Crime : A03 Marxism

• +Marxists have been praised for examining the power struggle in society.
• +They explain why the working classes are more involved in crime.
• +It provides people with a solution to the problem of crime. Communism is the logical conclusion and when that occurs crime will disappear.
• -Victims are ignored. Marxists don't take into account the harm done by offenders. It is a very for the proletariat approach, which in itself is ironic as the proletariat are the main victims of crime. They fail to discuss proletariat crime as being bad, they are too keen to point out white collar crime.
• -Not all laws benefit the bourgeoisie such as drink driving and grievous bodily harm.
• -Feminists claim it ignores patriarchy and the way it can affect the making of law. Laws are mostly generated towards men and they also fail to look at crime committed by and against women.
• -Marxism suggests that the solution is a revolution resulting in a communist state, but crime exists in communist countries like Russia and China.
• -Jones suggests that capitalism doesn't always equal high crime rates. Switzerland is a capitalist country and has very low rates.
• -Power distribution is not straightforward there are lots of people involved not just the bourgeoisie eg white collar crime.
• +Marxist approaches challenge the orthodox thinking of the time. For example, they dismiss the functionalist view that the law reflects value consensus, arguing instead that it perpetuates ruling class ideology. By challenging dominant views, the Marxists open up new areas of debate about class and power and their relationship to crime and deviance.
• -Marxist theories seem to ignore individual motivation as a cause of crime. The stress is primarily on the nature of capitalism and how economic factors 'force' people to act in various ways. As such, Marxist explanations are often attacked for being highly deterministic, rarely considering notions of individual free-will.
• -Marxists seem to suggest that the high rate of recorded crime among the working class, the youth, and black communities is solely the outcome of biased policing. At the same time they argue that the laws are biased against the working class, thus forcing them into crime.
• -Their analysis emphasises the importance of power and questions the ability of the state to influence law creation and enforcement. By doing this they also cast doubt on the validity of official statistics on crime. Official statistics are of little use if they simply reflect a policy of selective law enforcement and ruling class control.
• +It seems implausible to explain all laws in terms of the interests of the ruling class; many laws appear to rest on genuine agreement. However, Marxists reject this argument, claiming that even laws which appear to be for the benefit of society are of use to the ruling class. By providing a few laws that are of use to everybody, the real, repressive nature of the legal system is hidden.
• +Marxists offer a solution to crime. By replacing capitalist society with an egalitarian Communist society, the root cause of crime would be removed.
• +Marxism has been extremely influential in the development of more recent theories and approaches to crime and deviance, in particular. New Criminology and Left Realism. It has also influenced recent approaches to the study of the crimes of the powerful.
• -Left Realists argue that Marxism focuses largely on the crimes of the powerful and ignores intra-class crimes (where both the criminals and victims are working class) such as burglary and 'mugging', which cause great harm to victims.
• -Societies which called themselves Marxist appear to have had at least as high a crime rate as capitalist ones, yet in a Marxist society there ought not to be any crime because the principle cause of it, capitalism, has been removed.