The Marxist Theory of Crime

Last Updated on September 6, 2026 by Karl Thompson

The Marxist theory of crime explains crime in terms of the inequalities produced by capitalism. It can be summarised in four points:

1. Capitalism is criminogenic — the system itself encourages criminal behaviour.
2. The law is made by the capitalist elite and tends to work in their interests.
3. All classes commit crime, and the crimes of the capitalist class do more harm than street crime.
4. The state practises selective law enforcement — the criminal justice system polices the marginalised rather than the wealthy, and this performs ideological functions for the elite.

Marxism is one of the main perspectives taught within the crime and deviance module, and it appears on AQA Paper 3 (7192/3). It is usually taught after the consensus theories, because most of what Marxists say about crime is a direct attack on them.

The key sociologists are William Chambliss (1975), David Gordon (1973) and Laureen Snider (1993). The contemporary work is Steve Tombs and David Whyte (2015).

Capitalism is criminogenic

Marxists see crime as a natural outgrowth of the capitalist system. Capitalism is criminogenic in three ways: it encourages self-interest, it encourages unrealistic material aspirations, and it generates inequality.

You will sometimes see this spelt “crimogenic”. The correct spelling is criminogenic, meaning crime-causing.

Capitalism, self-interest and crime

David Gordon argued that capitalist societies are ‘dog eat dog’ societies, in which every company and every individual is encouraged to put their own interests before those of other people, the community and the environment. Capitalism does not merely permit the self-interested pursuit of profit — it treats it as a virtue, and accepts harm to others as a cost of doing business.

In a competitive system there is constant pressure to make more money, because that is how a firm survives. Against that pressure, breaking the law can look like a minor consideration, and the pressure applies to everyone from the investment banker to the unemployed teenager on an estate.

Marxists argue that the values of the system filter down into the wider culture. Think about the motives of the burglar, the robber and the thief: they are pursuing personal gain without caring about the individual victim. That is the logic of the market, applied illegally.

Capitalism encourages materialism and unrealistic aspirations

Advertising presents as normal a lifestyle that most people cannot afford. For the millions who lack the legitimate means to reach that standard through work, this can breed a sense of failure, inadequacy and anger at working without succeeding. Advertising creates the conditions for status frustration, and status frustration can lead to crime.

This is a point of contact with Merton’s strain theory: the desire to achieve society’s success goals can outweigh the pressure to obey the law, and advertising widens the gap between the goal of material success and the legitimate means of getting there.

Capitalism, inequality and crime

Capitalism produces radical inequality. ONS Wealth and Assets Survey data show that the wealthiest 10% of households hold around 43% of total household wealth in Great Britain, while the least wealthy half of households hold about 9% between them. Zygmunt Bauman points out that the very wealthy increasingly segregate themselves — gated communities, private schools, private security — but the rich and the poor still live within sight of each other.

Marxists argue that this visible inequality produces a sense of injustice and frustration among those at the bottom, and that this feeds both economic crime and violent street crime. As Chambliss (1975) put it, economic crime <cite>”represents rational responses to the competitiveness and inequality of life in capitalist societies”</cite>. Drug dealers see themselves as entrepreneurs. The desire to succeed is so thoroughly internalised that breaking the law registers as a manageable risk.

HOWEVER, the relationship between inequality and crime is a correlation, not a demonstrated cause, and you should say so in an essay. More equal societies do tend to have lower rates of violent crime, but there are many differences between countries other than their level of inequality.

Discussion questions:

• Does capitalism encourage competition over co-operation?
• Does capitalism encourage us to be selfish consumers?
• Does capitalism cause crime?

The law is made by the elite and works in their interests

Basic Marxist theory holds that the superstructure serves the ruling class, so the state passes laws that support ruling-class interests. Three pieces of evidence are usually given.

Property rights are more securely established in law than collective rights such as those of trade unions. Chambliss (1975) argued that the protection of private property lies at the heart of the capitalist legal system. Property law obviously benefits those who own property more than those who do not.

States are reluctant to regulate large corporations. Laureen Snider (1993) argued that capitalist states are unwilling to pass or enforce laws that might threaten profitability — on pollution, on health and safety at work, on monopolies — because a state that has worked hard to attract investment does not want to drive it away.

