The early quote from 1845
>>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 -
raises the question of how much a socialist society can really dispense with an extensive, complicated system of administrative and judicial bodies. There was a powerful current in Leninism, emphasising the ideas in Marx about smashing the existing state machinery. Early decades in revolutionary countries saw great solidarity but also the absence of a socialist legal system and due process. It was not until 1939 that the head of the Soviet security system had any training in police methods. This was one of a number of factors leading to the widening of a concept of a dicatortship of the proletariat far beyond the immediate class enemy wanting to restore capitalism.
The comments of Marx and Engels imply a deeper meaning.
That in bourgeois society crime is not arbitrary but only appears so to bourgeois individualism. The building of socialism is not only about handling contradictions among the people increasingly without the coercive powers of an armed state, but of undermining concepts of bourgeois civil right.
How that is done, I do not know, but perhaps we need to look for examples, shoots of socialism within the prevailing bourgeois field of battle.
Chris Burford
London
At 15:06 10/03/99 -0500, you wrote:
>'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
>
>