On One-Dimensional Marxist Criminology

Author(s): David F. Greenberg

Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter, 1976), pp. 611-621
Published by: Springer
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 611

ON ONE-DIMENSIONAL MARXIST CRIMINOLOGY

DAVID F. GREENBERG

Werkentin, Hofferbert and Bauermann (WHB) have recently presented a

Marxistcritique of what they call "bourgeoiscriminology,"and sketch the
lines along which they believe a Marxist criminology ought to develop.'
Although a substantialpart of their discussionis directedto elements in West
Germancriminologicalthought which Americancriminologistshave for the
most part long abandoned,the WHBpaperrepresentstwo importantintellec-
tual achievementsin radicalcriminology.

Radical criminologists have argued that criminology's traditional focus on

explaining the causes of criminal behavior is inherently conservative and
mainly servesthe state's interest in repression.2WHBsee a good deal of lower
class crime as an alternativeto revolutionaryactivity. The scientific explana-
tion of criminal behavior is then of potential value to radicals as it may
suggest ways to redirect the energiesnow invested in individualisticcriminal
violations toward a more organized, consciously political challenge to the
dominant institutions of a capitalist society. This position allows one to seek
the elimination of some common forms of lower class crimewithout embrac-
ing liberalmeliorismor conservativerepression,and acknowledgesthat fear of
crime need not be a manifestationof racism. In emphasizingthe importance
of class consciousnessfor an understandingof the relationshipbetween social
structure and proletarian behavior (ordinary versus politically conscious
crime),WHBavoid the mechanicalcausalexplanationsof traditionalpositivist
criminologywhile at the same time transcendingthe radicalquietismof David
Matza's"appreciativestance" toward deviance or the "unconventionalsenti-
mentality" which Becker ascribes to much of the recent humanistically
oriented researchon crime and deviance.3

WHBalso depart from recent Americanradicalcriminologyin their sociology

of criminallaw. Wheretraditionalperspectivesemphasizethe law as a reflec-
tion of normative consensus and harmonizerof interests, radicalcriminolo-

Sociology Department, New York University

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 612

gists have seen dissensus and conflict of interests, and depict law, in its
formulation, enactment and enforcement as a reflection of the interests of
the powerful and a tool in the maintenance of existing social relations,
especiallyclass relations.4

While the radicalformulationhas yielded valuableinsights into the place of

law in capitalist societies, it has limitations. Evidence for the existence of
substantialconsensus about major crime categories5has been ignored, along
with any awarenessthat membersof the working class might want to avoid
being victimized by members of their own class. In addition, the conflict
perspectivehas inadequatelyconceptualizedpower and its sources.Powerful
groupsare generallyportrayedas operatingvirtuallywithout constraint,never
as being forced to make concessions to challenginggroupsor as being forced
to act contraryto short-runinterestsso as to maintainlegitimacyby respond-
ing to the expectations of a public. The role of law in regulatingconflicts
among membersof the propertiedclasseshas been ignoredjust as completely
as the problem of crime within the working class. The structuralistapproach
to the sociology of criminallaw WHB adopt (described more fully below)
opens the door to a better understandingof laws that cannot be explainedas
expressionsof the interestsof a class or groupin conflict with other classesor
groups.

Despite these contributions, there are deficiencies in WHB's approach to

criminology; in view of the growing interest in Marxist perspectives on
crime,' it seems worthwhileto spell out some of them.

In addition to criticizingsuch old theoretical perspectivesin criminologyas

1ª crítica
Lombrosianbiogeneticismand Durkheimianfunctionalism,WHBattack more
a HWB
recent developmentssuch as labeling theory, as well. These criticisms,which
originatepartly in a misinterpretationof the sources criticizedand in part in
WHB'ssomewhatcrudestructuralistMarxism,are in largemeasureunmerited.

