Class Cultures, Moralities, and the Social Relations of Crime

Nick: Part 5 of 5

In the final part of Nick’s interview, we discuss the morality and cultures of crime, ‘solidarity for survival’, crime as a form of social decay and a danger to social order, the impacts of the black economy and gangsterism, and we reflect on the ‘Crimes of Class’ interview process.

PART FIVE

Mark: I wanted to ask about your views on the morality of crime, can crime be moral and what do you think the distinctions are between interclass crimes and intraclass crimes?

Nick: I’ve already talked about inter and intraclass crimes to a certain extent, but maybe I'll start there, because I think, again, it depends on how you understand class. Given the ways we've already discussed class, there can be moral distinctions made between inter and intra crimes. Our struggles should involve trying to limit the crimes that go on within our class as well as crimes that are carried out by the ruling class against us. When we're talking about crimes committed by our class against their class then they tend to be moral. But morality can be difficult to judge because, like class, there’s a range of different ways of thinking about it which reflect different values, in both economic and social senses, what's valuable to us, to other people, to society, and so forth. The way we think about crime is often focused on things that are valuable to capital and a capitalist society, so, to help us think about different moralities, we need to consider what's really valuable and what types of value are most important. Anti-capitalist morality revolves around things that are more valuable than money or property, such as solidarity and cooperation and our ability to organise against the ruling class and for the proletariat. But money and possessions can be very important, especially for people who don't have a lot, and can also be useful when we’re trying to build class power.

Throughout these interviews we've touched on how culture revolves around criminal morality tales and we can see how in a whole range of stories, in films and books, in music, and so on, criminal concerns and questions of criminality are explored. These morality tales tend to romanticise crime in ways that deflect from the social realities of it and are often about the excitement of being involved in crimes that are self-interested and exploitative. Capitalist culture celebrates the power of fictional super villains, but also people like Putin, Trump, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos. Many people see them as rebels who are bending or breaking the rules and getting away with it. And, of course, they're doing that by trampling over other people, treating people like shit, committing horrific crimes against masses of people, the environment, and so forth. While people like your mum are highlighted as the most wanted criminals, those who get away with the really big crimes, such as robbing banks and stealing from bank customers because they own the fucking banks, they’re ignored, they never end up in gaol. In many ways capitalist cultures celebrates and romanticises that type of crime, as success.

So, the dominant ideologies of crime tend to glamorise crimes that benefit the individual and suggest that the ability to get away with crimes requires being powerful within capitalist society, that the crimes which pay are those that fit into and reproduce capitalist social relations. The message is often - ‘if you want the power to defy laws then you need the power of the ruling class, you need the power of property and money, the power to use and exploit other people, the power to exert force and violence over others’. Capitalist culture is steeped in crime. For example, my daughters are into ‘true crime’ podcasts, which are very popular, there’s lots of movies about heists and violent revenge or vigilante fantasies, you've got games like GTA (Grand Theft Auto), there’s police and ‘law and order’ TV shows, which are often just ‘copaganda’ justifying the breaking of laws supposedly in the pursuit of justice, suggesting that to defend the law you have to be beyond the law, that it's alright for the police and the ‘justice system’ to break the law. That's such a powerful message and you can see how it plays out in brutal struggles to maintain the system, to become top dog, and get rich.

Whereas a decent morality of crime is about class struggle as the collective defiance of the rules of capital and crimes that are really forms of caring about the oppressed and exploited, about looking after each other. Our class lore provides morality tales, ethics, that seek to distinguish as clearly as possible between the crimes of capital and proletarian lawbreaking, because it's important to try and understand which crimes damage us and which can help us to resist, survive, and thrive. Proletarian cultures are also steeped in crime stories, from the romanticisation of the Ned Kelly gang to the burning down of the Minneapolis Third Precinct police headquarters, the celebration of crimes which are about caring about, for and with other people, sharing stuff and so forth, that revolve around different types of status, of dignity, and social power, through to kids killing the KKK in games like Red Dead Redemption. We romanticise all sorts of stories about stealing from the rich, fighting fascistic gangsters, we share our tales about pickets, protests, occupations, rebellions, revolts and revolutions, which are all about defying and breaking the law.

