Revisiting Crimes of the Powerful

Marxism, Crime and Deviance

Steven Bittle, Laureen Snider, Steve Tombs, David Whyte, Steven Bittle, Laureen Snider, Steve Tombs, David Whyte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351815369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Criminologia

Frank Pearce was the first scholar to use the term 'crimes of the powerful.' His ground-breaking book of the same name provided insightful critiques of liberal orthodox criminology, particularly in relation to labelling theory and symbolic interactionism, while making important contributions to Marxist understandings of the complex relations between crime, law and the state in the reproduction of the capitalist social order. Historically, crimes of the powerful were largely neglected in crime and deviance studies, but there is now an important and growing body of work addressing this gap. This book brings together leading international scholars to discuss the legacy of Frank Pearce's book and his work in this area, demonstrating the invaluable contributions a critical Marxist framework brings to studies of corporate and state crimes, nationally, internationally and on a global scale.

This book is neither a hagiography, nor a review of random areas of social scientific interest. Instead, it draws together a collection of scholarly and original articles which draw upon and critically interrogate the continued significance of the approach pioneered in Crimes of the Powerful. The book traces the evolution of crimes of the powerful empirically and theoretically since 1976, shows how critical scholars have integrated new theoretical insights derived from post-structuralism, feminism and critical race studies and offers perspectives on how the crimes of the powerful - and the enormous, ongoing destruction they cause - can be addressed and resisted.

Section II

Crimes of the powerful research

Empirical dimensions

The nine chapters which constitute Section II collectively underscore the breadth, depth and extent of crimes of the powerful enabled by globalization. Kristian Lasslett uses CotP and Marx’s Capital to theorize the link between structural conditions and agency, then applies these factors in a case study of the actions taken by executives of a mining company in Papua New Guinea, sponsoring war crimes when intractable local resistance clashed with capitalist profit-making imperatives. Liisa Lähteenmäki and Anne Alvesalo-Kuusi document that even in Finland, one of the few countries to pass and enforce corporate criminal liability laws, individuals rather than corporations are charged, fines are miniscule and blame is too often shifted to low-level employees. Thus power relations remain unchallenged while the illusion of equal justice is maintained. Gregg Barak analyses the apparent immunity from punishment enjoyed by global financial institutions and multinational corporations through a study of the worldwide rigging of interbank interest rates (the Libor scandal), showing how capitalist state apparatuses of social control increasingly privilege the interests of global capital over the welfare of global citizens. Elizabeth A. Bradshaw’s study of resistance by environmental and indigenous activists to the construction of the Dakota Access (oil) Pipeline also focuses on complex and contradictory efforts by states – here the U.S. federal state – to uphold both capitalist accumulation/profit maximization imperatives and respect citizens’ wishes (as well as its own rhetoric on climate change). In the end citizens won, but the victory was symbolic, short-term and quickly overturned by a new federal government. Meanwhile, Stéfanie Khoury looks at crimes of the powerful in Brazil, where the federal government has allied with agribusiness corporations (themselves allied with the dominant political class) to make Brazil a world leader in the production and use of agro-toxins – with dire effects on the health and wellbeing of the vast majority of Brazilians. Paul Leighton focuses on enablers of crimes of the powerful in the academic discipline of criminology, asking why scholars have ignored the massive, $550 billion annual theft perpetrated by employers on the employed. Scott Poynting uses Pearce’s comments on the ways that deeper structures of systemic power are masked by the scandalization of corruption to illuminate how the case of former New South Wales government minister Eddie Obeid was subjected to a process of ideological mystification. In so doing, Poynting shows how the Obeid case was not an aberration, but an archetypal consequence of a neoliberal political system that has routinized some forms of corruption. Ignasi Bernat’s case study of mortgage lending concessions made by the Spanish state before and after the fiscal crisis of 2007–2008 locates crimes of the powerful within the financialization of the economy. The state then becomes an instrument to assist corporations to “squeeze yet more corporate profitability within the frame of the neoliberal turn.” The final chapter in this section, by David O. Friedrichs, excoriates criminologists for ignoring the harms perpetrated by immensely powerful international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which privilege profits over safety, social and environmental standards and impose huge damage on the Global South through mandatory structural adjustment agreements.