WHB criticize the "assumption"that crime is a universalfeature of human

society, varying only in kind and amount (pp. 29-29), characterizingthis
position as a politically motivated attack on the old socialist position that
crime is a consequenceof capitalismand can be eliminatedby its overthrow.7
To be sure, the functionalistargumentsfor the universalityof crimeWHBcite
are theoretically weak. But it does not follow from this weakness that the
conclusion is mistaken. It is far more plausible to assume that crime will be
present in any populous and socially differentiatedsociety-the amount and
nature of crime dependingon the social structure--thanto assumethe oppo-
site, for it would requiretechnologicalmechanismsof social control exceed-

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 613

ing the worst Orwellian nightmares (even in 1948 there was crime) to
eliminate all motivations to criminalactivity and all opportunitiesto act on
those motivations.8

While WHB characterizethe position that crime is a universalfeature of all

advanced,industrialsocieties as a political attack on socialism,it might better
be seen as an intellectual attack on a certain kind of naive utopianism to
which socialists occasionally succumb-unnecessarily: for surely there are
stronger argumentsfor socialism than its ability to prevent each and every
crime or eliminate altogether every social ill. In any event, to hold that crime
will never fully disappearneed not by any stretch of imaginationdiscourage
attempts to reduce the incidence of crime by eliminatingits social causes as
WHBsuggest, for it clearly makes a great difference whether there is a small
or large amount of crime, and whether it takes one form or another.
Socialism can surely be expected to eliminate a lot of crime. Isn't that
enough?

WHB's attack on labeling theorists is unnecessarilysharp and largely mis-

placed. In emphasizingthat the categorizationof a given form of behavioras
crime or deviance is a product of social activity and does not necessarily
reflect an inherent quality of the behavior independent of its social context,
labeling theorists supplied a necessary correctiveto earliersocial pathologists
who at times failed to note that their own conceptions of pathology were not
alwayssharedby the populationsunderstudy, and who tended to ignoresuch
matters as the processes by which collective definitions were or were not
embodied in law and the influence of organizational structures on the
processing of cases. In this connection, labeling theorists drew attention to
the neglected issue of power in the study of law creation and enforcement.
There was a time not so long ago when these matters could not have been
taken for granted.

Few if any labelingtheoristswould, as WHBimply, maintainthat the creation

of criminal categories is in general unrelated to the consequences of the
behavior so classified, or that criminals are nothing more than innocent
victims randomly selected by whim of the labeler without regardto their
conduct. Indeed, Beckerindicatesexplicitly:

In short, whether a given act is deviant or not depends in part on the

nature of the act (that is, whether or not it violates some rule) and in part
on what other people do about it.9

The key point is that there is no one-to-one correspondencebetween act and

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614

social reaction; reactions vary depending on many contingencies within a

society, and also between societies.

Whilea good deal of the researchinspiredby the labelingperspectivehas been

ahistorical,focussing on interpersonaland organizationalprocesses (such as
police andjudicial discretionin the handlingof suspects),with little attention
paid to largerstructuraldeterminantsshapingthese processes,there is certain-
ly no inherent incompatibilitybetween a labeling perspectiveand the devel-
opment of a historically grounded analysis relatingfeatures of criminallaw
and process to structural features of the economy or society. Quite the
contrary: the labeling perspectiveinvites just such analysis, and some of the
historicalstudies of such matters, though not alwayscarriedout by "labeling
theorists,"can properlybe classifiedas labelingstudies.10

In writingthat "violationsagainstthe conditions of productionand reproduc-

tion of a particular society establish the characterof certain actions and
necessitate the reaction of the sanctioningpowers of the State" (p. 36), WHB
suggest the lines along which they believe a historical theory of labeling
should be formulated-a Marxistvariety of structuralfunctionalism which
may explain legislation prohibitingsome forms of property acquisition,but
which would be highly misleadingfor other forms of criminalactivity.