Capitalist culture desensitises us to and normalises systemic violence, so we can’t see beyond it, it traps us, and limits our horizons. Whereas proletarian culture interrogates capitalist law and order and poses questions about what the acceptable moral lines are when we’re breaking the law? There's a widespread understanding that everybody’s breaking the law. So, what is just, what is moral, in that lawbreaking? For example, both of us have been watching ‘The Responder’ on TV recently about a crooked cop and the whole story is about him breaking the law and the people around him breaking the law. The story’s constantly posing - why does he do these crimes, what should he do, which of the lawbreaking are you sympathetic to you? Do you think is moral? Why? Today, a lot of criminal morality tales confronts, or tries to get us to confront, these types of concerns.

When we started this interview, I talked about the extremes of policing and systemic violence, because we’re desensitised and this violence is so normalised that we often don't see it as criminal, we don’t think of it as crime when capital harms and kills people. Yet, our culture constantly struggles with questions such as - is defensive killing justified? Is it moral to kill people to defend yourself or others? What about revenge killings? And I wonder what does that questioning suggest when we think about how violence plays out in homes, in neighbourhoods, during warfare, etc? Killing baddies is culturally acceptable and baddies killing baddies is something that we're not supposed to worry about. This is the bread and butter of the culture industries. But stories that are often painted as black and white are not black and white, goodies versus baddies, it's more difficult than that. So, how do we make sure that the criminal morality of capital isn't dominating our lives, the way we think and act, our relationships, our organisational forms? What are the ways of taking on the law without behaving in the ways capitalist culture tells us we should?

I know that a lot of my comrades, my friends, and myself have romanticised our criminal activity in ways that were damaging to us and dangerous to the class, because we were resigned to operating within capitalism, rather than focusing on how to demolish it. When you feel relatively powerless and become despairing you may still have the ‘solidarity for survival’ that we've been talking about, but you may not have anything more than that, it's just about survival, and that's not enough. If we want to struggle against capital, we need to resist it and escape it. I've spent a lot of my life living in poverty and learning to survive it was crucial. But what is more important is escaping poverty. Similarly, I think it's important to escape from crime. So rather than just thinking of ways to break capitalist laws it's important to think about how we can break capitalist law, how can we end it, so there is no capitalist law.  

Mark: What you said at the end provoked a question for me, which has run throughout the whole conversation in an interesting way, which is, we’re sort of speaking from very personal experiences, so it's like the minutia of these questions of crime and poverty and so on, but, particularly in this discussion with you, what's weaved within that or looms around that, is always coming back to the question of the collective and the broader sense of the class and how the breaking of capitalist laws, if it's weaved into collective struggle, is actually a more liberatory sort of practise and perhaps that's where these individual acts become the practice of a communist lore.  And I was struck, listening to that and thinking about my own responses when you interviewed me, and I remember that being a feeling but being stuck in only being able to talk about the much shorter horizon of the neighbourhood. One of the last points that came up in the interview with me, when you were asking about some of these same questions about crime as rebellion, I remember thinking well it was actually as I became more politicised in a sort of leftist sense that I felt more rebellious, even though what that looked like was maybe reading and going to protests and meetings. I think that's what you’re getting at here. 'Cause the question I did wanna ask is about that realm of necessity and what capital would call criminal activities as a way of grappling with necessity, can we think of that as class power? Or is as far as that gets ‘solidarity for survival’?

Nick: Yeah, well I think ‘solidarity for survival’ is class power. If you don't survive then other struggles are going to be impossible. But to move beyond survival is important, because a lot of people's lives and struggles get stuck at that level for various reasons, their horizons are limited, as you say. Even the word ‘necessity’ can be limiting. When you say ‘necessity’ I'm thinking well we probably have different conceptions of necessity, certainly while growing up, because you come from a poorer background than I do. So, what's necessary for you and what's necessary for me? You might say ‘well quite a lot more was necessary for me than it was for you’. Yet you also talked about how you didn't really need a lot of the stuff you stole, it wasn't necessary. In some ways it was taking the stuff that was more necessary than the stuff taken. So, there are different ways of thinking about what's necessary and for me, even though I lived in poverty for a long time, a lot of the stuff I did wasn’t because it was economically necessary, it was for a range of other reasons. I had desires, the people around me had desires that I wanted to help them fulfil, but also testing out those boundaries, breaking those laws, finding out how to be able to do that collectively rather than just on your own, for me that was necessary. It was like an educational exploration of the world and its boundaries that was necessary.

