Chapter 4 from the 1998 book Money and the Human Condition by Michael Neary and Graham Taylor.
4 Probation, Criminology and Anti-oppression
The Current Predicament
The Probation Service of England and Wales is the least spectacular agency within the Criminal Justice System (CJS), lacking the dramas and cruel tensions of other aspects of law enforcement. Working in the space between the Courts, the Police and the Prison Service, its practice is motivated by a commitment to the principle of social justice, involving a concern for the well-being of all those caught up within the administration of the law, including, and, in particular, the people against whom the law is being enforced ('the offender'). In recent years this 'decent' presence has been questioned as the Probation Service, along with other parts of the CJS, has been forced to redefine itself in response to the social difficulties experienced by all western democracies and the associated rapid escalation of crime (May, 1994).
This realignment in the administration of crime initially through the Criminal Justice Act (1991), offered the Probation Service a central role in the management of recidivism, but has more recently, through the repeal of the 1991 Act by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1995), driven the Service to the point where it is barely recognisable even to itself. Decency and discrimination are being replaced by a managerial authoritarianism (May, 1994; Nellis, 1995).
In response to this punishing imposition, and in an attempt to protect itself, the Probation Service and its scientists are developing a set of values through which they can defend and develop their work. In opposition to the new reactionary realism displayed by the Home Office, the Probation Service intelligentsia is formulating its own realistic set of proposals, now being worked out in a debate between those who wish to reaffirm the general principle of social justice based within a commitment to liberal individualism (to reaffirm the Service's traditional role) and those who argue for a more practical, realistic and precise definition within the same moral arrangement. The advocates of this approach argue that the social justice ethic, and its attendant social work practice is illdefined, that it fails to take into account the new reality of management within the service (i.e. 'benevolent corporatism') and calls for a more criminologically sophisticated value-base built around the linked notions of anti-custodialism, restorative justice and community safety so as to redefine the Probation Service as a Community Justice Agency (Nellis, 1995).
Despite the humanitarian and apparently radical aspect of these proposals they are deeply problematic. Mainstream criminology suffers from its normative assumptions: morality is assumed as a basis for human action, with crime an egotistical deviation. The exercise of sanctions is legitimated through recourse to a supra-social and ahistorical secular, metaphysical authority. Radical social science (critical criminology), despite its more material foundations, is also inadequate as a theory for progressive social transformation. It dogmatically assumes that crime functions as the ideological support to a system of social control within which criminality is romanticised as the logical consequence. Mainstream criminology is deficient because it concentrates on the form of social power without an investigation of the content out of which this form is derived. Radical criminology is inadequate because it concentrates on the content of social power: its repressive character, without explaining why these precise forms of regulation exist in the form that they do. It is left to imply that punishment follows some rational logic of repression with no clear understanding of how these repressive instruments can be transformed (Fine, 1984).
The problems inherent in these positions have meant that the debate has got bogged down as both sides search for the ethical high ground, or try to demonstrate their ability to reflect more accurately the reality of the present situation by ever-more pragmatic solutions. In the meantime the whole project is undermined by an escalation in criminal activity and an ever-more reactionary political response.
The purpose of this chapter is to intervene in this debate and to open up new areas for discussion. I take as my starting point remarks made by Mike Nellis (1995), who in a perceptive aside points to the poverty of theoretical interpretation within this debate and the need for a theory that counters the repressive regimes that the Probation Service is forced to take up:
The more fundamental concept of anti-oppressiveness can be revised to produce new ways of thinking about probation values . . . anti-oppressiveness is a serviceable basis for further arguments . . . anti-oppressiveness has not been adequately theorised, and until such work is done its intellectual foundations will remain precarious.
(ibid.: 30)
In order to advance this debate Nellis cites the work of Paulo Friere and Erich Fromm; but, having set up this interesting channel for discussion, he abandons it and, avoiding the problem, escapes back into mainstream and critical criminology.
It is precisely my intention to ground this debate within a theory of anti-oppression. I shall contextualise the discussion within a political philosophy that argues against the current dominant bourgeois orthodoxies in a manner that is logically, historically and materially informed. Following Nellis's advice, I shall situate the discussion in the world of anti-psychology with an investigation into the work of Erich Fromm and other writings in the anti-psychological tradition (i.e. Lucien Sève, Deleuze and Guattari). From Lucien Sève, I take it that a theory of anti-oppression must include a theory of human personality, i.e. an investigation not simply of the will to power (state); but an autopsy into the will to life, the 'science of human biography', as Sève has it. I shall show how Deleuze and Guattari have developed this theory of personality through an exposition of Marx's theory of money and of history. I support these abstractions through an examination of two ways in which the emergence of money as a supreme form of social power has been recorded: as the novel and as social history. In Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe, writing in the eighteenth century, gives an account of the first biographical life. In The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in 18th Century London (1991) Peter Linebaugh provides a social history of money through the aggregated biographies of the London poor. From this work, I shall conclude that (auto)-biographical life is a life lived as a human processed form of the social relations of capital. I shall substantiate all of this by way of another historical account of the Probation Service and with reference to my own biography.
Paulo Friere
Nellis reminds us that Paulo Friere is one of the few genuine radicals to have influenced social work practice; and, therefore, despite the fact that he has disappeared under the onslaught of radical management theory, we would do well to rediscover his work. The strength of Friere's work is the obviously successful campaigns to develop literacy in Latin America. However, although the subversive nature of his analysis has proved an inspiration to radical educationalists and excited the fears of the Brazilian generals in 1964, who jailed him for 70 days following the military coup, it is limited as a theory on which to base anti-oppressive strategy. Friere's theorising suffers from a complete lack of concrete or material analysis.
While his work derives out of a sympathy for the real condition of class oppression imposed on the Brazilian poor there is no explanation for the logic of that oppression other than as a left version of a standard theory of political elites, whose position is psychologised as an oppressive motivation explained by the rulers' ambition to remain powerful. This is linked to a Maoist attachment to revolutionary education as an aspect of cultural transformation within an idealist notion of the Hegelian dialectic. His recourse to psychoanalytic theory is superficial, borrowing from Fromm and Marcuse without any reference to their considerable theoretical disagreements. His suggestion that the poor form an attachment to an enlightened cadre, who will provide them with the intellectual tools to understand the nature of their predicament and how to transcend it, has obvious appeal for academics already in positions of authority. However, its validity as a theory of revolution has been undermined by the Chinese nightmare of the cultural revolution in the 1960s and the degradation of revolutionary movements in Latin America, i.e. into Castroism and Guevarism.
