What Marx knew: crime pays – for the law-and-order industry

Feuding drug cartels make great TV – and handy political enemies. In France, as elsewhere, though it’s largely a myth, the ‘narco threat’ has become a justification for expanding the security machine.

In the early 1860s, Karl Marx wrote that just as a philosopher produces ideas and a poet verse, a criminal produces crime – and much else besides. At a time when narco-trafficking seems to have become one of French society’s principal scourges, his words merit renewed attention.

Going against the criminological thinking of his day, which tended to view crime as a kind of social or mental disease, Marx suggested that it was in fact an integral part of collective life. The sociologist Émile Durkheim explored this idea more systematically a few years later, showing that grouping certain acts and behaviours under the label ‘crime’ serves to demarcate a society’s moral boundaries, separating a majority of ‘honest men’ from a minority of ‘criminals’.

But Marx had an additional insight when he considered the ‘secondary benefits’ of crime: there are many activities (law, publishing, the press, science, technology) and professions (police officers, lawyers, insurers, locksmiths etc) that thrive because it exists. His list was not exhaustive: most of the political elite now merit a place on it, as they have made security one of their issues of choice.

The ascendancy of ‘law and order’, which began in the US in the early 1970s, spread some 30 years later to Europe and Latin America. It provoked a race to pass laws and make pronouncements condemning political opponents’ naivety and laxity, and calling for tougher crackdowns, even in political parties traditionally more favourable to crime prevention and defending liberties.

Separating security issues

By separating security from social issues with which it was once closely linked, this trend has profoundly reshaped the framework and operating principles not only of justice and policing, but also of education and social services. As a result, French prisons are full to overflowing (85,000 prisoners as of 1 July 2025, for 62,509 places). without any observable reduction in crime and (…)

Full article: 3 200 words.

Laurent Bonelli

Laurent Bonelli is a researcher in political science at the University of Paris-X (Nanterre) and member of the French team on the European Commission programme ‘The Changing Landscape of European Security’.

(1) Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, part I, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1988 (1861-63), p 355, available at Marxists.org/. (Original: Ein Philosoph produziert Ideen, ein Poet Gedichte, ein Pastor Predigten, ein Professor Kompendien usw. Ein Verbrecher produziert Verbrechen).

(2) Evan Le Bihan and Jérôme Moreau, ‘Au 1er juillet 2025, + 8,3 % de personnes détenues sur un an’ (On 1 July 2025, an 8.3% increase in prison population compared to previous year), Infos Rapides Justice, Paris, July 2025.

(3) Jérôme Durain and Étienne Blanc, commission of inquiry report on the impact of narco-trafficking in France and the measures needed to address it, Senate, Paris, 7 May 2024.

(4) United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims/.

(5) Xavier Besnard et al, Sécurité et société (Security and society), Insee Références, 2021 edition, Montrouge, 2021.

(6) Alex Brissot et al, ‘Les niveaux d’usage des drogues illicites en France en 2023’ (Illicit drug use in France 2023), Tendances, no 164, Paris, June 2024.

(7) Peter Reuter, Disorganized Crime: Illegal Markets and the Mafia, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1983.

(8) Oswaldo Zavala, La Guerra en las palabras: Una historia intelectual del “narco” en Mexico (1976-2020) (The war of words: an intellectual history of the ‘narco’ in Mexico, 1996-2020), Debate, Mexico City, 2022.

(9) Alessandro Dal Lago and Emilio Quadrelli, La città e le ombre: Crimini, criminali, cittadini (The city and the shadows: crime, criminals and citizens), Feltrinelli, Milan, 2003.

(10) Michel Kokoreff, Michel Péraldi and Monique Weinberger, Economies criminelles et mondes urbains (Criminal economies and urban worlds), PUF, Paris, 2007.

(12) ‘Prévalence nationale et régionale du tabagisme en France en 2021’ (National and regional prevalence of smoking in France 2021), www.santepubliquefrance.fr/.