometimes

accompanies the reporting of research by liberal professionals, because these researches characteristically do not catch the essential, key element of such anxieties. "Fear of crime" in many working class areas is real in the sense that such a fear expresses ?or is a

metaphor for-a generalized insecurity and sense of social dislocation which has developed in some working class areas over the last two decades. It is this social and cultural insecurity (which was not a feature of working class communities even in the recession of the 1930s) which fuels working class support for a right-wing politics and a right-wing crime policy like that of Thatcher and Reagan. In this respect, James Q. Wilson (1976) articulates an ideology which

speaks to the control of individual predators as a way of restoring a lost sense of order to "community."

8. "Bennism" is the term now generally given to the uncompromis? ing form of left-reformism that dominates the Left of the Labour

Party at the local level in Britain. The unofficial "leader" of this

tendency is Tony Benn, M.P., Minister of Energy in the last Labour

government and author of two recent texts on the reconstruction of socialist thinking in Britain: Arguments for Socialism and Arguments

for Democracy (Benn, 1980, 1981). For clarification of the relation between orthodox Marxist and Bennite ideas of socialism, see Benn

(1982).

9. This point should not, of course, be exaggerated. Severe cuts have been imposed on nearly all local councils in Britain, and a

particularly heavy attack was mounted during 1981 on the schools and college system in the Lothian area. However, on what has become a very important symbolic question (that of subsidized

public transport or "cheap fares"), the Thatcher government so far has refrained from confronting either Lothian or South Yorkshire.

10. The notion of the Left being composed of a series of "frag? ments" which are inorganically related to each other, rather than

being simply part of one amorphous mass movement, was first articulated by Rowbotham et al., 1979. Since then, at a series of

"Fragments" conferences, different socialist interest groups came

together in order to identify common ground, without any prema? ture collapse into a "new Party." The overwhelming feature of the

"Fragments" groups is a serious commitment to political pluralism and to the construction of procedures for meetings, etc., which

prevent the silencing of one interest by others.

11. The increasing "problematization" of the police in Britain

began to intensify in 1979, after the so-called "riot" in Southall, West London, on April 23, 1979. On this occasion, a peaceful sitdown protest of almost the entire local Asian population, attempt? ing to prevent the holding of an election meeting in the local town hall by the fascist National Front, was broken up by the Metropolitan Police's Special Patrol Group. 347 people were arrested, many of them extremely violently; many others were left badly injured, and one young anti-racist, Blair Peach, was killed (National Council for Civil Liberties, 1980).

12. The different purposes and character of the New Right in the USA and Britain can be derived by comparing Gordon and Hunter's (1977-78) very useful piece on the Moral Majority with Gamble's (1979) account of the Thatcherite coalition.

13. The attempt to analyze the respective power and influence of

the Right in individual capitalist societies is important. Anything less than a clear analysis threatens the reader with a paralyzing vision of the ineluctable, universal advance of an internationally organized conspiracy of the Right. Two recent articles in Crime and Social Justice seem to me to have this effect. Hylton's (1981) article on the growth of community corrections in Saskatchewan (which was governed at provincial level until this year by a social democratic government), if understood as an example of the growth of the Right, does not make real sense of the Canadian situation since liberal economic and social corporatist policies are pursued by all three major parties in that country, and there really is no evidence of the existence there of any organized right-wing movement that even approaches the fundamentally anticorporatist position of the Thatcherite and Reagan coalitions. Shank and Thomas's (1982) article on the "National Democratic Policy Committee" in turn seems merely to substitute an absurd right-wing conspiracy about the Left with an almost equally absurd vision of an internationally organized, virulent, and effective conspiracy of the lunatic Right.

14. The broad outlines of this account of Thatcherite economic and social theory are taken from Gamble (1979).

15. It is worth noting that Thatcherism has not resulted in a straight? forward conversion of the existing penal and social apparatus in Britain to a technology of repression. In the juvenile field, for example, the reintroduction of militaristic detention centers for the few has been accompanied by the expansion of so-called Intermedi? ate Treatment for the many. In IT programs, young offenders and "young people at risk" are provided with a variety of activities by social workers (either in their own environment or in the open country): the rationale for these programs is basically one of provid? ing young people with a "better alternative." Young people are basically being invited to choose that better alternative. This is classicism, but it is not in any obvious sense "repressive."

16. Major international conferences have been held throughout the world in recent years to try to devise ways of controlling the growth of "business-type crime," in particular the rapid growth in "offshore share-dealing" in the interstices of the world's legal jurisdictions, and in long-term fraud. The range and scale of these various illegal operations are breathtaking, although they are only rarely covered in the oopular press. See, inter alia. Rose-Ackerman, 1978; Leigh, 1980; Mack and Kerner, 1975; and Levi, 1981. For an account of one of the international conferences, that of the OECD held in Paris in 1976, see Keesing's Contemporary Archives (July 16,1976: 27,40).

17. We should note that while the overall figure of crime had dropped by 3% in 1978 and 1979, the rate of increase for crimes of violence continued to rise steadily, by some 6% each year (Criminal Statistics, England and Wales, 1980).

18. These assertions about the failure of monetarism are put with some firmness in order to counter the mysticism about Thatcherism and Reaganomics, which is encountered even on the Left. The only sense in which these economic strategies could "succeed" is in "rationalizing" the national economy (i.e., in paring it down to

make it more competitive). They cannot prepare the way for a new era of capitalist growth and thereby of social peace, because there is no way they can generate a demand for the products of the rationalized economy. The capitalist economies have, once again, encountered their classic limit of overproduction.

19. The idea of a "new immiseration" in the American working class, arising out of the unevenness of change within different groups in the class, and in particular the unequal distribution of "income security" in an overall context of "stagflation," was first advanced by Currie et al. (1980). The analysis would surely need to be rewritten now to take account of the escalating unemployment in the United States.

20. I sketch out a range of the issues in the "reconstruction of socialist social policy" in Taylor, 1981a, chapter 3.




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Winter 1982/15



Documents

REMAKING JUSTICE || AGAINST CRIME AND FOR SOCIALISM