Class Crimes, Power, Poverty, and Violence

Nick: Part 4 of 5

In this post Nick discusses the impacts of crime on class formation and the building of class power, the criminalisation of poverty, and the relationship between crime and violence.

PART FOUR

Mark: You’ve spoken to this a little bit, but maybe you can elaborate on it, in relation to crime and maybe also work refusal, and I remember a phrase that we were using when we were talking last time was ‘solidarity for survival’. Maybe then we can turn to a question around class formation and class power. So, when we are in poverty, when we are either excluded from, which is how some people experience it, or refusing the wage and sometimes I suppose they’re the same thing, in what ways can crime be connected to building class power? But also, what are the other forms of class power that comes from those conditions which are often thought by mainstream thinking as destitution and exclusion?

Nick: It's difficult talking about class formation because although you and I speak a reasonably common language we still have differences of opinion on this process and anybody reading this is also likely to have different views, because it depends on how you think about class. There's the traditional view of the working class as the class dominated and exploited by capital. However, when I talk about class, I prefer to talk about those who struggle against capital to abolish it, those who collectively create communism as a social movement, and there are different ways of deploying those different understandings of class in relation to crime. Crime and punishment have been central issues in the formation of what's traditionally seen as the working class and I mentioned the workhouse at the beginning of this interview as an example of how poverty was criminalised and punished to help form the working class as labour for capital during its early development, and that has continued.

I think it's also important to think about how class formation, as struggle against capital, means that the way crime is practised and understood can involve a recognition of how the class has common enemies – the bosses, the cops, the courts, the gaols, capitalist states, and that what is called class consciousness can involve, or should involve, a recognition of class rule and class law and struggles around crime that helps us to do that. Thinking about the differences between capitalist crime and capitalist law and communist crime and proletarian lore fosters a rejection of how capital frames laws and crimes and can aid the creation of alternative ways of thinking about crimes and the morality, or justice, of different things we do. Social revolt always involves crime, breaking the law in both small and large ways, and that's important and helps the class to form by engaging in what from the position of capital is seen as criminal. But I also think it's important to appreciate that involvement in crime can be poisonous to class struggle and class formation.

It's difficult to determine which criminal activities assist class formation and which divide the class.  One of the images that came to mind when I was thinking about this was a video from the recent uprising in Chile and there's this bloke who's running down the road with a TV that he’s looted from a shop. He reaches an intersection and there’s a group of people setting-up barricades on the road to stop the cops from attacking them and they just grab the television and throw it on the ground to add to the blockade. This poor bloke, he’s probably risked being shot dead to get that TV. But while he’s clearly upset and shocked by the loss of his own individual property redistribution, there’s also this look of resignation and of ‘yeah, yeah, I know the uprising is about more than me getting a television, I understand the collective action going on here too’.

That sort of struggle about - well what's important here? Shouldn't I get some sort of reward from this as well? In that instance and more generally there's a question about how the class mobilises to build class power and to defend itself from crimes. When we think about these things, we tend to think that it's us who are committing the crimes, when it's not really us, it’s them, the ruling class and their agents and agencies that are criminal. What capital and its state forms try to do is mobilise communities to uphold bourgeois law and social order by positioning them as defending people from crime and fostering cooperation between them and the cops and so forth, while they’re in fact the organised criminals, they're the ones committing crimes. So, it's important that we focus on the crimes of the rich and powerful and the cops and the courts, etc., and we find common cause in defending ourselves against the crimes that are being committed by them.

Mark: I think that's such a good way of thinking about it, and it’s been going all the way through everything that you have said, that constant tension between crime as something we do, but criminalisation as something done to us. And this is bound-up with a tension between, as you framed it, between that passive conception of class, those who are exploited as opposed to let's say a more creative or productive conception of class and commonality formed in struggle, that therefore involves a whole range of activities, including the refusal of capitalist law at the same time as constructing a communist lore. I think that's really useful and really interesting.