Here are some of the questions WHB'sposition raises: is it true always that
the State's reaction is necessary to the maintenance of production and
reproduction?Mightthe State or those on whose behalf it acts not sometimes
be mistaken, thinking a reaction necessary when it isn't? Or, on the other
hand, might it not fail to recognizethe necessity of some rmeasure
and so fail
to react?Wheresteps are taken, what determineswhetherlegislationis civil cr
criminal,and the level of penalties? Are these always determinedby "nercis-
sity?" How would that be demonstrated? Don't Wi-lBassume a level of
governmentomniscience that even Marxistsocial scientists equippedwith the
tools of "scientificsocialism"have yet to attain?

WHB'streatment of laws dealing with behavior that does not threaten the
"conditions of production and reproduction"in society is especially reveal-
ing. Laws involving homosexuality and abortion are called anachronistic
(p. 38), implying that at one time such laws were necessary but are so no
longer. Elsewhereabortionlaws are characterizedas continuingto criminalize
actions that are "no longer problems because of changed social conditions"
(p. 35-36, emphasis added). But when was abortion ever a problem, and to
whom? And what was tilc nature of the problem? The answer is far from
obvious.l 1

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 615

Questions of this kind cannot be answered without looking at historically

situated actors, and their perceptions of what did and did not constitute a
problem. A mode of analysis that eschews such investigationsand looks only
at what an economic system (in the view of the theorist) "requires"is likely
to produce little more than science fiction, usually of a fairly unimaginative
variety. As generally happens in functionalist theory, the theorist discovers
retrospectivelythat thingshappenedexactly the way the system needed them
to happen, but with little understandingof how these results were accom-
plished. Longlive Pangloss!

WHB make clear that their theoretical strategy entails the denial of an
independentsubjective dimension to social relationships.They don't need to
ask to whom abortion was a problem because for them problems do not
happen to people, but to systems or to disembodied"relationships."Their
discussion of environmentalpollution, a criticism of the dictum that social
reality is constituted throughsocial defilnitions,actually shows the limitations
of such an exclusion of subjectivity. Air pollution was far worse in major
Americancities half a century ago than it is at present; I suspect the same is
true of food contamination.Yet it is largelyin recent years that pollution has
become a major social issue. This suggests that the mobilization of public
opinion which creates a social problemmay dependless on the physicalstate
of the atmospherethan on the extent to which other circumstances,such as
increasedanxiety about the effects of more and more complicatedtechnolo-
gy, increasedliteracy, higher expectations of health, and the ameliorationof
other problems,have evoked a public movement concernedwith the state of
the environment.While the biological impact of pollution may be indepen-
dent of our awareness,the social impact clearly depends on the way human
actors define the situation, and this takes place in consciousness.

While sociologists need hardly concern themselveswith the idealist position

that in general "social problems" exist only in the mind with no basis in
physical or social reality (and which thereforecan be eliminatedby changing
people's ideas), the mechanical correspondencebetween consciousness and
reality implicit in WHB'swork is equally faulty: it would leave mysterious-
and in fact would not even providea frameworkfor askingwhy-long existing
social arrangementsor phenomena (slavery,12 female inequality, juvenile
misbehavior, prostitution, pornography, poverty, etc.) come to be seen as
social problems requiringsolutions at particularpoints in time. WHB'sper-
spective has no room for mistaken definitions of situations or alternative
definitions of problems and thus appears to be incapable of discussingthe
anti-Communistlegislation of the McCarthyperiod, the anti-witchcrafthys-
teria several centuries in the past, the anti-Jewishpersecution in Nazi Ger-

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616

many, the massive purges in Stalinist U.S.S.R., or legislation about which

there exists considerabledissensus,e.g. marijuana,gambling,abortion,homo-
sexuality, pornography,alcoholic beverages-and which has at times been the
battlegroundfor sharppolitical conflict between groups with different inter-
pretations of reality. Such conflicts do not even appearin WHB'sformula-
tion.

