marxist crime essay

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The Marxist Perspective on Crime

Marxism focuses on how crime is a ‘natural outgrowth of the capitalist system and how the criminal justice system works for the benefits of elites and against the lower social classes.

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Last Updated on July 1, 2024 by Karl Thompson

Marxist criminologists see power being held by the Bourgeoisie and laws are a reflection of Bourgeois ideology. The legal system (lawyers, judges and the courts) and the police all serve the interests of the Bourgeoisie. These institutions are used to control the masses, prevent revolution and keep people in a state of false consciousness.

For the purposes of Second Year Sociology, the Marxist perspective on crime may be summarised into four key points:

• Capitalism is Crimogenic –This means that the Capitalist system encourages criminal behaviour.
• The Law is made by the Capitalist elite and tends to work in their interests.
• All classes , not just the working classes commit crime , and the crimes of the Capitalist class are more costly than street crime .
• The state practices Selective Law Enforcement – The Criminal Justice system mainly concerns itself with policing and punishing the marginalised, not the wealthy, and this performs ideological functions for the elite classes.

Key Sociologists associated with this perspective are William Chambliss (1978) and Laureen Snider (1993). Examples of more contemporary theorists include Professors Tombs and Whyte (See later).

Capitalism is Crimogenic

Many Marxists see crime as a natural ‘outgrowth’ of the capitalist system. The Capitalist system can be said to be crimogenic in three major ways –

• Capitalism encourages individuals to pursue self-interest rather than public duty
• Capitalism encourages individuals to be materialistic consumers, making us aspire to an unrealistic and often unattainable lifestyle.
• Capitalism in its wake generates massive inequality and poverty, conditions which are correlated with higher crime rates.

Capitalism, self-interest and crime

Capitalism is Crimogenic because it encourages individuals to pursue self-interest before everything else.

Marxist Sociologist David Gordon says that Capitalist societies are ‘dog eat dog societies’ in which each individual company and each individual is encouraged to look out for their own interests before the interests of others, before the interests of the community, and before the protection of the environment. If we look at the Capitalist system, what we find is that not only does it recommend that we engage in the self-interested pursuit of profit is good, we learn that it is acceptable to harm others and the environment in the process. Please see KT’s blog post – ‘On The incredible immorality of corporate greed’ for referenced examples of Corporations acting immorally in the pursuit of profit.

Marxists point out that in a Capitalist society, there is immense competitive pressure to make more money, to be more successful, and to make more profit, because in a competitive system, this is the only way to ensure survival. In such a context, breaking the law can seem insignificant compared to the pressure to succeed and pressures to break the law affect all people: from the investment banker to the unemployed gang member.

Marxists theorise that the values of the Capitalist system filter down to the rest of our culture. Think again about the motives of economic criminals: The burglars, the robbers, and the thieves. What they are doing is seeking personal gain without caring for the individual victims.

Capitalism, materialism and crime

Capitalism is Crimogenic because it encourages us to want things we don’t need and can’t afford

Companies such as Coca Cola and McDonald’s spend billions of dollars every year on advertising, morphing their products into fantastical images that in no way resemble the grim reality of the products or the even grimmer reality of the productive processes that lie behind making their products. Advertising is a long way beyond merely providing us with information about a product; it has arguably become the art of disinformation.

It is doubtless that corporations benefit through advertising, and modern Capitalism could not exist without the culture of consumerism that the advertising industry perpetuates, and activities have pointed to many downsides. One of the most obvious is that the world of advertising presents as normal a lifestyle that may be unattainable for many people in British Society.

For those millions who lack the legitimate means to achieve the materialist norm through working, this can breed feelings of failure, inadequacy, frustration and anger at the fact that they are working-but-not–succeeding. In short, Advertising creates the conditions that can lead to status frustration, which in turn can lead to crime.

Merton and Nightingale have pointed out that for some the desire to achieve the success goals of society outweigh the pressure to obey the law, advertising only adds to this strain between the legitimate means and the goal of material success.