I remember we talked about lumpen crimes and social decay and that debate, and I have a question about that coming up soon, but what you just finished on also leads me to want to ask about capitalist law, and I think you framed this well already but I know you are going to have more to say about it. The law is a weapon wielded by capital against the class, that is essentially what the law is in many of its iterations. But it is also wielded differently upon different sections of the class and criminalisation and being criminal and being policed is also to be subject to that class rule, is to be subject to that law in different ways. So, I wanted to hear you say more about how criminalisation and policing of the proletariat is something that we need to think about as communists. What's a way to think about that? How is it connected to class formation, class composition, but also to poverty as well? What's the connection between criminalisation and poverty?

Nick: I'll turn those questions around because I’ve been neglecting poverty a bit in my previous answers. So, poverty is a crime and Martin Luther King famously said that we should recognise poverty as a form of violence. So, poverty doesn't just produce crime, poverty is a crime, it’s systemic theft. By changing the way we think about that question we can consider how capitalist states are focused on mobilising communities to uphold bourgeois law and social order and foster cooperation with capitalist states. As I said, they recognise the importance of defending against crime and try to frame that in a way that reinforces capital. The general tendency is to divide the class, to pit different sections of the class against each other, and the policing and targeting of the poor, those labelled as criminals, certain sections of the class, helps to do that.

When those living in poverty are viewed as a criminal class, because they are being framed-up by laws that criminalise them, they are seen as dangerous, and policing can be seen as protecting people from those who harm them. While this deflects from focusing on and understanding the crimes of the rich and powerful, the way that crime is policed also shows that intraclass crime is treated as less serious. When the class turns on itself, then it's still policed and it's still condemned, but it's not considered as important as interclass crime. Interclass crime that’s what's most heavily policed and not just heavily policed by the cops, it's biopolitical, it’s policed in every aspect of our lives, via various regimes of living, from the way a city is divided, where you can actually commit crime, to who gets away with crime, what we think crimes are, how we police each other, how we’re divided along class lines across the whole social body in relation to crime. So, I think we have to appreciate that why crimes, or the people who commit crimes, are treated differently and thought about differently, and the way their bodies and lives are treated differently, is a continual reproduction of bourgeois crimes and bourgeois law.

Class resistance to and rejection of capitalist work and capitalist property relations is heavily policed and criminalised to protect exploitation, the theft of most people’s energy, time, lives, and to enforce capitalist labour, so that we behave in ways that reproduces capital, which again involves the reproduction of how we understand crime and how we understand the law. This constant struggle is crucial and hence why when we talk about these things it's difficult because the power of that process is so great and everything is connected to it. It seems natural in many ways to think and do certain things that reproduces capitalism, because that's how powerful capital as a criminal social relation is.

Mark: Yes, it’s interesting because when you get drawn into the question of what is justifiable it’s already beholden to that same logic. It’s still that same value structure connected to a conception of law, connected to a conception of property in the reproduction of that same system. I might imbue certain activities with ‘this is a more legitimate performance of rebellion’ but it’s still beholden to that same logic. So, yes, it’s such a powerful, such an overarching structure, that we're constantly battling with, and it is a violent one as well. So, we've raised the issue of violence a few times in different ways and keeping in mind the contradiction you’ve just outlined really well, crime is often associated with violence, or as a form of violence, and as you say it's important to unpack the connection between these words, the meaning of them, and then the practises of them. So, the question I have is, is there an inherent relationship between crime and violence and along with that can crime ever be a way to escape violence?

Nick: Again, we have to consider the question of what is violence? because what violence means is contested and people like King suggest a different way of thinking about violence. That's why I began this interview by talking about how I grew up in relation to class violence and how that’s something which has resonated throughout my life. When I did my thesis, I wrote two chapters on peace, because for me the question of violence is a central question and there’s no easy definition of violence or clear understanding of if or when it's productive and when it's destructive. However, while they are intermingled and not clearly distinct, I think we can distinguish between the violence of capital and anti-capitalist or communist violence. So, I've banged on a lot about how capitalism is criminal and capital is a form of violence, or various forms of violence. The obvious ones we've been talking about throughout both of our interviews are the violence of policing, of various types, and I've also brought in war, and connected that, because for me that is policing on a more violent scale. Exploitation is violence, poverty is violence, and so on. So, we need to think about what we mean by violence and how and why we tend to associate it with certain crimes.

