Our working class communities are all too often torn apart by anti-social crime. William Z. Foster once said that "capitalism, by its very nature, is a prolific breeder of crime." And Gus Hall, the former leader of the Communist Party USA, said that "Street crime--assaults on the property and persons of working and poor people--is a serious crime...
"Crime cannot be excused or justified. However, most street crime has its roots in poverty, hunger, frustration, anger and generations of unemployment...
"While deploring crime in the streets, we have to point the finger at the source of most big city crime--the big landlords and bankers (and) runaway corporations." Gus Hall also said that cuts in social and economic programs goes hand in hand with street crime. "Jobs, education, recreation and cultural centers are the only realistic, effective crime fighters." (Gus Hall, Fighting Racism, 1985, International Publishers)
We must also have an anti-racist approach to abolishing crime. American capitalism's criminal injustice system, with it's prison warehouses for the working class, is permeated by racism. Almost one million African-Americans are behind bars. In the U.S, black people comprise 13% of the population, but constitute half of the country’s prisoners. A tenth of all black men between 20 and 35 are in jail or prison; black workers are incarcerated at over eight times the white rate. We must, to use Henry Winston's words, "challenge the inhuman, racist character of the prison (and policing) system." (Henry Winston, Strategy for a Black Agenda, 1973, International Publishers)
William Z. Foster, a Marxist-Leninist former leader of the Communist Party USA, rightly said that:
"Capitalism, by its very nature, is a prolific breeder of crime. It is a system of legalized robbery of the working class. The whole process of capitalist business is a swindle and an armed hold-up. In capitalist society what constitutes crime and what does not is a purely arbitrary distinction. The capitalists do not recognize any line of demarcation for themselves. They do whatever they can 'get away with.' The record of every large fortune and big corporation in this country is smeared with brutal robbery of the workers...
"In a society where each grabs what he can at the expense of the rest, naturally the government offers a wide field of corruption...Such corruption is not a special condition, but of the very tissue of capitalism.
"It is not surprising that in a society where the aim is to get rich by any means, crime of every kind should flourish. Faced by low wages and other impossible economic conditions on the one hand and by the corrupt example of capitalism generally on the other, many naturally take the lives of open crime and try to seize at the point of the gun what the capitalist 'big shots' steal through exploiting the workers, by a corner on the stock exchange, or by corrupting the government. The main difference between their operations is primarily one of dimension. Al Capone is an altogether legitimate child of American capitalism, and it it no accident that he is an object of such widespread admiration...
"Socialism, by putting an end to capitalist exploitation, deals a mortal blow at crime of every description. The economic base of crime is destroyed. The worker is enabled to live and work under the best possible conditions. There is no place for human sharks to prey upon their fellow men. Not only does the abolition of capitalism destroy the basis of the so-called crimes against property, but the revolutionized economic and social conditions, involving an intelligent moral code and effective educational system, also greatly diminishes the 'crimes of passion'...
"Capitalism blames crime upon the individual, instead of upon the bad social conditions which produce it. Hence its treatment of crime is essentially one of punishment." And "capitalist prisons are actually schools of crime...
"Socialist criminology, on the other hand, attacks the bad social conditions. While the American (socialist) government will ruthlessly break up up the...gangs that brazenly infest all American cities and will also give short shrift to grafting politicians, its prison system will be essentially educational in character." (William Z. Foster, Towards Soviet America, 1932, International Publishers)
