Phil Scraton and Kathryn Chadwick (1991)

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The reaffirmation of class analysis produced important work on class location (Carchedi, 1977; Hunt, 1977; Miliband, 1977; Poulantzas, 1973, 1975; Wright, 1976, 1978) in which the process by which classes were conceptualized and class location established was explored.  Braverman and Wright each indicated that class boundaries are located in terms of the economic demands of capital while emphasizing the structural significance of ideological and political criteria.  As Poulantzas argued, the divisions which arise out of supervisory or managerial functions occur at the political level.  Functionaries of capital, be they in the factory, the state or the police, occupy ambiguous and contradictory class locations.  Classes, however, remain ‘in motion’, they organize and disorganize, they extend and retract their capacities and they are fixed permanently in struggle.  The fundamental criteria for the location of the classes are economic, however, and this has been clearly evident in the 1980s as the free market economy has expanded but not required a comparable expansion of labour, and substantial numbers of workers have been forced into the relative surplus population.

                Marginality, and the process of marginalization, is an important concept in the structural analysis of contemporary class location, class fragmentation and Wright’s discussion of contradictory class locations.  Implicit in this analysis is the premise that during periods of economic recession part of the total workforce is used as the disposable surplus of wage-labour essential to the reconstruction of capital.  During the 1980s while international companies enjoyed unprecedented profits and those with secure incomes took part in a decade of unchecked consumerism, approximately one-third of the population sat, marginalized, on or below the poverty line (Walker and Walker, 1987).  While the private sector in housing, education, health care and transport flourished, the National Health Service, state schools, council housing and public transport offered a reduced service staffed by disillusioned workers.

Set within the context of the structural location of class the concept of marginality is both rigorous and significant.  Marginality is manifested not only in terms of economic relations but also in terms of the subsequent political and ideological responses to those relations.  Just as certain groups occupy ‘contradictory class locations’ so groups are pushed beyond the marginal locations of the relative surplus population.  A range of identifiable groups and individuals, while relying on the capitalist mode of production and social democracy to provide them with an economic opportunity structure, live outside the ‘legitimate’ social relations of production.  Marx (1961: 644) identified those condemned to ‘pauperism’, ‘the hospital of the active labour army…’ as the ‘demoralized and ragged’.  They constituted the ‘dangerous classes’ because their conditions were seen as the breeding ground of dissension and a real threat to civil order and social stability.

The link - unemployment, destitution, crime – has provided an important starting-point for research which has developed the ‘surplus population’ thesis and its relevance in explaining not only certain categories of crime but also the process of criminalization of certain groups of people.  While the ‘immiseration thesis’ cannot explain fully ‘all’ crimes it has demonstrated that the broader structural contexts of production and distribution, of poverty and unemployment, are significant in the involvement of people in ‘crime’ but also in the processes which define, adjust, enforce and administer the criminal law.  The policy of targeting identifiable and vulnerable groups through heavy or saturation policing, for example, often precipitates a quasi-political resistance from marginal groups.  While street crime might arise out of social, political and economical conditions it is not a progressive ‘political’ expression.  Not only is it unlikely to stimulate long-term solutions to structural problems but inevitably it carries negative consequences.  It divides the working-class, nourishes racism, popularizes ‘law and order’ campaigns, victimizes the poor, consolidates the threat of violence towards women and increases the vulnerability of poor neighbourhoods.  Consequently street crime, burglary and assault are often intra-class, and exacerbate problems and sharpen contradictions.  Clearly poverty and long-term unemployment increase the propensity of the poor to commit ‘survival’ crime (Box, 1987; Franey, 1983) but this process of immiseration has divisive and threatening consequences as well as the potential for sharpening political consciousness and action.

Criminalization, the application of the criminal label to an identifiable social category, is dependent on how certain acts are labelled and who has the power to label, and is directly related to the political economy of marginalization.  The power to criminalize is not derived necessarily in consensus politics but it carries with it the ideologies associated with marginalization and it is within these portrayals that certain actions are named, contained and regulated.  This is a powerful process because it mobilizes popular approval and legitimacy in support of powerful interests within the state.  As Hillyard’s (1987) discussion of Northern Ireland illustrates clearly, public support is more likely to be achieved for state intervention against criminal acts than fro the repression or suppression of a ‘political’ cause.  Further, even where no purposeful political intention is involved, the process of criminalization can divert attention from the social or political dynamics of a movement and specify its ‘criminal’ potential.  If black youth is portrayed exclusively as ‘muggers’ (Hall et al., 1978) there will be less tolerance of organized campaigns which emphasize that they have legitimate political and economical grievances (Gilroy, 1987a).  the marginalization of women who campaign for rights or for peace and the questioning of their sexuality is a further example of the process by which meaningful and informed political action can be undermined, de-legitimized and criminalized (Chadwick and Little, 1987; Young, 1990).  Fundamental to the criminalization thesis is the proposition that while political motives are downplayed, the degree of violence involved is emphasized.  In industrial relations, for example, it is the violence of the pickets which is pinpointed (Benyon, 1985; Fine and Miller, 1985; Scraton and Thomas, 1985), rather than the importance, for the success of a strikeHealth Service, sts, in preventing supplies getting through to a factory.  The preoccupation with the ‘violence’ of political opposition makes it easier to mobilize popular support for measures of containment.

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