Chapter 9

Marx reloaded for the 21st century

Capitalism, agency and the crimes of the powerful

Kristian Lasslett

Frank Pearce’s Crimes of the Powerful enjoys pioneering status for a diverse range of compelling reasons (Pearce 1976), one of which is its serious engagement with Marxist theory both as a tool of critique in criminology and as a framework for understanding the drivers which lie behind the crimes of the powerful. Yet Pearce was writing this seminal contribution when Marx’s ideas had reached a high point in their influence on the social sciences in Western academic institutions. In a few short years, post-modernism and post-structuralism would call into question “grand-narrative” theory, which has marginalized Marx’s work.

Although for a period mainstream academic tendencies precipitated a turn away from Marx, Pearce’s original intervention germinated a small but serious engagement with Marx’s ideas within the crimes of the powerful scholarship. Indeed, in their 2002 paper, “Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful,” Tombs and Whyte observe:

The labour theory of value and the theory of surplus value, the necessarily antagonistic relationship between classes, the inherent tendency of capitalism to expand, destructively, whilst at the same time reproducing the contradictions upon which it is founded, all seem to be crucial tools for understanding and engaging with the trajectories of the world.

(2002: 222)

Two years later Green and Ward (2004) published the keystone text State Crime, which again points to the value of Marxist theory as a device for explaining elite deviance.

Since then Marx’s works have enjoyed something of a revival. The 2008 global financial crisis saw his writings being quoted in the popular press, with approval, while sales of Capital are said to have soared. We have also witnessed adept popularizes of Marx’s thought broaden this process of theoretical renewal – David Harvey, Slavoj Žižek and Yanis Varoufakis are notable examples. For those who believe in the enduring intellectual and emancipatory value of Marx, these vectors are to be welcomed, as fragile as they may be in practice.

Yet as Marx noted in the preface to Capital, “there is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits” (1976: 104). The challenge that is now set for crimes of the powerful scholarship which aims to cultivate an expanded engagement with Marx is translating this broad appreciation of the latter’s work into an active programme of research that appropriates in a critical and creative fashion the scientific canon Marx generated – in its entirety – applying it to fertilize understandings of state and corporate crime in its regionalized trajectories. This task, in part, demands a sensitive theoretical balancing act that uncovers the threads that connect objective conditions of existence with historical struggles and events powered by human agency.

In this respect Pearce notes:

The social conditions under which men live determine the limits of their possible action. The nature of group identification and what are seen as the historical possibilities within these situations will affect the historical development of these societies. Those who treat the subjective views held by people in situations as if they are irrelevant epiphenomena are distorting Marxism.

(1976: 55)

The following chapter aims to build on this important insight, looking in particular at how Capital can be interpreted not only as a critique of political economy, but an important contribution to theories of human agency and the latent criminogenic potentials which can be actualized by human beings acting under certain concrete conditions. To do this, a summary will be offered of the philosophical framework Marx developed to steer his critical engagement with political economy. This will establish a vantage point for framing Capital as a theoretical treatise that offers important insights into how identity, capacities, values and ideas emerge within human subjectivities, giving rise to the possibility of agency taking historical forms that drive the waste of life, ecosystems and wealth. To evidence Capital’s applicability to this micro level of analysis, examples will be drawn upon from the author’s research into state and corporate crime in Papua New Guinea.

The philosophical foundations of Marx’s political economy

In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx remarked of his unpublished book – The German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1968) – which he co-authored with Engels, “we abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification” (1971: 22). The German Ideology was not the only intervention from this period that aided self-clarification. The Poverty of Philosophy (Marx 1978a), The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx 1959) and The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Critique (Marx and Engels 1957) also stand out as texts where Marx laid the foundations for his future theoretical trajectory.

A close reading of these volumes reveals an emerging philosophical framework that reimagines ontology, epistemology and methodology in a way that is congruent with a materialist modality of dialectical thought. Critically, during this period of reflection and inquiry, Marx developed an understanding of human nature – a theory of being and self-actualization – that is critical to reading his later work, Capital. In the absence of this philosophical link, Capital remains a powerful treatise on the laws and tendencies of capitalism as an economic system, but once the link is made, it also becomes a vehicle for thinking about how humans value their world, connect and relate to each, develop capacities and identities and express different forms of social agency.

Owing to spatial limitations, only an elliptical presentation of Marx’s philosophy is possible here. To that end, it ought first to be noted that one of the most fundamental features of existence pointed to in Marx’s philosophical inquiry is captured by the category totality. That is, all matter, however complex or simple, cannot exist in an isolated, atomized form, even if this appears to be the case on the surface of things. From a dialectical position, atomization and isolation would negate the possibility of matter possessing any definition or characteristics, which is what distinguishes being from non-being. Accordingly, Marx argues that all matter exists within systems of relations, which give the constituting elements of a system their concrete features.