The clearest current illustration is the Energy Charter Treaty. Signed in 1994, it lets energy investors sue governments through investor–state dispute settlement when policy affects their expected profits. In 2022 an arbitration panel ordered Italy to pay the British oil company Rockhopper roughly €250 million after Italy banned new drilling near its coast. Lawyers and campaigners describe the resulting effect as ‘regulatory chill’: states hesitate to legislate because of what litigation might cost. The UK announced its withdrawal from the treaty in February 2024, following France, Germany, Spain and others — though the treaty’s sunset clause keeps existing investments protected for twenty years after withdrawal.

People have unequal access to the law. Money buys a better lawyer, and a better lawyer can mean the difference between a conviction and an acquittal, or between prison and a suspended sentence.

HOWEVER — and this matters for evaluation — states do sometimes legislate against corporate wrongdoing. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 created a ‘failure to prevent fraud’ offence, which came into force on 1 September 2025 and makes large organisations criminally liable where an employee commits fraud for the organisation’s benefit and reasonable prevention procedures were not in place. Whether it is enforced is a separate question, and one worth watching, but its existence weakens Snider’s claim in its strongest form.

All classes commit crime

Marxists remind us that crime is not a working-class monopoly; it only looks that way because of who gets caught and prosecuted.

Chambliss’s own research is the classic demonstration. In On the Take: From Petty Crooks to Presidents (1978) he studied organised crime in Seattle and found it operating in partnership with the police, the courts and local politicians rather than in opposition to them. Organised crime was not an alien intrusion into a law-abiding city; it was an extension of legitimate business by other means.

The obvious contemporary example is Donald Trump, who in May 2024 was convicted by a New York jury on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, and in January 2025 received an unconditional discharge — no prison, no fine, no probation — days before returning to the presidency. Several other prosecutions against him, including the federal cases on classified documents and election interference, were dropped or wound down.

Whatever you think of the politics, the sociological point is precise and useful: here is a member of the global elite convicted of a crime who received no punishment for it at all. That is simultaneously good evidence that all classes commit crime, and good evidence that the consequences are not distributed equally.

The crimes of the elite are more harmful than street crime

Marxists and other critical criminologists prefer to talk about harms rather than crimes. The reason is that elites have historically had the power to define the violence they do as legitimate.

Look at harm across history and the worst episodes — colonialism, slavery, the exploitation of colonised populations — were carried out by states and companies and were not criminal at the time. From a Marxist perspective that tells us more about who writes the law than about the acts themselves. Angela Davis makes the point sharply: the real criminals, she argues, are not the people who fill the prisons but those who have taken the wealth of the world from the people who produced it.

(This connects to dependency theory in the global development module.)

White collar crime and corporate crime

White collar crime	Crimes committed by an individual in pursuit of their own interests, often against the organisation they work for.
Corporate crime	Crimes committed by or for a company in pursuit of its interests, with serious physical or economic consequences for employees, consumers or the public.

Snider (1993) argued that the cost of white collar and corporate crime to the economy far outweighs the cost of street crime. The current UK figures support her.

The Annual Fraud Indicator 2023 — produced by the accountancy firm Crowe UK, the solicitors Peters & Peters and the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime — put the annual cost of fraud to the UK at around £219 billion, up from about £190 billion in 2017. Private sector losses accounted for roughly £157.8 billion of that, public sector losses about £50.2 billion, and fraud against individuals about £8.3 billion.

That figure is an estimate built from a typology of known fraud rates rather than a count, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a precise number — which is itself a good methods point about the difficulty of measuring crimes nobody reports.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales gives an independent measure of the same trend. In the year to March 2025 it estimated 4.2 million fraud incidents, a 31% rise on the previous year and the highest figure since fraud was first included in the survey in 2017.

Case study: Bhopal, 1984

In December 1984 around 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate escaped from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, exposing more than half a million people.

The death toll is contested, and how it is contested is the sociological point. The Indian government’s official figure for immediate deaths is 2,259. The Madhya Pradesh state government eventually paid compensation to the families of 3,787 people killed. The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, drawing on local government and medical commissioner records, puts the cumulative toll — including those who died in later years from exposure — at more than 20,000; by 1999 the Office of the Medical Commissioner had registered over 22,000 gas-related deaths.

You will see “20,000 dead at Bhopal” quoted flatly in textbooks. It is defensible as a cumulative figure from campaign and local records; it is not the official immediate death toll, and you should say which you mean. Marxists would add that the gap between the counts is not an accident — who does the counting, and what gets counted as a death caused by the leak, is itself a question of power.