Mark: The difficulty is distinguishing what’s against capital and what’s for liberation. Sometimes it appears clear that they’re separate things and then at other times it is far less clear that their separate, or it's clear that they're not separate. It’s like this is a bit of survival, this is how we deal with these situations, and we did that for all sorts of reasons and that was fine, but the struggle is over there. But then it turns out that's not always the case. So maybe the lesson is that there's no clear line.

Nick: You’ve talked about how you changed the way you thought about crimes, activity, and rebelling when you became part of ‘the left’ and started seeing things that may not overtly look as rebellious, as more rebellious. But, in some ways, that view created a distinction between what you were doing before 'cause you were just getting by and doing other things that may be seen by capital as more rebellious, or more dangerous, and are more heavily policed. ‘The left’ often creates that false distinction and romanticises certain things, surprise surprise, that the left does. And those who aren't of ‘the left’, or who aren't considered part of the class, the stuff they do is put down, is neglected, or painted as dangerous to the class. These distinctions are constructed and contested, rather than being clear. As we mentioned before, an important debate within revolutionary theory challenges the dominant view of the revolutionary subject and the writing-off of the ‘lumpen’.

Survival and class struggle are interconnected, there’s no going and joining strikes or protest movements if you haven't survived. If, when you were a kid, you had been on your own and all that shit had happened and you had no support, your parents didn't love you, and you didn't have good friends and neighbours, then maybe you didn't make it. So, there’s no left wing activism unless you survive. So, what’s more important? Well in some senses the surviving is more important, because if you don’t do that then you don't do the other stuff. Meanwhile, a lot of the stories we tell, and we're doing the same thing here, there's no way to grasp the complexity, there's no way to tell tales that don’t simplify and make things seem less complicated than they are.

Mark: I want to ask about crime as a form of social decay and a danger to the class and social order. Is there anything you want to say about the idea of crime as social decay and how do we understand the idea that growing crime is an indication of increasing social decay, and crime as a threat to social order. Can crime be a threat to social order and what does it mean to say that?

Again, it's difficult because when we use words like decay, we conjure up different ways of viewing the world for different people and social order is the same. What I was thinking about when I raised these terms was that crime is a form of social decay in both positive and negative ways. It's negative in the sense that social connections, social relationships, things that are valuable to the proletariat, care, collectivity, communism, etc. decays due to capitalist crimes. We can sense the dangers of growing criminality in our society, we understand the danger to us, the people we care about, and what we have built to help reproduce our positive ways of life, the class and class struggle. But crime can also be an aspect of social decay that’s a threat to the capitalist social order, the way society is ruled. So, the social decay that weakens the rule of capital, that sees capital’s law and order being undermined and defied, can be positive, if it's the class doing it in ways which are helpful and productive for the class in struggle. But it can also be the opposite because the current social order cannot stand and what's coming, what's demolishing this order, and what's going to replace it is unclear. It could be that we're seeing the social order of the recent past collapse and the rise of a more fascistic social order.

Mark: There’s a question that didn't come up in any direct way in my interview and that is the relationship between capital and the black economy, the informal economy. What is the relation between them? How can we understand it?

Responding to the question about morality I sort of made an argument that there's a moral economy of crime and part of the black economy is a moral economy. We can see it in some ways, and I've certainly experienced it in some ways as an exodus from control, from the discipline of wage labour, from the boss. But I think we should appreciate that the general tendency of the black economy is capitalist discipline or self-discipline. So, you’re still trying to get on in the capitalist world within the black economy, capital is setting the parameters of how that operates, and you're trying to manage within that, so any autonomy is limited. But I do think that, and we talked about this in relation to WOW and other things, that the black economy can be self-organised in ways which are useful for the class, that helps to foster, or fund, or support resistance and there are illegal activities that create what I think we can consider moral economies. But the more money, the more property it involves, the more likely it’s just capital operating in the shadows and it's usually the most vicious sections of the ruling class in control. The tendency, if you're involved, is to be incorporated into that, to self-exploit, to self-discipline, to be exploited and disciplined, and to discipline and exploit other people.

