Theoretical Essay · Illustrated EditionLaw · Neurobiology · Social Pathology

Crime and Communism An Analysis of Law, Neurobiology, and Social Pathology

Abstract

This paper establishes a unified, scientific-materialist theory of social pathology, law, and the transition to a classless society. By integrating the commodity-exchange theory of law (Pashukanis), the labor-market analysis of punishment (Rusche & Kirchheimer), and Marxist sociological criminology (Bonger) with contemporary clinical findings in neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatric epidemiology, and behavioral ecology, we argue that the great bulk of what is called "crime" is not an intrinsic biological invariant or a simple moral transgression, but a superstructural expression of capital accumulation. The physical, cognitive, and psychological violence observed under capitalism is shown to be the somatic inscription of class and gender oppression onto the human nervous system. Consequently, the dramatic reduction of violent pathology is not primarily a juridical, punitive, or carceral task, but an economic one—pursued through the abolition of the value-form, the dismantling of the state, and the socialization of reproductive life. We are explicit, however, that crime is never fully eradicated: a residue driven by personal, familial, interpersonal, and idiosyncratic motives—including acts committed simply for their own sake—will always remain. What disappears is the vast economic and social base of offending, and with it the great majority of violence, bringing crime down sharply in aggregate rather than to zero.

I.The Epistemological Inversion of Bourgeois Criminology

To analyze the phenomena of violence, harassment, and social pathology, scientific materialism must first dismantle the two dominant, mutually reinforcing illusions of bourgeois ideology: idealist legalism (the Classical School) and biological reductionism (the Positivist School).

FIG. 1

The epistemological inversion of bourgeois criminology

Conceptual
CLASSICAL SCHOOL — idealist legalism Beccaria (1764), Bentham. Crime = free-willed choice of a rational homo economicus; law = neutral moral arbiter. POSITIVIST SCHOOL — biological reductionism Lombroso (1876), Ferri. Pathology = innate genetic / anatomical / neural defect of the isolated individual. ideological interdependence both abstract the individual from material conditions HISTORICAL-MATERIALIST ACCOUNT The psyche and its somatic substrate are neither vessels of free will nor fixed genetic machines. They are historically contingent and plastic — produced through the metabolic relations of labour, property, family and state. ⇒ "crime" is reframed as a superstructural expression of the mode of production, not an invariant of the individual.
Fig. 1 | The two dominant bourgeois schools are framed not as opposites but as mutually reinforcing illusions — one locating crime in free will, the other in biology — both subsumed under a single materialist account of plastic, socially-produced behaviour.

1.The Classical School: Legalism and the Myth of the Homo Economicus

The Classical School of criminology, pioneered by Cesare Beccaria (On Crimes and Punishments, 1764) and systematized by Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, is the direct superstructural projection of bourgeois economic theory onto the legal sphere. It treats the "criminal" as an atomized, rational actor who calculates the utility of an offense based on a hedonistic calculus of pleasure and pain.

Within this idealist framework, "crime" is a voluntary choice made by a free-willing agent, and "law" is the expression of a neutral social contract designed to preserve liberty. This framework completely abstracts the individual from their material conditions, class position, and historical determinism. It treats the starving proletarian who steals bread and the capitalist who violates safety codes to maximize surplus value as identical, abstract legal actors making unconditioned choices.

The social function of this idealist legalism is to legitimize state-sanctioned retributive violence. By framing crime as a product of individual free will, it justifies the state's punitive apparatus as a moral and logical necessity.

2.The Positivist School: Biologized Class Hatred

In the late nineteenth century, as the consolidation of monopoly capital and the growth of the urban proletariat generated systemic misery and social unrest, the Positivist School—led by Cesare Lombroso (L'Uomo Delinquente, 1876) and Enrico Ferri—emerged to replace moralistic legalism with scientific-sounding biological determinism.

Lombroso asserted that criminals were "atavistic" throwbacks to primitive human ancestors, identifiable by physical anomalies (stigmata) such as asymmetrical skulls, large jaws, and sensory insensitivity. Ferri and Rafale Garofalo subsequently expanded this biological reductionism to justify "social defense" measures, arguing that certain individuals were biologically incompatible with civilization and required permanent carceral isolation, sterilization, or execution.