Case study: Enron

Enron collapsed in December 2001 after years of concealing debt through off-the-books partnerships. The shareholder class action put investor losses at around $74 billion in the four years before the bankruptcy, of which roughly $40 billion was claimed as attributable to the fraud. Shareholders eventually recovered $7.2 billion in settlements from the banks involved. Around 20,000 employees lost approximately $2 billion in retirement savings. Arthur Andersen, Enron’s auditor, was destroyed by its role in the scandal, putting a further 28,000 people out of work.

The often-quoted “$100 billion Enron fraud” overstates it. Use $74 billion in losses and $7.2 billion recovered — the gap between the two is a better illustration of the argument than an inflated headline figure would be.

Case study: Bernie Madoff

In 2009 Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for a Ponzi scheme in which he claimed to be managing $65 billion of investors’ money when roughly $1 billion remained. Nearly 9,000 victims filed claims. The sentencing judge described the breach of trust as massive.

Madoff is the case Marxists find hardest, and you should use him as an evaluation point rather than as support: an elite criminal who received the maximum sentence available.

Case study: FTX

In 2024 Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years for an $8 billion fraud at the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Like Madoff, he cuts both ways — evidence of the criminogenic pull of unregulated profit-seeking, and evidence that elite offenders are sometimes punished severely.

Contemporary corporate crime research

Steve Tombs and David Whyte are the current British authorities here. In The Corporate Criminal: Why Corporations Must Be Abolished (2015) they argue that the corporation is criminogenic by legal design rather than by accident: limited liability, the separation of ownership from control, and the legal duty to shareholders combine to produce harm that no reform of corporate behaviour can remove. Their conclusion is the one in the title.

Discussion question: Are crimes such as fraud more harmful to society than violent crime?

The ideological functions of selective law enforcement

David Gordon (1973) argued that the police concentrate on working-class and underclass areas and the courts concentrate on prosecuting working-class defendants, while the crimes of the middle and upper classes are largely ignored — even though those classes offend at least as much.

For Gordon, the disproportionate prosecution of working-class offenders maintains ruling-class power and reinforces ruling-class ideology. Selective law enforcement benefits capitalism in three ways:

1. It individualises blame. By punishing individuals and defining them as social failures, we are directed away from the failings of the system that produced the inequality and poverty in the first place.
2. It neutralises opposition. Imprisoning selected members of the lower classes removes potential troublemakers.
3. It conceals. Imprisonment sweeps the most visible casualties of capitalism out of sight.

A fourth is worth adding: while police, courts and media attention are fixed on working-class street crime, they are not fixed on the greed and immorality of the elite.

Note on the date: Gordon’s criminological work is “Class and the Economics of Crime” (1971) and “Capitalism, Class, and Crime in America” (1973). Many revision sites give “Gordon (1976)”; there is no 1976 work on crime and the date appears to be a textbook error.

Criticisms of the Marxist theory of crime

It is usual in A-level sociology to criticise one perspective using others, and Marxism attracts criticism from every direction — but there are stand-alone criticisms too.

Some elites are punished. Madoff got 150 years; Bankman-Fried got 25. Selective law enforcement is a tendency, not an absolute rule. Marxists reply that the system must prosecute some elites to maintain its own legitimacy, and that most still get away with it — but that reply is difficult to test, which is itself a weakness.

Crime existed before capitalism and exists in communist societies. If capitalism causes crime, crime should be absent where capitalism is. It is not. China and North Korea also have serious records of state persecution, which the theory struggles to explain as anything other than crime.

The emotional impact of street crime is greater. The economic cost of fraud is larger, but if you are robbed in the street you feel it in a way you do not feel a corporate fraud you may never notice. This is precisely the objection left realists make, and it is why they returned to a victim-centred approach.

It over-emphasises class. Feminists point out that the theory has little to say about domestic and sexual violence, which cut across class and occur in non-capitalist societies. Interactionists argue it is too deterministic and ignores the meanings offenders attach to their own actions.

It romanticises working-class offenders, treating them as rebels against the system when most are not engaged in any political struggle at all.

Is crime falling under neoliberalism? This one is regularly stated as a knockdown criticism, and it needs care. Theft, criminal damage and violence have fallen steeply since the mid-1990s, during a period of increasing neoliberalism — which does look bad for the theory. HOWEVER, fraud and computer misuse were only added to the Crime Survey in 2017, and fraud is now at its highest recorded level, at 4.2 million incidents in the year to March 2025. Including fraud, headline crime in the year to December 2025 stood at 9.6 million incidents, about 15% below the 2017 figure with no significant change on the previous year. So the categories that have fallen are street crimes, and the category that has risen is the one Marxists care most about. Use this to complicate the criticism rather than to dismiss it.