Erich Fromm
A more rewarding area for investigation can be found in the work of Erich Fromm (1900–80). Working within the problem of consciousness, and searching for an explanation for human behaviour, Erich Fromm formed part of the tradition of radical psychoanalysis — including Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt School and the Surrealists — that attempted to explain, following the Freudian moment (1856–1939), human behaviour as a science of the irrational or the theory of the unconscious. That is, Fromm sought to combine Marx's class theory with Freud's theory of instinctual drives.
Fromm took from Sigmund Freud the assertion that 'most of that which we are conscious of is not real and that most of what is real is not in our consciousness' (Fromm, 1971: 14). It was, therefore, the unconscious (the hidden) that held the key to real desire, expressed concretely as dreams, neurosis and 'unintentional' acts. For Fromm it was no longer sufficient to explain human activity simply from behaviour or intention, rather it was necessary to analyse what lay behind it. The progressive aspect of this theory of human irrationality (psychoanalysis) was that through an awareness of the psyche, one can understand and control irrationality (i.e. self-destructive tendencies) through Reason. The negative aspect was that, for Freud, needs and desires are constant, their satisfaction was an end in itself.
Fromm argued that this satisfied formulation denied Freud any revolutionary potential. Fromm exposed the bourgeois assumptions that underpinned Freud's work and the politics that it supported. Freud's notion of repressed sexuality was derived from his own notion of society as the ultimate form of human organisation. In this way Freud becomes part of the intellectual bourgeois project reflected in other liberal social science, e.g. Weber in sociology and marginalist economics (see Clarke, 1991a). In the psychoanalytical moment man is the abstract individual of bourgeois economics, isolated, self-sufficient, realising his needs through exchange in the market which appears to work for the mutual satisfaction of all. Driven by the economic notion of scarcity, man is motivated by the desire to satisfy his need for self-preservation (the reality principle) and sexual satisfaction (the pleasure principle).
The reactionary tendency of this theory for Fromm was that within the Freudian theory of need man is driven by the necessity to unburden himself of unpleasurable tensions. It denies the possibility of a theory of need as a result of abundance where human behaviour is not driven simply by the need to survive within the limits of that society; but, rather, to desire more intense human experience. Although Fromm accepted that Freud had produced a dynamic reading of human action, he argued that Freud destroyed the dynamism in his model by converting the social and historical into a timeless myth: a Greek tragedy. Man might be striving to make sense of his life, but his life is already scripted.
This script takes on ever more tragic dimensions with Freud's reassessment of the nature of man following the horrors of the First World War. Ego and sexuality are subsumed within a notion of the life instinct (Eros) in opposition to the death instinct (Thanatos), the root of all human destructiveness. This new configuration abandons any possibility of human satisfaction, carrying the notion of the avoidance of unpleasure and tension to its ultimate place of complete unstimulation: death. Destructiveness is inevitable. Death reduces the tension of social life completely, returning living substance to the 'quiescence of the inorganic world' (Fromm, 1970: 47).
Fromm developed his understanding of consciousness through the work of Karl Marx. In the German Ideology Marx wrote: 'It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness'; and in the Preface to The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines consciousness.'
In order to establish this connection between psychoanalysis and historical materialism, psychology and sociology, Fromm premised that all social phenomena are related back to relations between human beings which had somehow escaped from human control. Following the Marxist humanist tradition, found in Lukács and the early work of Marx, Fromm sought to investigate the 'social totality' rather than just its economic base. Fromm's radical Marxist social psychology was constructed on the basis that it was necessary to investigate the social world from a perspective of the fundamental nature of the mode of production and the class-based nature of society. Central to Fromm's concern was the acceptance of the notion of individual and personal gratification and development as against the Freudian notion of repressed individuality. Fromm, therefore, rejected Freud's libido theory, the Oedipus complex and the biological determinism of instinctual theory.
Fromm rediscovered Marx's interest in psychology, 'the natural science of man' (Marx, 1975b: 354). Unlike Freud and liberal social science, Marx does not deal with man as abstraction. Marx's concept of man is dynamic: driven by passion and desire in relation to that which can satisfy. These drives are not ends in themselves, nor are they the product of animal instincts or chemistry; they are social, the energy through which man transforms himself and the world around him. Man does not simply use the world to satisfy his desire, but expresses himself in and through the world. The limits and possibilities of this process are explained in Marx's theory of alienation. For Marx, sensuality is the active expression of human reality, and man's ability to confirm himself in this relation. Each new recognition opens up a new possibility of development: 'each new object truly recognised opens up a new organ within ourselves' (Fromm, 1970: 67).
Fromm's work is important. It points out that the inability to overcome the impossibilities of everyday life is not simply a crisis of psychoanalysis, nor even a crisis of man, but a crisis of life itself. And that within this problematic, psychoanalysis still has a crucial role to play because it deals with issues of 'critical awareness, the uncovering of the deadly illusions and rationalisations that paralyse the power to act' (ibid.: 191).
But despite the importance of these insights, it is not at all clear how helpful they are in developing a real material psychology or a theory of anti-oppression, or to what extent he escapes the necrophiliac eschatology of Freud, or the idealistic and moralising tendencies in Marx's early work. In Escape from Freedom (1941) the spontaneous inspiration required to develop truth and social justice is introduced as an extraneous variable rather than the product of a specific social relation. His notion of 'social character' suffers from social-psychological functionalism. He tends to socialise psychology and psychologise the social (Wiggerhaus, 1994: 272–3). In The Art of Loving (1957), a treatise informed by eastern religions, Spinozian philosophy, Freud and Marx, Fromm's pertinent understandings about the nature of modern love are undermined by a romantic mysticism. And, finally, revolution is conjured up by a supranatural appeal to the transcendental mysteries of creation: 'In the name of Life!' (Fromm, 1957: 192). In order to develop a real material theory of antioppression we need to look elsewhere.
Lucien Sève: A Theory Of Human Personality
An attempt to continue this analysis and develop it more materially can be found in the work of Lucien Sève. Writing in 1968, Sève's project was to develop a theory of personality, the absence of which he suggests is a problem not just for psychology but for all social science. The development of a theory of personality requires a radical philosophical and political critique (materialist and dialectic) of psychology's basic concepts; to expose and understand its own limited terms of reference and, in particular, to highlight psychology's ambitious but confusing concept of man: the study of human behaviour.
Sève refers to psychology's working notion of its object of enquiry as the 'logical monstrosity' that undermines all psychological investigation. All psychology presupposes a particular philosophy of man. It understands that human personality is premised on the belief that the individual personality is a particular example of the general personality, that the concrete individual is a single variation of man in general, but man in general can be nothing other than an abstract individual. In order to overcome this contradiction, psychology seeks refuge in the speculative pseudo-materiality of biology (in which social life is naturalised) or the idealistic pseudo-scientificity of sociology (where particularity is regeneralised as ideal-types and categories), and/or a combination of both. Sève argues that the behaviourist focus abandons the social relations or the determining conditions within which human personality is developed. He gives the example of wage-labour where the condition within which the activity of workers is determined is ignored and wages become the preoccupation of the economist.