Capitalism, Inequality and Crime

Thirdly, Capitalism is Crimogenic because it creates inequality and poverty

The Capitalist system is one of radical inequality. At the very top we have what David Rothkopf calls the ‘Superclass’ , mainly the people who run global corporations, and at the very bottom we have the underclass (in the developed world) and the slum dwellers, the street children and the refugees in the developing world.

The Sociologists Zygmunt Bauman points out that the super wealthy effectively segregate themselves from the wealthy, through living in exclusive gated communities and travelling in private jets and armoured vehicles with security entourages. If people can afford it, they move to a better area, and send their children to private schools. However, this doesn’t prevent the poor and the rich from living side by side.

Marxists argue that this visible evidence of massive inequalities give people at the bottom a sense of injustice, a sense of anger and a sense of frustration that they are not sharing in the wealth being flaunted in front of them (the flaunting is the point is it not?) As a result, Capitalism leads to a flourishing of economic crime as well as violent street crime.

William Chambliss even goes so far as to say that economic crime ‘’represents rational responses to the competitiveness and inequality of life in capitalist societies”. As we have seen from previous studies. Drug dealers see themselves as innovative entrepreneurs. So internalised is the desire to be successful that breaking the law is seen as a minor risk.

Marxists hold that more egalitarian societies based on the values of the co-operation and mutual assistance, have lower crime rates, as can be evidence from Bruce Parry’s visit to the extremely egalitarian Island of Anuta

Discussion Questions:

• Does Capitalism encourage competition over co-operation?
• Does exploitation lie at the heart of the Capitalist system?
• Does Capitalism encourage us to be selfish consumers?
• Does Capitalism cause crime?

The Law benefits the elite and works in their Interests

Basic Marxist theory holds that the superstructure serves the ruling classes, thus the state passes laws which support ruling class interests.

Evidence for this can be found in the following:

• Property rights are much more securely established in law than the collective rights of, for instance, trade unions . Property law clearly benefits the wealthy more than those with no property. William Chambliss has argued that ‘at the heart of the Capitalist system lies the protection of Private Property. Consider the fact that there are roughly 100, 000 people recognised as homeless in the United Kingdom 1 , and 300, 000 houses lying empty 2 . The rights of the property owners to keep their properties empty are put before the rights of the needy to shelter.
• Laureen Snider (1993)argues that Capitalist states are reluctant to pass laws which regulate large capitalist concerns and which might threaten profitability. Having tried so hard to attract investment the last thing the state wants to do is alienate the large corporations. The state is thus reluctant to pass – or enforce – laws against such things as pollution, worker health and safety and monopolies.

While the lack of regulation in these areas is obvious in the third world, in most of Europe, there are many laws protection the environment and health and safety, but fines for them are relatively low, and, until 2007, no individual member of a corporation could be prosecuted for damaging the environment or endangering worker safety through corporate practise.

A further recent example which could be used to support this is the deregulation of financial markets prior to the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent ‘credit crunch’ and economic recession. The activities of the vast majority of bankers and financiers were not seen as illegal and, far from being prosecuted, many grew rich through the payments of large bonuses.

Also, People have unequal access to the law . Having money to hire a good lawyer can delay trials, meaning the difference between being found not guilty or guilty, and influence the length of one’s sentence and the type of prison one goes to. Thus for Marxists, punishment for a crime may depend and vary according to the social class of the perpetrator. Poorer criminals tend to receive harsher punishments than rich criminals. As evidenced in one of the examples above, Mark Thatcher received only a suspended sentence for assisting mercenaries in a military coup against a democratically elected government.

Discussion Question: Can you think of any other ways in which the law works in the interests of the elite?

All classes Commit Crime

Marxists remind us that people from all classes commit crime. Theres no better contemporary reminder of this than the case of Donald Trump in the USA. As the ex president of the country and a billionaire, you don’t get much more elite than him!

Case Study: The Crimes of Donald Trump

The former U.S. President Donald Trump currently stands accused of committing 87 crimes between 2017 and 2022.  The details of these are complex, as this article in The Conversation points out. Four of the most basic crimes he is accused of include:

• Falsifying business documents (you might do this to increase the sale value of your assets or decrease the amount of tax you pay).
• Hoarding classified documents (these may contain details of Trump’s allegedly criminal activities).
• Interference in the 2020 presidential election.
• Attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results (e.g. through the Capitol Hill insurrection). 

