John Lea and Jock Young (1984)

Download Word version

[…]

Discontent is a product of relative, not absolute, deprivation.  […] Sheer poverty, for example, does not necessarily lead to a subculture of discontent; it may, just as easily, lead to quiescence and fatalism.  Discontent occurs when comparisons between comparable groups are made which suggest that unnecessary injustices are occurring.  If the distribution of wealth is seen as natural and just – however disparate it is – it will be accepted.  An objective history of exploitation, or even a history of increased exploitation, does not explain disturbances.  Exploitative cultures have existed for generations without friction: it is the perception of injustice – relative deprivation – which counts.

[…]

THE CAUSES OF CRIME

For orthodox criminology crime occurs because of a lack of conditioning into values: the criminal, whether because of evil (in the conventional model) or lack of parental training (in the welfare model), lacks the virtues which keep us all honest and upright.  In left idealism, crime occurs not because of lack of values but simply because of lack of material goods: economic deprivation drives people into crime.  In the conventional viewpoint on crime, the criminal is flawed; he or she lacks human values and cognition.  In the radical interpretation of this, the very opposite is true.  The criminal, not the honest person, has the superior consciousness: he or she has seen through the foolishness of the straight world.  To be well conditioned is to be well deceived.  The criminal then enters into a new world of value – a subculture, relieved in part of the mystifications of the conventional world.

                We reject both these positions.  The radical version smacks of theories of absolute deprivation; we would rather put at the centre of our theory notions of relative deprivation.  And a major source of one’s making comparisons – or indeed the feeling that one should, in the first place, ‘naturally’ compete and compare oneself with others – is capitalism itself.

                We are taught that life is like a racetrack: that merit will find its own reward.  This is the central way our system legitimates itself and motivates people to compete.  But what a strange racetrack!  In reality some people seem to start half-way along the track (the rich), while others are forced to run with a millstone around their necks (for example, women with both domestic and non-domestic employment), while others are not even allowed onto the track at all (the unemployed, the members of the most deprived ethnic groups).  The values of an equal or meritocratic society which capitalism inculcates into people are constantly at loggerheads with the actual material inequalities in the world.  And, contrary to the conservatives, it is the well-socialized person who is the most liable to crime.  Crime is endemic to capitalism because it produces both egalitarian ideals and material shortages.  It provides precisely the values which engender criticism of the material shortages which the radicals pinpoint.

A high crime rate occurs in precise conditions: where a group has learnt through its past that it is being dealt with invidiously; where it is possible for it easily to pick up the contradictions just referred to and where there is no political channel for these feelings of discontent to be realized.  There must be economic and political discontent and there must be an absence of economic and political opportunities.

THE NATURE OF CRIME AND CRIMINAL VALUES

For conventional criminology, […] crime is simply antisocial behaviour involving people who lack values.  For left idealists it is the reverse: it is proto-revolutionary activity, primitive and individualistic, perhaps, but praiseworthy all the same.  It involves, if it is a theft, a redistribution of income, or if it is part of youth culture, symbolic and stylistic awareness of, say, the loss of traditional working-class community or the repressive nature of the system.  In either case it involves alternative values.

                We would argue that both of these interpretations of crime are superficial.  It is true that crime is antisocial – indeed the majority of working-class crime, far from being a prefigurative revolt, is directed against other members of the working class.  But it is not antisocial because of lack of conventional values but precisely because of them.  For the values of most working-class criminals are overwhelmingly conventional.  They involve individualism, competition, desire for material goods and, often, machismo.  Such crime could, without exaggeration, be characterized as the behaviour of those suitably motivated people who are too poor to have access to the Stock Exchange.  Crime reflects the fact that our own worlds and our own lives are materially and ideologically riddled with the capitalist order within which we live.

RELATIVE DEPRIVATION

Relative deprivation is the excess of expectations over opportunities.  The importance of this concept is that it gets away from simplistic notions that try [to] relate discontent and collective violence to levels of absolute deprivation.  The link between relative derivation and political marginality is crucial for understanding riots and collective violence.  Political marginality is unlikely to result in riot unless there is the added sense of frustration stemming from relative deprivation.  A social group may be economically and politically marginalized, yet if it has no desire to participate in the structure of opportunities and social rights from which it is excluded, frustration need not occur.  For the rioters of the eighteenth century the problem was not the failure to be included in a structure of opportunities stemming from industrial society, so much as the fact that an existing way of life was in the process of being destroyed by industrialization and its opportunity structure.  In contemporary industrial societies social groups that have a high degree of economic and political marginality but a low sense of relative deprivation tend to be either deviant subcultures, particularly religious groups oriented to ‘other-worldly pursuits’ or first-generation immigrant communities.  The latter, forced to take the worst jobs and the worst housing that industrial societies have to offer, may still, in the short term, be sheltered from a sense of relative deprivation by virtue of the fact that their standard of comparison is not so much the opportunity structure of the wider society from which they are excluded by racial discrimination or legal barriers, as the societies from which they recently emigrated by comparison with which living standards are higher.

