This is the final post of the interview with Mark, it covers themes on the morality of crime, crime as a form of rebellion, and crime in relationship to class struggle and power. After this, we will begin sharing the interview with Nick.
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PART FIVE
Nick: Before, you only spoke briefly about your own criminal activities, and I wondered whether you viewed/view this activity as rebellion?
Mark: I think it depends on how you frame it, 'cause growing up not just in the neighbourhood but in the particular household I grew-up in, it's hard to participate in criminal activity in a way that's rebellious relative to your neighbourhood, immediate social world, or even your parents – where could I have gone from robbing banks? It’s hard to be more rebellious or cool than that.
So in some respects, it is hard for me to think of it all as rebellion due to context. There was a little while there where I was not so bad at school, like I probably could have done well at school, but then I ended up not doing that. I drank quite a lot, mum even commented a couple of times about being worried about my alcohol consumption, which coming from someone who used like my mum kinda had a bit of weight to it, and I’d smoke a fair bit of weed, and like I said just causing stupid types of trouble. As I’ve mentioned earlier, we were regularly running up against the police in the neighbourhood and outside of it too. There was a period when I was getting hassled by the cops a bit. I was known to the cops not just 'cause my parents were, I mean the daughter of the head detective who led all the raids on our house was in my year at school, but also because of all of that other shit too. And as I kinda mentioned earlier, my experiences are imbued with structures of whiteness, you know, where not too much really happened to me by the cops or being drawn into the carceral system, besides some harassment and stuff. Whereas like I said before, I have friends who at the time went either to juvenile detention or have been to gaol since.
But yeah, there were times when my mum was like ‘you need to sort this shit out, you can't keep doing this’ and me being like ‘how are you even making that argument?’ It doesn't make any sense for you to make that argument given what's happening here at home and you’re about to be going back to prison cos you were robbing banks for fucks sake, it was kind of hilarious really. So, in that limited sense, the scale of crime I was around just meant that it was too normal to really think about my own minor activities as a form of rebellion, it was just the world I lived in and had always lived in. I would have been visiting Tony in prison before I’d even been to preschool, you know. It’s a different context to what a lot of people know or are familiar with I think, and it becomes a part of everything you think and learn about from being a child all the way through.
In relationship to my own immediate social world, again I don't think I saw it as a form of rebellion, not really anyway and again as it was all so normalised. But I guess there was certainly a thing where doing things like that or just being who we were, and not just me but also my friends, thought about that as a refusal of being incorporated and drawn into normal life, that it was expressive of our own already outcastness, and we were happy to persist in that.
So, I suppose in that sense it was a type of rebellion and the target of that usually was the cops and also property. To me that was kind of who we hated – the cops, at least that is who I hated. And in a way with property, I kinda had a strange response to it, 'cause you know like we used to tax - steal things from shops, from cars, that house burglary or wherever, and I didn’t always feel good about it. I didn't really get a joy out of some of those sorts of things, except for when we stole kegs of beer or shit from shops. But like from cars, mostly it didn't feel good to me. And so while I do think there was an aspect of rebellion it wasn't necessarily always a good vibe for me.
One of the reasons I exited the way I did, which really was via politics, was partly not really enjoying it and also, just being really exhausted and traumatised by the proximity I had to my parents’ engagement with crime and what that did to their lives and my life, the police raids, constant thoughts about prison and so on. My nerves were pretty wrecked throughout those years of the 90s, there was a lot of stress and I think I just self-medicated through it all without being aware that is what I was doing. Like for example, we were really pretty young when we did that burglary, but I was already stressed out and kinda freaked out about it cos I knew what it was like to have cops literally bash through your door and it was hard for me to get those things out of my mind, whereas my friends were calm as fuck. So anytime I sort of thought about a growing proximity to crime, I mean to mum and Tony’s type of crime as I got older, it kind of freaked me out.