The final one is just about as serious as you can get!

Trump has pleaded not-guilty to all of these charges, and has been in and out of various courts since his presidency ended. However prosecutors don’t normally pursue a prosecution unless they think they have a good chance of getting a guilty verdict. So Trump is probably guilty of all these crimes. 

This is a great example of how all classes commit crime, Trump being a member of the true global elite. It is also a good example of how someone with huge wealth can stay out of jail. Trump is doing this by challenging every little detail of every charge. So this is also an example of how the legal system can work in the interests of the rich. 

However the very fact that Trump is being prosecuted shows that we don’t have selective law enforcement here! 

We will have to wait and see what the outcome of this is.

The ‘Crimes’ of the Elite are more harmful than Street Crime

Marxists and other critical criminologists tend to focus on ‘social and environmental harms’ rather than crimes. If we take this approach then the violence and destruction carried out by elites are by far the worst in history.

The reason for focussing on harms rather than crimes is that historically elites define the violence they do against others as legitimate, or not criminal. However from a Marxist perspective this is only because they have the power to do so.

If we look at harms through history events such as colonialism and slavery, carried out by European powers have done enormous harms across Africa, Asia and the Americas. However throughout the colonial period, these harms were not seen as criminal. But from a Marxist perspective we should redefine them as criminal. As Angela Davis puts it….

‘The real criminals in this society are not all the people who populate the prisons across the state, but those people who have stolen the wealth of the world from the people’ Angela Davis, former leader of the Black Panthers .

(NB This links in to Dependency Theory ).

White Collar Crime and Corporate Crime

Marxists argue that although they are hidden from view, the crimes of the elite exert a greater economic toll on society than the crimes of the ‘ordinary people’. Laureen Snider (1993) points out that the cost of White Collar Crime and Corporate Crime to the economy far outweighs the cost of street crime by ‘typical’ criminals. Two contemporary organisations: Multinational Monitor and Corporate Watch , specialise in documenting the illegal activities of corporations.

In the section below we look at two types of white collar crime – Fraud and Health and Safety infringements. Both of these sound either terribly complex or terribly unexciting (or both) which means people are generally uninterested in hearing about them, and this general lack of public interest is something which helps the elite get away with an incredibly high level of criminality.

Key Concepts

The cost of financial crime (fraud).

Organisations such as Corporate Watch and…. Multinational Monitor, suggest that Corporate Fraud is widespread. The General Accounting Agency of the USA has estimated that 100s of savings and loans companies have failed in recent years due to insider dealing, failure to disclose accurate information, and racketeering. The cost to the taxpayer in the USA of corporate bail outs is estimated to be around $500 billion, or $5000 per household in the USA.

Case Study: Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion Fraud

In 2009 the disgraced financier Bernie Madoff was sentenced to the maximum 150 years in prison for masterminding a $65bn (£38bn) fraud that wrecked the lives of thousands of investors .

The US district judge Denny Chin described the fraud as “staggering” and said the “breach of trust was massive” and that a message was being sent by the sentence. There had been no letters submitted in support of Madoff’s character, he said. Victims in the courtroom clapped as the term was read out.

Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 counts of fraud, theft and money laundering. The sentencing, in what has been one of the biggest frauds ever seen on Wall Street, was eagerly anticipated. Described by victims in written testimony as a “thief and a monster”, Madoff has become an emblem for the greed that pitched the world into recession. Nearly 9,000 victims have filed claims for losses in Madoff’s corrupt financial empire.

Madoff masterminded a huge “Ponzi” scheme. Instead of investing client’s money in securities, it was held with a bank and new deposits used to pay bogus returns to give the impression that the business was successful. At the time of his arrest in December, he claimed to manage $65bn of investors’ money, but in reality there was just $1bn left.

Corporate America has suffered a series of massive frauds during the past decade, including scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and more recently the financial empire run by Texas billionaire Allen Stanford. Former WorldCom chief Benrard Ebbers is serving 25 years for accounting fraud. Former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling was sentenced to more than 24 years in prison although the sentence was overturned. He remains in prison awaiting resentencing.