That labeling theorists have at times exaggeratedthe importanceof conflict-

ing values and definitions of behaviorby concentratingso heavily on victim-
less crime legislation can be understood in terms of the social context in
which the perspective emerged: American college campuses of the 1960s.
This was a period of comparativeworkingclass quiescence,with the flourish-
ing among college students and young faculty of subculturescenteredon the
use of marijuana,freer sexual expression, and political opposition. Those
norms being challenged by persons with whom sociologists could identify
were the ones most closely subjectedto scrutiny.13

WHB'sdiscussion of theft helps to correct this imbalanceby pointing to areas

where economic constraintssharplylimit the autonomy of law. This is true
not only in bourgeoissociety: for many common forms of theft, the violation
would disrupt not only bourgeois property relations, but rules that almost
any advanced economic system would want to maintain."4A one-sided
emphasis on areas of legislation where the law is so highly constrained,
however, would be just as misleadingas the opposite emphasis.In other areas
of legislation, the determinationappearsmuch less rigid, less directly con-
strained by economic relations. Correspondingly,alternativedefinitions of
reality and conflicts among opposing groups become more important for
understandingcriminal legislation and enforcement. WHB fail to see this
because they perceive society in generalas being far more highly integrated
than it is. It would be theoretically preferableto leaVeopen to investigation
the extent to which differentkinds of legislationare constrainedby economic
structures than to postulate ab initio a very high or very low degree of
determination.This extent is itself historicallyvariable.

Such a stance need not deny the importance of structural features of a

society and the way these change for an understandingof the enactmentand
application of law: where there are alternativedefinitions of reality and/or
groups in conflict, the participants are respondingto particularstructural
features of the society. But it must be kept in mind that this is so in ways
that can be far more complicatedthan a direct responseto a "problem"or to
economicallydysfunctioi.alactivity.

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 617

Some recent work in the sociology of law is relevantto this point. Suzanne
Embree,for example,has shown15that the legislationinitially prohibitingthe
importation of opium into the United States did not grow out of anyone's
concern about the problems opium-smokingwas creating;it had to do with
America'simperialexpansioninto the Pacificat the turn of the century when
the United States was seeking an international opium treaty as a way of
preventing Great Britainfrom earningforeign exchange to offset its balance
of payments deficit by sellingIndianopium to China.Embreehas also shown
that the contents of the act were influenced by the medicalprofessionin its
attempt to secure monopolistic jurisdiction over the use of heroin in medical
practice-part of a larger attempt on the part of doctors to influence the
divisionof labor in medicalcare.

John Helmerand Thomas Vietoricz have recently presented evidence16that

massive drives to enforce narcotics legislation have occurred,not in response
to drug use itself, but duringperiods of economic recessionwhen employers
sought to divide different segments of the working class by campaigning
against drugs used predominantly by working class members of particular
racial or national minorities (the Chinese in the case of opium, Mexican-
Americansin the case of marijuanain the 1930s, blacks in the case of heroin
in the 1950s). Gusfield'searlierwork on the temperancemovement17,though
it pays little attention to urbanProgressivereformers,portraysthe emergence
and development of a major section of the movement as a response to the
status problems createdfor a certainsegment of the populationby changesin
the structureof the U.S. economy.

In all these instances, structuralfeatures of the economic orderare shown to

be relevantto an understandingof the law, but in more subtle, complex ways
than WHB'spaper allows. For WHB,presumably,the temperancemovement
could only have involved a "recognition" of the problems created by con-
sumption of alcoholic beverages,problems which mysteriouslydisappeareda
decade later, allowing the then anachronisticlegislation to be repealed. By
loosening the functional relationshipbetween law and economy a bit, one
createsthe possibility of developinga materialistapproachto the sociology of
law than transcendsmechanicaleconomic determinism,and which, in particu-
lar, does not try to explain every element of legislation in terms of its
functional necessity for the economy. Wherethe relationshipbetween struc-
ture and consciousness is one of only partial determination, and where
conflicting groups contend, the final outcome can be influenced by many
contingencieswhich cannot be predictedfrom the grossstructuralfeaturesor
processesalone.18