Modern biological positivism has discarded Lombroso's craniometry, but it preserves his fundamental methodology. It seeks the etiology of crime within the isolated biology of the individual—attributing violent behavior to genetic predispositions (e.g., the MAOA "warrior gene" myth), neurotransmitter deficits, or hormonal variances—while completely divorcing these somatic states from the concrete social relations of production.

This biological reductionism serves a vital ideological purpose for the bourgeoisie: it naturalizes the systemic violence generated by capital, shifts the blame from the relations of production to the DNA of the exploited, and presents the police and carceral state as permanent, post-historical sanitizing agents.

Historical materialism rejects this dualism. The human psyche and its somatic substrate are neither vessels of abstract free will nor static, genetically programmed machines. They are historically contingent, plastic, and produced through the specific metabolic relations of labor, property, family, and state power.

II.The Homology of the Law and the Value-Form

The structural critique of penal law requires a scientific explanation of why the "legal form" itself is structurally bound to capitalism. As Evgeny Pashukanis established in The General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), the legal superstructure is not an abstract sphere of justice, but a direct structural homology of the commodity-form.

Under the capitalist mode of production, private producers must exchange their products in a market governed by the law of value. To do this, these independent producers must recognize each other as private owners. The legal "person" or "juridical subject" is thus the necessary reflection of the commodity owner:

Commodity Exchange (Value-Form) ⟺ Contractual Relation (Legal Form)

This same commodity-logic penetrates the entire structure of capitalist penal law:

Offense A = Commodity Equivalent B (Confinement Time)

This quantification of justice is historically specific to the wage-labor system, where the exploitation of the proletariat is itself measured in labor-time.

FIG. 2

Structural homology of the value-form and the legal form

Conceptual
ECONOMIC BASE Private owner A Private owner B commodity exchange equivalent value · abstract labour-time structural homology LEGAL SUPERSTRUCTURE Legal subject A Legal subject B contract · tort · penal equivalent Penal tariff: offence A ⟷ confinement-time B — liberty quantified like a commodity, paid in years/months/days.
Fig. 2 | After Pashukanis (1924): the juridical "person" is read as the mirror of the commodity owner. The same logic of equivalence that reduces concrete labour to abstract labour-time is said to reduce concrete offences to abstract confinement-time.

3.The Political Economy of Punishment: Rusche and Kirchheimer

In their seminal work Punishment and Social Structure (1939), Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer historically verified the materialist foundation of the penal system, demonstrating that the methods of punishment are determined directly by the state of the labor market and the value of labor-power.

Throughout history, the state's response to social deviation has adjusted to the requirements of capital accumulation:

FIG. 3

Punishment as a function of the labour market

Conceptual · ordinal
labour SCARCE — high value labour SURPLUS — cheap, replaceable VALUE OF LABOUR-POWER → (Rusche & Kirchheimer, 1939) Mercantile era forced labour, galleys, workhouses discipline bodies into wage-labour Industrial era mass incarceration, capital punishment prison as warehouse for the reserve army Late capital carceral state + prison labour super-exploited v, no legal subjecthood PENAL FORM
Fig. 3 | The claim of Rusche & Kirchheimer (1939): the dominant method of punishment tracks the value of labour-power. When labour is scarce, bodies are disciplined into work; when surplus, they are warehoused. Drawn as an ordinal sequence — no continuous dataset underlies it.

Under communism—where the market, money, wage-labor, and the value-form are abolished—the legal form, the juridical subject, and the carceral apparatus lose their material basis and wither away. You cannot have a penal tariff when human existence is no longer mediated by abstract labor-time and commodity exchange.

III.The Etiology of Violent Pathology: Capitalism as a Crisis-Generator

To understand why violence (such as homicide) occurs, we must trace the economic and ecological pathways through which the capital accumulation process systematically generates social pathology. In Criminality and Economic Conditions (1916), Willem Bonger demonstrated that capitalism is inherently a system of structural egoism.

