Introduction

The present period is an appropriate one in which to re-read Engels' Condition of the Working Class in Britain. The demolition of the welfare state under conditions of high global unemployment and dramatic increases poverty would have been thought impossible twenty years ago. Capitalism appears, in this and other respects, to be moving backwards, closer to the world described by Engels in 1844 rather than away from it. Of course there is a wealth of literature and social science research studying and documenting these conditions and proposing various solutions. But in most of this literature the poor, the unemployed, remain passive victims of circumstance or even responsible for their own fate. To the extent that they are seen to act, it is usually in the guise of the threatening 'underclass' through the negativity of crime and violence. But this is not how Engels saw the suffering masses in 1844. As Lenin remarked:

"Even before Engels, many people had described the sufferings of the proletariat and had pointed to the necessity of helping it. Engels was the firstto say that the proletariat is not only a suffering class; that it is in fact, the disgraceful economic condition of the proletariat that drives it irresistibly forward and compels it to fight for its ultimate emancipation. And the fighting proletariat will help itself." [1]

It is here that one of the most important reasons for re-reading Engels' book is to be found. What appears refreshingly new and relevant for us today about Engels is his method, his understanding of the suffering masses as not just objects to be studied and helped but, in the last analysis, as acting subjects, the bearers of the solution to their own problems through a historical transformation that only they can achieve. Even if his predictions of revolutionary transformation were premature and, even if we understand that today there are new and different obstacles to their realisation, Engels' perspective appears increasingly less dated as time passes. This is underlined by a second feature of the present crisis: the combination of rising poverty and misery, with a collapse, not just of traditional welfare state policies but, at a much more fundamental level, of popular confidence in the ability of politicians and political parties, of the left as well as the right, to actually do anything about it. The supposed passivity of the poor is a distorted reflection of the impotence of the politicians.

Many of these issues are brought into focus by the discussion of working class crime in the pages of The Condition of the Working Class in England. The high incidence of crime among the most exploited sections of the working class seems to encapsulate all the problems facing any view of poor as the agents of their own emancipation. Theft or assault may well be a response to oppression and exploitation but it is only occasionally directed at the actual source of such oppression. More often the victim is, like the offender, poor and powerless. Marxists for this reason have often regarded crime as a marginal issue seeing it, for example, as a feature of the 'lumpenproletariat' rather than the working class (Hirst 1975), deconstructing discourses about crime as adoption of the ideological categories of bourgeois law (O'Malley 1988), or regarding talk of working class crime as capitulation to 'moral panic' fuelled by the mass media.[2] A great deal of confusion is indeed created by talking generally about 'crime', a legal term which can cover everything from financial fraud to serial murder, and without paying precise attention to the social and political forces which determine which activities become criminalised in particular historical periods. When these are taken into account crime can return as a central element in the history of working class self activity. As the work of Marxist historians such as Edward Thompson (1967, 1974), Douglas Hay (Hay et al. 1975), Peter Linebaugh (1991) and others have shown, crime and punishment were central issues in the formation of the working class during the eighteenth century. But what was at issue was not 'crime' in some general abstract sense, but the criminalisation, by the ruling classes and the judiciary, of working class resistance to the development of capitalist property relations.

Engels was writing, at first hand, of the experience of the working class in the next period in the development of British capitalism, the new urban factory system as represented in particular by Manchester. His discussion of crime is more attuned to the issues of urban deprivation and poverty familiar - and increasingly so - to us today. If the eighteenth century, as studied by Thompson and his collaborators was characterised by crime as a form of politics, the early nineteenth, as documented by Engels was characterised by the transition from crime to politics as the form of working class self activity in response to capitalism[3]. In the remainder of this chapter I shall first attempt a summary of Engels' treatment of crime in The Condition of the Working Class in England and then discuss its relevance for today. 

THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF CRIME

Some years ago Jock Young summarised Engels' views on crime as amounting to four alternatives facing the impoverished worker. He "... can become so brutalised as to be, in effect, a determined creature." Secondly he can äccept the prevalent mores of capitalist society, and enter into the war of all against all." Thirdly, he can steal the property of the rich. Finally he can struggle for socialism (Young 1975, p. 78). This classification provides a very useful starting point for an investigation of Engels' treatment of crime. 

crime and brutalisation

The theme of demoralisation and brutalisation of the working class as a cause of crime is undoubtedly strong in Engels. At first sight the relation between brutalisation and crime appears to take a strongly determinist form.

Ïf the influences demoralising to the working-man act more powerfully, more concentratedly than usual, he becomes an offender as certainly as water abandons the fluid for the vaporous state at 80 degrees, Réamur. Under the brutal and brutalising treatment of the bourgeoisie, the working-man becomes precisely as much a thing without volition as water, and is subject to the laws of Nature with precisely the same necessity; at a certain point all freedom ceases." [4:425]

Engels elaborates the effects of brutalisation in a number of directions. Moral disintegration appears to be one consequence. Lack of moral restraint combined with poverty lead inexorably to crime.

