the founders of Marxism thought that crime, same as all other problems of human society, is a direct result of the unjust structure of capitalism. So they did not wrote a lot about crime in particular.

Marx argues that the institutions within society such as law, family, religion, politics, and media are tools in the hands of the ruling class, bourgeoisie. The capitalists are exploiting the working classes, and as a result of that, the poor people are driven into crime for their needs or as an opposition to the current system. Marx (1867) wrote about criminals on page 734 of Volume One of Capital as:

?At the same time, the proletariat could not suddenly adapt to the discipline of their new conditions, and so were turned into beggars, robbers, and vagabonds, partly from inclination, but in most cases from the stress of circumstances. [Cited Conflict Criminology, 2004 (online)]
The capitalist system is a criminal system in its nature, so there is not any solution, as they argue, except a proletariat violent revolution, as Moore said:

Crime is seen as a result of the very nature of capitalism (the crisis) and the need to maintain law and order. The police are seen as provocateurs, not agents of the law responding to offences committed against society. [Moore, 1996: 76]

Capitalism controls all the government and social institutions for its benefits; law and law enforcement is used to exploit the working class, they enforce their own values upon the rest of the population i.e. hegemony, through their control over the education system, mass media and religion. Moore further explains this matter by saying:

According to the Marxist view, one of the major means by which the ruling class control people is to manipulate the cultural values of society to their benefit? in Marxist terminology, the imposition of the ruling class?s values on the rest of society is known as hegemony. [Moore, 1996:88]

Bonger (1916) developed the so-called Traditional Criminology as a theory; he argues that unemployment, low wages, deprivation, and alienation within the society cause crime. Bonger argues that capitalism is based on competition, on greed and selfishness; the poor people cannot get what they want so the only way towards their aims is crime. According to him theft is a redistribution of income, and the genuine criminals are those who manipulate the whole wealth of the society in the hands of a small number of people.

Crime, as the Marxists argue, is an important mean for supporting the ideology of capitalism: by creating moral panics about certain crimes or certain groups in the community they divert the public attention from the very exploiting nature of capitalism. They concentrate on the need for law enforcement and stronger policing to protect public from those dangers, while in reality is to protect the capitalist regime. What is going on nowadays in the tabloid media and within the public about the illegal immigrants and asylum seekers, it can be argued, that is a good example of this. Martin Bright describes the moral panic about the asylum seekers, as he writes:
The report, 'Understanding the Stranger', also registers serious concern among asylum seekers that negative portrayal by politicians and the media can have a serious effect on local opinion and can lead them to fear for their physical safety? 'Local people and asylum seekers are strangers to each other in many areas of England. Both groups are anxious about each other to the point of concern for their personal safety. This can result in a climate where myth and rumour can take root very quickly.' [Bright, 2004 (online)]
The traditional Marxists leave no any other ways to deal with crime except a violent revolution. What they expect as socialism is supposed to be the end of all the miseries of the masses, not only crime. The Communist Manifesto describes that stage as:
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class. [Marx& Engles, 1848 (online)]

The communist Manifesto sees socialism as a society free from:

The exploitation of one part of society by the other?, which cannot completely vanish except, with the total disappearance of class antagonisms. [Ibid]

These traditional views and one-dimensional analyse of crime paves the way to a new Marxist criminology, known as New Criminology. The new criminology or, radical criminology is formulated on the hands of Taylor, Walton and Young (1973). Livesey says:

Taylor, Walton and Young wanted to demonstrate that conceptions of crime and law were based upon the ability of powerful classes in society to impose their definitions of normality and deviance on all other social classes. [Livesey, 2004(online)]

The white-collar crimes are crimes of the clerks, managers and administration bodies in the course of their occupation. These crimes are not easy to deal with, and the police also are not taking them serious as the working class crimes. The police are concentrating on the so-called street crime not these kinds of crimes, As Livesey says:

Expert knowledge is used to steal and defraud from companies, such as Nick Leeson, but expert knowledge is needed to uncover the crime and because police focus is on working class crime they don?t posses the necessary knowledge needed. [Ibid]

Another kind of crime is corporate crime, which is the crime of the big companies in order to get more benefits on the expense of the masses, especially the poor working classes. The new or radical criminologists see the crimes of those capitalists and company owners the same as a street theft or mugging committed by a working class youth, as Livesey says:

Criminal activity simply reflects dominant Capitalist norms, since a thief, for example, steals to make money (he or she exploits the people from whom they steal). Similarly, a Capitalist exploits his / her workforce by making a profit. Criminals, therefore, want the same things as Capitalists; they simply don't want to provide anything in exchange. [Ibid]

The Marxists see law as an instrument in the hands of the powerful to exploit the poor, even they argue that law is not for preventing crime but it is a cause of crime, as Livesey says:

Taylor, Walton and Young argue, the "cause of crime is the law". In order to understand why people commit crimes we have to firstly understand the way Capitalist societies are structurally differentiated in terms of wealth and power. [Ibid]

The Marxists? description of law reaches its extremes as Livesey says:

"The radical criminological argument appears to be that if there were no laws, there would be no crime".