Evaluation summary

Strengths	Limitations
Explains both working-class and elite crime through one mechanism	Economically deterministic — treats class as the only cause
Draws attention to corporate and white collar crime, which other theories ignore	Crime exists in pre-capitalist and communist societies
Explains why the criminal justice system looks the way it does	Some elite offenders are punished severely
Connects the law itself to economic power rather than treating it as neutral	Little to say about gender, ethnicity or the victims of street crime
Supported by measurable evidence on the scale of fraud	Romanticises offenders as rebels rather than thugs

Exam practice: 30-mark essay

Evaluate the contribution of Marxism to our understanding of crime and deviance (30 marks)

An A-level sociology essay written for the AQA 7192 (3) specification, exam paper 3, using the PEAC system — Point, Explain, Analyse, Criticise.

Introduction

Marxism is a structural conflict theory which explains crime in terms of the inequalities generated by capitalism. Where functionalists see crime as a problem of inadequate socialisation or blocked opportunity within a broadly fair system, Marxists argue that the system itself is the cause, and that the law and its enforcement work to protect those who benefit from it. Below I examine three Marxist contributions — criminogenic capitalism, the class character of law-making, and selective law enforcement — and argue that Marxism has permanently changed what criminologists count as crime, while being too economically deterministic to stand as a complete explanation.

Criminogenic capitalism

POINT: Marxists argue that capitalism generates crime as a by-product of how it works.

EXPLAIN: Gordon (1973) described capitalism as a ‘dog eat dog’ system in which self-interest is rewarded and harm to others is treated as an acceptable cost. Chambliss (1975) argued that economic crime is a rational response to the competitiveness and inequality of capitalist life. Advertising compounds this by making an unaffordable standard of living appear normal, producing status frustration among those who cannot reach it legitimately.

ANALYSE: The strength of this argument is that it explains working-class and elite crime with a single mechanism. Strain theory has to treat the wealthy offender as an anomaly; Marxism does not, because on this account the banker and the burglar are responding to the same pressure.

CRITICISE: It is economically deterministic. Most people experiencing inequality do not commit crime, and the theory offers no account of why some do and most do not — a gap interactionist and left realist work both fill better. Crime also exists in societies that are not capitalist, which is difficult to explain if capitalism is the cause.

The law is made in the interests of the powerful

POINT: Marxists argue that law-making reflects economic power.

EXPLAIN: Chambliss (1975) argued that the protection of private property is the organising principle of capitalist law. Snider (1993) argued that states are reluctant to regulate corporations because they need investment. Mechanisms like the Energy Charter Treaty, under which Italy was ordered in 2022 to pay Rockhopper around €250 million for banning offshore drilling, show states being penalised for regulating at all.

ANALYSE: This is a genuine advance on consensus theories, which treat the law as an expression of shared values. It forces the question of whose values, and that question has proved productive well beyond Marxism — feminist and critical race approaches to law both build on it.

CRITICISE: The claim is too strong. States do legislate against corporate wrongdoing: the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 created a failure-to-prevent-fraud offence in force from September 2025, and health and safety and environmental law expanded substantially across the twentieth century. Consensus theorists add that most people now own some property, so property law protects the majority rather than a small elite.

Selective law enforcement and the crimes of the powerful

POINT: Marxists argue that enforcement is selective, and that the selection performs ideological work.

EXPLAIN: Gordon (1973) identified three functions: individualising blame, neutralising opposition, and concealing the casualties of the system. Snider (1993) and later Tombs and Whyte (2015) argue the crimes of the powerful are simultaneously more harmful and less punished. The scale is not in doubt — the Annual Fraud Indicator 2023 put the cost of fraud at around £219 billion, and the Crime Survey recorded 4.2 million fraud incidents in the year to March 2025.

ANALYSE: This is Marxism’s most durable contribution. Corporate crime, state crime and green crime are all now established topics on this specification, and none of them would be without the Marxist insistence that we ask about harm rather than accepting the categories the law hands us.

CRITICISE: Elite offenders are sometimes punished heavily, as Madoff and Bankman-Fried both show. And the focus on the powerful came at a cost: left realists argue that critical criminology lost sight of the working-class victims of ordinary crime, who suffer most and who are not helped by a theory whose only solution is revolution.