FIG. 5

Causal pathway from capital accumulation to expressive pathology

Conceptual · directed graph
CAPITALIST BASE artificial scarcity · forced competition SYSTEMIC EGOISM competitive survival displaces altruism; relations reduced to the "cash nexus" (Bonger) METABOLIC RIFT OF INFANCY chronic stress · deprivation · intergenerational trauma EXPRESSIVE PATHOLOGY homicide · assault · addictive coercion
Fig. 5 | The aetiological core: a single base condition (scarcity + competition) branching into two mediators — magnified egoism and developmental injury — which converge on the same behavioural output.

1.The Cultivation of Egoism over Altruism

Bonger argued that the capitalist mode of production systematically suppresses the altruistic instincts of the human species while artificially magnifying egoism.

Because capitalism is based on the private appropriation of socially produced wealth and relentless competition, it forces every individual to view others as rivals or instruments of utility:

2.Behavioral Ecology: Relative Deprivation and "Compressed Futures"

Contemporary behavioral ecology and epidemiology confirm Bonger's materialist intuition. Research linking homicide rates to economic inequality (e.g., Daly & Wilson, 1997) shows that violence is not a product of absolute poverty, but of relative deprivation and extreme social stratification.

In highly unequal societies, the rate of homicide varies more than hundredfold between neighborhoods. This is explained by the material reality of "compressed futures." When individuals find themselves trapped in environments characterized by concentrated poverty, systemic discrimination, and low life expectancy (often depressed by poor healthcare, environmental toxicity, and structural precarity), it becomes behaviorally rational to discount the future heavily.

If an individual has a low probability of surviving to old age or achieving material security through conventional, legal means, they will prioritize immediate, high-risk rewards over long-term stability. The mathematical model of this future-discounting behavior can be expressed as:

D(t) = e−γ(G,M)·t

Where:
D(t)  is the subjective value of a future reward at time t.
γ   is the subjective discount rate, a direct function of economic inequality (G, the Gini coefficient) and local environmental mortality risks (M).

Under high inequality (G) and high precarity (M), the discount rate (γ) spikes. Immediate risk-taking, involvement in violent parallel economies (such as the illegal drug trade), and the defense of localized status (reproduction of honor cultures) are not symptoms of moral or biological deficit. They are rational, material adaptations to an environment of compressed futures generated by capital accumulation.

FIG. 4

The future-discounting model of "compressed futures"

Quantitative · interactive
discount rate γ = ρ + βG + M0.10
"half-value" horizon6.9 yrs
implied rel. homicide rate1.0×
P(survive to 20 yrs) = e−20M74%
Fig. 4 | The model's only formal object: D(t) = e−γ·t, with γ = ρ + βG + M. The mortality term is principled rather than decorative — a reward at time t is only enjoyed if one survives to collect it, so a constant extrinsic hazard M multiplies value by e−Mt (Sozou 1998); raising M therefore steepens discounting by construction. The inequality term βG is the stylized part (here ρ = 0.03, β = 0.25), standing in for the empirical finding that homicide scales steeply with inequality and with depressed local life expectancy (Wilson & Daly 1997). The "implied relative homicide rate" read-out is calibrated so that crossing this range reproduces the order-of-magnitude (≈100×) neighbourhood variation they document — a calibration to a documented population-level regularity, not a fit to individual data. The figure makes a falsifiable claim, not a proof: it predicts that discounting — and the violence that tracks it — should rise with G and M wherever they vary within the system, and is wrong if they do not. Drag the sliders; the grey dashed curve fixes a low-precarity reference (G = 0.25, M = 0).

3.The Extraction of Surplus Value and Somatic Alienation

The exploitation of wage-labor is a physical process of bodily wear and cognitive exhaustion. To maximize the rate of surplus value (s/v), capital subjects the proletariat to unsafe working conditions, unstable shift-work, housing insecurity, and nutritional deprivation.

This sustained physiological stress acts as a direct neural and developmental hazard. Somatic alienation—the physical destruction of the working-class body—reproduces the volatile emotional and physiological states that erupt as impulsive, reactive violence in domestic and community spheres.