Sève finds a more compelling basis for a real psychology in the work of Karl Marx, not only in his early writing on the subject where he deals specifically with psychology, but also more usefully when the speculations of this early work were immanently developed through his theory of commodity fetishism. Through this work Marx replaces his earlier concept of abstract man or 'human essence' with a theory of abstraction where the substance of man is found, not in his individuality, but within the ensemble of real-life processes (social relations) which man produces and which produce him. It was Marx's project to discover these processes so that he might more adequately conceive of a scientific theory of personality. This investigation, argues Sève, took forms that were not always psychological, but the question of the real nature of man is present in all the categories that Marx examined in his later work (e.g. abstract and concrete labour, money, surplus value, the general law of capitalist accumulation . . . ). Sève suggests that there is no short-cut to this project: any attempt to base a real psychology on the early work leads back to a speculative humanism (cf. Fromm). Such is the nature of the project that it has not been completed. The project began by Marx has not been set back on its feet. Sève suggests a way forward by the integration of historical materialism with what he calls 'the science of human biography' (Sève, 1975: 39), within which every form of human existence has at once its characteristic social relation and its specific form of human individuality.
Sève argues that the relationship between the form of specific individualities is an immanent one. For example, Marx's categories of capitalist and worker are not basic personality types but the objective logic of the activity out of which they are derived: the capitalist as 'capital personified' and labour as 'a machine for the production of human value'. In this way, the particularity of each concrete individual, each biography, is the result of the process in and against which it is produced. Each life can then be analysed in relation to a series of acts considered in the context of their objective social results (psychology). This Sèvian concept of acts is a much more dynamic idea than the more orthodox notion of human behaviour. It is based on a progressive idea of human need, or what Sève calls, 'the expanded reproduction of activity'.
Sève develops this idea through an exposition of the central yet subordinate position of humanity in the process of capitalist accumulation, through a discussion of the relationship between need and desire, production and consumption. The Freudian thesis is that the fundamental motor of human activity is the reduction of tension or the fulfilment of a desire: that needs are satisfied through consumption. Sève argues that this exposition fails to explain the expanded reproduction of activity or 'the appropriation of a social heritage'. Sève suggests, following Marx's theory of capital valorisation,1 that the expansion of human need and desire is produced from within the circuit of capitalist (re)production: desire is valorised. This demonstrates not only the social and historical character of human need, but also, at the same time, demonstrates the central yet subordinate position of human existence in the production of itself.
This argument has devastating consequences for liberal social theory and orthodox Marxist account of class struggle for whom the working class exist as a fetished category. It suggests that as a form of capital (wage-labour) human life exists against itself. The struggle against oppression, therefore, involves a struggle in and against the form through which human life exists and not just against an external alienated form of capitalist power (e.g. the state).
Anti-Oedipus
This hypothesis is elaborated further in Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1984) written by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In this book they develop a theory of antioppression (revolution) through what they claim is a material psychiatry against the repression of psychoanalysis and its Oedipalised object. Central to the theory, and in common with others examined so far in this anti-psychoanalytic movement, is the notion of desire as a process of self production in a society of abundance. What is important for my analysis is that Deleuze and Guattari locate the problem of desire and repression through Marx's theory of money-capital and the development of revolutionary theories of money in the work of J.M. Keynes:2
One of Keynes' contributions was the reintroduction of desire into the problem of money; it is this that must be subjected to the requirements of a Marxist analysis. That is why it is unfortunate that Marxist economics too often dwell on considerations concerning the mode of production, and on the theory of money as the general equivalent as found in the first section of Capital, without attaching enough importance to banking practice, to financial operations, and to the specific circulation of credit money — which would be the meaning of a return to Marx, to the Marxist theory of money.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 230)
Deleuze and Guattari develop Marx's concept of the relation between man (social) and his world (nature), expressed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the Grundrisse and Capital. For them man exists in an immanent relationship with the world. Man is not simply the bearer of a relation or an appendage to the machine. Man is the relation. He is the machine. There is nothing else. Within Deleuze and Guattari's cybernetic universe, machines and the logic of machines (production) have replaced man and nature; nothing else has any meaning, everything is production, everything has the same essential reality, with desire as its immanent principle, its divine energy, dissolving all idealistic and normative categories. This process is driven, not by Platonic lack or Oedipal need or Kantian fantasy, but by passion, defined as 'the essential reality of man and nature', or 'the missing subject'. For Deleuze and Guattari, to talk of a fixed subject is always to talk of repression. What is real is what is produced: 'There is only desire and the social and nothing else' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984).
Body Without Organs
For Deleuze and Guattari, the process of production within which man and nature have been subsumed is deeply problematic; it suffers from organisation. This takes the form of identity, abstraction and the not-consumable. Deleuze and Guattari formulate this organised condition as the 'body without organs'. In a conceptualisation that reworks Marx's notion of commodity fetishism, they argue that this organisation regulates and records production as a process of anti-production. That is, the 'body without organs' forms the surface of this process and provides the identity on which the process is recorded and distributed. It claims what appears to be the case, that the process emanates from it, as a miraculated form of its own, non-derived power, or a 'true consciousness of a false movement'. The false movement is apparently derived from the movement of that which provides its identity, abstraction and not-consumables: money. The modern form of the Body without Organs is then the Body of Money: 'the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984).
What makes the Body of Money different from previous bodies without organs (The Earth Body and The Despotic Body) is the nature of capitalist production. The Body of Money does not simply regulate and record codes which are inscribed upon it, but decodes and recodes the codes as they come up against their own limit. Capitalism then operates by decoding flows, that is, substituting for intrinsic codes (i.e. codes that have an internal logic [e.g. community]) an axiomatic code of abstract quantities in the form of money. Deuleuze and Guattari argue that this process of (expansion), of concreting the abstract, of decoding, occurs through the form that money takes: as wages and as finance:
In the one case impotent money signs of exchange value, a flow of means of payment relative to consumer goods and use-values, and a one to one relation between money and an imposed range of products ('which I have a right to, which are my due, so they're mine'); in the other case, signs of the power of capital, flows of financing, a system of differential quotients of production that bear witness to a prospective force or a long term evaluation, not realisable hic et nunc, and functioning as an axiomatic of abstract quantities. In the one case, money represents a potential break-deduction in a flow of consumption; in the other case, it represents a break-detachment and a re-articulation of economic chains directed toward the adaptation of flows of production to the disjunctions of capital.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 228–9)
This dissimilation provides the ground for the immanence of the social relation of modern society and provides the dynamic for the logic of desire. One money flow works within and against and through the other:
The apparent objective movement where the lower or subordinate form is no less necessary than the other . . . and where no integration of the dominated classes could occur without the shadow of this unapplied principle of convertibility — which is enough, however, to ensure that the desire of the most disadvantaged creature will invest with all its strength irrespective of any economic understanding or lack of it, the capitalist social field as a whole. Flows, who doesn't desire flows, and relationships between flows, and breaks in flows? — all of which capitalism was able to mobilise and break under these hitherto unknown conditions of money.
