Letter: Criminal classes (1976)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Criminal classes

The Socialist Party persistently state in their vintage way that there are only two classes in society. I beg to differ. My list of classes would include criminals who were once members of the working class, and the self-employed. Your figures of two classes is petty.

R. West

London W.10

Reply:

Your contention about criminals might be answered by looking at court reports in the newspapers. Do the accused give their occupations as “burglar”, “smash-and-grab raider” or “bag snatcher”? Of course not. They describe themselves as salesmen, labourers, drivers, factory workers, unemployed etc. — in short, as members of the working class.

The definition of a worker is one who has no ownership of the means of living and is therefore forced to sell his labour-power, his only possession, in order to live. There are always numbers trying to escape this life-sentence or to solve the perpetual working-class problem of insufficient money, by crime. Hardly any live by it; it is a sporadic activity, and for the rest of the time the individual is faced with having to find a job because that is his class position.

By “self-employed” presumably you mean small shopkeepers and other one-man businesses. Again, consider definitions. A capitalist, because of his ownership of the means of production, employs people and appropriates the surplus value created by them to turn it into interest and profit. A person using no other labour-power than his own is not in this position. If he is a shopkeeper his profit is from trading, i.e. it is a small portion of what is realized from the surplus value created in manufacture. Generally his position is no different from what it would be if he were an employee, nor is his income. As an example, some “landlords” of public-houses are managers employed by breweries and others are tenants and allegedly “their own masters”; in practice the difference is purely one of business administration and the “landlord” is a member of the working class — as are these self-employed individuals as a whole.

Editors.