4.Scope and Testability

One objection must be met directly, because the model invites it. If the thesis is that crime expresses capitalism, where is the non-capitalist control society against which to test it? We treat capitalism as a single global system (Wallerstein): nominally socialist and pre-market formations of the twentieth century were never sealed off from it, but traded on world markets, competed militarily, and were disciplined by the same accumulation pressures. On this premise there is no clean external control, and we do not claim one.

That premise, however, must not be used as an immunising device—the move that would let any high-crime society confirm the theory while any low-crime society is dismissed as "still embedded in the system." A claim that no observation could contradict is not a strong empirical claim but a definitional one, and we reject that posture explicitly. The world-system premise narrows the test rather than abolishing it: the theory is to be evaluated by within-system variation.

Concretely, the account predicts that the incidence and form of violence track the material variables named in this section—chiefly inequality (G) and extrinsic mortality or precarity (M)—across regions, classes, and historical periods within capitalism. It is supported where violence covaries with those variables (as in the inequality–homicide gradient of Wilson & Daly 1997), and it is falsified where violence fails to fall as G and M are equalised, or persists undiminished where they are low. Three independent lines bear on it: cross-sectional inequality–homicide gradients; historical within-country swings in crime as material conditions shift; and the contested anthropological record of stateless, non-market societies, which is the nearest thing to an external case and which—honestly read—neither cleanly confirms nor refutes the claim.

IV.The Neurobiology of Alienation: The Somatic Inscription of Class Oppression

A scientific-materialist psychology must bridge the gap between structural socio-economic relations and individual neurobiology. Neuroscientific and epigenetic research demonstrates that class oppression is literally inscribed onto the human nervous system, physically constructing the neural circuits that modulate aggression and violence.

1.Prefrontal-Limbic Dysregulation and Cortical Modulation

Neurobiology identifies partially distinct neural circuits regulating different forms of aggression:

Reactive aggression is governed by a hyper-reactive limbic system—specifically the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the periaqueductal gray (PAG) of the brainstem—combined with weak top-down regulation from the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

FIG. 6

Prefrontal–limbic regulation of aggression

Conceptual · circuit schematic
PREFRONTAL CORTEX impulse control · planning emotion regulation slow · energy-expensive LIMBIC SYSTEM amygdala · hypothalamus · PAG threat detection fast · hyper-reactive top-down inhibition weakened by chronic ACE exposure → dashed = attenuated Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) family instability · material precarity · environmental violence REACTIVE aggression impulsive · threat-triggered · "hot" INSTRUMENTAL aggression planned · callous-unemotional · "cold"
Fig. 6 | Reactive aggression as a hyper-reactive limbic system under weak prefrontal control. The argument: chronic adversity blunts the slow inhibitory pathway (drawn dashed) and entrenches the fast threat circuit.

The prefrontal cortex is the executive center responsible for impulse control, future-planning, emotional regulation, and cognitive flexibility. Neurodevelopmental research reveals that chronic exposure to family instability, material precarity, and environmental violence—categorized in public health as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)—directly impairs the structural development of the PFC and its functional connectivity to the limbic system.

When a child grows up in a chaotic, threatening capitalist environment, their brain adapts to survive immediate threats: it prioritizes the rapid, hyper-reactive threat circuits of the amygdala over the slow, energy-expensive cognitive modulation of the prefrontal cortex. The resulting psychological disposition—low frustration tolerance, impulsivity, and hypervigilance—is a physical adaptation to class oppression, which later manifests as reactive violence under stress.

2.Epigenetic Methylation and the HPA Axis

The biological mechanism of this inscription is largely epigenetic. Environmental stressors do not alter the DNA sequence itself, but they leave durable chemical marks—such as DNA methylation and histone modification—that permanently alter gene expression.

Chronic elevation of glucocorticoids (stress hormones like cortisol) in parents and infants under material distress alters the methylation of genes regulating the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (the body's primary stress-response system).

For example, severe early-life trauma is linked to hyper-methylation of the NR3C1 gene (which encodes glucocorticoid receptors in the hippocampus) and alterations in the FKBP5 gene. This molecular modification prevents the hippocampus from executing its normal negative feedback loop on the HPA axis, locking the individual into a permanent, highly inflammatory fight-or-flight state.