(ibid.: 1984, 229)
In this process society and all forms of life are monetised:
A global object of an investment to desire. The wage earners desire, the capitalists desire, everything moves to the rhythm of the one and the same desire, founded on the differential relation of flows having no assignable exterior limit, and where capitalism reproduces its immanent limits on an ever widening and more comprehensive scale.
(ibid.: 239)
Negative desire, or the capacity for man to appear to desire repression (Fascism), is not the product of ideology, of false consciousness, but the result of real material flows: 'a secret investment of desire', which is contained within the monetisation of society. This is a material process. Production is real. It is 'at the level of flows, the monetary flows included, and not at the level of ideology, that the integration of desire is achieved' (ibid.: 239).
The way in which money flows, and its connection with desire, is theorised by Deleuze and Guattari within Marx's theory of money: C-M-C (payment) and M-C-M' (financing). Capitalism can only proceed by continually developing the subjective essence of abstract wealth or production for the sake of production, that is, 'production as an end in itself, the absolute development of the productivity of labour'; but on the other hand and at the same time, it can do so only in the framework of its own limited purpose as a determinate mode of production, 'the self-expansion of existing capital':
Under the first aspect capitalism is continually surpassing its own limits, always de-territorialising further, displaying a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every restriction and bond; but under the second, strictly complementary aspect, capitalism is continually confronting limits and barriers that are interior and immanent to itself (desire), and that, precisely because they are immanent let themselves be overcome only provided they are produced on a wider scale.
(ibid.: 259–60)
Capitalism, therefore, liberates the flows of desire, the worker is free to sell his labour, wage-labour takes on an equivalence or a demand that needs to be satisfied: desire, 'a generalised decoding of flows'. However, this occurs under the social conditions that define its own limit and the possibility of its own dissolution. The condition of wage-labour needs to be enforced, freedom and equality are imposed as Oedipus. The Body of Money is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it towards its schizophrenic limit:
The moment when capital comes face to face with itself and the limits of its own mortality: its inherent tendency brought to fulfilment, its surplus product, its proletariat and its exterminating angel.
(ibid.: 35)
This is a contradictory process, coding and recoding social existence, between paranoia (the state), schizophrenia (the limit of the condition), and celibacy (the celibate machine), the way in which the process might be transcended. For Deleuze and Guattari the celibate-machine is the opposition between the desiring machine and the body without organs. This opposition produces a new form of humanity, i.e. it contains traces of the previous way of existing but is essentially a new form of existential reality. Everything about it is different (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 18). What is new and different is the fact that it can only exist as, through and against money. Human life loses its dependency on other humans and gains a new dependency on money. Human life becomes the possibility of an independent life. The human condition loses its immediate connection between other independent lives and the world around it and is suspended in a condition of permanent desire, or a 'zone of intensity' that can only be satisfied through the agency of money (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 18). As this agent of satisfaction is alien to human life consummation is always a degraded and degrading aspiration (Tomkins, 1997).
Deleuze and Guattari propose schizo-analysis as a theory of anti-oppression, as a material psychology to counteract the repressive nature of Oedipus, to answer the question why people appear to desire their own repression. And, at the same time, to explain what motivates revolution. Schizophrenia is not revolutionary; the process is schizophrenic. Capitalism is mad. Society is not driven mad; it is mad. Schizo-analysis expresses the contradictory manner in which life exists, as the economy of desire and the desire for economy. In the former, it exists as the unconscious libidinal investment of desire, i.e. to introduce a new code, to realise its molecular possibilities: revolution. In the latter it exists as the preconscious investment of class or interest enslaved to a structured molar aggregate, anti-revolution or the revolution betrayed (e.g. social democracy). Each form of desire is realised through the form of money-as-capital; in its subordination as wage-labour desire invests passionately in the system that oppresses it; and as capital, creating the desire that will ultimately consume itself.
Money: Its Life And Times — A Marxist History
This thesis can be supported by an analysis of the development of money as a submissive object of desire into a mass weapon of its own destruction. That is, through an examination of the creation of what we now call 'society', the process through which the social world became monetised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This historical moment is the culmination of a process of decomposition of feudal authority that had been going on since at least the twelfth century. Feudal authority had not been constituted by one dominant logic, but by a constellation of order that tended towards, but did not demand, a unifying principle. Under feudal regulation law was based on custom and tradition, with rights and privileges appertaining to concrete individuals or a delimited group of individuals. Each town, estate or guild had its own traditional rules, with no common universal legal status common to all. Each regulation was particular and local (guild, estate, etc.), each relation was personal and visible, each instruction was private and direct. This was an immediate political system of disorder predicated on absolute authority; each relation was a relation of power, of personal domination and subordination. It was a situation of extensive inequality (Kay and Mott, 1982).
The economic condition of the later middle ages (from the twelfth to the fifteenth century) was restricted to regional economies based on the town and the countryside. Within this system a substantial portion of peasant production was for their own consumption, another part of their production (not money) went as rent (established by custom) and another part of a peasant's productive life was in the service (corvée) of the appropriate lord. What meagre surpluses were made by peasants were sold at market, the money made was used to buy tools from urban craftsmen in a process of production that was regulated by the customary demand and monopoly regulations. Any surplus production accumulated by the lord was sold or bartered for luxury items from home and abroad. What is important to note is the fact that the rural feudal economy was distinguished by its overwhelmingly natural character and the feeble development of money exchange (Rubin, 1979: 19).
By the sixteenth century this system was being dissolved through the decomposition of the natural economy under the pressure of a money-economy and the growth of merchant capital. Merchant capital is based on the principle of buying cheap and selling dear. In the monopoly and protected markets this enabled merchant traders to accumulate vast amounts of wealth. At the same time, colonial development saw an enormous increase in the amount of precious metal and an improvement in the extraction technologies. This ensured a rise in the quantity of money in circulation, leading to an increase in commercial exchange, and fuelling the demand for yet more money. Faced with this pressure of the growth in the importance of money feudal landowners abandoned the quick rent system in favour of the creation of rented free tenancies, which went to the highest bidder. Peasants were expelled from their land to which they had a customary right, to create room for grazing sheep, whose wool had become lucrative in the expanding international market:
Gentleman do not consider it a crime to drive poor people off their property. On the contrary, they insist that the land belongs to them and throw the poor out from their shelter, like curs. In England, at the moment, thousands of people go begging, staggering from door to door.