"The moral training which is not given to the worker in school is not supplied by the other conditions of his life... his whole position and environment involves the strongest temptation to immorality. He is poor, life offers him no charm, almost every enjoyment is denied him, the penalities of the law have no further terrors for him: why should he restrain his desires, why leave to the rich the enjoyment of his birthright, why not seize a part of it for himself? What inducement has the proletarian not to steal? .... And, when the poverty of the proletarian is intensified to the point of actual lack of the barest necessaries of life, to want and hunger, the temptation to disregard all social order does but gain power. .... Want leaves the working-man the choice between starving slowly, killing himself speedily, or taking what he needs where he finds it - in plain English, stealing." (4:412)

Engels gives us some graphic portrayals of the moral disintegration of working class life in early capitalism. Such brutal conditions are particularly concentrated in the most marginalised elements, those on the fringes of the reserve army of labour who lead a casual existence and are forced into the lodging houses and hostels. Speaking of the London lodging houses he wrote:

"Into every bed four, five, or six human beings are piled, as many as can be packed in, sick and well, young and old, drunk and sober, men and women, just as they come, indiscriminately. Then come strife, blows, wounds, or, if these bedfellows agree, so much the worse; thefts are arranged and things done which our language, grown more humane than our deeds, refuses to accord." (4:336)

And again, in the Manchester lodging houses:

 "what physical and moral atmosphere reigns in these holes I need not state. Each of these houses is a focus of crime, the scene of deeds against which human nature revolts, which would perhaps never have been executed but for this forced centralisation of vice." (4:366)

But brutalisation and demoralisation not only affect the poorest elements in the lodging houses but the working class as a whole. In this context it is important to note that although property crime has a special significance, which we shall come to, Engels does not ignore other forms of crime. In particular he pays attention to prostitution, sexual harassment and domestic violence as features of working class family and working life.

"Next to intemperance in the enjoyment of intoxicating liquors, one of the principal faults of English working-men is sexual licence." [4:423]

The working class, "with no means of making fitting use of its freedom" turns to drink and sex which are carried to excess [423]. This excess is related to poverty and insecurity: what is the point in deferred gratification and 'respectability' when there is no security in life [4:424]

All this sounds very similar to those middle class Victorian moralists who studied the poor and the 'dangerous class' from the standpoint of the need to inculcate moral restraint. Thus Henry Mayhew, twenty years after Engels, in his London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1861 was concerned with the 'undeserving poor' as 'a vast heap of social refuse' possessed of an 'innate love of a life of ease' and criminals as 'those who will not work'. The obsession of the early Victorian middle classes in the 1830's and 1840's had been with the 'lack of moral restraint' of the working classes, and the need to habituate them to the discipline and sobriety of hard work even if this meant reforming the worst excesses of the factory system. Engels was concerned to show that the destruction of morality was precisely a product of the 'hard work' and accompanying destruction of family life imposed by capitalism itself.

"The husband works the whole day through, perhaps the wife and also the elder children, all in different places; they meet night and morning only, all under perpetual temptation to drink; what family life is possible under such conditions? Yet the working-man cannot escape from the family, must live in the family, and the consequence is a perpetual succession of family troubles, domestic quarrels, most demoralising for parents and children alike. neglect of all domestic duties, neglect of the children, especially, is only too common among the English working people..." [4:424-5]

Part of these strains and stresses of working class family life are related to the condition of various family members in the labour market.

Ïn many cases the family is not wholly dissolved by the employment of the wife, but turned upside down. The wife supports the family, the husband sits at home, tends the children, sweeps the room and cooks. This case happens very frequently; in Manchester alone, many hundred such men could be cited, condemned to domestic occupations. It is easy to imagine the wrath aroused among the working-men by this reversal of all relations within the family, while other social conditions remain unchanged." [4:438]

He traces similar consequences from the employment of children. Engels at first sight seems to be sanctioning a particular family division of labour and seeing domestic labour as trivial. Indeed in the German editions of 1845 and 1892 the phrase "the wrath aroused... relations within the family" is put in stronger language as "the just wrath aroused among the working-men by this virtual castration, and the reversal of all relations within the family." There were plenty of middle class reformers lamenting the effects of the factory system on the morality and family life of the working classes. But the comment "while other social conditions remain unchanged" implies that Engels starts from the possibility of a 'democratic domesticity' advocated by feminists[4] where the capitalist ideology of the male as breadwinner has been overcome:

Änd yet this condition, which unsexes the man and takes from the woman all womanliness without being able to bestow upon the man true womanliness, or the woman true manliness - this condition which degrades, in the most shameful way, both sexes, and, through them, Humanity...... we must admit that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes can have come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning. If the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too. If the wife can now base her supremacy upon the fact that she supplies the greater part, nay, the whole of the common possession, the necessary inference is that this community of possession is no true and rational one, since one member of the family boasts offensively of contributing the greater share. If the family of our present society is being thus dissolved, this dissolution merely shows that, at bottom, the binding tie of this family was not family affection, but private interest lurking under cloak of a pretended community of possessions". [4:439]

The first moment or aspect, then, of Engels' treatment of working class crime is the purely negative one of brutalisation and the deterioration of family life. Obviously, if this theme of brutalisation is abstracted out from the rest of Engels' work as a 'theory of the causes of crime' then we end up with something very similar to conventional sociology or criminology. In the same way that his account could be seen to echo the sentiments of middle class reformers of the factory system. But this was not Engels' intention. 

the war of all against all

A second theme in the discussion of the causes of crime focuses on the social relations of competitive capitalist accumulation which have brought England to a state of the war of all against all.

"The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest... The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.

"Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. Just as in Stirner's recent book[5], people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker under foot..." [4:329]

At times Engels' discussion has almost the flavour of a conservative romanticism lamenting the decline of a stable ordered society in which each individual knew his or her place:

"The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy?.... And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another..... The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme." [4:329]

Bourgeois critics of the new urban life were of course saying similar things. Thus in the same year of publication of Engels book, 1844, the Tory Blackwoods Magazine warned that "the restraints of character, relationship and vicinity are.... lost in the crowd ... Multitudes remove responsibility without weakening passion."[6] But unlike these critics of the anomie of the industrial city Engels is clear that is it capital accumulation that lies behind this process, and which inevitably imposes its effects upon the working class.

"Since capital, the direct or indirect control of the means of subsistence and production, is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on, it is clear that all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the poor ..." If the worker "can get no work he may steal, if he is not afraid of the police, or starve, in which case the police will take care that he does so in a quiet and inoffensive manner." (4:330).