In one sense I think it would have been easy to stay there in the neighbourhood and be brought further into that world that shaped the household I grew up in and I think Mum and Tony maybe could have let that happen. They never pressured us to do that or anything like that, but I don't think they necessarily would have hesitated either. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but like I really don’t know what would have happened if I’d hit them up for smack as I got older, you know. I kinda feel like they might have shown me how to do it properly and safely you know. Maybe not, maybe they would have said I was being a dickhead, and I never asked for that sort of thing off them and didn’t have interest in it, so who knows. And due to the relationships I had it would have been easy to do another burglary, maybe another one and so on. But I didn't want any more of that particular sort of police attention as I got older.
And I also wanted or needed to step back and look at it from a different angle, which ended up being from a far-left political perspective, I guess. Once I had that sort of viewpoint, which obviously came through the experiences and I guess I was developing from a youngish age, but kind of stepped into when I was about 17 or something, I was able to make a bit more sense of my life. And in a very strange way, it was then, when I started taking myself to the second-hand bookstore and the library to get ‘political’ books, going to protests and things, that I felt more rebellious in relationship to capital or whatever in doing that. Which is pretty weird, really.
And then also starting to be a little more involved in political things and the feeling of rebelling that came with that was kinda important for me. And you know, I’ve talked about all sorts of my proximity to and participation in crime, from what happened in my household, neighbourhood, and I think I mentioned riding freight trains, stealing from cars and whatever… Or as a point of comparison, there was one time, one night in Berry and we got all the newspapers from different news agencies and built barricades on the roads and set them on fire. You know that was fun, funny, and pointless, but felt good. But I remember also building barricades in the streets of Melbourne and elsewhere as part of movements, and doing that with so many people was another really important thing to do, for me. I’m not saying that that is more important than the shit that I got up to in Bomaderry, only that what happened around the neighbourhood for me sometimes it felt more like just something to do, what you had to do…
So, was it rebellion? I dunno, we're sort of these poor kids, we’re not really even punks, we weren't like aesthetically punk, we would just steal our clothes from the second-hand Salvos shop. We kinda thought of ourselves as punks, but if you had of seen us, we wouldn't really look like them, the real punks who were round, but there was that sense of refusal of the status quo…
N: You say that if there was rebellion it was a rebellion against the police, against the restrictions, the controls, the status quo, etc. in general and how that impacted you and you also talked about it as an embrace of your outsider status. So, I wondered whether, and you sort of answered this, but I just wanted to check, whether you felt that any of that crime was an expression of anger over exclusion from mainstream capitalist social relations, waged work, wealth, consumption, and so forth?
M: Again, I don't remember it that way and definitely not for most of the time when I was living there. I was angry about our conditions, what happened to our lives in those neighbourhoods, but I didn’t see any desire to be a part of what I was excluded from either, if that makes sense. If anything, I wanted to destroy it, change everything, I didn’t see much to preserve in our condition and I didn’t see what I was excluded from as desirable. Like I never really tried to get a job until a little later, later than many of my friends, and I didn't really have examples of work. As I said, Mum and Tony hardly ever worked and even Terry, he's either worked a while in care or he's been on the dole doing his own thing. And we came into a punkish or lumpen sort of viewpoint from pretty young, I guess. I did really enjoy feeling like I was not part of the normal world.
When I was probably twelve, thirteen, or fourteen, I did feel sadness about exclusion. Exclusion isn’t even the right word. I generally made friends easily with people from the neighbourhood and I didn't have any enemies in my own neighbourhood, and these are sorts of things you would know about, often mediated by forms of violence or the threat of it. At school I had my crew, which again was kids from the neighbourhood, but I was also friends with people from all other areas as well. So, it wasn't so much exclusion, but I definitely felt sad and upset by the fact that home life was like it was, but also people would give you shit about it, drugs and poverty, whatever. I don't know whether that's exclusion or what, it’s some boundary drawing I guess. I used to spend a lot of time stressing, angry, whatever over that sort of shit. But when I got a bit older it was fun to actively embrace not being a part of that sort of working world and to drift a bit. Spending time in the neighbourhood felt like drifting, 'cause you weren't really going anywhere or doing anything, maybe just walking into town and hanging out in the car park, that sort of thing, and I liked doing that.
