Kapital & Krime

Michael Hoover hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us
Wed Mar 10 12:06:50 PST 1999


'Good and pure air - the pestilential atmosphere of English basement dwellings! Great natural beauty - the fantastic beggars' rags of the English poor, and the withered flesh of the women who are consumed by work and misery; children lying on filth; the monsters produced by overwork in the monotonous mechanization of the factories! And the most delightful final detail of the whole thing: prostitution, murder, and the gallows!' (Marx, "Critical Marginal Notes on the Article 'The King of Prussia. By a Prussian'", 1844, _Karl Marx: On Revolution_, McGraw-Hill, p. 10)

'The contempt for the existing social order is most conspicuous in its extreme form - that of offence against the law. If the influenes demoralizing to the working-man act more powerfully, more concentratedly than usual, he becomes an offender as certainly as water abandones the fluid for the vaporous state at 80 degrees, Reaumur.' (Engels, _The Condition of the English Working Class_, 1845, Academy Chicago Publishers, p. 159)

' ...Present day society, which breeds hostility between the individual man and everyone else, thus produces a social war of all against all which inevitably in individual cases, notably among the uneducated people, assumes a brutal, barborously violent form - that of crime. In order to protect itself against crime, against direct acts of violence, society requires an extensive, complicated system of administrative and judicial bodies which requires an immense labour force. In communist society...we put the axe to the root of crime - and thereby render the greatest, by far the greatest, part of the present activity of the administrative and judicial bodies superfluous' (Engels, 'Speeches in Elberfield,' _Marx Engels: The Individual and Society_, 1845, Progress Publishers, pp. 121-122)

'Like right, so crime, i.e., the struggle of the isolated individual against the prevailing conditions, is not the result of arbitrariness ...The same visionaries who see in right and law the domination of some independently existing, general will can see in crime the mere violation of right and law.' (Marx & Engels, _The German Ideology_, 1846, International Publishers, p. 107)

'Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris . ..No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies...the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind. "We," said a member of the Commune, "no longer hear of assassination, theft, and personal assault...' (Marx, "The Civil War in France," 1871, _On Revolution_, p. 358)

Michael Hoover



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