Property and Crime. (1905)

From the April 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Nearly our whole criminal code is made up of what may be called property crimes. The jails and penitentiaries of the world are filled to overflowing with men and women who have been charged with committing crimes against property. But where is the property that has been the subject of these dire assaults ? No matter where you turn your eyes in the world, the whole property is in the hands of a chosen few, and the so-called owners of all this wealth—created by the labour of man and the bounty of nature—these so-called owners have committed no crime against property. The statement of the fact is sufficient to show the inequality of the whole system under which the fruits of the earth are kept in the possession of the few.

As a consequence of his desire for life and the means that make it certain and pleasant, man has ever turned his attention to the conquest of nature, reducing vegetable and animal life to his control. But his conquest does not end here. Ever has man enslaved his fellow : he has sought to make his own career upon earth pleasanter and more certain by compelling others to toil for him. In its more primitive stages slavery was enforced by the ownership of the man. In its later and more refined stages it is carried on by the ownership of the things from which man must live. The rulers no longer have the right to buy and sell the man, to send him here and there to suit their will. They simply have the power to dictate the terms upon which he can stand upon the earth. With the mines, the forests, the oil, the harbors, the railroads, and the really valuable productive land in the rulers’ hands, the dominance and power of man over his fellows is absolute and complete.

The rulers make penal codes for the regulation and control of the earth and all the property thereon. Not only do they make these rules for their brief, haughty lives, but they provide that it may pass from hand to hand for ever. The generations now living, or rather those that are dead and gone, fixed the status of unborn millions, and decreed that they shall have no place to live except upon such term as may be dictated by those who then controlled the earth. To retain all the means of life in the hands of the few and compel the many to do service to support these few requires the machinery of the state. It is for this that penal laws are made.

The criminal statutes forbid extortion and swindling, and yet the largest part of business is extortion, and much of the balance is swindling. Real extortion is taking for any service more than it is fairly worth by means of agencies created by the extorter to despoil his victim and this is the business of the business world. . . The law forbids swindling, at least in certain ways, and yet a large part of business consists in making the public believe that they are getting more value for what they give than the tradesman can possibly afford. . . . All our merchants and tradesmen frantically call out their lies in every form, that they may sell their wares for a larger price than they are really worth. And yet to all of this the criminal code has no word to say. The man who can buy the space of a great paper to tell the wondrous qualities of the wares he has to sell is not the sort of man to come within the meshes of the penal code.

Remove dire poverty, as could easily be done with a tithe of what is now spent on force : let organised society meet the individual, not with force, but with helpfulness and love, and the inducement to commit crime could not exist. Let society be the friend not the tyrant, the brother not the jailor, and the feeling will be repaid a thousandfold".

Clarence S. Darrow in “Resist not Evil”

It’s a bloody crime – or is it? (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

   “The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business” (Clarence Darrow).

The man in front of me in the bus said to his companion “You know, it’s a bloody crime!” He was obviously referring to the front page story in the evening newspaper which he was holding and which I had read earlier.

The story referred to a sick child who needed intensive care. The hospitals locally and elsewhere had been canvassed by medical staff for an intensive care cot but none were available. Last year, given the same level of demand, a cot would have been available but pressure on NHS funding had necessitated cuts in services. The child died, a newshound got a story and the grieving parents were left to wonder why.

But the man in front of me on the bus was wrong; it was not a crime. In fact he was using the term ‘crime’, as many do, as a designation for something that is obviously wrong or bad or evil and these qualities are not necessarily the considerations that determine what is and what is not a crime.

Crime is a transgression of the laws governing particular societies; specifically rules usually endorsed by a ruling executive that, in a political democracy, has been elected by the people or, in a dictatorship, has amassed sufficient coercive power to impose its authority upon the people.

Laws or rules of behaviour

It need hardly be said that whatever the form of society some form of behavioural rules or mores are necessary; equally, of course, the form of society we live in creates the conditions that determine the need for specific rules. Society is continually evolving and it is this evolution that continually creates the need for ruling executives amending existing laws and passing new laws to meet the exigencies created by new situations like, for example, the social implications of technological advances in automotive transport.