(Thomas More, Utopia, p. 23)
The law was used to deprive people of their customary rights and to drive them into the expanding production process in the towns. That is, to force them to exist as wage-labour, to exist through money. The penalty for refusal to work, 'vagabondage', was brutal:
The measures adopted by the state against vagabondage were harsh: able bodied vagabonds were lashed or had their chests branded with red-hot irons; persistent vagrants were liable to execution. At the same time maximum wage rates payable to workers were established by law. The brutal moves against vagabondage, and the laws setting maximum wages were attempts by governments of the day to turn these declassed social elements into a disciplined obedient class of wage workers who, for a pittance, would offer up their labour to a youthful and growing capitalism.
(Rubin, 1979: 24)
In the towns this process of decomposition of the feudal economic order was occurring through the insertion of money into the process of production. What were regional economies were now being connected through the universal value of money. These connections were made through the deliberate creation of surpluses by producing commodities to be sold in the new demanding and rewarding (inter)national markets. This market was facilitated by the appearance of 'middlemen' with orders that needed to be satisfied. The significance of this is that the direct link between producer and consumer is broken. There is now a logic external to the previously self-serving economy. Initially these 'middlemen' bought a portion of what was being produced, but eventually demand expanded to the point where they were buying the total volume produced. Eventually, a position is arrived at where the 'middlemen' are giving producers orders, supplying them with the raw materials and paying them a remuneration (the wage). The wage turns the independent craftworker into a dependent wage-earner. This process develops as cottage industry, machino-facture and eventually as the factory with a highly developed division of labour.
The significance of this process in so far as money is concerned is that money has taken on a new social identity. Money is not simply a rational instrument of exchange, it is now, as money-capital, money that exists in order to make more money through the process of production — the determining logic of the whole productive system. Money-capital now exists as the supreme and unavoidable social power. Money now has two identities: it is schizophrenic.
These two functions of money are essential aspects to the development of the capitalist system. Surplus-value is produced in the process of production and realised in exchange. But these two functional identities suggest different logical imperatives. As a rational instrument of exchange, money is the means by and through which human need is satisfied; enabling humanity to exist as independent choosing beings and, therefore, as moral individuals. As money-capital exists in order to make itself more, it has no interest other than itself. In this form it is indifferent to human need. It is cruel and brutal.
Political economy has focused on one or other of these identities. For Adam Smith money, as a rational instrument of exchange, could facilitate human happiness. For Karl Marx money, as money-capital, could lead only to eventual human immiseration. The value of money-capital can expand only by forcing labour into wage-labour and keeping the value of labour low. If anything threatens the expansion of value, it will evacuate that place leaving a trial of destruction in its wake.
The process through which this monetisation of social life occurred was one of extraordinary upheaval. The seventeenth century is the most revolutionary period in English history, featuring regicide after the Civil War; the establishment of a Republic under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell; Restoration, when the Old Order tried to reassert itself; and finally Revolution in 1688, when the Old Order was reconstituted as the monetisation of society (Hill, 1991). This moment is described in orthodox history as the reconstitution of the monarchy in a form we know today, answerable to Parliament and having only limited powers. In fact, the whole of society was reconstituted. This moment was the culmination of six hundreds of years of struggle, and witnessed the transition from the religion-based ethics of feudalism to the secular ethics of capitalism. It was a period when the traditional controls were removed; right and wrong were to be negotiated; the Divine Right of Kings became the Divine Right of Providence. Property became King (Mitchell, 1978: 10).
This period saw the reconstitution of the whole of society at all levels. The ground-rules and explanations of everyday life had to be redefined:
Thus the period is one of profound value confusion and of unusual social, economic and morality mobility — the like of which has not been seen since in England. It was a time of great uncertainty when different moral and legal codes conflicted in their claims to universal validity. It was a period when the values which today we hold as self-evident were very much up for grabs . . . the clear cut oppositions of crime and good citizenship, morality and immorality . . . have not yet separated themselves out.
(Mitchell, 1978: 10–11)
This is a period when what we now know as the criminal law was struggling to establish itself. Fewer people were punished for their religious or political views. The rapid escalation in the number of crimes that incurred the death penalty was for crimes against property: 'capital' punishment. Despite the disorder of this period its significance for criminological study has rarely been fully understood (see Thompson, 1977; Hill, 1991; Linebaugh, 1991). The transition from feudal to capital relations has been portrayed by the bourgeois social sciences as an evolutionary development based on the rationality of historical progress around improved technology of industry and agriculture. However, this narrative entirely misses the point. What is being struggled over in this period, following the intervention of money-capital into the process of production, is a new form of existential reality (see Rubin, 1979). As Christopher Hill (1991) has it: 'The world was turned upside down.' It is impossible to underestimate the significance of this upheaval, nor the problem that this new reality had in invoking and reconstituting itself as a political society. What was at stake was nothing less than the basis of human value and of human life.'
In order to understand this upheaval, it is useful to look at the way in which the new social order — 'society' — recorded the process. And the way in which it attempted to understand itself through the novel, a new art-form that appeared at this time.
Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders, written in 1723 by Daniel Defoe, but set in 1682, was one of the first attempt to record this new social order. The book is a dramatisation of the conflict and confusion that occurred in the seventeenth century over the establishment of a new moral and legal basis of capitalist society. Juliet Mitchell, in the Introduction to the 1978 edition, argues that the novel endures as 'a profound consideration of the creation of social values and the relationship of the individual to society' (Mitchell, 1978: 5).
The story is the first story of a life lived: the first biography. It begins with Moll as an orphaned child of 'criminal' pedigree; it traces her sexual adventures, including incest, marriage and prostitution, and her decline into crime — at which she was very successful. It records her punishments, her escapes and her eventual triumph into a prosperous old age. Through an account of the monetisation of society, it provides an account of the first appearance of human life processed as a form of money.
Money is among the main protagonists in the novel. Money is the reason Moll does anything and provides her with the capacity to do anything. Moll steals and is a prostitute for one reason: she has no money. When prosperous, she leads a moral life. Moll exists as a juxtaposition of contradictory moral elements which have been imposed on her through the monetisation of the social world. She is heroine and villain, capitalist and thief, wife and prostitute, saint and sinner. Mitchell (ibid.) makes the point that the boundary between crime and non-crime is hard to draw at this moment and that 'the epoch in which she lived was still struggling to convince itself of the distinction'. This problem of 'distinction' applied not just to a definition of crime but to all aspects of social life including and especially the nature of the relationship between the sexes and the precise nature of human nature.