These biological changes are not genetically fixed; they are somatic records of the social environment, passed down intergenerationally as long as the material relations of oppression remain unchanged.

3.Neurochemistry and Gene-Environment Interactions (G×E)

The biological reductionist focus on single genetic variants (such as the monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, gene) is scientifically invalid. Extensive longitudinal studies show that genetic predispositions toward low serotonin or altered dopamine metabolism have zero predictive power for violent behavior in individuals raised in supportive, non-abusive, and materially secure environments.

The genetic risk factor is activated only when paired with severe developmental trauma and deprivation. This gene-environment interaction (G×E) proves that biology is not destiny; rather, the capitalist social structure is the decisive catalyst that converts latent biological vulnerabilities into manifest social pathologies.

V.Clinical Neuropsychiatric Anomalies as Systemic Reflexes

A materialist cognitive neuroscience must systematically map specific neuropsychiatric conditions, demonstrating how their behavioral manifestations are shaped, amplified, and mediated by the capitalist social environment.

FIG. 7

Three-tier mapping of neuropsychiatric mediators

Conceptual · small multiples
STRUCTURAL ANTAGONISTIC STRESSORS social defeat · sensory bombardment · alienation · economic enclosure Psychopathy / ASPD BPD Schizophrenia MEDIATOR vmPFC–amygdala paralimbic disconnection serotonergic deficit + fronto-limbic volatility mesolimbic dopamine dysregulation + executive deficits EXPRESSION instrumental, exploitative, cold-calculated impulsive, reactive, explosive self/other injury defensive, paranoid retaliation to "social defeat"
Fig. 7 | One shared stressor input, three parallel condition-columns each tracing mediator → expression — differences in the data, not the design. The reported violence odds ratios for psychosis (≈2–7, rising to ≈9 with comorbid substance use) are stated in text, not plotted, as no underlying dataset accompanies them.

1.Psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD)

Psychopathy is characterized by a core configuration of interpersonal-affective traits (superficial charm, pathological lying, manipulativeness, lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse) and lifestyle-antisocial traits (impulsivity, irresponsibility, stimulation-seeking, persistent rule-breaking). Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) is its clinical diagnostic relative, focusing primarily on a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others commencing in early childhood.

Neurobiologically, psychopathy involves profound structural and functional abnormalities in a centralized paralimbic network:

High-resolution structural imaging reveals significant volume reductions in these paralimbic regions, alongside subcortical alterations in the basal ganglia, thalamus, brainstem, and cerebellum. Critically, psychopathy is characterized by a disconnection (reduced structural and functional connectivity) in the uncinate fasciculus—the primary white-matter tract linking the vmPFC and the amygdala.

Because of this pathway disruption, the psychopathic brain is unable to integrate emotional signals (such as a victim's terror or the anticipated pain of social punishment) into its cognitive valuation of future outcomes. This neural profile generates a specific cognitive style: cold, instrumentally rational, predatory aggression.

Crucially, capitalism does not merely tolerate this cognitive style; it actively rewards it. The competitive marketplace, corporate mergers, speculative finance, and imperialist geopolitics are structural terrains where the psychopathic decoupling of analytical computation from emotional empathy is a highly functional survival strategy. The "corporate psychopath" is the normal, highly adapted product of late capitalism's dominant value-form.

2.Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Impulsive Volatility

Borderline Personality Disorder is characterized by a pattern of intense instability in affect, interpersonal relationships, self-image, and impulse control. Aggressive outbursts—manifesting as self-directed harm or explosive, reactive violence against others—typically occur in response to perceived rejection, abandonment, or social exclusion.

The neurobiology of BPD is characterized by a severe fronto-limbic dysregulation:

This fronto-limbic deficit leads to a critically lowered threshold for emotional arousal, rapid negative affect escalation, and a profound difficulty recruiting reflective cognitive control under stress. Developmental imaging links these structural deficits directly to childhood maltreatment, indicating that reduced right vlPFC volume is the somatic imprint of early developmental trauma.