Much of this form of legislation should be straightforward, at least in motive; if people driving cars did not abide by defined regulations road accidents would increase incalculably. If anyone was allowed to pilot an aircraft there would be frequent air disasters. Unfortunately, in our present society, interests outside the province of safety can impact on the lawmakers. The vast wealth of vehicle manufacturers, petroleum refiners, civil engineering contractors, et al, can be used, and is used, to ensure that as far as possible their specific interests are not adversely affected and such interests are rarely in the general interest. It would be difficult to think of any new regulation, even one patently beneficial to the general good, like restrictions on passive smoking, that will not find opposition from some commercial interest.

Arising from property

The overwhelming body of laws in all countries today are not primarily concerned with public health, public safety or public well-being. They are concerned with property in all its forms; with the endorsement, protection and conveyance of possessions. In fact, the greatest volume of law, the millions of pages of legislation, the myriad volumes of case law, is based on relationships arising from the existence of property.

The whole legal circuses, clown-attired judges, wigged councillors, solicitors, the solemn decorum of the courts, the years of legal study and practice behind the imposing façade of erudition, these are not necessarily concerned with acts that are in themselves bad or injurious to people nor are they faithful to some abstract principles of good and evil. The entire fabric of what is absurdly known in the United Kingdom as ‘the Queen’s justice’ or elsewhere as State Justice is solidly founded on the appalling injustice of property society; specifically today, the Laws of capitalism and the Order necessary to allow for the smooth functioning of those Laws.

The French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, affirmed that ’Property is theft!’ He was, like the man on the bus, wrong. The act of theft is a crime but the possession of property rather than being a crime is lauded by the major religions and is the very foundation of capitalist civilisation.

The cornerstone of freedom

Inevitably, in a property society people will aspire to ownership and those who claim that the right to property is the cornerstone of freedom often cite this aspiration as proof that capitalism conforms with the natural order of things. But the capitalists and their political defenders are not promoting some unworkable concept of equality within a property society nor are they referring to the right of every citizen to a home and such personal appurtenances as reflect the material needs of everyone in the pursuit of a full and happy life.

What the capitalists and the political advocates of capitalism effectively promote is the legal right of a minority class of people to own and/or control the machinery of production and distribution; the land, the factories, mills, mines, warehouses; in fact the resources of nature and the machinery and tools used by the working class to produce all the vital goods and services needed to sustain the whole of society.

It is the Law that enforces the right of a minority to use its ownership to take possession of all the goods and services produced by those who labour by hand or brain in exchange for a wage or salary that restricts the overwhelming majority of workers to conditions of relative poverty or dire want. It is in fact capitalism’s law that confers on the working class the apt designation of wage slaves.

But the effects of this much-vaunted ‘cornerstone of freedom’ do not end there. Ownership of the means of production and distribution also gives the capitalist class the right to embargo any productive activity that does not hold out for the owning class the promise of profit. Additionally, in today’s world, technology has facilitated the mobility of capital thus gifting to the capitalists the ability to locate wherever the rate of profit is most beneficial to them irrespective of the hardships they impose by unemployment on the workers whose labour is already enshrined in the fortunes of the capitalists.

Additionally, this mobility has given capital an effective weapon in enfeebling trade unions and resisting wage claims with the threat of re-locating plant where the slaves are paid less.

Majestic equality

Behind capitalism’s legal system is its vast array of coercion; ultimately the armed forces of the state but more usually police forces, judges, magistrates, lawyers and jailers. We hear about their work through the media; overladen, they toil diligently as a vast conveyor belt of capitalist justice, keeping vandals and villains and thieves and robbers off the streets; stuffing the jails to overcapacity. Essentially virtuous in their majestic equality.

The French writer, Anatole France, perhaps better than most exposes the vacuity of capitalism’s legal charade when he said:

  “The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the streets, sleep in the parks or to steal bread”.

Reality means that we live in conditions determined by capitalism and it is those conditions that almost without exception create the circumstances in which all forms of crime occur. In the past the power of the cop and the judge, unquestioning instruments of class justice, were reinforced by the fictions of religion and the Ten Commandments.

In today’s world the sins of the gods, like the legal misdeeds of the rich are increasingly evident. None would challenge the observation of the eminent American civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow – he of the famous ’Monkey’ trial – that “the law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business”.

