Criminals

[TheBigREDOne]

In your opinion are criminals (from petty thieves to crime bosses), a reactionary or revolutionary class (if you'd call them a class at all)?

[Jimmie Higgins]

In my view, "criminals" are just people who've broken SOME kind of law. A lone act isn't a relationship to production, or even several -- but at any rate, that someone has transgressed some criminal law doesn't really tell us much about how they fit into society in a general sense.

So criminals can be members of any class. In terms of people who support themselves through cracks or on the margins of legality in capitalism, and not only support themselves but have an interest in maintaining their "niche" - this group might fall into something more like the "lumpenproletariet".

For this controversial (in terms of theory) semi-class, some revolutionaries tend to romanticize this group, other seem to blanketly condemn them. I think either approach is too deterministic. I think the key to this group is that while they may not have an inherent class interest alligned with workers (US organized crime sometimes competed with radicals for influence in unions; sucessful crime groups generally become like an illegal petty-bourgoise who own shops, run scams, employ others for both legal and illegal work, organize the local black market) they often can have sympathies with workers because of whatever subjective reasons (like they live in working class communities, family are workers, etc) but can also SOMETIMES overlap with workers in terms of also dealing with the repressive aspects of the state.

So left to their own devices, people who make their main living off of gaps in capitalism when there are other means of making a living just as easily available (as in working relativly decent job or scamming people for a living, not "well you could always work part time at McDonalds or as a sign-spinner") are too tied in with the capitalist system, and simultaniously marginal to that system, to reject capitalism on their own class terms (it's still how they make their living) and too marginal to really challenge it anyway.

But in a larger scope - I think increased class consiousness and radicalism and organization among workers can pull middle class or "lumpen" people closer to identification with workers over owners.

Histotically there are examples of, for one, street gangs acting both incredibly reactionary in one place and time or actually joining to support movements against oppression and exploitation in other situations.

But most criminals are probably not "lumpen" in any sense - they are probably more accuratly connected to other classes like worker, boss, or small-owner... and some illegal activity through their work (stealing on the job by workers which is incedibly wide-spread, to corporate criminals in the bourgoise sense of business-crime) isn't quite the same as making a living off of the black market to the extent that the stronger the black market conditions, the more you can prosper.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

In your opinion are criminals (from petty thieves to crime bosses) [bold/italics added - GDU], a reactionary or revolutionary class (if you'd call them a class at all)?

I think the parenthetical note there really points to the heart of the issue - so-called "criminals" (I assume, in this case, you don't mean law breakers generally, but rather those whose livelihood is premised on the criminalization of certain economic activity) run the gamut of class positions just as they do in the legal economy. The de facto piece work of a nickel-and-dime-ing pot dealer (most of whom also engage in some sort of wage labour) is essentially working class - at least in the abstract - whereas moving up the chain of command, we eventually find capitalist bosses (who, not coincidentally, are often owners or technocrats in the legal sphere as well).
My personal experience would tend to be that the lowest-rung muscle/dealer is also a tenant and a part-time janitor, while the guy moving pounds, and coke is also a landlord with investments, bonds, etc.

That said, I recognize that I'm playing a simplifying game here, and any individual case is likely to be far more convoluted. I think there's also some theorizing that's worth while around the relationship of the law and the state to class that I'm skipping over here, and the relationship of ostensibly illegal capitalism to the state-as-(sometimes-)rival-gang, etc.