Discussion Question: Are crimes such as fraud more harmful to society than violent crime?

The Ideological Functions of Selective Law Enforcement

David Gordon argues that the police mainly focus on policing working class (and underclass) areas and the justice system mainly focuses on prosecuting working and underclass criminals. By and large the system ignores the crimes of the elite and the middle classes, although both of these classes are just as likely to commit crime as the working classes.

Gordon argues that the disproportionate prosecution of working class criminals ultimately serves to maintain ruling-class power and to reinforce ruling class ideology (thus performing ‘ideological functions’ for the ruling class.)

According to Gordon ‘selective law enforcement’ benefits the Capitalist system in three major ways:

• By punishing individuals and making them responsible for their actions , defining these individuals as ‘social failures’ we ignore the failings of the system that lead to the conditions of inequality and poverty that create the conditions which lead to crime.
• The imprisonment of selected members of the lower classes neutralises opposition to the system.
• The imprisonment of many members of the underclass also sweeps out of sight the ‘worst jetsam of Capitalist society’ such that we cannot see it.
• We may also add a fourth benefit, that all of the police, court and media focus on working class street crime means that our attention is diverted away from the immorality and greed of the elite classes.

Criticisms of the Marxist Perspective on Crime

Although there are MANY examples of elites committing VERY harmful crimes, SOME of them get prosecuted. This means the elites do not always get away with crime. The case of Sam Bankman-Fried’s guilty verdict following the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX criticises the Marxist Perspective on Crime.

However a counter claim by Marxists would be that the system has to prosecute some elites to maintain legitimacy. Most of them still get away with their crimes.

While it may be true that the economic costs of corporate crime and fraud are greater than street crime, the direct emotional impact of street crimes are greater. If you are a victim of robbery or other types of street violence, you feel it more than being a victim of a corporate crime which you may not even notice!

This is part of the reason why people are more concerned about immediate street crime, which is something Left Realists addressed.

Communist countries are not crime free. Nor are the people who live in them free of persecution by the state! China and North Korea have pretty bad human rights records, for exampl!

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Related Posts

• Marxism is one of the main perspectives taught within the crime and deviance part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course.
• Evaluating the Marxist Perspective on Crime (part 1)
• Assess the Contribution of Marxism to our Understanding of Crime and Deviance – outline essay plan

Selected Sources 

1 http://www.crisis.org.uk/policywatch/pages/homelessness_statistics.html

2 http://www.aboutproperty.co.uk/news/planning/urban-planning/nearly-300000-empty-houses-in-england-$482464.htm

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Jump to a key chapter

For Marxists, this is true!

In this explanation, we will be focusing on Marxist theories of crime.

• We will explore the Marxist perspective on crime and deviance .
• We’ll also take a look at how Marxism , as a very influential school of sociology , has been taken up and adapted by other scholars and branches to explain crime and deviance .
• We’ll close with an evaluation of the Marxist theory of crime and deviance, diving into particular strengths and criticisms of this perspective.

Let's get started.

The Marxist theory of crime: examples and key terms

In this section, you’ll find an explanation of the Marxist view on crime. Before we look at Marxist theories of crime, it may be helpful to have a reminder of Marxism generally.

A refresher on Marxism

Marxism is a conflict structuralist theory in sociology , pioneered by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels (1848). Structural theories in sociology take a top-down approach by examining the workings of society in terms of the institutional relationships which shape human behaviour. Marxists believe that class conflict is at the core of all societies. This conflict is between those in positions of power and the powerless, and is caused by the nature of the capitalist system. Social control is implemented by the bourgeoisie (ruling class) upon the proletariat (working class), based on the premise of economic determinism .

Economic determinism refers to the idea that society’s most significant relationships are those which are based on economic factors (such as a relationship between an employer and an employee). All other types of relationships, like cultural or political ones, are determined by the form of the economic relationship.

Society is criminogenic

Marxists believe that the capitalist economic system is criminogenic .

Something is criminogenic when it is believed to be the root of criminal or deviant behaviour. A criminogenic society is one where crime is inevitable due to its nature.

