Young, Gifted and Demonised

Mike Cowley

Mike Cowley takes a look at political explanations of youth crime.

The rumble of trainers on lamp lit streets; a glimpse of tracksuit and wine bottle; the nails-on-blackboard growl of boys-swearing-like-men; the locking of stares, the wrong word, a flash of blades across the night. These are the spectres the tabloid press invoke daily. Like cautionary fables and children’s fairy tales, they act as warnings to what lies in wait for those of us naïve enough to stray from prescribed paths. Hear this, lest your trust in humanity renders you vulnerable to Burberry-clad goblins!

But what is the ‘truth’ about knife crime, of the apparently open-ended escalation of violent crimes associated with the young? The Socialist Left itself has offered varying insights over the decades.

‘Traditional’ Marxists viewed working class crime as a lashing out of the oppressed. For Engels, it was just as ‘natural’ for the poor to turn to crime as it was for ‘water to turn to steam at boiling point.’ But there was a flaw at the core of this determinist orthodoxy. On the one hand ‘traditionalists’ regarded working class crime as disproportionately policed and punished. Where were the resources that might usefully be allocated to corporate fraud, tax evasion etc? In comparison, working class crimes comprised a minor social irritant.

On the other hand, working class crime was idealised as a kind of ‘unconscious consciousness.’ Mugging, burglary and shoplifting were in fact embryonic gestures of rebellion, latter-day Robin Hood adventures in a post-Feudal setting. The ‘traditionalists’ ordered their cake (the incidence of working class crime was gratuitously over-reported and punished), then went about eating it (working class crime existed, and had political dimensions).

This ‘Left Idealist’ sociology of crime was challenged in the late 1960s/70s by the ‘Left Realist’ perspectives of amongst others, Jock Young. He contended that, far from diminishing the significance of street crimes, the Left had a responsibility to take this stuff seriously. Demonstrating solidarity with the victims of such crimes (who were, Young pointed out, predominately working class themselves), became their central theoretical distinction. Though they viewed democratic socialism as the best long term solution to socially divisive market shibboleths, nonetheless they disdained what they saw as a romanticising of youth crime. They accused the Marxists of ignoring a social schism most directly confronted by the poor. The closest contemporary adherents of this school can perhaps be found at the Compass think-tank.

The serious point is to what extent should the Left encourage working class youth to reflect on their personal behaviour? Of course, we offer entreaties designed to lift the veils of false consciousness. But at what stage do we also say to the young: such and such behaviour is unacceptable, uncivilized and barbaric, irrespective of circumstances? The Tories, and Barak Obama in the US, incline heavily towards this ‘personal responsibility’ position. Though poverty may be the reason, it does not qualify as an excuse. (This represents the more liberal component of the right wing argument. New Right sociologists such as Charles Murray regard the poor as morally feckless, a ‘social plague’ on the body politic). I believe that there is something for the Left to learn from here.

The authoritarian Left, whose DNA runs from Stalinism through Trotskyism, have perceived working class behaviour as of little consequence in the context of capitalist social relations. Workers are seen as a passive mass, a homogeneous confederacy that, once they had been sufficiently roused to sweep the vanguard party to power, were expected then to retreat into bovine acquiescence. In contrast, idealists saw the class as rich in spontaneous invention. Their collective blood coursed with unspent poetry, and their psychology would one day magically alchemise – sending them onto the streets demanding the impossible – if only the stubborn plates of history would lock into their appropriate places.

Perhaps there are elements from both these broad traditions that might usefully be salvaged. However, if we are in the business of educating, agitating and organising, can’t we – in the context of Socialist humanism and compassion – offer a fresh position on youth crime?

After all, celebrity-worship, casual violence and the virtues of conspicuous consumption do not offer fertile conditions for the Socialist case, and like it or not, these are habits and values that many young people uncritically buy into. We need to offer a critical approach to anti-social behaviour (where it exists), as well as an unambiguous analysis as to the provenance of such criminality, and our solutions to it.

This is where the feeble-mindedness of the New Labour Project is fatally exposed. I recall another recent moral panic not dissimilar to the present one around knife-related crime that sought to heap the ills of the world on the shoulders of hip hop in general and rappers in particular, for ‘promoting’ gun-violence and greed. The irony of this has not been lost on the more astute commentators. As Richard Sennett notes, in societies where the ideology of ‘meritocracy’ has taken root, those at the bottom of the pile now have only themselves to blame for their lowly status. If only they had demonstrated sufficient merit, worked hard and seized the opportunities available to all, they too could be sipping fine wines in Tuscany, listening to James Blunt on their i-Pods and sampling the finest sun-dried tomatoes instead of Happy Meals and chips. The unmistakeable message is that the white working class are the sole authors of their own misfortunes.

Michael Young has cause to resent this sophistry more than most. In his 1958 satire ‘The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870 – 2033,’ Young offers a dystopian vision of a ruling class whose ideological mendacity has been so successful and become so entrenched, that their privilege goes completely unchallenged. In this future a lack of merit now constitutes grounds for sterilisation (sound familiar?).

If Labour is now ‘incredibly relaxed’ about people becoming filthy rich; if we are contriving to appeal to and appease those with the most selfish (anti-social?) consumer appetites; if we have failed over the course of three governments to say anything of substance regarding the corrosive individualism that is the Thatcherite legacy; and if we then, after dangling the trinkets of consumerism, remove them from people immersed in this culture, should we be surprised at their response?

The accessing of status by ‘illegitimate’ means is nothing new. Sociologists have long reflected on the grouping together of young people in loosely organised gangs as a means of winning an acceptance otherwise denied them by ‘official’ society. With the sharpening of consumer aspirations, the historical marginalisation of working class movements and their corollary politics, a dangerous vacuum has opened up. Recently, I spent a perfectly agreeable Saturday morning at a Labour event to commemorate the anniversary of the NHS. But where is the joined up thinking that seeks to extend those values – selfless public service, collectively provided, not-for-profit institutions that exist for the enrichment of all – to society as a whole? How different might things have been if, over the last decade, Labour had extolled the virtues of public service, decried the greed (and White Collar crimes) of the corporations, rallied public support to redistribute the obscene profits of the Masters of the Universe?

If we are to tackle crime we must first put the figures into clear perspective. Any talk of a ‘knife-epidemic’ is a media confection. Crime is down, and our murder rate is only marginally higher than the EU average (1.7 murders per 100, 000 citizens). Knife crime is up 72% on 1997 figures, though down from a high of 240, 000 in 1995. What is true is that repeat offenders are being drawn from a progressively younger demographic. Carrying knifes is now an issue for the under-16s, who do not appear on British Crime Survey figures. However, locking people up – other than as a means of protecting society from the most dangerous criminals, and for providing a sense of restitution to victims – does not work. Feeding folk devils to the tabloid monster is a losing strategy. There is no such thing as too much hanging and flogging to these people.

The tightly organised gangs of the fevered tabloid imagination are in the main, a chimera. Recent research carried out by Manchester University suggests that young men and women – black and white – drift in and out of informal relationships. Drug dealing gangs are not the problem. Angry, dispirited and alienated youth are. And until we listen directly to them, to speak to them using a lexicon of hope rather than condemnation and fear, the ‘hooligans’ and ‘vandals’ of folklore will continue to haunt us, seeking our attention in the only way that appears to work. Where it exists, the Left should condemn brutalism without recourse to relativist morality. But more crucially, in the two years remaining of this government (and as the best Labour representatives continue to do up and down the country), we have to listen to what the behaviour of our cowed, angry and dispossessed youth says about the priorities of the adult world we have abandoned them to.