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NOTES
1. Falco Werkentin, Michael Hofferbert and Michael Bauermann, "Kriminologie als
Polizeiwissenschaft oder: Wie alt is die neue Kriminologie?" in Kritische Justiz 3,
translated as "Criminology as Police Science or: How Old is the New Criminology?"
in Crime and Social Justice: A Journal of Radical Criminology 2, (Fall-Winter
1974). Quotations and page references are to the English translation.
2. Richard Quinney, Critique of Legal Order: Crime Control in Capitalist Society
(Boston, 1974), pp. 26-32; Clayton A. Hartjen, Crime and Criminalization (New
York, 1974), p. 73; Charles E. Reasons, The Criminologist: Crime and the Criminal
(Pacific Palisades, California, 1974), pp. 3-13.
3. David Matza, Becoming Deviant (Englewood Cliffs, 1969), pp. 15-40; Howard
S. Becker, The Other Side: Perspectives on Deviance (New York, 1964), pp. 5-6.
4. Richard Quinney, The Social Reality of Crime (Boston, 1970), pp. 29-97; William
J. Chambliss, Crime and the Legal Process (New York, 1969), p. 10; Richard
Quinney, Criminal Justice in America: A Critical Understanding (Boston, 1974),
pp. 18-21.
5. Peter H. Rossi, Emily Waite, Christine E. Bose, and Richard E. Berk, "The Serious-
ness of Crimes: Normative Structure and Individual Differences," American Socio-
logical Review 39 (1974), pp. 224-237. This concensus is of course not uniform or
absolute. There are areas of disagreement. For references to British studies indicat-
ing class differences in assessment of crime seriousness, see Ian Taylor, Paul Walton
and Jock Young, "Critical Criminology in Britain: Review and Prospects," in Ian
Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, eds., Critical Criminology (London, 1975),
p. 19. As Jock Young has emphasized in his paper "Working Class Criminology," in
the same volume, working class indignation toward crime is not necessarily false
consciousness. The working class would benefit from a reduction in some forms of
working class crime, not only through reduced rates of victimization, but also
through the increased cohesion that would result were the fear of crime-which
divides various strata of the working class-to diminish: it is by interfering with the
development of class solidarity rather than through the mechanisms that Durkheim
suggested, that crime contributes to the stabilization of the society. Nevertheless, it
is also true that a successful government program to reduce crime without changing
relations of power and property would tend to reduce the cost to office-holders of
adopting criminogenic economic policies undertaken, as Raford Boddy and James
Crotty suggest in "Class Conflict and Macro-Policy: The Political Business Cycle,"
Review of Radical Political Economics 7 (1975), pp. 1-19, to discipline the labor
force. In this sense, a successful program to reduce crime without simultaneously
instituting major social change could be seen as stabilizing exi'ting political arrange-
ments. At present this is hardly feasible. As social developments of the last decade
have led to major increases in crime, the fiscal crisis of the state has restricted the
ability of governments to respond effectively to increased crime. In New York, for
example, the current recession is blamed for unusually high increase in property
crime, but large numbers of police are being fired. If, as seems probable, there is a
deterrent effect to punishment, this would lead to further increases in crime. The
Marxian concept of contradiction seems appropriate, but it is not one that holds
any promise of benefit for the working class.
6. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, The New Criminology (London, 1973),
Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, eds., Critical Criminology (London,
1975); Richard Quinney, Critique of Legal Order: Crime Control in Capitalist
Society (Boston, 1974).
7. Although not essential to the argument, this position usually rests on an explicit
identification of criminalitv with the lower economic strata. WHB make this
identification explicit, writing: ". . . a thoroughgoing explanation of the phenomen-