Making the same point, but from the detached perspective of a social history, Peter Linebaugh considers the phenomenon of human lives as they are lived through the development of the monetisation of society. In order to draw general conclusions about the period, the policy and its criminal behaviours, Linebaugh uses the technique of aggregating biographies (i.e. the consideration of groups of individuals, 'the London Hanged', studied as individual dramas). Aggregation, he argues, enables us to understand the similarities and differences between the condemned and the condemning, and to consider that what may appear incidental or anecdotal in the individual case may attain from an aggregated study a significance that puts it close to the essence of class relations in civil society.
In The London Hanged: A Critical Study of Hanging in the 18th Century Linebaugh investigates this most terrible sanction through a conceptualisation of money-capital as the determining social condition:
In criminology as in economics there is scarcely a more powerful word than 'capital'. In the former discipline it denotes death; in the latter it has designated the 'substance' or the 'stock' of life: apparently opposite meanings. Just why the same word 'capital' has come to mean both crimes punishable by death and the accumulation of wealth founded on the produce of previous (or dead) labour might be left to etymologists were not the association so striking, so contradictory, and so exact in expressing the theme of this book. For this book explores the relationship between the organised death of living labour (capital punishment) and the oppression of the living by dead labour (the punishment of capital).
(Linebaugh, 1991: XV)
Inspired by E.P. Thompson, George Rudé and E.J. Hobsbawm, who investigated the history of premodern crime (e.g. Robin Hood), and developing themes explored in Albion's Fatal Tree (1975), Linebaugh provides a history of crime and punishment in the eighteenth century through a social history of money.
Periodised chronologically to correspond to stages of capitalist development (finance capitalism, mercantilism, manufacture and industrialisation) and written within the traditions of economic history, rather than any discussion of the theories of money, Linebaugh investigates lives lived in response to the increasing monetisation of society through the imposition of wage-labour (urbanisation) and the struggle of the labouring poor to resist such an imposition (urban crime). He argues that the method of payment for workers or their employers was so sporadic within this system that crime becomes the way in which unpaid labour exists in a monetised society, and corruption the way in which the ruling class acquired their surplus; so that crime and corruption are endemic in the system itself. Crime is not a pathological condition of the individual: the individual is a product of the monetisation of society (Moll Flanders); it is not an 'anomic' condition arising from a sophisticated division of labour (Durkheim): the division of labour is the result of the introduction of money into the process of production. It is not the result of the culturally inspired will to over-achievement denied by structural incapacities, but the nature of monetised society itself. It is not a cultural phenomenon, or even a category of drift. It is much simpler than that: the hanged belonged to the labouring poor.
Theory Of Anti-Oppression: Probation
The struggle within human biography occurs in and against the institutional forms of organised power (the state). The Probation Service as a form of state power is a part of this oppression. This struggle can be examined historically through an investigation of its developing forms. The history of the Probation Service is usually presented as an historical accident, developing out of an encounter between the Temperance Movement's Church Court Missionaries and the drunken, criminal classes of the late nineteenth century (Haxby, 1978; McWilliams, 1987; May, 1994). While Probation is most discernible in its modern form from this period, in order to understand its originality fully, its history needs to be traced back to the period when the previous regime of order (feudalism) is dissolved and a new regime of subjugation is established in a form that is appropriate to the new society. That is, as part of the attempt to create a 'Society of Manners' that corresponded to the reconstituted political and civil society following the complete breakdown in law and order in the seventeenth century:
Despite the fact that capital punishment was extending to include less serious infraction it proved to be an inadequate deterrent. Disorder was increasing. This led to calls for more terrible punishments including breaking offenders on the wheel, suspension on gibbets to die a long lingering deaths, branding, castrating and, in so far as women were concerned, indiscriminate transportation. But the fact that criminality was most prevalent in certain areas of the new metropolitan districts, concentrated attention on the manners and customs of the urban poor; leading to the connection between impropriety and immorality, drunkenness and depravity, lechery, prostitution, vagrancy, idleness.
(Radzinowicz, 1948/1956)Laws already existed against immorality, although they were inadequately implemented and had fallen into disregard. It was now the primary object of the time to reassert them enthusiastically.
Immorality was not simply an individual problem, but was generalised into a major social issue. There was a connection between individual virtue and community security and property safety. The general problem of safety could be threatened by the sin of one person exciting God's anger against an entire population in the form of plagues; or individual depravity could threaten commercial life through, for example, decisions taken whilst drunk, which could lead to financial ruin affecting not just that particular sinner but the people with whom they traded. Profanity and debauchery were thus the worst enemies of the state. This link justified the practice of intervening in the life of the sinner:
The grand seducer flatters men that he is freeing them from the bondage of religion, when he is enslaving them in the fetters of vice. The immoral man cannot be a good citizen, because he is not happy; and in his restlessness he imputes to the Government 'the distresses which flow from his own vices or impudence'. (ibid.: 163)
'The Society of Manners' was established to eradicate this condition. It was formed out of the religious societies of the 1670s and 1680s in a context of the collapse of order inspired by immorality and corruption. The developed metropolitan society had a mission to (re)impose Christian private and public morality in the context of a tide of evil which appeared to have swamped London at this time. Appealing to a period of virtue after the Reformation and prior to the Restoration, the target for these societies were drunkenness, depravity and prostitution. Originating in East London, the society went on to establish a presence throughout the capital and eventually became a national movement.
The first society, set up in 1691, was composed of eminent lawyers, MPs, JPs and citizens of London of known ability and integrity. Most of the leaders of the societies came from 'the world of politics and business'. The movement spread quickly throughout the British isles. Widely supported by Church and state, it acquired added energy from 'The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge', which was composed of senior members of the Church, whose specific aim was to reduce vice and immorality. Other societies were made up off lesser lights: tradesmen, or those taking part in parish administration, or constables able to discuss best practice and those capable of providing useful information.
Informing And The New Science Of Information
The effective instruments of intervention included aftercare and informal sanctions such as shaming and informing. Aftercare was the practice by which on release from county workhouses vagrants appeared before Quarter Sessions to be 'registered and recorded', so that upon re-offending they might more easily be convicted (Radzinowicz, 1948, Vol. 2). Informal sanctions were used to prevent criminality. These included public admonition, e.g. shaming through the production of public lists of offenders, and informing. Informing involved the collecting, processing and recording of information about individuals. Although despised, the information system formed the cornerstone of the Societies' activities. Through the processing of this information the societies supervised moral order in their localities. Through this process the society knew the detailed activity of all of the inhabitants in its jurisdiction and through this material could save individuals souls, avert the wrath of God and enforce the law (Curtis and Speck, 1976).