I got a good insight into the counter-revolutionary power of the black economy when I visited the Soviet Union. Here I was doing investigative journalism and saw how, and just to be clear I'm not saying the Soviet Union was communist, I describe it as ‘state capitalist’, but when I was there (in 1990) the dominant state form was being confronted by a rising ruling class that was organising via the black economy. So, new sections of capital were taking power and they managed to do that and extend that power across the world in many ways, and we've seen similar processes happen elsewhere. For example, since then, I've read about the rise of fascism in Germany and the Nazi’s connections to what’s traditionally called organised crime and how the Nazis were organised criminals. They were like ‘fuck the law’, ‘we’re just gonna smash and murder people and grab whatever we can’. That's what was happening in the Soviet Union when I was there. There was little semblance of formal state law, it was rapidly breaking-down, and instead there was the law of force, of violence, and corruption, the power of what Russians called ‘the mafia’. Violent crime was rampant, different factions were muscling in on different territories, making a grab for the spoils of chaos, taking advantage of rapid disorderly change. Today, you can see how Putin, the contemporary face of this new ruling class in Russia, gets what he wants, to have some understanding of what was going on then. It was horrific.

If we look around the world today, there's a lot of examples of states collapsing in a similar way to the Soviet Union and new rulers emerging from the shadows of the black economy or in the pockets of criminal gangs. It's important to think about how and why we're seeing the black economy become politically more important, why the distinctions between what’s considered to be the black economy and the mainstream economy is less clear now, and what that means for the sort of conflicts we're seeing, the civil wars, proxy wars, the transformation of places all over the world, with gangsters and warlords fighting each other, mercenary violence, that sort of stuff.

Mark: So, there’s a question here about gangsterism and it’s an interesting term. I'm sure it conjures up a whole range of different things for different people and the politics of gangsterism in relationship to crime, the word sounds like crime, but it also sounds like cops if you ask me. But I wonder if there's anything more you wanted to say about the politics of gangsterism within capitalism and within the black economy as well, especially as that distinction is becoming more acute, between what is called the black economy and what's not. But at the same time, they are becoming more and more the same thing, which then poses the question what is the distinction and what’s the purpose of the distinction?

Nick: Gangsterism, as you said, conjures up different things and if we boil it down to talking about gangs, gangs mean different things. When we were talking about our own past, we could have described some of the groups we hung around as gangs. But we wouldn't think of that as gangsterism because the term is connected to organised criminal capitalist gangs, which might suggest there’s not a clear distinction, they’re just business-people operating outside of the law, perhaps more ruthless and vicious business-people. Yet business-people who are operating inside the law are also vicious, at times more vicious, like the totally legal arms manufacturers.

In some ways gangsterism is an alternative state form and the most powerful crime gangs are organised to carry out a lot of the same functions as legal capitalist institutions. They reflect and practise a range of capitalist political, economic, and policing functions and these criminal formations have become so rich and powerful they can dominate other state forms, the legal structures, so the distinction between them is becoming impossible to make. It's not that they take over, as such, but that there is no distinction, and we have what is traditionally seen as gangsterism rising politically as fascism. Criminal groups offer different forms of order. Even in the black economy it's not like there’s a ‘free market’. Crime gangs are often highly regimented hierarchical structures that have firmly enforced rules and regulations, their own laws, protection for some, punishment for others, taxation, services, organisational roles and responsibilities, and so on. That type of gangsterism is on the rise, it's a growing tendency within and as capitalist state forms, and there are no uncorrupted states, no uncorrupted state institutions. With capital in deep crisis, in many ways collapsing and decaying, the level of corruption is increasing as the most destructive tendencies of capitalism grow.

Mark: As this is seemingly the end of the interview is there anything else to add about how we might sum up the question of crime, law, and class struggle?