At the neurochemical level, BPD-related impulsive aggression is characterized by serotonergic (5-HT) system dysregulation. Chronic deficits in central serotonin turnover (evidenced by blunted prolactin response to serotonergic challenge) undermine the brain's baseline capacity for impulse control and emotional interoception (alexithymia).

When combined with HPA-axis dysregulation and altered cortisol dynamics resulting from childhood abuse, the individual is locked into a neurochemical state of chronic volatility. Under the isolating, unstable conditions of capitalist atomization, this neurochemical profile inevitably erupts in explosive, impulsive violence.

3.Schizophrenia, Related Psychoses, and the "Social Defeat" Model

Schizophrenia is a complex neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by positive symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thought), negative symptoms (flat affect, avolition), and cognitive deficits (impaired working memory, executive dysfunction).

Epidemiological meta-analyses demonstrate that schizophrenia and related psychoses are associated with an elevated risk of violence compared to the general population (with odds ratios typically ranging from 2 to 7, rising to approximately 9 when comorbid with substance misuse). However, this risk is not an inherent, immutable feature of the disease; it is highly concentrated in subgroups experiencing active persecutory delusions, command hallucinations, lack of medical-social support, and acute housing precarity.

Fronto-temporal network disruptions, structural reductions in the prefrontal cortex, and subcortical dopaminergic dysregulation (specifically hyper-dopaminergic activity in the mesolimbic pathway) undermine the schizophrenic brain's capacity for reality monitoring, working memory, and executive cognitive control.

The biological positing of schizophrenia as a "violent brain defect" completely collapses under the sociological model of social defeat:

Violence in psychosis is the desperate, reactive defense of an cognitively vulnerable, structurally abandoned individual experiencing extreme social defeat. It is a social pathology produced by the total lack of collective, uncommodified psychiatric and social care.

VI.The Cognitive Architecture of the Exploitative Mind

To fully demystify "crime," we must examine the specific cognitive processing mechanisms through which material environments translate into harmful behavior.

1.Risk Representation under Fuzzy-Trace Theory: "Cold" vs. "Hot" Cognition

Fuzzy-Trace Theory (e.g., Reyna & Brainerd, 1995) posits that memory and decision-making rely on two parallel cognitive representations of information:

FIG. 8

Dual-process risk representation (Fuzzy-Trace Theory)

Conceptual · bifurcation
RISK / REWARD STIMULUS incoming decision under uncertainty GIST representation abstract, value-laden meaning "safety-first" · loss-averse heuristic sparing · intuitive default VERBATIM representation literal, quantitative calculation lateral temporal / parietal cortex high-overhead · "cold" evaluation Precarity forces verbatim-only calculation of immediate survival gains
Fig. 8 | After Reyna & Brainerd (1995). The thickened vermillion path is the paper's argument: under scarcity the intuitive "gist" route (faint) is bypassed for cold, literal calculation. Line weight, not colour alone, carries the emphasis.

Cognitive neuroscience studies show that individuals who engage in persistent criminal or antisocial behavior exhibit an aberrant, highly calculative cognitive style: they rely heavily on verbatim, calculation-heavy representations of risk rather than gist-based heuristics. When evaluating risky choices, these individuals show hyper-activation in the lateral temporal and parietal cortices, the temporoparietal junction, and the insula—regions associated with analytical, cold computation—rather than the emotional, amygdala-driven activation typical of ordinary, intuitive risk-taking.

Under capitalism, this calculative, verbatim-heavy cognitive style is not an accidental error. It is a necessary cognitive adaptation to precarity and artificial scarcity.

When the structural conditions of survival are highly insecure, the proletarian cannot afford the luxury of "gist-based" safety-first heuristics. They must constantly engage in "cold", literal calculations of immediate material gains versus the precise mathematical probability of legal capture. This verbatim-heavy cognitive style, which completely bypasses the visceral, emotional representation of social norms or moral boundaries, is the direct neuropsychological consequence of a market society that demands calculated self-interest as the price of survival.

2.Self-Control, Executive Dysfunction, and Cognitive Plasticity

Self-control and executive functions (working memory, cognitive flexibility, response inhibition) are mediated by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and related frontostriatal networks. Deficits in these executive domains are highly correlated with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Borderline Personality Disorder, and Antisocial Personality Disorder, significantly elevating the probability of reactive, impulsive violence when paired with socio-economic stressors.

