The publicity for Cobra describes this latest celluloid venture by bare-chested, grenade-draped. machine gun toting Sylvester Stallone into the pornography of righteousness like this: "Crime is a disease. This man is the cure".
Very few adults, apart from perhaps his bank manager, take Stallone seriously so there is nothing to be gained from any exhaustive examination of the many fallacies in those two short sentences. But it is worth discussing the claim that there is a "cure" for crime, if only because it is made so often by so many people.
One of the most illusory concepts in present-day politics is that it would be possible to have a crime-free capitalism. All that is needed, it is argued, are a few changes in the law, an increase in the police force, a beefing up of the penal system . . . no election manifesto. no Home Secretary's speech, no Tory
conference debate on law and order, feels complete without some reference to a plan for the imminent eradication of crime. The deception rests on the Stallone assumption, that crime is a type of sickness, an irrationally anti-social disruption in a fundamentally reasonable and humane society.
The problem, however, is that in spite of these assurances, even in spite of the "cures" which get beyond the state of being promised and are actually applied, crime is not only not eradicated but continues stubbornly to increase. One result is a growing concern about the extent of crime, which at times reaches the point of the sort of neurosis which promises some weighty box office receipts for Stallone's prescription for the summary execution of those criminals he considers deserve it.
It would be more hopeful if those who queue to see Cobra were to look at the issue in more basic terms. This society is based on the minority possession of the means of life. The rest of us — the majority, including the people in the cinema queue — are allowed access to what we need to live only on terms which are essential to the class existence of the owning minority. We are employed by them, as wage slaves, and we are required to respect the privileged status which their property rights confer on them. If we don't, they have the means to restrain and punish us; we might even end up at the receiving end of one of Stallone's grenades.
But the essence of capitalism is that property. with its laws and its coercion, is everywhere. No matter what a worker's intentions may be. it is really virtually impossible to avoid breaking the laws of property in some way. Wage slavery is a degrading, frustrating way of life and it is not unnatural for workers to try to burst free of it by deliberately taking some of the wealth which they as a class have produced but which is legally denied to them.
So crime is natural and inevitable under capitalism. It cannot be cured. It can be eliminated only by relegating it to history, through a revolution to establish a society of common ownership and free access to wealth in which the acts which are crimes under capitalism will not happen because there will be no reason for them. That revolution will come about through political awareness, but Stallone's eager fans are not famous for that.
Unsigned.
ReplyDelete