To succeed within capitalism requires criminal violence and the crimes of capitalism are violent in the broader sense of the term. So, when we're thinking about questions of crime and morality and our interconnection and complicity with criminal violence, we're struggling with whether we’re trying to succeed within capitalism, or are we trying to escape or move beyond capital and what types of violence does that entail or justify, or could we consider moral, if any? We're faced with the fact that when we think about the mafias, warlords, and gang bosses, and so on, those are the capitalist bosses, that's what they are, and to counter the level of violence they organise, foster, and deploy every day, in so many ways, can require the use of violence to defend people, and that violence is criminalised. When we fight back against their violence it’s more likely to be called violence. Classic examples come to mind, like the number of times you see demonstrations portrayed in the media where the police are attacking people while the headlines are screaming ‘protest violence’ or ‘protestor violence’. When we resist it’s called violence, challenging their power is violence.

However, proletarian crimes are not generally violent and can involve various forms of care and even love. For instance, at the moment local states are further criminalising blockading, because climate change protestors are increasingly disrupting production and distribution. Protestors are doing this because they care about ecosystems, about other people and other beings, about the living world. These types of proletarian crimes, crimes that resist, reject, disrupt, and create alternatives to capitalism, can be ways of helping people to escape violence, to avoid and avert the brutalities of capital, today most obviously to counter the criminal systemic violence threatening life on earth.

When people are being violently attacked, when they're in danger, then I believe it can be legitimate to use violence to defend them, and that can be a form of solidarity. So, it can help class formation, by helping the class to defend itself against violence, and sometimes that’s required and therefore can be a positive thing in certain circumstances, as a response to vulnerability, as a response to violence. So, violence can be a way of helping people. But the tendency of violence is to foster division, to create more violence, or the intensification of violence. So, wherever possible, violence should be avoided and that's hard because the class is often forced into violence.

We can think of many problems with that dilemma. In the past, for example, I've celebrated the armed struggles of the FMLN in El Salvador and the way they defeated counter-insurgency, American troops, and the death squads. But now we look at El Salvador and much of those struggles have degenerated into criminal gangs that are horrible violent parts of capital. We can think of the Red Brigades, because we're so interested in the Italian struggles of the 1970s, and what happened there, and how they used violence apparently to defend class movements from attacks by the cops, fascist terror, and fascistic state violence, and how they degenerated into a mirror image of who and what they were apparently fighting and how this helped to reproduce what they were supposedly defending the class against. Similarly, in Ireland, the way sections of the IRA degenerated into terrorism and crime gangs. I've written a fair bit about ‘the strategy of tension’, which is a deliberate strategy that capitalist forces use to foster violence from those who are opposing them, to help incorporate them into the violence of capital, and it's a sophisticated deliberate strategy being organised by some of the most powerful violent groups that capital deploys against us.

Mark: When you talk it makes me think, with capitalist law and communist lore, there needs to be some way to differentiate what is meant by the violence of capital and the all-encompassing way we’re drawn into it, and then the defensive violence that we sometimes have to deploy in order to do other things, to struggle. I wondered if we need another term to think about that, but then that risks perhaps smoothing over the problem that you just outlined, which is that calling it something else elides the fact that it can very quickly become a reproduction of what it’s trying to refuse.

Nick: When I've written about this and distinguished between the violence of capital and what we can call proletarian or communist violence, I’ve discussed that non-capitalist violence is not only defensive but that it's also democratic. Being democratic distinguishes it from the degeneration of the FMLN, the dangerous practices of the IRA and the Red Brigades, and so on. Democracy isn't something that exists in a static way, or just as a future goal, it's a constant struggle to develop our ability, the ability of the class, to collectively organise and govern our everyday lives. If defensive violence isn't part of that democratic struggle, if it's not as democratic as possible, then it's likely to be a danger to the class. It's not just about being defensive and not offensive, it's about who's in control of it, who has power within social struggles around the deployment of force.

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The next, fifth and final post of the interview with Nick, will discuss Class Cultures, Moralities, and the Social Relations of Crime. It will be posted in about a week.