On Crime

The only serious approach to eliminating crime is to eliminate its very grounds, to make it worthless. If one can expect to reach well-being by robbing the others, that person is tempted to commit a crime, and hence ready to become a criminal, under favorable conditions. On the contrary, if no crime would lead to any profit, there would be no motive to commit it. The absolute majority of crimes are aimed at re-distribution of wealth, when one person wants to seize what belongs to another person, by any means, up to the murder. The second motive is power, but it can be considered as derivative of money. If there is no property at all, and no power over other people, what can change from murdering someone? Even assuming that criminals are mentally insane, the absence of the insane spirit of gain would significantly reduce the risk of getting mad.

Obviously, the ruling classes will hardly ever do anything to stop crime, and all they can do is to fight individual criminals, which only gives way to other criminals, and thus to infinity. This is the well-known game of cops and thieves, described by Eric Berne.

Civilization begins with crime and ends with crime; crime is in its very core. The first act of appropriation is already robbery, since one person pretends to have exclusive rights to what belongs to the humanity in general.

No wonder, the modern capitalist society is replete with crime, essentially depending on it. Capitalism is interested in reproducing the atmosphere of crime, and that is why all the mass media, all the entertainment industry tries hard to persuade people that nothing can be more attractive than crime (except, probably, sex; and a mix of the two is a real blockbuster). Slaves must live in fear, to be more obedient. Those at power put forth the myth of "legality" as a social system that prevents the evil from invading people's life, and the guards of the capital pretend to be defending the well-being of all. People are made to believe that the annihilation of such a "protective" system would result in chaos, and thus they are suggested the thought that the existing society, however poorly organized, should be kept on just for the sake of stability...

Of course, if no order other than capitalism is admitted, its removal would seem a catastrophe. For a bourgeois, who cannot imagine his existence without property, any attempt to eliminate property will look like a robbery. Elimination of bourgeois legality would ruin the "legal" right of one person to appropriate the work of another. When a criminal robs somebody, this in no way threatens the system, being the individual problem of that person, while any infringement on the sanctuary rights of the proprietor is a blow for the whole class of proprietors, and hence a much more serious crime, for an advocate of capitalism.