However, executive dysfunction is not a permanent, unchangeable genetic sentence. Cognitive neuroscience demonstrates high levels of cortical plasticity in these networks:

The executive deficits observed in the prison population are the direct, material products of a class-divided educational and developmental infrastructure. Capitalism systematically damages the prefrontal cortex of the poor through developmental trauma, environmental lead exposure, and chronic stress, and then punishes them for the resulting failures of self-control.

3.Empathy, Moral Cognition, and Class Dehumanization

Moral cognition and empathy recruit an interconnected network including the vmPFC, the posterior cingulate cortex, the precuneus, the temporoparietal junction, and limbic centers (amygdala and insula).

In psychopathy and severe ASPD, this moral network shows blunted activation when processing moral violations or observing others in physical pain. There is a profound decoupling between the cognitive perspective-taking regions (theory of mind) and the affective arousal centers of the brain: the individual can "know" intellectually that they are causing harm, but their brain fails to generate the visceral, negative emotional feedback that normally inhibits such actions.

This empathetic decoupling is not limited to clinical psychopathy. Under capitalism, it is a systematically produced cultural superstructure. To justify the global extraction of surplus value, colonial plunder, wage-labor, and imperialist warfare, the ruling class systematically deploys ideological technologies of dehumanization.

By representing exploited classes, nations, or demographic groups as sub-human, lazy, dangerous, or alien, capital effectively short-circuits the empathetic moral networks of the population, training the brain to view systematic violence and exploitation as rational, necessary, and biologically justified.

VII.The Political Economy of Gender and Sexual Violence

Sexual violence and harassment are not abstract, trans-historical products of male biological drives. They are structurally integrated into the gendered division of labor, patriarchal property relations, and the commodification of the body under the law of value.

1.The Patriarchal Enclosure and the Woman as Commodity

As Friedrich Engels established in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), the emergence of private property necessitated the destruction of communistic kin groups and the enclosure of the female body within the patriarchal nuclear family.

Under this system, the woman's body was formalized under law as a private reproductive asset, designed to guarantee paternity for the transmission of accumulated wealth. Under capitalism, this patriarchal property relation is preserved and deepened:

FIG. 9

Patriarchal enclosure and the reproduction of labour-power

Conceptual · flow
CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION privatisation of the costs of reproducing labour-power (v) THE CLOSED NUCLEAR FAMILY unpaid reproductive labour absorbed within the home (Engels, 1884) IDEOLOGY OF SOMATIC OWNERSHIP entitlement · the body as appropriable asset · sexual coercion expressed as sexual violence & harassment — concentrated, not random ("rape culture")
Fig. 9 | A linear derivation: from the need to cheapen variable capital, through the family as an unpaid reproductive unit, to an ideology of bodily ownership — with sexual violence positioned as a concentrated expression of these material relations.

Capitalism structurally relies on the nuclear family to absorb the costs of reproducing labor-power. By delegating domestic work, childcare, and emotional labor to unpaid women within the home, capital keeps the cost of variable capital (v) as low as possible.

This privatization of reproductive labor requires an ideological superstructure that enforces gender hierarchy and male entitlement, treating the somatic autonomy of women as a resource to be owned, controlled, and violently appropriated.

2.The Law of Value and Somatic De-personalization

Capitalism is characterized by the universal expansion of the commodity-form. Under the law of value, everything—including human sexuality, emotional expression, and physical labor—is transformed into an alienable commodity to be bought, sold, or rented.

Through prostitution, pornography, the sexualization of consumer advertising, and the economic dependency of the wage-labor contract, sexuality is systematically objectified. This commodification conditions the human psyche to perceive interpersonal relations through the prism of ownership, transaction, and utility.

Rape and sexual harassment are the direct, violent expressions of this somatic de-personalization. They are actions carried out by individuals conditioned by a society where the appropriation of another's physical existence is the dominant, state-sanctioned economic relation.