The Order that capitalism needs to underpin its Law is showing evident signs of breakdown. The hired hands that the system needs in the political system and the pensioned media to maintain its rotten values scream for ever more laws, ever greater penalties, against the evidence that crime is a reflection of capitalism and will remain as long as that system does.

Richard Montague

About Books (1953)

Book Reviews from the December 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

John Peter Altgeld and Clarence Darrow had much in common. Their lives overlapped and during the latter part of Altgeld’s life and the earlier part of Darrow’s they were close friends.

Both were lawyers, both were humanitarians. Each wrote books on crime and each defended the early American Trade Unions in the law courts of his day. Each gravitated to an extreme radical outlook during his life, “going over to the left” as it would be called in modern parlance. Each one sacrificed lucrative jobs through his strict adherence to his humanitarian principles, but neither of them scratched below the surface to find the causes of the social problems that stimulated their sympathies. Neither of them came anywhere near to being socialist.

The life of each of these two famous Americans is interestingly portrayed in books by Howard Fast and Irving Stone. In his book, “The American,” Mr. Fast gives us a very readable story of the life of John Altgeld from the days when his German farmer father used to stripe him across the buttocks with a leather belt, to the day when he was laid in his coffin for hundreds of thousands of Americans to file past in homage in the pouring rain.

When a boy, Altgeld ran away from his poverty stricken home and joined the army of the northern American states to fight in the civil war. Later he became a school teacher, a barrister, a judge and governor of the state of Illinois.

In the early days of his legal career, Altgeld wrote a book entided, “Our Penal Machinery and its Victims,” which drew down on his head the opprobrium of the American ruling class. In this book he showed that the major portion of crime could be traced to the poverty, slums and lack of opportunity which result from the unequal distribution of wealth in a class society. This book was published in 1884, fifteen years before that internationally famous criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, arrived at the same point of view as Altgeld.

In the days when men like Phil Armour, George Pullman and John D. Rockefeller were piling up their vast fortunes out of the sweat and misery of the American working class, and men like Eugene V. Debs were risking their lives to try to organise the American workers to resist the intense exploitation—in those days Altgeld was driven to the support of “Labour.”

When he became governor of Illinois, Altgeld found himself in the embarrassing position that is experienced by all who seek to help the workers by undertaking to manipulate capitalism. The American newspapers vilified him in column and cartoon, presenting him to the people of America as a bloodthirsty ogre trampling on their rights and liberties. President Grover Cleveland moved federal troops into Illinois during the strike of the workers of the Pullman Company. Altgeld was powerless.

He tried to get his nominee elected as president of U.S.A. but failed. He tried to organise an independent political party, a sort of “Labour” party, but failed again.

Apart from all other merits, Mr. Fast's book is to be recommended for its detailed account of the Haymarket bombing incident of 1886 for which eight prominent working class leaders were “framed,” four of them executed and others imprisoned. This affair had international repercussions. Also, Mr. Fast presents us with an insight into the working of the American political elections, a most illummating insight.

“Darrow for the Defence,” the book by Irving Stone, picks up the threads of American history at a date just a few years prior to the death of Altgeld. In it Darrow is presented as a man who would take on any task to help the “under dog” at no matter what cost to himself.

From the day that Clarence Darrow walked out of his job as attorney for the Chicago and North Western Railway to fight for Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union against whom the railway company had obtained an injunction, he became accepted as the man to represent trade unions and other workers' organisations when they were in trouble with the law.

It was a tough job in those days. Murder was committed and trade union officials were charged with the crime; an explosion occurred and a union organiser would be accused; men were bludgeoned into defending themselves and then accused of attacking; a union man was fair game to hang any crime on to and the American press worked up mob hysteria against the accused. Darrow defended brilliantly and with more than frequent success.

He argued that man had not a free will; that a man's actions were the product of his biological makeup worked upon by his social environment This was the basis of all his arguments whether he was defending a murderer, a thief, a prostitute or union officer. In fact, he did not defend his clients so much as he attacked their prosecutors.

