Tim Pendry's Reviews > Organized Crime: A Very Short Introduction

This Oxford University Press 'Organised Crime: A Very Short Introduction' is solid enough but it reads throughout like an academic report to a government department. As a basic primer, it might be useful to someone entirely new to the subject but it cannot be said to be 'inspiring'.

One insight (although dealt with rather tentatively by the authors) is that our perceptions have been over-defined by, first, American reactions to the very specific experience of Italian-American organised crime and by, second, the emergent special interests of 'law enforcement'.

A sub-text of the final chapter is a frustration that law enforcement's propensity to secrecy makes it difficult for academics to get access to the data that they think they require in order to understand what is going on 'out there'. A suspicion is that law enforcement's political narrative may be flimsy.

Although the book is largely descriptive with little or minimal opinion, the final chapter more than hints at an uncomfortable truth - that organised crime is really not that organised except insofar as the market is organised ... it is just another aspect of human aspiration.

This leads us to some uncomfortable thoughts because, in the end, criminality is not defined in terms of moral good and evil so much as what the law dictates. Any assumption that the law is the same as justice or morality is as dodgy as the equation made between education and intelligence.

In general, there is some consonance of terms. Most people most of the time can reasonably prefer the order of the lawful State over the disorder of a market without restraints especially when the human condition creates desire for things that are harmful to it.

The discomfort comes from a number of factors - one is that criminal behaviour can be a reasonable response to aspiration in any system where aspiration for things (including security) is unavailable to some people but normal for others (within the system that law protects).

We might add here that the desire for 'bad' things - like addictive drugs or tobacco - may be driven by legitimate anxieties and pressures that the system as a whole will not deal with. Even human and sexual trafficking may be far more a negotiation with crime by the vulnerable than we might think.

Protection (revisited later as extortion) may be the least worse outcome where law enforcement itself has failed to provide it. Loan sharking would not need to exist outside a world of low wages and vulnerable small businesses. Criminals mostly exploit the already weak or exploited.

The authors flip things on their head a little further by pointing out that many criminals simply want things and do a cost-benefit analysis on the various non-legal means of ceasing to be weak or exploited themselves. They are, in short, just business people working in a parallel system.

Another factor is that we should be in no doubt that order (in the form of States) originated in what we would call crime if extortion is a crime. Most of our state structures are derived from older forms where tribute was exacted for 'protection' and eventually became 'taxation'.

In other words (and we do not have to be an anarchist to accept this), exactly who benefits from the State structures dependent on taxation and how and what they define as criminal is highly relevant to any attempt to match any concept of good and evil to the law.

Finally, in the struggle between order and criminality, order is not averse to extreme and cruel measures sanctified as law if and when it can get away with it. One matter not covered very much in the book is organised political crime or 'resistance' but this really needs considering.

If the State under pressure can start banging people up for a Facebook post and turning them into 'criminals', frustrated and excessively exploited or marginalised communities can turn to criminality to finance resistance or create their own authority.

The response of the prevailing global neo-liberal community has been to try to force the abandonment of any notion of resistance or national liberation but retain the political dimension by creating a super-criminal category of 'terrorism'.

The category may have back-fired as the complexity of Hamas' or Hezbollah's resistance has been understood better under what amounts to a state terrorist operation against their communities by Israel but it has also enabled States to impose extreme measures on their own populations.

The abstract problem here is that, whereas lawful states can define criminality by fiat, there is no universally valid international legal structure that has not ultimately been a measure of the American interest (now under severe pressure). The 'rogue state' category has been invented to deal with this.

Globalisation, which may prove to have been order's fundamental strategic error in maintaining itself viably, has intensified the ability of aspirational actors to work the global market system and driven 'order' to go trans-national and build a sledgehammer bureaucratism under US influence.

Similarly, the New World Order's attempt to define itself as a global police force seems to be in ruins as 'rogue states' and 'terrorists' have proven resilient with increasing sympathies for their predicament from significant domestic minorities who are otherwise law-abiding.

This presents a fascinating crisis of definitions where the temptation of the system is to start criminalising aspects of political dissent at home. This threatens to worsen the situation as elements amongst those targeted may start to see unlawfulness as a reasonable response to unjust legality.

On balance, one should very much be part of the faction of humanity that seeks order over market chaos but if that order fails to deliver what people aspire to, is inept at controlling the market in general and becomes tyrannous in defence of order, then we have mounting problems.

In practice, we should not be romantic about criminals. Sometimes they deliver 'goods' that really should never have been under state sanction. The case study of alcohol during prohibition is probably one of humanity's greatest examples of unintended consequences on these lines.

Far more often, they supply 'bads' - addictive drugs, faulty counterfeit products, low priced tobacco, unnecessary protection (extortion), financial redistribution from the most vulnerable in society to themselves, exploitative labour, access to non-consensual sex and so forth.

Getting the balance right between meeting the aspirations of all humanity equally, dealing with the trade in oppressive and dangerous 'bads' and maintaining a 'good' (that is, smoothly functioning) market system is not easy. A certain balance was seriously broken with imperial neo-liberalism.

It would have been good if the authors had been bolder in addressing this tension which is essentially political but, as a basic overview, even if unsatisfactory in places, this will serve most newcomers to the subject well enough.