Abstract

That Marxists have traditionally paid little attention to crime is not simply attributable to the fact that Marx and Engels themselves wrote scarcely anything on the topic. Rather, this neglect manifests a deeper theoretical devaluation rooted in the classical Marxian analysis of the capitalist mode of production, an analysis which has resulted in a frequently fetishist focus on the industrial proletariat as the tendential collective subject. Crime, for the most part, has been relegated to the parasitic and politically insignificant Lumpenproletariat and one-sidedly viewed as symptomatic of the endemic degeneracy and “demoralization” of industrial capitalism. At best, it has occasionally been treated as a form of transitional or pre-political (individual) revolt which cannot, in itself, play an historically important part in the revolutionary process and which, in any event, is ultimately destined (like law and the state) to disappear with the abolition of class society and the advent of genuinely universal communism.