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 619

on of criminality must consider the behavioral aspect as well. This means that the
question must be pursued as to how to determine the concrete causes of behavior
which in the social setting of the proletariat lead either to conscious class struggle
on the one hand, or to conforming behavior or delinquent behavior on the
other . . . Besides these general conditions, it would be necessary to characterize the
specific circumstances which lead to the development of criminal behavior patterns
within the proletariat" (p. 27, emphasis in original). Apparently the authors have
never heard of middle class delinquency, or corporate and government crime. The
omission of these categories is an odd oversight for Marxists. Nor do WHB note that
the "bourgeois" criminologists on whom they vent sarcasm, contempt and ridicule
have been concerned to a great extent with precisely what WHB here describe as
necessary, that is, specifying the specific circumstances which lead to the develop-
ment of criminal behavior patterns within the proletariat, or more specifically,
among its children, since participation in most forms of common crime is largely a
youthful phenomenon. In a forthcoming paper on delinquency I suggest that it may
be more accurate to trace a great deal of theft and related forms of crime to the
exclusion of young working and middle class youths from the labor market, than to
the attempts of producers to recover the surplus value extracted from them in the
workplace, as WHB suggest (p. 27)-though their perspective may well apply to
employee theft. It is true, however, that few mainstream criminologists have been
willing to specify that the causal mechanisms of their theories might be inoperable
in different sorts of societies, thus lending a conservative cast to their findings.
8. In WHB's work the assumption that crime will disappear strikes me as resting on an
excessively social social psychology that is never explicated. In The New Criminolo-
gy and in "Critical Criminology in Britain: Review and Prospects," Taylor, Walton
and Young also hold out for a crimeless future and take as their political goal the
creation of a society that does not criminalize diversity, but advance no arguments
for the possibility or the desirability of this project. In particular, no materialist
analysis of criminalization in non-capitalist society is presented. Instead we receive
a recapitulation of the most utopian part of the Marxian corpus, the doctrine of the
withering away of the state (the secular equivalent of "pie in the sky"). In view of
the persistance of crime in state and market socialist economies, it is plausible to
assume that all societies contain contradictions that will generate disputes involving
behavior that will be perceived as sufficiently threatening and sufficiently repre-
hensible to warrant punitive intervention, and that in modern societies this inter-
vention will at least some of the time take the form of criminalization. Indeed, under
socialism, the expansion of the public sphere into traditionally private realms may
create a strain toward an expanded use of the criminal sanction. As Harold
Pepinsky suggests in "Reliance on Formal Written Law and Freedom and Social
Control in the United States and the People's Republic of China," British Journal
of Sociology 26 ((1975), p. 330, alternative forms of social control may be feasible
under social arrangements quite different from those in the West, but these
alternatives may entail costs that a libertarian would be reluctant to pay. By
comparison with alternative mechanisms of social control the criminal process
carries with it some advantages: open recognition of the adversarial nature of
conflicts and protection of the interests of all parties through procedural and
substantive due process. Under capitalism, the large case load in the courts func-
tions to deny de facto these rights to most defendants, but under socialism their
promise could be realized. The great danger is that the search for alternatives will
lead to coercive intervention that justifies the denial of these protections with the
mystifying claim that the abolition of classes has abolished all conflicts of interest.
9. Becker, op.cit., p. 14.
10. There are defects and limitations in the writings of many labelling theorists that
should, however, be noted. A number of empirical studies of secondary deviance