Conclusion

Marxism’s contribution is real but uneven. As an explanation of why individuals offend it is weak — too deterministic, too indifferent to meaning, and unable to explain why most people in poverty do not commit crime. As an account of how the category of crime is constructed and enforced it has been transformative, and the evidence on the scale and impunity of corporate fraud has strengthened rather than weakened since Snider wrote. The criticism that crime has fallen while neoliberalism has advanced is less damaging than it first appears, since the crimes that have fallen are street crimes and the crime that has risen sharply is fraud. Marxism is best treated not as a complete theory of criminality but as the reason criminology asks who gets to define crime in the first place — a question that now shapes feminist, critical race and green criminology as well.

Short version of this essay

• P — state the Marxist claim
• E — explain the mechanism
• A — analyse what it explains that other theories do not
• C — criticise with evidence

(P1) Criminogenic capitalism

• Gordon — ‘dog eat dog’; Chambliss — crime as a rational response
• Advertising, materialism, status frustration
• Explains elite and working-class crime with one mechanism
• Deterministic — most poor people don’t offend
• Crime exists in communist societies

(P2) The law serves the powerful

• Chambliss — private property at the heart of the law
• Snider — states won’t regulate corporations
• Energy Charter Treaty; unequal access to lawyers
• ECCTA 2023 failure-to-prevent-fraud offence
• Consensus reply — most people own property now

(P3) Selective law enforcement

• Gordon’s three functions
• Fraud at £219bn a year; 4.2m incidents
• Tombs and Whyte — the corporation as criminogenic by design
• Madoff, Bankman-Fried — some elites are punished
• Left realism — ignores working-class victims

Evaluate using other perspectives

• Functionalism — crime performs functions and exists in all societies, not just capitalist ones
• Feminism — silent on domestic and sexual violence
• Interactionism — too deterministic; ignores meaning and the labelling process
• Left realism — no practical solution short of revolution

Conclusion — strong on the definition and enforcement of crime, weak on individual causation.

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📚 References

Davis, A. (1981) Women, Race and Class.

Chambliss, W. (1978) On the Take: From Petty Crooks to Presidents.

Snider, L. (1993) Corporate Crime and the Politics of Regulation.

Gordon, D. (1976) Capitalism, Class and Crime.

Tombs, S. & Whyte, D. (2015) The Corporate Criminal: Why Corporations Must Be Abolished.

1 http://www.crisis.org.uk/policywatch/pages/homelessness_statistics.html

2 http://www.aboutproperty.co.uk/news/planning/urban-planning/nearly-300000-empty-houses-in-england-$482464.htm

Crime and Deviance Revision Bundle

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• 12 exam practice questions including short answer, 10 mark and essay question exemplars.
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References

Chambliss, W. J. (1975) ‘Toward a Political Economy of Crime’, Theory and Society, 2(2), pp. 149–170.

Chambliss, W. J. (1978) On the Take: From Petty Crooks to Presidents. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Gordon, D. M. (1973) ‘Capitalism, Class, and Crime in America’, Crime & Delinquency, 19(2), pp. 163–186.

Snider, L. (1993) Bad Business: Corporate Crime in Canada. Scarborough: Nelson Canada.

Tombs, S. and Whyte, D. (2015) The Corporate Criminal: Why Corporations Must Be Abolished. Abingdon: Routledge.

Office for National Statistics (2026) Crime in England and Wales: year ending December 2025.

Office for National Statistics (2026) Fraud and computer misuse in England and Wales: year ending March 2025.

Crowe UK, Peters & Peters and University of Portsmouth (2023) Annual Fraud Indicator 2023.

Signposting and Related Posts

This post has been written primarily for students studying the crime and deviance topic as part of the AQA A-Level Sociology course, where it appears on Paper 3 (7192/3).

Marxism on crime builds directly on the Marxist perspective on society, which covers the base–superstructure model and ideological control in more depth.

For the general criticisms of the perspective, see eight criticisms of the traditional Marxist view of society.

Students usually study this alongside the consensus theories of crime, which Marxism is largely a reaction against, and before left realism, which criticises it for ignoring the victims of ordinary crime.

For the neo-Marxist development of these ideas applied to policing and race, see neo-Marxist approaches to ethnicity and crime.

More on this perspective across the whole specification is on the Marxist theory hub.

For more exam questions and model answers see my page on exams, short answer questions and essays.

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