Crime is the natural result

"In this country, social war is under full headway, every one stands for himself, and fights for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calculation as to what is most advantageous for himself. It no longer occurs to any one to come to a peaceful understanding with his fellow-man; all differences are settled by threats, violence, or in a law court.... And this war grows from year to year, as the criminal tables show, more violent, passionate, irreconcilable..... This war of each against all, of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, need cause us no surprise, for it is only the logical sequel of the principle involved in free competition." [4:427]

Crime as the inevitable result of capitalist social relations had been stressed by Engels in his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy published the year before.

"Competition governs the numerical advance of mankind; it likewise governs its moral advance. Anyone who has any knowledge of the statistics of crime must have been struck by the peculiar regularity with which crime advances year by year, and with which certain causes produce certain crimes. The extension of the factory system is followed everywhere by an increase in crime.... This regularity proves that crime, too, is governed by competition; that society creates a demand for crime which is met by a corresponding supply; that the gap created by the arrest, transportation or execution of a certain number is at once filled by others, just as every gap in population is at once filled by new arrivals; in other words, that crime presses on the means of punishment just as the people press on the means of employment. How just it is to punish criminals under these circumstances, quite apart from any other considerations, I leave to the judgement of my readers." (3:442)

In seeing crime as the natural result of capitalist relations of production Engels was far ahead of both those modern criminologists who insist on seeing crime as the result of some type of disruption of normal social relations as well as those who see it simply as a result of some 'moral panic' induced by the mass media. For Engels, crime is not a result of the breakdown of social relations, it is rather one of the necessary forms they take. As Steven Marcus, in his biography of Engels in Manchester, wrote, crime is not considered by Engels to be a result of deviance or the absence of norms:

"It is, in the first place, much too intimately connected with the values and norms it violates to be considered as simply anomic in respect to them; and secondly, no behavior that is both an inversion and a parody of another can be properly or fully understood as a deviant form of the latter." (Marcus 1974 p. 223)

That crime arises from the normal workings of capitalist production rather than their breakdown is even clearer when Engels comes to talk about the criminal activities of the bourgeoisie itself, an area with which many modern criminologists have had problems precisely because it is frequently impossible to find anything 'deviant' about the bourgeois criminal[7]. Much of this activity, especially on the part of the small bourgeoisie, merchants and shopkeepers, concerned the adulteration of foodstuffs. Thus "The workers get what is too bad for the property-holding class..." (368), that is, low quality rotting vegetables, meat etc. Engels quotes numbers of cases of the Manchester courts fining meat-sellers for sale of tainted meat (369). He concludes:

"And when one reflects upon the many cases which must escape detection in the extensive markets that stretch along the front of every main street, under the slender supervision of the market inspectors - and how else can one explain the boldness with which whole animals are exposed for sale? - when one considers how great the temptation must be, in view of the incomprehensibly small fines mentioned in the foregoing cases; when one reflects what condition a piece of meat must have reached to be seized by the inspectors, it is impossible to believe that the workers obtain good and nourishing meat as a usual thing." (4:369-70)

But workers are "victimised in yet another way by the money-greed of the middle class". (370) Engels quotes the local Liverpool Mercury on cases describing all the fiddles of the period - sugar adulterated with pounded rice, even refuse from soap making sold as sugar! Cocoa adulterated with brown earth and mutton fat, recycled tea leaves, flour adulterated with gypsum and chalk etc. Not only food but cloth, pottery etc., but also various quack medicines such as the notorious Godfrey's Cordial.

"Fraud is practised in the sale of articles of every sort... But the lion's share of the evil results of these frauds falls to the workers. The rich are less deceived, because they can pay the high prices of the large shops which have a reputation to lose... while.... They (the workers) must deal with the small retailers, must perhaps buy on credit, and these small retail dealers who cannot sell even the same quality of goods so cheaply as the largest retailers, because of their small capital and the large proportional expenses of their business, must knowingly or unknowingly buy adulterated goods in order to sell at the lower prices required, and to meet the competition of the others"(4:371)

Engels has thus a sophisticated understanding of the contemporary dynamics of fraud committed against the working class as consumer - small retailers have little choice but to adulterate - these are the competitive conditions. If discovered they can always move elsewhere, a large shop will lose its capital if it is exposed: the crime of the petty bourgeois in food adulteration etc. is understood as an inevitable consequence of the market. (ibid.)

The crimes of the bourgeoisie do not stop at fraud and adulteration of course. Engels was mainly concerned with the conditions of the working class, he was not writing a treatise on criminology. For a history of murder among the upper classes we can therefore justifiably be asked to turn elsewhere. Engels' focus was those crimes committed against the poor and the working class, and in this context he mentions another form of crime, sexual harassment and rape at work in a context in which modern writers would describe as 'power rape' or 'exploitation rape'[8]

"It is, besides, a matter of course that factory servitude, like any other, and to an even higher degree, confers the jus primae noctis upon the master. In this respect also the employer is sovereign over the persons and charms of his employees. The threat of discharge suffices to overcome all resistance in nine cases out of ten, if not in ninety-nine out of a hundred, in girls who, in any case, have no strong indictments to chastity. If the master is mean enough... his mill is also his harem; and the fact that not all manufacturers use their power, does not in the least change the position of the girls. In the beginning of manufacturing industry, when most of the employers were upstarts without education or consideration for the hypocrisy of society, they let nothing interfere with the exercise of their vested rights." [4:441-2]

Engels' discussion finally moves on to wider crimes of the bourgeoisie which includes death in the city by asphyxiation and workplace death in the factories and mills, by what would now politely and equally hypocritically be called 'industrial accidents' in many cases brought about by the use of use of drugs to pacify children at work [esp. pp 436-7]