It's funny because, as I said, I wasn’t a uni student radical, I’d come to communist and anarchist politics younger via my experiences of class, policing and prisons as a child and teenager and via friends, but also before I’d ever had a job. I ended up getting a job working on a farm and then in construction, and then many others. So in that way, I was drawn into work and wages after the experiences I’ve described above, after having being drawn into socialist groups, and before ever having a uni education. And the weirdness of learning about politics in a more ‘organised’ sense and in a way it was then during that process of joining socialist youth groups, not the reading of the books on their own, but when I came up to Resistance, that I started to feel a sense of exclusion, via this experience more than I had earlier by a more explicit exclusion from aspects of capitalist society and wealth. That probably sounds unclear, I guess what I mean is I didn’t really feel an anger of exclusion as such from capitalist forms of wealth etc as a younger teenager, and I wanted to overthrow, abolish that wealth and state or whatever, not be included in it. But in a warped kind of way I came into a feeling of a lack of class power, exclusion from it, via a narrow conception of what political activity was in my first forays into the left, in finding how absent experiences like mine, not even mine specifically but the conditions I come from, were from those groups. In many ways, I think that is still the case in many of these groups, clusters, or whatever. That’s not a moral criticism, but there is some kind of question there…
N: Thinking about the differences between intra-class crime, where the poor target the poor, and those crimes that target capital, its state forms, the rich, etc. I'm wondering about considerations around the morality of crime, whether some crimes are more moral than others? Drug crimes are often seen as immoral and divisive and I'm wondering when you're talking about not feeling good about committing crime how you felt/feel about the morality of crime and some of the class questions connected to that?
M: I just moved between at least two feelings about this. I do think there is a morality to crime, where some is more, I don’t want to use the word justifiable, but some is clearly just not problematic, whereas other forms are problematic, thinking of this in terms of class. So, intra-class crimes can be really problematic and can have really vexed moral elements to them, if not immorality too. My own participation in it, it's a tricky one. Sometimes it was like that, feeling bad about stealing shit from cars. But not all the time. Again, everything's a bit skewed because in my imagination at the time if you had a car and your house is made of bricks and you owned it, then you were rich. That's not true of course, but the points of reference I was working off, I knew there was proper rich rich beyond that. But in terms of my own immediate interactions, I'd walk out of my street and be thinking that all of Meroo Rd or Lyndhurst Dr were these well-off people, but it turns out they're not, they may have jobs, but many of them are renting, paying a mortgage – just working class people. Then I’d go from there to Berry and I'm like ‘well Berry people are definitely fair game’. But even then, I was generally wrong about that, and taxing shit out of people’s cars is not inherently cool. It was just something to kill boredom. It's not like we even needed the shit, or were even selling it, though sometimes we hocked shit. So, in that sense I do think there's a question of morality to it and who’s targeted. I never felt bad about stealing from Woolworths or from bottle shops or whatever shop.
But with the question and a bit more seriously, I did think about this even when I was young, because heroin addiction is serious. It's not for everybody, but for a lot of people it’s a serious thing and so selling it is a pretty questionable thing to be doing. Even if your material standards of living don’t improve as a result, because of your own addiction, still that act is not unproblematic. I thought about it then, because it's clear that mum and Tony’s lives were messed up as a result, and there's just like shit tonnes of people coming into the house to score and not all of those people are messed up, some of them seemed fine, but a lot of them were pretty struggle street. They would rock-up-in and there would be stories about all the other shit that's going on in their lives. The selling of it is a part of all of that story. Viewed from many angles, that’s an intraclass crime. Your extracting money from the same class as yourself, even though whatever money came went into their own arms as well. So, I do think there's a question of morality about that.
