Marxism, what you got?

[The Grand Nudger]

I agree that crime is a symptom of class struggle.

However, I disagree that if you do away with classes, you do away with crime.

Probably depends on the society - in abolishing slavery, for example, huge chunks of criminal law were wiped off the books and this very much did mean that all that crime was done away with.

A compassionate person might say -but those were bad laws hurting good people who committed no real crime...but that's a counterfactual world argument.  I give him the benefit of the doubt here when I'm being serious.  He believed that we would one day violently rebel - so he knew we weren't saints.  Surveying a class based society with laws powerfully aligned to class interests and feeling that this would get worse and contending that doing away with the rule of law would do away with crime, in those circumstances, would be very meaningfully true.  

Same thing with the government disappearing when communism is established. I think Marx got that wrong too.

Yeah, more like aspirational goals, right?  

In short, I consider myself a Marxist (because I think Marx had good criticisms). But I don't consider myself a communist. 

Even the type of communist who says, "Mao and the Soviets did it wrong."-- while these communists may be correct that Mao/Lenin did it wrong... I still think communism is unrealistic (as Marx envisioned it). People are determined by more than their social conditions. Social conditions are a huge determining factor, yes, but Marx overestimated how much of a factor it is.

I think a person might be in such a precarious state that their social conditions are overriding.  Those would have been the kinds of downtrodden cogs rising up against their capitalist masters in his idea of a better world.

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Class struggle? Some people are just bad, and enjoy committing crime.

Of the number of people currently imprisoned in the us, what percentage do they account for, if you had to guess? On a fundamental level, having the laws doesn't stop them - and getting rid of the laws wouldn't make anyone who wasn't already one of them do whatever shitty thing they do. The rule of law, and notions of some people™ just being bad, are more often tools for class oppression than objective assessments of human nature or necessity.