Up to this point Engels' has given us a graphic portrayal of crime as pure negativity, of the working class as suffering from the moral and social disintegration inflicted by industrial capitalism of which interpersonal violence and theft, inflicted by working-class people on one another is the natural result. He has also shown how the capitalist class, in the normal course of business is under constant pressure to violate laws and to engage in criminal, as well as legal exploitation of working class communities. If his account had stopped here, he would still have given us a graphic historical memoire of the conditions of life in early industrial capitalism. If he had been among the liberal utilitarian reformers of his age, such as Edwin Chadwick or Henry Mayhew he would then have continued on to suggest various enlightened strategies for the moral education of the working classes and the amelioration of their conditions. But Engels' interests lay in quite other directions. 

crime and the struggle for socialism

For Engels, as for Marx, any amelioration of the conditions of the working class brought about from above, by the actions of the ruling class and the state, would be concessions wrung on the basis of fear of the self activity of the class and its latent, and growing, capacity to overthrown capitalism. Engels was not, therefore concerned with Victorian plans for social reform but with understanding how, from the conditions of demoralisation and deprivation described so far, the working class emerges as a historical force. For Engels, crime is a central part of this emergence. It is not just that the working class leaves crime behind as it develops political consciousness, crime is an essential stage in the development of class consciousness. Class consciousness and working class political organisation rather overcome the limitations of - certain forms - of crime while preserving some of their driving forces, notably the sense of rage and hatred of capitalism. Politics is the dialectical transcendence of crime, not simply its displacement.

The demoralisation and brutalisation of the workers finds its immediate negation in rage and hatred:

"There is, therefore, no cause for surprise if the workers, treated as brutes, actually become such; or if they can maintain their consciousness of manhood only by cherishing the most glowing hatred, the most unbroken inward rebellion against the bourgeoisie in power." (4:411)

Such hatred, although expressed through crime, was for Engels:

" ... the proof that the workers feel the inhumanity of their position, that they refuse to be degraded to the level of brutes, and that they will one day free themselves from servitude to the bourgeoisie" [4:414]

The consequence is crime which is, of course, a destructive activity. The working class has been negated and crime is where it discovers its power and humanity but at first only in that negation, by negating others even within its own ranks. In other words

 "...such crime is estranged labour coming to perverse life, endeavouring immediately to cancel its frozen and 'objectified' existence and behave in accordance with its deformed conception of a free human being." (Marcus 1974 p 221). But as the workers come to realise the source of their oppression, the more conscious among them come to direct their rage against its real source rather than their fellow workers. This involves initially a focus on theft which according to Engels is becoming the majority form of crime committed by the poor.

"The offences, as in all civilised countries, are, in the great majority of cases against property and have, therefore, arisen from want in some form; for what a man has, he does not steal." [4:426]

That the development of capitalism brings a relative shift from violence to theft in interpersonal crime would find agreement among many historians [Zehr 1976] though it is obvious that various forms of violence - against women in the home for example - would be under represented in the arrest or reported crime statistics and theft against property owners well represented.

But as capitalism develops the working class becomes aware of itself as a class, rather than as a group of individuals. The workers overcome and go beyond the individual demoralisation and brutalisation with finds its reflection in individual crime against property. The rage against and hatred of the bourgeoisie, which took an individual form in crimes against property, takes on a more directed, organised, effective political form as the working class makes the transition from being simply as class-in-itself to a class-for-itself. Engels describes the process in the following way:

"The earliest, crudest, and least fruitful form of this rebellion was that of crime. The working-man lived in poverty and want, and saw that others were better off than he. It was not clear to his mind why he, who did more for society than the rich idler, should be the one to suffer under these conditions. Want conquered his inherited respect for the sacredness of property, and he stole.....

"The workers soon realised that crime did not help matters. The criminal could protest against the existing order of society only singly, as one individual; the whole might of society was brought to bear upon each criminal, and crushed him with its immense superiority. Besides, theft was the most primitive form of protest, and for this reason, if for no other, it never became the universal expression of the public opinion of the working-men, however much they might approve of it in silence." [4:502-3]

How does such a transition, from crime to politics, from Luddite machine-smashing and robbery to Chartism and Socialism become possible? Obviously capitalist development, the expansion of industry and the size of the working class, the decasualisation of the labour market, the reduction in female and child labour and the stabilisation of the working class family and community: all these factors lay at the basis of the emergence of strong working class political and trade union organisation for the collective organisation of grievances on one hand and the development of strong informal controls against crime within the community on the other. But this is to move ahead, well beyond the period about which Engels was writing, and to read into his account a social history of the growth of a type of working class community and Labour politics which he did not, at that time, anticipate. In particular such a view would see criminality as a sort of pre-history rather than an essential moment in the development of class consciousness. In fact both Engels and his collaborator Marx, were thinking, in the mid 1840's, of something very different: the proximity of revolution. The growing power of the Chartist movement coupled with violent resistance by the employers to trades unionism convinced both Engels and Marx that a revolutionary situation was near at hand.

"When such insanity prevails in the property-holding class, when it is so blinded by its momentary profit that it no longer has eyes for the most conspicuous signs of the times, surely all hope of a peaceful solution of the social question for England must be abandoned. The only possible solution is a violent revolution, which cannot fail to take place". [4:547]

and furthermore:

"The classes are divided more and more sharply, the spirit of resistance penetrates the workers, the bitterness intensifies, the guerrilla skirmishes become concentrated in more important battles, and soon a slight impulse will suffice to set the avalanche in motion. Then, indeed, will the war-cry resound through the land: 'War to the mansion, peace to the cottage - but then it will be too late for the rich to beware." [4:583]

Engels quotes the criminal arrest statistics for England and Wales which rise consistently from 4,605 in 1805, through 14,437 in 1825 to 31,309 in 1842. In Scotland an even more rapid increase was to be noted. Engels emphasises the urban nature of the bulk of these arrests (London and Lancashire) - i.e. London and Manchester produced 1/4 of the whole in 1842. He also notes that nearly all crime arises within the proletariat, over half of those arrested could read or write only imperfectly and a third could neither read nor write. 0.22 out of a 100 had a higher education. He continues:

Ïf demoralisation and crime multiply twenty years longer in this proportion (and if English manufacture in these twenty years should be less prosperous than heretofore, the progressive multiplication of crime can only continue the more rapidly), what will the result be? Society is already in a state of visible dissolution..." [4:426]

Thus as the social war between bourgeoisie and proletariat continues to intensify, it would continue to take the form of both rising criminality and at the same time the metamorphosis of criminality into more organised forms of class struggle. As long as it is understood that crime and organised class struggle, far from being mutually exclusive, are components of each others development - crime as a primitive form of class war, heightened class struggle as increasing the rage that gives rise to crime, then we can understand why Engels saw it as natural to presuppose that both would increase. hand in hand. To make sense of this assumption two things have to be understood.