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620

have made clear that many of the principal labeling theorists grossly exaggerated
the deviance-producing effects of formal intervention; see, for example, Walter
Gove, ed., The Labelling of Deviance: Evaluating a Perspective (New York, 1975).
At the same time, social structural sources of primary deviation were systematically
overlooked. The pluralist political stance of labeling theorists has recently been
criticized by Dean Manders, "Labelling Theory and Social Reality: A Marxist
Critique," The Insurgent Sociologist 6 (1975), pp. 53-66. The criticism is well-
founded but not very devastating. There are many forms of deviance that do not
threaten upper class interests; the interests threatened may be those of other classes
or social groups, in which case the ruling class may have little interest in the
prohibition one way or another. When that is so, non-ruling class groupings may be
decisive. For example, the recent unsuccessful campaign to achieve the passage of a
civil rights bill for homosexuals in New York City saw a coalition of gay activist
groups and miscellaneous libertarian supporters pitted against an alliance of the
Catholic Church, the Orthodox Jewish rabbinate, and the city firemen's union-
none of these representing the ruling class. Other forms of deviance threaten units
that are found among all classes (e.g. mental illness in the family). The existence of
class relations may well affect such conflicts indirectly, by generating conflicts, by
affecting the resources the antagonists possess, and by setting the terms and limits
within which the conflict is carried out. The orthodox Marxist position that "the
ruling class makes the laws" is so simplistic as to be useless for most purposes.
11. Marxists have tended to explain abortion legislation in terms of the need under
early industrial capitalism for a pool of labor. A similar argument has been applied
to the prohibition of homosexuality. In both cases, the argument is advanced
without supplying evidence that flesh and blood legislators were responding to this
"need." Some research by Cherni Gillman and Tamara Georges, illustrates the
complexity of causal analysis in such matters. When nineteenth century American
reformers scrapped the comparatively liberal stance toward abortion that had
prevailed in colonial times, when abortionists were prosecuted only if the pregnant
woman died, they argued that legislation was needed because surgery was danger-
ous, not that more workers were needed for New England factories. Since other
forms of equally dangerous surgery were not prohibited, their explanation cannot
be taken at face value. Yet if the legislation received support for unstated reasons, it
would be unclear whether legislators were concerned with the labor supply, anxious
about the changing position of women, or influenced by the wave of religious
perfectionism that swept nineteenth century American Protestants into all kinds of
reform movements. An orthodox, schematic Marxism operating with only a few
abstractly defined concepts like class is not likely to be rich enough to contribute
to the disentangling of these kinds of causal chains.
12. Slavery illustrates nicely the relativity of the concept of social problem. To the
slave, slavery is presumably always a problem, to others, only sometimes. To the
slave-owner, on the other hand, it is the escaping or rebelling slave and the
abolitionist who are social problems. The static character of the structural formula-
tion seems particularly unhelpful when there is dispute about the type of social
organization a society ought to have.
13. Other aspects of the writings of 1960s-era labeling theorists also reflect the
atmosphere of the times. The anarchistic political stance implied in the notion that
official intervention is necessarily counterproductive clearly reflects the anti-author-
itarian attitudes of the campus New Left. The systematic neglect of structural
sources of deviant behavior in favor of an emphasis on micro-processes and the
phenomenological analysis of experience likewise can be seen as reflections of the
New Left's voluntarism and disdain for structural analysis of social processes
(including those processes that produced the New Left).

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 621

14. Even here, a caveat is in order. While it may be essential that rules against theft be
observed, it is no mean methodological trick to establish precisely what contribu-
tion if any the existence and enforcement of laws against theft make to the
upholding of those rules. There are alternative sources of compliance. In any event,
what is important for understanding the existence and perpetuation of such laws is
not their deterrent or incapacitative effects, but beliefs concerning these effects.
15. Suzanne Scott Embree. The Politics of Expertise: A Profession and Jurisdiction.
Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, (New York University Sociology Department,
1972).
16. John Helmer and Thomas Vietoricz, Drug Use, The Labor Market, and Class
Conflict. (Washington D.C., 1974).
17. Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temper-
ance Movement (Urbana, 1963).
18. This is consistent with Friedrich Engels, "Letter to Conrad Schmidt" and "Letter
to Joseph Bloch," in Lewis Feuer, ed., Marx and Engels, Basic Writingson Politics
and Philosophy (New York, 1959), pp. 397-407.

Theory and Society 3 (1976) 610-621

? Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands

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