The Marxists cannot give sufficient explanations for non-economical crimes such as rape and sexual assaults, although most of the victims are from the working classes.

However, it can be argued, that the Marxists are exaggerating in their believes concerning law; not all laws are in the interests of the rich and powerful people only, but there are many laws in the interests of the majority of people, as Moore says:

Not all laws, however, are seen to be entirely for the benefit of the ruling class. Clearly, many laws do genuinely protect ordinary people- obvious ones would be the laws on rape, drunken driving and safety at work. Genuine concessions can be gained either when the interests of the powerful and of ordinary people overlap or when representative pressure groups are able to push through reforms in the interests of the wider population. [Moore, 1996: 72-73]

The functionalists talk about the functions of different institutions within community. They argue that different organs in society are just like the organs of body; if they function properly the body is healthy, the same is true for society. However they are different from the Marxists because the Marxists argue that those functions are for the interests of the rich and powerful ruling class. Livesey comments on this matter by saying:

Whereas Functionalists talk about laws functioning in the interests of everyone in society, Radical Criminologists talk about laws functioning to protect the basic interests of a ruling class. [Livesey, 2004 (online)]

The functionalists are criticizing the Marxists because they argue that the Marxists are always negative about law; capitalists need law to exploit the working class, they argue, so law always supports crime, or as Quinney argues it is Illegal:

As Quinney saw the law as illegitimate, he also saw the need to obey the law as being questionable, and certainly viewed crime as a natural choice in many instances. [Williams, 2001:451]

Subcultures are the cultures that are different from the general norms and culture of the society. Marxists argue that the youth sub-culture in capitalist society is an opposition to the unjust nature of capitalism; as the norms of capitalism is the dominant culture the other sub-cultures are recognised as criminal or deviant:

The laws would usually represent the rules or norms of the dominant culture. The norms of other groups may even be criminal under the law, so that by living within their subculture?s rules of behaviour, they may be breaking the criminal rules of the dominant culture. [Moore, 1996:439]

However the Marxists are criticized because they cannot explain other groups in society who may have their own sub-cultures, such as women, as Moore says:

Feminist writers argued that the Marxist subcultural approach ignored women. In defence of the Marxist subculturalists it should be pointed out that the overwhelming bulk of criminal activity among youth is committed by males. [Ibid, P. 91]

The Marxists? subcultural theory is based on the youth working class subcultures; those youths show their opposition to the society or the capitalist system, as the Marxists argue, in the way they dress, their language as well as special music. Although their opposition is not a serious danger to capitalism, so they are recognized as magical opposition.

However, it can be argued that these kinds of youth subculture may have other psychological, physical or social reasons relating to the transitional period of their life. Moore also thinks that the Marxist approach lacks practicality, as he says:

The Marxist subcultural approach has also been criticized because it implies that the sociologist always knows best. For example, the youths themselves may well give their own explanations for their behaviour, but the Marxist sociologists would discount these and argue that the real, underlying reason (of which the youths are unaware) is related to elements of the class struggle. [Ibid P.92]

The Marxist approach is also criticized because they attack all social institutions, laws and norms of the capitalist society, but they do not offer so much as an alternative. The socialist countries were not successful in creating societies as it was promised in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Crime rates were still high in those countries and the so-called working class state became the ruling class and exploiter of the people.

Societies, which call themselves Marxist, have equal crime rate to capitalist ones, yet in Marxist society, there should be no crime. [Revision- Notes, 2003 (online)]

However the history did not follow the way, which was expected by Marx; capitalism, it can be argued, changed its policy and even might took advantage from the writings of traditional Marxists for its reforms. Capitalism proved to be cleverer than they expected it. People accepted the society as it is and got busy with all the financial and business matters of the modern capitalism, such as mortgages, jobs and banking accounts etc?

From another side, the society in our time is not the same society that Marx and Engels experienced it in the past, so it can be argued that what they wrote for that time is not relevant for today. Burke even saw the new criminology as:

From the standpoint of the twenty-first century, it can be seen to be utopian, reflecting the optimistic nature of the times in which it was written; while, the generality of the work itself meant that it could offer very little to substantive theory at all. [Burke, 2002: 155]


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