Firstly, it is important not to make the mistake of reading Engels' account, written in the 1840s, from the standpoint of modern notions of criminality which already presuppose the modern criminal law and a clear distinction between organised reformist working class politics and crime[9]. The criminality which Engels has in mind is much closer to what Edward Thompson and his collaborators called 'social crime'[10] much of which arose from the defence of older forms of traditional rights - to common pasture for example - against the encroachment of bourgeois property relations and which continued into the urban setting in such forms as traditions of 'pilferage' in the London Docks. This is the crime that working class people 'approve of in silence' and not the modern notion of petty crime, stealing from your neighbours or robbing elderly people, crimes of which the working class, then and now, firmly disapproves. Most important of all it has to be remembered that attempts at the formation of trade unions, then termed 'combination', was itself a criminal activity, under the notorious Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800. The criminalisation of working class resistance to capitalist property relations in the eighteenth century was followed by the criminalisation of working class resistance within capitalist property relations in the early nineteenth. But it is important also to understand that a clear distinction between social crime and harmful intra-class crime is one imposed by historians after the event. The distinction at the time was much more blurred. As E.P. Thompson warned: "there is not 'nice' social crime here and 'nasty' anti-social crime there" (Thompson 1972)[11]. Such a distinction presupposes the strong cohesive working class community which was as yet in a process of formation[12] This is precisely what is implied in crime as a moment in the development of class consciousness.

A second factor to keep in mind is that Engels is not engaging in some sort of romanticisation of a criminal underworld or 'lumpenproletariat' as the leading force in the class struggle, nor is he regarding personal crimes like rape, for example, is somehow class conscious acts. Engels is clearly talking about crimes committed by the working class against the bourgeoisie, a type of criminality which, as already noted, mainly concerned theft, though arson and machine smashing are also mentioned. While Marx and Engels did not always use the term 'lumpenproletariat' precisely in a sociological sense (Bovenkerk 1984), it was clearly distinguished from the working class, including the most marginalised sections of the reserve army of the unemployed. Four years later, in the Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx and Engels referred to the

".... 'dangerous class', the social scum, the passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society ... (which) ... may, here and there swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution, its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary regimes."

Of course, the brutalisation by capitalism to which theft is a response, also gives rise to more destructive forms of inter-personal violence within the working class, and it is in this context that some of Engels' more chauvinist remarks concerning Irish immigrant workers have to be read. It is also of course true that in the early nineteenth century, as the working class was still in the process of formation, the distinction between the living conditions of its poorest sections, so graphically documented in The Condition of the Working Class in England , and those of the lumpenproletariat or criminal underworld is blurred.

"This reserve army, which embraces an immense multitude during the crisis and a large number during the period which may be regarded as the average between the highest prosperity and the crisis, is the 'surplus population' of England, which keeps body and soul together by begging, stealing, street-sweeping, collecting manure, pushing hard-carts, driving donkeys, peddling, or performing occasional small jobs." [4:384]

This is echoed later by Marx in Capital where the poorest sections of the reserve army of labour are seen as living in similar conditions to, though distinct from, the criminal underworld:

" The lowest sediment of the relative surplus population, finally, dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the 'dangerous classes'[13] this layer of society consists of ....First, those able to work...Second, orphans and pauper children...Third, the demoralised and ragged and those unable to work,,, [Capital Vol. I. 643]

The fact that the actual conditions of life of sections of the reserve army of labour blur into the lumpenproletariat is the other side of the coin of the criminalisation, by the ruling class, of the working class in general in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as 'the mob' [Linebaugh 1992]. But however similar the conditions of life of sections of the working class and the criminal underworld, the political distinction between these groups remains profound. The distinguishing feature of the working class - even the weaker sections of it continually moving in and out of the ranks of the reserve army of labour - is its capacity to learn and develop forms of class consciousness. It is quite otherwise with that permanent underworld of professional thieves and robbers for whom crime is itself a form of economy and employment whose social relations are antipathetic to all forms of class consciousness.

These factors: crime as a form of generalised, albeit individual, resistance to capital, the working class rather than 'lumpen' nature of much crime together with the assumed immediate prospect of revolutionary upheaval, help explain why Engels made the assumption that crime would continue rising even as it was merging into more developed collective forms of political struggle. But history developed in a different direction.

THE INCIDENCE OF CRIME

The question of crime rates during the latter half of the last century seems to have been something of a problem both for socialists and conservatives. The Condition of the Working Class in England was, in fact, published at a turning point in the development of crime. Up to the mid century it is reasonably clear that crime rates were rising. Most historians are agreed on this [Emsley 1987]. However, from around the mid 1840's crime rates fell steadily until well after the first world war, [Gatrell and Hadden 1972, Gatrell 1980, Jones 1982, Emsley 1987]. According to commentators such as Lynn McDonald (1982) there was a conspiracy of silence about falling crime in the second half of the nineteenth century which embraced both left and right. The Right saw rising crime both as a vindication of the breeding habits of the criminal classes and of the necessity for "continued use of capital punishment (and fighting the abolition movement), flogging, transportation and severe prisons for children" [ibid.]. For the Left meantime it is argued that rising crime was an essential indicator of the worsening and oppressive nature of capitalism.

