Definition
Marxist criminology explains crime by reference to the structure of capitalist economies. The competitive, unequal, and acquisitive logic of capitalism generates the material pressures and ideological frames that produce both ordinary street crime and the laws that criminalise it. The criminal law itself is read as a class instrument, not a neutral codification of shared morality.
The lineage runs from Willem Bonger's 1916 Criminality and Economic Conditions through Richard Quinney's social-reality-of-crime work in the 1970s and the British New Criminology of Taylor, Walton, and Young. Each generation reformulates the core claim: criminal categories serve dominant-class interests, while the daily harms of poverty, exploitation, and unsafe workplaces are systematically under-criminalised.
Why it matters
How it works
Analytically, a Marxist criminologist asks two questions of any criminal-justice phenomenon: whose interests does this law or practice serve, and what material conditions make this behaviour likely? The first directs attention to legislatures, courts, and police as sites where ruling-class interests are protected; the second locates offending in inequality, unemployment, and the alienation produced by wage labour.
The tradition has been criticised for treating law as a simple reflex of economic power and for underplaying the agency of working-class offenders and victims. Contemporary critical criminology absorbs the critique by combining structural analysis with attention to lived experience, intersectional power, and the harms produced by states and corporations as well as individuals.