                Conversely, of course, a sense of relative deprivation can co-exist with the absence of economic or political marginality.  This is the situation with regard to the majority of the organized working class in industrial societies faced with a marked inequality in the distribution of wealth and opportunities.  Relative deprivation becomes the driving force of militant trade union and political struggles to increase living standards through the process of political negotiation and compromise.  These distinctions between relative deprivation combined with political integration and relative deprivation combined with political marginality enables us to understand some of the differences between the 1930s, with their relative absence of riots despite high levels of unemployment, and the present period.  During the 1930s the experience of unemployment was not linked as closely as it is today with political marginality.  Unemployment was concentrated in the older working-class communities centred in the basic industries of the north, iron and steel, shipbuilding, coal mining, etc.  The experience of unemployment was often the collective experience of a whole community related to the slump of the industry around which the community lived and worked.  This meant that the institutions of class politics – the trades councils, Labour party and union branches – appeared to the unemployed as the natural weapons of struggle.  The attempt to transfer these traditional methods of struggle at work into the arena of the struggle for work, such as in the construction of the National Unemployed Workers Movement, was an obvious course of action for the unemployed, most of whom had spent a period of their lives at work.  Even the younger unemployed could be drawn into this through the general status and influence of labour-movement institutions in the cohesive working-class community.

                The present period presents two contrasts to this.  First, the working-class community, particularly in the inner-city areas throughout the country – not just in the older industrial areas – is far less cohesive.  The fragmentation of employment between older, industrial employment in decline, newer state employment in the public services, and new small firms relying on cheap labour, combined with a greater cultural and ethnic diversity as older sections of the working class have moved out of the area or just ceased to exist and new immigrant communities have been established, has produced a much greater diversity of levels and types of labour-movement organization.  It is not that organization has not emerged in the inner cities, but it no longer constitutes the cohesive and unifying force in the working-class community that it once did.  Added to this is the massive growth in the number of young people who have never worked and therefore are not familiar with the organization and attitude of working-class politics.  The isolation of youth from work and from class political organizations combines with the reduced hegemony of working-class institutions in the community, by comparison with the 1930s, to produce an acuteness of political marginality probably never previously experienced by any section of British society since industrialization.

                But the burden of our argument here is that this acute political marginality is, for the young unemployed, combined with a greater sense of relative deprivation than in the 1930s.  It is this volatile combination that underlies the rising street crime and collective violence that we see returning to our cities.  This sharp growth of relative deprivation follows from quite fundamental changes, again by contrast with the 1930s, and even more with the nineteenth century, in the mechanisms determining the relationship between expectations and the opportunities for achieving them.  […]

                Particularly since the last war the growth of the Welfare State has combined with the mass media and mass secondary education to produce a steady growth on relative deprivation.  The mass media have disseminated a standardized image of lifestyle particularly in the areas of popular culture and recreation which, for those unemployed and surviving through the dole queue, or only able to obtain employment at very low wages, has accentuated the sense of relative deprivation.  The spread of mass state secondary education has had a similar effect, not so much by standardizing expectations of career patterns, living standards, etc., as by raising the minimum expectation.  During the period of exceptional economic expansion of the 1950s and 1960s this posed no problems.  But now the phenomenon of ‘over-education’ is beginning to appear.  As Cloward and Ohlin (1960: 118-20) have pointed out, the excess of aspirations and opportunities can paradoxically lay the basis for social, racial and other forms of discrimination […]

                The consequence is that expectations have become governed by a set of mechanisms much more loosely, if at all, related to opportunities.  The latter are still to a large extent determined by the market mechanism coupled, of course, with massive growth of state intervention and investment, which itself has had an effect on relative deprivation.  As it has become perceived that the state has taken responsibility for major components of the opportunity structure through careers and employment in state services, as well as the general responsibility undertaken by post-war governments, until recently, for maintaining the level of employment, so the discrepancy between expectations and opportunities, now growing as a result of economic recession and cutbacks in state spending, becomes blamed on the ‘system’, rather than the individual.

                Meanwhile, another quite important change was taking place, the consequences of which are now much clearer.  While the tendency, as far as expectations were concerned, was for greater standardization and raising the minimum, the nature of post-war economic expansion was to create a working-class opportunity structure which was increasingly differentiated in terms of wage levels and working conditions.  The decline of manufacturing employment in general and the rise of new highly paid white-collar and technical occupations, combined with new sectors of low pay in services (often combining low pay and unsociable hours) and small firms, has produced a more diverse set of opportunities at the same time as expectations have been becoming more standardized.  In the short run the solution to this problem in most Western industrial societies was immigrant labour.  […] The passivity of the early, post-war, immigrant communities was based on a combination of a cultural orientation towards the homeland and an expected short stay in Britain.  This means that immigrant workers were prepared to accept working conditions which would not be accepted by native workers, such as low pay and flexible shift systems involving long periods of night work.  In addition, the legal barriers of alien status and racial prejudice of the native British population generally excluded immigrants from better paid forms of employment.

                This situation has been brought to a conclusion during the 1970s by the growth of a second generation of Britons of immigrant percentage.  Going through the same education system (despite various forms of discrimination operating there), the children of immigrant families have grown up with the same spectrum of aspirations and expectations derived from the mass media and the education system as young people in general.  Expectations and opportunities, then, have been moving in opposite directions, relative deprivation has been increasing, and, as the state has increasingly been seen as the determinant of opportunities, the resentment of unfulfilled expectations increasingly takes the form of resentment against the state and its manifestation, particularly those, like the police, who are encountered on a day-to-day basis by the young unemployed.

[…]

justice4victims.org