According to McDonald, this position assumed the status of political dogma in the revolutionary socialist movement: ".. a significance was given to rising crime that would make it difficult for a dedicated Marxist to question. Decreases in crime would be expected.... if the theory of the liberal bourgeoisie were right, if the post-revolutionary republic had resulted in an adequate society. But instead of 'order, harmony and love of humanity' there was 'disorder, dissension, murder, theft, bankruptcy and child abuse' ... To argue that crime was decreasing was to question the very need for communist revolution." [14] McDonald considers that Ëngels himself provided the kernel of a revised position" by showing that crime was a stage in the development of class consciousness and that the workers gradually made the shift to organised class politics. The argument here is that Engels, if he had thought through his argument consistently, would have realised that the development of organised class politics would have led to a decrease in crime. As I have argued above, this is a mistaken view of Engels' original argument concerning the dynamic relation between criminality and revolutionary struggle as he saw them in the 1840's. What he failed to anticipate was not the growth of working class political organisation but the particular processes of the 'stabilisation' of capitalist society which introduced a relationship between crime and politics quite different to that which he had originally envisaged. There were several elements involved.

Firstly, the development of the tradition of reformist trade unionism, led by the skilled workers drives a wedge between crime and politics in the sense understood by Engels. Social crime never of course entirely disappears from working class communities, and a healthy tradition of things 'falling off the back of a lorry' continues to the present time. But gradually theft and violence come to assume their modern forms of largely intra-class crime in which individual criminal acts against bourgeois property or its defenders, except at times of major strikes or lockouts, becomes more concentrated among marginalised members of the reserve army of the unemployed.

A second important factor is the increasing segregation between the classes in modern cities. Engels in fact observes the beginning of this process and spends some time considering its implications in the context of the anticipated climax of the class struggle. Thus he wonders aloud why the bourgeoisie is so calm in the face of the rising crime wave and accuses them of "mad blindness" arising from its "class prejudice and preconceived opinions" [4:427].

"But it may well surprise us that the bourgeoisie remains so quiet and composed in the face of the rapidly gathering storm clouds, that it can read all these things daily in the papers without, we will not say indignation at such a social condition, but fear of its consequences, of a universal outburst of that which manifests itself symptomatically from day to day in the form of crime." [4:427]

And he partly answers his question through a perception of the role of the city in enclosing and segregating social problems, so that the poor have only the poor for their victims and the rich, as long as they remain within their own suburbs. The Manchester slums hide their poverty:

"True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can." (4:331)

"The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working-people's quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks. (4:347-8)

He describes the division of Manchester into the central business district with main roads and busy traffic but no residents and where at night önly watchmen and policemen traverse its narrow lanes with their dark lanterns, surrounded by the working class districts and then, as an outer 'girdle' the upper and middle bourgeoisie:

Änd the finest part of the arrangement is this, that members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left. For the thoroughfares leading from the (Manchester) Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, which, out of self interest, cares for a decent and cleanly external existence and can care for it." (348)

This middle class flight to the suburbs accentuated after 1870 and notwithstanding a growing middle class fear of urban public order (in London particularly) at the time of the unemployed riots of 1885 (Stedman Jones 1984) and the Jack the Ripper murders of the later 1880's, such social shifts had the effect of reducing working class crime against the bourgeoisie and increasing the relative proportion of such crime which was inflicted within the working class community itself. At the same time however the strengthening of working class neighbourhood and community organisation, evident towards the end of the nineteenth century (Savage and Miles 1994) contributed to the general tendency of crime to fall during the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Finally, Engels was writing at that historical moment when the criminal justice agencies of the bourgeois state were about to begin their incursion, accompanied by railway building and urban planning, into the hitherto no-go working class areas of the city and to bring working class petty criminality under its dominion (Gatrell 1980). To a considerable extent up until the 1850's, the working class and the poor were left to deal themselves with that crime whose victims were within their own communities (Lenman & Parker 1980] with the consequence that, while there was plenty of 'intra-class' crime in Engels' day, as we have seen, a much greater proportion of the crime that came before the Justices of the Peace was 'inter-class' crime, more closely related to the war waged by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. The effect of the gradual but successful penetration of the police into the working class communities by the turn of the century [Brogden 1982, Storch 1976] was to reduce the latter to the role of 'informal social control' of crime and other forms of deviance.

Thus the 'modern' system was consolidated. Crime and politics parted company, the latter becoming less a matter of individualised class warfare and more the petty and destructive behaviour which sections of the lower working class inflict upon one another, while the criminal justice system, by securing its symbolic monopoly over the public control of such crime and disposal of its perpetrators achieved a further solidification of its hegemony. The equality of the rule of law - while not without considerable benefits to the working class - becomes a form of domination akin to that of Capital itself, in which the equality between the parties to a contract is the starting point for subordination. By claiming to deal impartially with the violence and theft inflicted on all social classes, by equating the violence of the weak with that of the powerful, the criminal law completes its transition from the ideology of direct class rule of the eighteenth century described by Douglas Hay (1975) to that of indirect class rule through the regulation of general 'criminality'.

ENGELS AND THE PRESENT CRISIS

The Condition of the Working Class in England was written, not on the eve of revolution, but on the threshold of a long period of capitalist growth and relative stability which continued, despite period economic crises, until the First World War and the Russian Revolution. After the crisis of the interwar years a new period of stability followed the Second World War before giving way, in the 1970's, to the present period of increasing social and economic crisis. The thesis that capitalism, from an initially progressive role in developing the forces of production and culture, eventually becomes a fetter on human progress is a central component of historical materialism though it is clear that both Marx and Engels underestimated the time period over which such a process would mature[15]. A discussion of the general dynamics of such decay and how they might be seen to manifest themselves in modern capitalism is beyond our discussion here. However one important indicator of such decay might be found in long run tendencies in crime rates.