Informing was not the only focus for discontent. The religious zeal of the societies' members deviated into excess; and the concentration on the urban poor meant that very few of the rich were taken to task by these reforming zealots. Such was the extent to which their malpractices were enacted that Sydney Smith, writing at the time, felt that 'reformation generally produces greater evils than those it attempts to redress' (Radzinowicz, 1948: 179). Eventually, the societies degenerated into unpopular centres of sedition, dissent and sectarianism. By 1737 the 'Societies of Manners' had virtually ceased to exist, although rescued in different guises from time to time. By 1878 the societies had mutated into Voluntary Associations, for example, 'The Society for Giving Effect to his Majesty's Proclamation against Vice and Immorality' (1878) and 'The Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Virtue' (1801).
Embryonic
The genesis of the modern Probation Service can be discerned within this evangelical police force. G.D.H. Cole argues that these societies form the beginnings of the social services in the later centuries:
They were probably the first voluntary groups organised on a national scale and tolerated by the government to step into a vacuum left by the inactivity of church and state and, in effect, to take over a part of the functions of the church and state and, therefore, despite their limitations must be considered an important part in the history of the creation of voluntary and free institutions.
(quoted in Bahlman, 1968: 107)
Whilst its form may be different from the 'Societies of Manners', many of the roles of the modern Probation Service remain remarkably similar to its original practice: admonition (shaming), intervening, aftercare and the role of information are all used today in Probation practice. And the problem of over-zealous practitioners was as much a problem in the eighteenth century as it was in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. But, be that as it may, the crucial point of this exposition of the genesis of the Probation Service is that the evangelical police reveal the origin not just of Probation, but of a moral order, at a time when it had not become naturalised or accepted as part of that order. That is a morality constructed on the intervention of money-capital, when whole new subjectivities were being invoked out of a post-revolutionary period.
Money, Biography And Value — A Theory Of Anti-Oppression
This anatomical investigation has demonstrated that (auto)-biographical life is a life lived as a human processed form of the social relations of capital. Money is the identity through which value expresses its personality: as oppressor (capital) and as oppressed (wage-labour). Each personality is the relation of value to itself. Each biography is the story of the (im)possibility of that relationship. Each personality is derived from characteristics of value in its oppressive (life-threatening) and anti-oppressive (life-giving) forms. Each biography is therefore unique and precisely the same. There is no humanity, there is only money and its identities. Liberal social science is a case of mistaken identity. What it imagines to be essential human characteristics are in fact characteristics of money-capital taken on and expressed in a human form.
This theory of anti-oppression points to the condition of cruelty rather than culture as the focus through which we should consider the human condition. In capitalist society the cruel power of money takes on the identity of masculinity. Masculinity is the expression of the cruelty, brutality and indifference of money-capital. In positions of power, women appear to take on the characteristics of men; in fact, they are taking on the identity of money. Feminism is the refusal of cruelty, an exposition of the brutal hierarchies of the power of money-capital dissolved through the flows of money as the satisfaction of human desire. In a world gone mad schizophrenia is the limit of the impossibility of human existence. More can be made of this: of course, poverty is the absence of money; criminality is the human condition of no money or a refusal to accept the law of money or the legal form of money: property rights; class is aggregated biography defined in relation to a life's position in the production of value and its realisation in exchange; currency is an important aspect of national identity; the struggle over a single European monetary system has as much to do with nationalism as it has to do with economics; social democracy is the avoidance of revolution through the redistribution of money; Nazism was the near-collapse of monetised society re-established as a Cruel State (Fascism); the Jew, in this condition, was the personification of the worst aspects of money-capital and held to atrocious account for the near-collapse of money society. The retribution of money-capital is terrifying.
To make these connections is not to suggest that the social enquiry is now at an end; but rather, to argue for the beginning of a real sociological enquiry. Money, on its own, changes nothing and explains nothing. And yet money is central to our understanding of the social world. From the biography of Moll Flanders, the aggregated biographies of Peter Linebaugh and from our own biographies, we know that it is possible for a life lived to demonstrate all or any or some characteristics of money-capital at any one time, or even at the same time. Each biographical or general life is lived in a particular way.
There can be, therefore, no one-dimensional theory of anti-oppression. An investigation into oppression demands an empirical investigation into each biography understood, not as a private life among other private lives, but as an institutionalised part of monetised society. There are no short-cuts; anything else is metaphysical speculation, or sheer intelligence. It is not enough for a theory of anti-oppression to explain that oppression to the oppressed. It must contain a manifesto for action. In the context of the Probation Service I make one claim: it is not offenders that must be rehabilitated, but money! Money can be rehabilitated when money-capital as exchange value (oppression) is subordinate to its other function, as use value (anti-oppression) That is, where the logic for the existence of money is not its own self-expansion but the logic of human need. In capitalist society this subordination is impossible. Rehabilitation demands the transformation of monetised society.
Sherborne House
In 1992 I was employed by the Inner London Probation Service as an Education Officer at Sherborne House, an alternative to prison project for young offenders in South London. Roger Graef, in Living Dangerously (1993), described Sherborne:
Operating from an old community building in South London, it is a showcase of the Inner London Probation Service. Many of the offenders who go there have already been to prison. They find Sherborne harder to take.
The building is on three storeys, with high ceilings, cold walls and cold floors. Sound bounces around the rooms making small groups seem like crowds. But it is free to the Inner London Probation Service, the gift of the Trustees of Sherborne School in the old tradition of helping the less fortunate. This is all the more telling as the bleak landscape of this part of South London is mocked by the opulence of the City just across the river. The staff augment their small budget with donated equipment that is all too scarce in other parts of the Probation Service . . . Staff have kitted out the art area with a darkroom and kiln. The music room has a range of synthesizers to create the current pop fashions. The tech workshop has a fine array of metal and wood-working gear. The work the young people have done there is astonishingly good.
They eat and play in 'the dining room' a large area that includes ping-pong and pool tables, as well as a makeshift kitchen and dining area. . . . the young cook, somehow produces the best institutional food I have ever eaten. . . . That the staff and offenders eat together seems normal in that atmosphere, but for it to happen in other penal establishments would take a radical change of attitude.
Behind the anonymous waiting area and the door with its passcode lies not only communal dining, but an ethical assault course. At the end of it is the chance for those who have come here to change their lives . . .
(Graef, 1993: 7–8)
Twenty-four young offenders go through the ten-week programme (four programmes a year). Living at home or in hostels they attended the Centre every weekday from 9 am until 4 pm. Through concentrated group-work sessions the young offenders are forced to confront their lives as offenders through a process of shaming, by challenging their attitudes and moralities, by role-playing and by considering the position of the victim. These sessions are augmented by life-skills sessions and designated periods which deal with issues of racism and sexism. All these practices (or 'mind-games' as described by the young participants) are based on psychological theories of the cognitive nature of criminal activity and ''radical' criminological theories of discrimination. Time spent out of these intensive sessions includes creative practical activity in art, metal and wood-workshops, a music studio and on sporting and outdoor activities. Failure to attend or lateness are met with strict penalties which could result in the offender going to prison. Only half the original number starting the programme would ever complete. It was my job to assist the young offenders in the transition from the course back into mainstream education projects, training and work.