But the other thing I was thinking about is how some of that shit, intraclass crime in general, works itself out within the networks of people involved. For example, within the neighbourhood sometimes people would steal shit from other people in the neighbourhood or they'd be borrowed money and not able to pay money back, all these sorts of things would play out, and I think in some ways there were processes within all of those relationships to manage that sort of shit. Sometimes it would be known if someone had broken into somewhere and stolen something and the recourse wasn't police and it wasn't just like ‘oh that didn't happen’ but it also wasn't the end of a relationship. Maybe it was a fight or maybe it was a stand-over for a little bit or something that made it clear that was not a cool thing to do. But also, it wasn't the out-casting of the person. I was young at this time, but it seems to me that there was an understanding that basically all people in those conditions are going to find themselves hard-up at a certain point and might do something that's not sensible for harmonious relationships within a neighbourhood, but are gonna do it anyway, 'cause it's what's at hand and there’s not much choice, people kind of get that.
I hope that makes sense, I think it can be hard to explain the character of these neighbourhoods, the explicit tension alongside mutual support and the morality of that, to people who might not have lived it…
In terms of inter-class crime, against the rich and the institutions of the rich, that is a whole other thing, and yeah I think targeting property, laws that keep people impoverished, policed and imprisoned, crime against that, breaking those laws, is fine and will continue to happen.
N: So, in what ways do you think the crimes you've been discussing are forms of class power or help to compose the class?
M: Some of the crimes we’ve been discussing don't. I don't think selling heroin composes class power, for example. I guess some of the shit that then comes after that might do that, but then again when we're saying class what's within that and what are practises that come from the class that might be thought of as criminal and then what is the form of power? Is grappling with necessity a form of class power?
I have looked back and continue living with the experiences of those days, in a lot of ways all that shit never goes away… and also, for example, the decisions of what Mum and Tony did, I can sort of place all of that in the context of their own lives. Before I was even in the world, they were struggling with all of these sorts of things and a lot of what happened in my life is a continuation of that. So, I can sort of understand it in that sense, but in terms of like an expression of class power I don't think some of that stuff that flowed directly from the drugs really does compose class power. Which is not me saying using is bad either, only it is a separate thing to me than a question of class power.
But I do think that a lot of the practice that people develop to live in poverty, and some of that is criminal or it's in proximity to it, are forms of class power. Theft can be a form of class power, in the sense that it's weaved into forms of living that people have, if it's not stealing from people living next door, but to get the food you need, things you want, these sorts of things. The particular crime maybe in itself doesn’t bare so much relationship to composing the class in its power, but it's an expression of class power, insofar as it’s weaved within a set of living arrangements that are not measurable by the status quo, the system, or the state, that are sort of in excess of that. Like the sharing of resources that are relatively scarce and the sharing of time outside of regulated things, or the sharing of time within a fundamentally regulated thing like prison, people coming together to say no to the police, the relationships that have come through that are meaningful relationships, parts of the happiness and joy of those lives, my life.
In that sense, some criminal activities entwined with both refusal of capitalist forms of wealth and sanctioned access to it, and constructing lives worth living, are a form of class power. I tend to think of power as a more collective expression of interest, but I think these things I’ve talked about are part of the question of class power and composition too. When it's enmeshed with a whole other range of relationships, community, and survival recipes, like shoplifting, and even Mum’s doing that and we got a lot of food, fed a lot of people, and it's an element of class composition insofar as those lives are part of what class is and it's a form of power, it's a refusal of absolute destitution in a way, and it’s a refusal of the commodity. A lot of those sorts of resources ended-up being shared in different ways, so it wasn't just about the household. I think that is an expression of power and the normalcy of that in people’s lives can give a sense of class power too. Being in relation to that puts you at odds with money and forces that exist to reinforce the rule of money, the police, the screws, and security, all these sorts of things, so there's something in knowing that which I think is a part of class power, even if you couldn't really be like ‘mum racking sugar or robbing banks is good for the class’.
The next post will be the first section of the interview with Nick, beginning with the theme of ‘Growing-up in a ‘Cold War’ communist family: Class Crimes, Law and Lore’