Students of long term trends in the incidence of homicide, robbery and other violent crime have suggested the hypothesis of a 'U-curve' in which crime rates in leading industrial capitalist nations, England included, generally fell during the period after 1850 down to a plateau in the inter-war years and began rising again during the period after 1950[16]. Such a continuous rise in crime has, of course, attracted a variety of explanations. It cannot, for example, be explained simply as a consequence of poverty and unemployment insofar as it was an observable tendency as much during the period of economic expansion and relative social stability following the Second World War as during the period of rising unemployment and economic stagnation after the mid 1970's. However it is clear in retrospect that the period of the welfare state and relatively full employment left large pockets of poverty and deprivation and at the same time by increasing expectations, particularly of working class young people, through diffusion of social rights and mass secondary education, fostered the type of frustrations that lead to crime (Lea and Young 1984). Since the beginning of the 1980's the increasing inability of capitalism to sustain the welfare state, the need for an increasingly open war by capital on all the social and political gains of the working class movement - which were the components of earlier stabilisation and integration - is recreating a society of growing poverty and inequality, long term unemployment, particularly for young people, and a social morality reminiscent of Engels' description of a 'social war' in which 'everyone stands for himself'. If falling crime during the second half of the nineteenth century was an index of capitalism's ability to develop the productive forces, raise working class living standards and create the general foundations for social cohesion, then rising crime in the second half of the twentieth century may be an index of capitalism's exhaustion reflected in an increasing socially and physically destructive use of technology, increasing inequality and fragmentation of the working class and the undermining of the foundations of social stability.

It follows that any attempt to repeat Engels' analysis and see rising crime among working class youth today as once again the precursor to radical consciousness must be aware of the fact that the 'same' phenomena under different social and historical circumstances may indicate quite different underlying dynamics. There are a number of obvious differences between the period of which Engels was writing and the present period.

On the one hand, it might seem obvious that the issue of a transition from crime to politics simply does not occur since the working class has historically already made that transition. Any re-emergence of radical or revolutionary consciousness in the forseeable future will emerge from the organised, and largely non criminalised, sections of the working class - and other social movements - taking advantage of the established structures of political organisation and civil rights based on the working class struggles of the last century. In such a situation the already established distinction between crime and politics will not be reversed - given the unproductiveness of crime as a form of political struggle and the fact that all the existing structures of political thought and organisation have moved beyond it. Even to pose the question is to answer it. Of course political and social movements will clash directly with the police. But only episodically and when the latter turn from their 'proper' focus on the control of crime to acting as the direct political agents of the ruling class in industrial conflicts or political demonstrations. Meanwhile the most salient aspect of crime in working class communities is defence against crime: a form of mobilisation, which, while it may well draw on traditions of 'self activity' is more likely to secure a closer, if critical, relationship between the police and the working class community.

On the other hand the character of much crime has changed. Precisely because of the development of the organised working class political and community structures noted above, social crime in the old sense declined. The growth of long term unemployment and the weakening of the political strength of the working class are of course fertile conditions for the re-emergence of such activity. Indeed a redistributive illegal economy of shoplifting and stolen consumer goods never entirely disappeared in the poorest sections of the working class and has undoubtedly grown in recent years. But as a form of illegal economy it has been largely overtaken by the, infinitely more profitable drugs trade[17]. Rather than being a form of social crime or collectively sanctioned popular resistance to capitalism the global drugs economy is, on the contrary, one of the most profitable sectors of international capitalist enterprise, with its entrepreneurs, financiers, managers, and workers. It is not a matter of criminal organisations taking advantage of social crime, as might eighteenth century professional poaching gangs have taken advantage of popular resistance to the encroachment of common land rights, but rather a matter of the hegemonisation by the 'illegal sector' of multinational capital of some of the most personally destructive and debilitating responses to the demoralisation flowing from exclusion from the labour market, and the social decay which accompanies it.

This has been accompanied by an important change in the relationship between the bottom or 'latent' section of the reserve army of labour and the lumpenproletariat. The development of virtually permanent unemployment for an increasing number of young people who have never entered the labour market and no longer function even as a 'latent' section of the reserve army of labour. They have given up even looking for work. Having few alternatives to petty crime as a source of income pushes them into the traditional criminal underworld but at the same time as that underworld is being reorganised and subject to the discipline of (illegal) capital in the form of the drugs economy. The inner city unemployed youth thus moves from the bottom of one labour market to the bottom of another - from the declining, increasingly casualised legal labour market to the expanding, hazardous, casualised criminal labour market, working under conditions that make the emergence of traditional forms of class consciousness difficult to imagine. Rage and anger is predominantly a reference to exclusion from, rather than resistance to, the imposition of capitalist work and consumption relations. Meanwhile working class communities are further weakened and demoralised by the growth in debilitating interpersonal crime - theft, robbery, domestic violence and rape.

Thus making a connection between crime and political consciousness has become difficult, if not impossible. As late as the mid 1970's Stuart Hall and his colleagues could still advance a sophisticated presentation of crime as resistance. In a discussion of the involvement of unemployed black youth in street crime, they wrote:

"Crime as such is not a political act, especially where the vast number of victims are people whose class position is hardly distinguishable from that of the criminals. It is not even necessarily a 'quasi-political' act. But in certain circumstances, it can provide, or come to be defined as expressing some sides of an oppositional class consciousness..... it requires only a moment's reflection to see how acts of stealing, pick pocketing, snatching and robbing with violence.... can give a muffled and displaced expression to the experience of permanent exclusion." (Hall et al. 1978, pp 390-1)

Black involvement in street crime was an issue in the 1970's and 80's as the ethnic minority communities were the first to feel the effects of the end of post-war capitalist expansion. But by the beginning of the present decade[18], as the issue widened out to include substantial sections of white working class youth now surplus to capital's requirements the mood among radicals had changed. In her discussion of young people and violent crime in various parts of Britain in the early 1990's Beatrix Campbell (1993) argued that whereas the riots in Brixton and other areas in the early 1980's had a legitimate element of grievance against police victimisation of Black youth, the violence bursting out on working class housing estates around Britain ".... did not represent revolt, they were simply larger displays of what these neighbourhoods had to put up with much of the time." And what they had been putting up with was the terrorism of organised criminal gangs of unemployed aggressive young men.