I did not come from the world of Probation. I had worked since 1978 on a range of programmes involved with young offenders and the young unemployed. I had been through all of the options, alternatives and ways of dealing with the problem. Nothing worked. And, what is more, the situation was getting worse for young people. In south-east London, education provision was shrinking, training schemes were universally despised, the employment market had collapsed and crime was escalating. The police had declared war on black youth, and the black youth were fighting back. The young people identified the problem themselves: 'The problem is money, money is everything.' All their crimes were to get money and they would do anything for money. Every youth at Sherborne said he would kill for money.
I called my part of the Sherborne experience 'The Futures' programme, with a subtitle 'the future is now'. We had just ten weeks, and we had to do something fast. For the youths on the programme there was no future. 'Now' was an imperative. I had money. A major supermarket chain gave the 'Futures' programme £24,000. I asked each youth in the group what he wanted to do, or to be. There was no limit, no refusals and nothing was considered to be unrealistic. Young people could get access to at least £500 from the Futures Trust and were eligible for other monies from award-making bodies such as The Prince's Trust and London Youth Adventure. These organisations were extremely supportive and we used them extensively. The young people wanted to do everything. To go everywhere. To be someone. Money was not always the biggest problem. Foreign travel meant learning a language; being a rally driver meant learning how to drive and repair a car engine; learning to fly meant getting access to a plane; being a lawyer meant going to college. Each individual project was designed as an educational package. But it was only money that made it possible.
The 'Futures' programme was more than an educational part of the Sherborne programme. It did not challenge the offending behaviour of the young people; rather, it sought to challenge the intellectual basis of offending behaviour programmes at Sherborne and elsewhere in the Probation Service. Crime is not a just an ethical or moral or cultural or environmental or societal or economic or psychological or cognitive problem. It is all of these things, but they are only expressions of a more fundamental problem, i.e. a problem of real biography: the impossibility of social existence without money in a world where the social has been monetised. This intellectual challenge was not out of disrespect to any of my colleagues working in impossible circumstances; but rather, a practical critical project against the mainstream and radical ideologies within which they had been 'trained'.
What had been envisaged as an aspect of the programme began to take over the whole Sherborne timetable. The 'Futures' programme, for some young people, became the reason for being at Sherborne and for finishing the course, as the grant was awarded at the end of the programme. As the completion rates went up, young people who had previously refused and criticised other aspects of the programme were very positive about 'Futures'. It had other spin-offs. The purely educative aspect of my work, formerly an option for the young people, became compulsory at the suggestion of the young people themselves. They could work on their 'Futures' projects during these periods. Its success meant that it attracted interest from other programmes working with young people in the Inner London Probation Service. It became established in all teams in south London working with young people, including a women-only programme in north London, and it became an integral part of Temporary Prison Release Programmes.
While the Probation Service responded positively to the energy that the programme generated, despite the fact that the approach challenged the criminological assumptions upon which much of their reason for existing was based, the real tension between the different approaches was never far from the surface. The more ambitious the project became the more resentment was generated. This was not surprising. The logic of the 'Futures' programme did undermine the logic of the Probation Service. Colleagues demanded more control over how grants should be allocated. It had been left to me and the Senior Probation Officer to control the money, and more controls were demanded on how the young people dealt with the money. I wanted to give the money without any control, other than a request that receipts be provided and a commitment that the money be spent in the way in which it had been applied for. I said that any sanction would not be against the young people who had been awarded the money but youths coming after them, for whom it would not be possible to justify such a policy if it were abused. The money did get ripped off, but rarely; although each time it happened the pressure mounted against the scheme.
Generally, the programme was regarded as a success. Kenneth Clarke, then Home Secretary, visited the project and accepted the 'Futures' programme as a challenging intervention. The same could not be said of his successor, Michael Howard. Howard was well known for his right-wing credentials, but the Criminal Justice System had not yet felt the full force of his reactionary instincts. On a visit to Sherborne he was surprised that such a project should exist in a penal institution. Our conversation went beyond the usual pleasantries associated with such visits: we had a real discussion, but not an argument. However, the tone of the meeting and the visit to Sherborne, which had not been a great success, made some of my less enthusiastic colleagues anxious as to the appropriateness of the money-giving scheme. Their anxieties were heightened by the spate of tabloid newspaper stories featuring young offenders from other projects on safari holidays, paid for at taxpayers' expense and justified as remedial therapy. They feared, not unnaturally, for the reputation of Sherborne and their jobs.
Matters came to a head when weeks later an article appeared in the Independent on Sunday:
When Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, visited the Sherborne House Probation Centre in Bermondsey, south London, in September he had his worst fears about liberal do-gooders confirmed. Staff [that's me] running Sherborne House, the community centre for juvenile offenders, proudly told him about an 18-year-old burglar who had learnt Spanish and would soon be heading to Madrid to test his skills. But far from being impressed the Home Secretary exploded. 'This is quite extraordinary!', he exclaimed, and began a hostile cross-examination to find out how it was that a young criminal could get a foreign holiday. Then Mr. Howard marched out. Decisive action followed. Last Wednesday David Maclean, the Home Office minister, told the Commons: 'Community penalties should be just that — penalties. A cushy foreign holiday . . . is clearly an unacceptable response to offending'. He promised new national standards which would ensure 'offenders receive proper punishment.'
(The Independent, 5 December 1992)
This article, despite the fact it was an untrue and a sensationalist account of what had happened, generated a great deal of anxious interest. This anxiety and the resentment already felt, allied to the fact that colleagues with whom I had set up the project had now moved on, added to the fact that the 'Futures' approach had re-oriented the Sherborne approach to young offenders in ways that were unacceptable to the Probation staff working there, and, as a result, the project began to get severely squeezed. Management control was exerted more tightly. It became impossible to reconcile the demand created among the young people themselves with the logic of control demanded by Probation. I had begun to get closed down. I left Sherborne in 1994 aware that there were no plans to replace me and that the 'Futures' programme faced an uncertain future.
The programme had not solved anything, but it had focused on the problem as a problem of money-capital in a way that went against all prevailing criminological approaches. It treated money as a means of exchange, as a way of making the impossible possible and denied, for an instant, money as a supreme social power in a world where money is the supreme social power. For a brief moment in time money had been rehabilitated. Such an approach could not be allowed to continue.
Comments