His particular bête-noire was capital punishment against which he lectured, wrote and campaigned for many years. He also spent much time and money opposing prohibition and the colour bar. Probably his most sensational case was the Scopes Evolution Case at Dayton when he defended the right to teach evolutionary theories in public schools against William Jennings Bryan and his Fundamentalists who were moving to get an Anti-Evolution Law passed in each of the American states.

During his last years Darrow cast a friendly eye at “Russian Communism” whilst talking about a fair capitalism in America. He pleaded the case of the small business man. He died in 1938 at the age of eighty and, as when Altgeld died, thousands queued in the rain to do homage at his coffin.

These two men, Altgeld and Darrow, were admirable, but neither of them has left a mark on the History of the class from which they sprang and with which they sympathised. They spent their lives rescuing individuals from the morass of capitalist crime and class antagonisms, but left the bog undrained and uncharted for others to wander into. They fought against injustice by taking separate “injustices” and striving to straighten them out—make them just. The cause of all the injustices, the class nature of capitalist society, escaped their attention. The problems they sought to solve were being bred faster than they could eliminate them.. We may salute them for their endeavours but we cannot compliment them for their achievements.

W. Waters

Science v Religion (1960)

Theatre Review from the June 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July, 1925, at the town of Dayton, Tennessee, a school-teacher was charged under a State law with teaching the Darwinian theory of the origin of man instead of the story in Genesis, as the law demanded.

The case was defended by the great liberal lawyer Clarence Seward Darrow, who was famous for defending many workers in cases that had arisen through their Trade Union struggles; a man who was by many derisively regarded as the friend of criminals, because he considered that society was to blame for their actions, being responsible for not only making men into criminals but also for defining at any time what was criminal and what was not, according to its own interests and prejudices.

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee have taken the case of the Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes, and made it the basis of their play Inherit the Wind, which had a regrettably short run at the St, Martins Theatre. The play is not an actual report of the trial and the authors have changes the names of the participants, so that what we have are the essentials of the case and its conflict. This conflict is between the cant and superstition of unsophisticated religion and the enlightenment of “atheistic” science and is played  against the background of the American Middle West with its particular pioneer traditions of suspicion, intolerance and isolation, which looked upon science not only as an encroachment on its religion and a device of the Devil, but as a threat to its way of life. 

The Legislature of the State of Tennessee had laid down that it was unlawful for any public teacher “to teach the theory which denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower form of animals.”* It is also of interest to note that similarly, the State Legislature of Florida had declared it “improper and subversive of the best interests of the state for any public teacher to teach as true Darwinian or any other hypothesis that links man in blood relationship to any other form of life."*

It was against thinking of this kind and every obstacle that could be put in his way, including the refusal to allow the testimony of eminent biologists, and the prosecution’s able lawyer, William Jennings Bryan, that Darrow had to fight in his defence of John Scopes. Bryan was a man who held “firmly with childlike faith to a literal interpretation of the Bible,” who was “hostile to the teachings of biological science which he had never had the inclination to study.”* 

Darrow was moved by his abiding interest in science and his deep commitment to freedom of thought to volunteer to defend Scopes. He was in fact “of an astonishing variety of intellectual and social currents: skepticism in philosophy and religion, determinism in psychology, evolution in science, realism in literature, a farrago of socialism and anarchism in politics.”*

The outcome of the trial was a farcical compromise to save the face of the community, forced by Darrow's brilliant defence and the weight of American public opinion. The teacher John Scopes was simply fined a nominal sum.

So far as Bryan was concerned, says the American Dictionary of National Biography, “the trial only revealed the naivete of his religious faith and his want of familiarity with the trend of biological science." Already an old man, the strain of the trial brought him to his death five days later.

Inherit the Wind conveys with a fair degree of authenticity the setting and atmosphere the trial, though the ending of the play is spoilt by anti-climax. The authors have conceded a point to the prevailing public morality, giving the impression that it is not religion itself that is questionable but merely fundamentalist religion; which is false not only to Darrow and to science, but to the spirit of the play also. Nevertheless, the play is not only good theatre, but a refreshing reminder of the gradual retreat of religion (and other fetishes), which makes our Socialist task that much easier.

Ian Jones

* American Dictionary of National Biography.