"Houses were set on fire, roofs were cleared of tiles, walls were stripped of radiators, houses were ram-raided, residents were robbed, threatened and pestered by gangs of lads who seemed beyond society's reach. Victimisation was a way of life." (Campbell 1993 p. 102)

Much of the discussion by the media and by social scientists has not surprisingly taken the form of a concern with the growth of the 'underclass', returning in some respects to the concerns of the early Victorian bourgeoisie with the 'lack of moral restraint' of the lower orders. From the standpoint of Engels' analysis, crime seems locked into the first, negative, stage of demoralisation and brutalisation. For the poor, and in particular long term unemployed young people, the transition from crime to politics has been replaced by the transition from politics to crime as contact with older traditions of class organisation and struggle are lost. This time the dialectic appears to be elsewhere: crime appears as an obstacle: a problem to be solved by the already existing organised working class and progressive social movements rather than a component in their own formation.

But this would be a one-sided view. The organised working class movement, the reformist political parties and the welfare state which gave them relevance, are themselves in crisis. The increasing levels of poverty, deprivation and social marginalisation which give rise to crime are part of the same forces which drive capital to demand the dismantlement of welfare rights and a recriminalisation of social protest extending from trade union action to wide categories of public gatherings[19] . It is not a question simply of the 'old' political structures getting together to mobilise and politicise those sections of the unemployed and young people turning to crime, they have showed precious little inclination to do so up till now. It is the question of new forms of organisation and new leaderships emerging within the working class movement with the problems of crime, poverty and unemployment at the top of their agendas.

References

[1]

Collected Works vol. 4. p 22.

[2]

The debate on the left during the late 1980's concerning inner city youth crime exhibited all these features. Some of the main texts were Hall et al. (1978) Lea and Young 1993 (1984), CCCS eds. 1982, Scraton et al eds. (1987)

[3]

That is in no way to suggest that the period studied by Thompson and Co. is only of historical relevance. The criminalisation, de facto and de jure of basic rights has featured heavily over the last few years, with the poll tax and the 1994 Criminal Justice Act whose revisions of the law on trespass evoke Thompson's discussion of the notorious legislation of the eighteenth century.

[4]

For a sympathetic appraisal of the contribution of The Condition.... from a feminist perspective Cf. Vogel 1983 esp. pp 43-8

[5]

The individualist anarchist, Max Stirner published his book The Ego and His Own in 1844

[6]

'Causes of the Increase of Crime' Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 56, 1844, (quoted in Wiener 1990, p. 19)

[7]

For discussions of this problem in criminology Cf. Box 1983 chapter 2 and Pearce 1976.

[8]

Cf. Box (op.cit.] chapter 4.

[9]

though, as discussed below, the distinction may be blurring again

[10]

The term was coined originally by Hobsbawm 1972

[11]

The very polemic among social historians about the nature of 'social crime' testifies to the importance of the concept. Thus Hobsbawm (op. cit.) saw social crime as ä conscious, almost a political, challenge to the prevailing social and political order and its values". John Rule (1979) usefully distinguished between explicit protest crime and crimes tolerated by the masses such as illicit distilling, pillaging wrecks, smuggling etc. George Rude (1985) suggested a classification into 'acquisitive crime', 'social' or 'survival' crime and 'protest' crime. Critics of the concept such as Jim Sharpe (1984) and Clive Emsley (1987) generally emphasise the blurred boundaries. Thus 'acquisitive' crime might be a form taken by 'social' crime or professional organised crime - such as poaching gangs selling to innkeepers - might be involved in 'social' crime thereby negating the political protest element and placing obstacles in the way of "determining exactly whe re social crime ends and normal crime begins" [Sharpe op. cit. p. 140]. This debate illustrates fundamental issues of method which cannot be gone into here save to say that the issue is not that of refining conceptual boundaries but rather of grasping the contradictory and dialectical movement of the real historical emergence of the working class.

[12]

For summary of the debate on the emergence of class consciousness during the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century see J. Rule (1986) chapter 16.

[13]

In the penguin edition of Capital, the term 'dangerous classes' is replaced by 'the actual lumpenproletariat' (page 797)

[14]

If this account is true then it stands in ironic contrast to arguments of the 1980's where for some socialists any suggestion of rising crime rates among the poor inner city communities were characterised as an attack on the working class (Lea and Young 1984).

[15]

though Marx hinted at some of the factors which would secure for capitalism a much longer phase of progressive development than he had initially thought possible. See the discussion in Meszaros 1989 chapter. 7

[16]

For a presentation and critical discussion of the evidence Cf. Gurr 1989. For England and Wales during the later nineteenth century Cf. Gatrell 1980 and for rising crime in the period after 1950 Cf. Lea and Young 1993

[17]

The separation between the organised drugs economy and more decentralised forms of petty crime is of course artificial when a high proportion of 'ordinary' burglary, theft and robbery is motivated by the requirements of drug purchasing. Cf. Parker et al. 1988

[18]

According to the Guardian (4th July 1994) among 8 pieces of completed Home Office research whose publication has been postponed or abandoned because their findings fail to support the attitudes of the present Home Secretary is evidence that Afro-Caribbean youth were less likely to be involved in crime, including drug crime, than their white counterparts.

[19]

In the form of the 1994 Criminal Justice Act