Nick: I want to finish by thinking about how what we've just been talking about, the viciousness, the criminality of capital today, and the rise of gangsterism, is a reaction to the power of anti-capitalist struggle. The fact that capitalist rule is in crisis and to defend itself it increasingly relies on violence, that its ‘justice’, its ‘law and order’ ideologies are falling apart, its ability to organise social relationships, social production, to reproduce itself, the fact that it’s really quite weak, means it has to rely more and more on violence and terror. This reflects our class power and the challenges that we’re posing, that the building of alternative non-capitalist futures, our struggles to actually care for, about and with each other, are really powerful.

Our ‘solidarity for survival’ and our alternative ways of living pose a danger to capital and what capitalist law traditionally does is pit us against each other, divide us, create laws that mean we're all arrestable, that at any time they can come and get us, and in some ways we understand that and that makes us feel vulnerable. No one wants to end-up in gaol or charged with something, or, especially for many of the most vulnerable communities, worse than being put in gaol.

Class struggle, global rebellion and local revolts have intensified in the last twenty years or so. These struggles pose, or leave us with, a range of questions. I’ve raised a number of these questions in this interview and I think the most important ones include - how can we build our ability to care for, about, and with each other and have as much ‘solidarity for survival’ as possible while posing an increasingly powerful challenge to capital and its state forms? How can we confront the crimes of capital? How can we do that in ways that doesn't end-up policing the class? These are difficult questions, that really need thinking about, because we often get tricked, forced, or coerced into policing each other.

We've talked about what things are dangerous to the class and when, or whether, different sections of the class are dangerous to each other and how can we know? Because we need to work out what reinforces capitalism and what weakens it? And we need to think about how we’re going to defy and challenge capitalist laws, from what's written in the law books right through to the way we might think about the law of value or the use of violence to keep us in our place, to make us go to work and to do what we're told.

In coming towards the end of the interview one of the things I'm conscious of is the way the discussion has progressed, starting with you in the street of your childhood and how we've moved outward and onward. As we’ve gone from talking about our lives, our friends, or the people we know, into this more abstract discussion, and as we’ve moved forward in time it's been more difficult to talk about the crimes we’re connected to, or that we have knowledge about, or the people we know who are involved in crimes, because it's more dangerous to do that, for them, and for us. Those who want to police us, well the stuff that happened thirty years ago it's less likely that they're coming for us in relation to those, I hope. But if we talk about what’s happening now, then it's more likely that we're getting a knock on the door, it's more likely other people are getting a knock on the door, and it's more likely we're providing information that can be used against the class now. So, I've struggled to concretise what we're talking about while keeping in mind the dangers of what we're doing. I'm conscious, and I'm assuming you are too, of our vulnerabilities, the risks we're taking by talking about a lot of this stuff and not wanting to bring that too close to the present.

Mark: Yeah, it's interesting, the timeline, where we draw that line, it’s a bit squiggly. 

Nick: Yeah, that line is all over the fucking place, because it's unclear, and one of the interesting things about doing this is trying to find out where the line is, testing the boundaries, trying things out. That's what we've been doing while we've been talking about doing that. It's not just about being policed by the authorities, it's about our own friends, our families, the people were talking about, and the stuff we're suggesting about the milieus we move within. Where’s the line and who's policing what we say and do, what we shouldn’t say or do, how do we police ourselves? It's unclear.

That’s one of the reasons we wanted to discuss class morality tales about crime, poverty, unemployment, things that have been difficult and important aspects of our lives, in the hope that recalling and sharing our stories, especially those from back-in-the-day, could be helpful to us and for other people. The moral instructions that members of the class hand-down are important in understanding the realities of class society, of capitalism, and the struggles to demolish it. Learning from the lore of class struggle often starts in relation to small things, where we test the boundaries and find out what happens when we don’t do what we’re supposed to do. Then those small things and the lessons we learn, the understandings we gain, can lead on to larger things and can be more collective and more powerful. If class struggle is intensifying and our class is becoming more powerful and we pose more of a threat to the ruling class, then they’re likely to be more vicious in trying to deal with us. So, we need to share lessons from the past and think about how we can defend ourselves from attacks, as well as finding ways of avoiding and dismantling systemic violence. Importantly, we should give more thought to how we foster love and care, to help us take back what is being stolen from us, our relationships with each other, with the world, our lives.

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This brings us to the end of the interview component of Crimes of Class. We will write a piece that reflects on the themes of the two interviews to be published here when it is ready.