The prevalence of crime and deviance is explained by Marxists as being the result of the very nature of capitalism, the key feature of which is the maximisation of profit through private ownership over the means of production. Following this, Marxists argue that the capitalist system encourages competition, greed, and exploitation with the goal of individual success (rather than collective wellbeing) in mind. The obsessive striving for material gains pressurises people into doing whatever it takes to achieve this goal, even if it means breaking the law.

Because of the value that’s attached to financial gain, breaking the law can be seen as a justified (or even logical) means to a profitable end, where even non-utilitarian crimes can be rationalised as the result of frustrations caused by capitalist pressures.

• Evading taxes
• Intellectual theft
• Drug trafficking
• Money laundering

The law is made for the rich

Marxists argue that the law is designed to benefit the bourgeoisie (ruling capitalist class) , as law enforcement agencies reflect and protect its interests. More specifically, society’s laws tend to enhance the occurrence of trade, industry growth, and private ownership. Several theorists have put forward explanations for why this is the case.

William Chambliss

The existence of laws protecting the ruling class is slightly more obscure in more developed countries than in third-world countries. For example, laws that protect trade unions are much more loosely implemented than the laws which govern property ownership rights.

William Chambliss (1976) stated that these property ownership laws were first set up by the state so that wealth would stay in the family among the ruling classes.

Laureen Snider

On the other hand, Laureen Snider (1993) suggested that laws that have been set up to protect the interests of the working class are only a smokescreen designed to disguise the exploitation to which they are subjected. Examples of laws that appear to reflect the interests of the proletariat include the minimum wage, workplace safety, and anti-monopolistic regulations.

Aside from the laws that appear to protect the working class, Snider (1993) also said there is a significant lack of laws regulating ruling class activities. This is because the state stands to profit from large corporations due to the investments which it has attracted from them. The state not only wants to protect these profits but also to continue to get along with corporations so that their profitability is perpetuated.

Trade unions are worker associations, formed to protect workers' rights in particular trades or professions.

Not only are laws created in favour of the ruling class, say Marxists; they are also enforced more strictly among the poor. Corporate crimes tend to be more leniently dealt with (if they’re ever prosecuted at all), while financial crimes committed by the poor are almost always pursued by law enforcement. This is called selective enforcement .

You probably remember, or have heard of the big Panama Papers incident of 2016. In short, many wealthy people like politicians, celebrities, and businesspeople were storing their money in offshore accounts. While this isn't inherently illegal, many were doing it for illegal reasons, like dodging taxes.

While many of the individuals involved were held accountable by being forced to step down from their jobs, the laws which call for more comprehensive and transparent corporation registration practices have been much slower to come to fruition.

Differences between the Marxist and functionalist theories of crime

There are many differences between the Marxist and functionalist theories of crime that you may want to consider when evaluating theories. Let's look at a few.

Marxist theories of crime: the nature of society

As opposed to functionalism, which sees consensus as the basis for society, Marxists believe that society’s main features are conflict and coercion.

Marxist theories of crime: causation

Another key difference between functionalist and Marxist theories of crime rests on causation. Unlike the functionalist theories of strain and status frustration, Marxism posits that the pressure to achieve prosperity affects all members of society, regardless of whether they come from poverty or wealth.

As a result, they believe that working-class crime is a response to the class struggles experienced by the proletariat.

Can you think of any more differences?

How has the Marxist view on crime been extended?

Let's take a look at how the Marxist perspective on crime has been taken up and extended by other scholars and branches of sociology.

Neo-Marxism

Neo-Marxism is a more recent version of traditional Marxist theory, which considers critiques of the original theory when forming explanations of their own. Neo-Marxists believe that cultural factors are much more heavily implicated in the shaping of human behaviour than acknowledged by traditional Marxists, who emphasised the sole importance of economic relationships.

Radical criminology

Radical criminology examines how the state labels certain actions as ‘criminal’, as a result of which certain demographics (namely the disadvantaged), are more likely to be labelled as criminal as well. Radical criminology takes on both micro and macro evaluations, emphasising the importance of studying the state-level management of the criminogenic capitalist society and lower-level interactions between, for example, the police and deviants. Some of the most popular proponents of radical criminology are Taylor, Walton and Young (1973). They advocated for a 'fully social theory of deviance'. While they agreed that capitalism creates an environment where crime is both encouraged and easily doable, their main argument was that working-class criminals haven’t been forced to commit crimes because of their circumstances - they make an active choice to do so.