Applied to human society, it follows that one of the most elementary constituting parts of social systems, human beings, are in their infant form, potential in the state of becoming. It is only once this human potential is actualized within a particular system of social relationships that human beings develop concrete capacities, sensibilities and ideas, that is the substance of human agency. Mediating social relationships and self-actualization are practice and culture (Mikhailov 1980). Social systems generate productive, political and social practices, around which rich human cultures develop, which as whole allows technique and knowledge to be transferred to new generations. Out of this process of cultural transference and practical application, humans in a state of becoming develop concrete agency powers through which to make history.

But as is the case with Marx’s thought, this ontological conception is laced with a contradiction. Although the human ability to actualize potential is facilitated through modalities of life activity that emerge out of historically evolving social relations, these relations can also place limits on how potential is actualized. To that end, Marx observes in The Poverty of Philosophy, “[i]n principle, a porter differs less from a philosopher than a mastiff from a greyhound. It is the division of labour which has set a gulf between them” (1978a: 120).

These social relationships can also amplify and supress different human capacities in uneven, historically distinct ways – creating contexts, for instance, where personal “greed” is so heightened, it appears a determining factor in precipitating economic crisis. Accordingly, from a philosophical and emancipatory perspective, making sense of these relationships and how they shape the historical actualization of human subjectivity becomes a core concern for Marx, which manifests in a twin track of political economy and political commentary that marked his intellectual career.

However, if we are to understand the social relationships which underwrite our agency powers, Marx argues, a process of methodological prioritization must take place. That is, although social reality exists as a totality, the human mind can only begin to appropriate this interconnected whole gradually and methodically. This process of gradual appropriation, Marx (1973) contends, must begin with the most elementary social relationships underpinning human communities before incrementally appropriating more complex relational sequences. To that end, he argues, it is the social relationships through which human beings produce the material substances essential to their sensuous existence, both essential (sustenance, shelter) and cultivated (enjoyment, culturally mediated consumption), that forms the elementary foundations of society. Theorization, therefore, must begin with these structures before contending with more complex political, cultural and legal relationships. The latter are not mere epiphenomena; they are also determinate forces that must be thought about. However, their concreteness cannot be fully unravelled without first appreciating the elementary processes they emerge out of.

In that light, Capital is a text which theorizes the elementary social relationships that underpin capitalist societies. However, it is also an attempt to think more richly about the historically developed social regimes that convert human potential into differentiated concrete subjectivities, that drive social contention, struggle and change. Reading Capital this way has important implications for how we apply Marx to crimes of the powerful scholarship. On that note, the broad contours of Capital will now be traced, before we then look at some concrete examples which demonstrate its capacity to inform analyses that link criminogenic events underpinned by contentious expressions of agency power to the broader structures of capitalist society.

Capital and the crimes of the powerful

Marx’s seminal theoretical work begins at the moment of production, which is primarily the focus of volume I. It then expands to consider economic circulation as a totality in volume II, before considering the mechanisms which condition how revenues are distributed, which is the subject of volume III. The latter two volumes were unfinished at the time of Marx’s death, and further planned iterations, including one on the state system, had not been started.

If we turn first to volume I, Marx (1976) begins the work by theorizing the social relationships which give commodities – goods produced for market – of many different types a common substance that underpins their exchange value. To that end, he argues, the common substance is human labour time – that is, each commodity requires a certain exertion of human effort, which can be measured temporally. Marx observes “what exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time necessary for its production” (1976: 129). To this he adds “socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society” (Marx 1976: 129).

Having set out his labour theory of value, Marx then considers the hidden basis of the revenues enjoyed by different stratas of the bourgeoisie. To that end, he argues, the owners of labour power (i.e. workers) sell their capacity to generate value in exchange for wages. The difference between what the worker is paid in wages and the value they can produce in the contracted time constitutes the elementary basis of surplus value, which through a series of mechanisms eventually congeals in revenue forms accruing to the capitalist class. The rate of surplus value extraction can be increased in a variety of ways, Marx argues, such as extending the working day, decreasing wages or cheapening the price of labour through efficiency gains in the production of the means of consumption essential to labouring households.

If we now shift attention to volume II of Capital, here Marx (1978b) broadens his focus from the moment of production in order to think about how it forms part of a broad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Revisiting Crimes of the Powerful: an introduction
• Section I Theoretical and conceptual excursions
• Section II Crimes of the powerful research: empirical dimensions
• Section III New developments in crimes of the powerful research
• Index