• Locating the act of deviance in the wider context of capitalism.
• Locating the act of deviance in the immediate social context.
• The meaning of the deviant act according to the individual who committed it.
• The societal response to the deviant act.
• Locating the societal response within the wider context with questions about who defines, and what is defined as ‘criminal’.
• The impacts upon the deviant after being labelled as such.
• An overall examination of the deviant processes combining the previous six steps together.

Bonger's Marxist theory of crime

Willem Bonger (1916) was one of the first criminologists to apply Marx’s theory of crime to his own study. Bonger’s key position was that a capitalist society brings out selfishness, or ‘egoism’ in people. It was this egoism that served as an indirect cause of criminal or deviant activity. It’s important to note that Bonger didn’t believe egoism to be directly responsible for creating the criminal. Instead, he argued that the environment which the capitalist system creates makes people more egoistic, and therefore more capable of committing crimes. Because of the individualistic focus of capitalism, the social bonds that tie people together are weakened and members of society are then subjected to acting out of pure self-interest. In line with the selective law enforcement which Marxists speak of, Bonger stated that the poor’s egoism is labelled as criminal often simply as a result of their lower position in the class hierarchy.

Feminist sociologists on Marxist theories of crime

It’s reasonable to be confused about what feminist sociologists have to say about Marxist theories of crime. One of the several branches of feminism is Marxist feminism. Marxist feminism is a theory that proposes that gender inequality stems from economic inequalities. Capitalism provides the context in which women can be exploited by men within the market. Those who take the least privileged positions in society are working-class women . Marxist feminists believe that the cause of crime is to exploit and oppress this demographic. Crimes such as sexual assault and domestic abuse committed by ruling class men tend to go unpunished. Therefore, a reformed society requires a legal commitment to female victims, both within and outside the workplace.

Strengths and weaknesses of the Marxist theory of crime

As with all theories, we will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the Marxist theory of crime. Check out our handy table below.

Marxist Theories of Crime - Key takeaways

Marxism is based on the notion of economic determinism - economic relationships are at the heart of all interactions within a society.

The capitalist society glorifies the maximisation of profits and ownership and therefore encourages the pursuit of individual successes over collective wellbeing.

The capitalist system is inherently criminogenic - its very nature leads people to deviant activity as a means to an end. The law is designed and enforced to protect the ruling class's interests.

Neo-Marxists follow a more recent perspective which is less deterministic than traditional Marxism - they believe that working-class criminals, despite the harsh conditions they’re subjected to, are still equally responsible for committing deviant acts.

However, Marxism's shortcomings include neglecting societal factors that are not inherently economic. It also fails to provide a potential solution for the flaws in the capitalist system.

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Frequently Asked Questions about Marxist Theories of Crime

What are Marxist theories?

What do Marxists think causes crime?

Marxists believe that the cause of crime is a combination of factors related to the capitalist system. Specifically, they believe that the maximisation of profits and private ownership as ultimate forms of success, in conjunction with the individualism that this encourages, is what leads people to commit crimes. This also explains the prevalence of crime across all social strata (i.e. crimes committed by the rich and the poor). 

What are some primary ideas of the Marxist approach to criminology?

• Capitalism is inherently criminogenic - it creates an environment that both encourages crime and makes it easier to commit. 
• The law is both designed and enforced in favour of the ruling class, in that laws governing working-class livelihoods are more strict and more subject to prosecution. 

What are the criticisms of the Marxist theory of crime?

A criticism of the Marxist theory of crime is that it overemphasises the significance of economic relationships at the expense of other factors which shape human behaviour. Traditional Marxism is also criticised for being too deterministic, which neo-Marxism accounts for by attributing responsibility to working-class criminals for their actions. 

Why is Marxist criminology important?

Marxist criminology is important because it studies the crimes of the powerful as well as of the poor.

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