3.Structural Risk Factors for Sexual Violence Perpetration

Epidemiological research confirms that sexual violence is not a random distribution of "bad men." It is highly concentrated in environments characterized by gender-inequitable masculinities—social norms that link manhood to dominance, emotional hardness, and sexual conquest.

These ideological structures are highly correlated with:

The concept of "rape culture" is the superstructural codification of these material conditions. It is the ideological network (media, legal precedents, institutional practices) that normalizes sexual aggression and renders it intelligible within a mode of production based on the exploitation of the human body.

VIII.The Transition Period: From Punitive Retribution to "Measures of Social Defense"

During the lower phase of communist society (the Dictatorship of the Proletariat), the workers' state is tasked with managing the transitional period while the remnants of capitalist psychology, somatic trauma, and legal fictions are systematically dismantled. This transition requires the complete abolition of the bourgeois penal system.

1.The Demolition of "Guilt" and "Punishment"

The transitional state rejects the bourgeois metaphysical concept of "guilt" and "sin." Violent offenders are not treated as independent, unconditioned moral agents who chose to commit evil, but as products of the violent contradictions of their social history.

Accordingly, the state abolishes the concept of "punishment" (the retributive penal tariff). Confinement is no longer a mathematical transaction of time designed to extract vengeance on behalf of the state.

2.The Implementation of "Measures of Social Defense"

The workers' state replaces prisons and retributive laws with a scientific system of Measures of Social Defense:

IX.The Higher Phase of Communism and the Decline of Crime

In the higher phase of communist society—characterized by the complete abolition of class distinctions, the value-form, and the money-form, and the administration of production according to the principle: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"—the legal category of "crime" largely loses its material foundation. It does not vanish completely. Offences arising from personal, familial, interpersonal, or purely idiosyncratic motives—impulsive acts, private quarrels, jealousy, grief, and even harm pursued for its own sake or "for fun"—remain possible in any society, communist or otherwise. What collapses is the enormous economic and social base of offending, so that the overall volume of crime falls dramatically even though it never reaches zero.

FIG. 10

The withering of the penal apparatus across phases

Conceptual · trajectory
SCOPE OF PENAL / STATE APPARATUS Capitalism retributive penal tariff, prison-industrial complex Transition (DotP) "guilt" abolished → measures of social defence, clinical care Higher phase economic base of crime gone; small residue → healthcare punishment therapy / quarantine organic anomaly only high
Fig. 10 | The argument drawn as a trajectory: the coercive apparatus contracts as the value-form is dismantled — from retributive punishment, through non-punitive "measures of social defence," to a sharp contraction of crime down to a small, non-economic residue handled as a health matter. The decline is qualitative; the smooth curve is illustrative of direction, not a measured time series, and the floor is deliberately above zero.

1.The Disappearance of the Penal State

With the disappearance of private property and the state, the judicial machinery (police, courts, prisons, and professional lawyers) withers away.

Anti-social behavior is no longer processed through a class-partisan legal apparatus. The social relations of production are now coordinated through technical rationality and organic social self-regulation, rendering the coercive force of the state obsolete.

2.The Sharp Reduction of Socio-Economic Pathologies

Because the material coordinates of scarcity, class competition, domestic economic entrapment, and the commodification of the body have been liquidated, the socio-economic causes of violence are removed at their root.

The vast majority of violent acts—which are generated under capitalism by property disputes, relative deprivation, systemic alienation, and patriarchal power dynamics—simply cease to occur. What remains is a far smaller stratum of offending with non-economic roots: interpersonal conflict, jealousy, family breakdown, impulsivity, mental-health crises, or harm pursued for its own sake. These never disappear entirely; people will always be capable of hurting one another for personal reasons. But stripped of the mass economic drivers that once stood behind them, such acts become the exception rather than the norm, and the total incidence of crime falls dramatically rather than to zero.

3.The Management of Residual Cases

The instances of harmful behavior that still manifest in a communist society fall into two residual groups. The first is organic, neurological, or psychiatric (e.g., acute brain lesions, severe neurodegenerative disorders, or rare genetic-psychiatric emergencies). The second is irreducibly personal: private quarrels, jealousy, family conflict, impulsive rage, or harm done for its own sake—motives that no economic arrangement can fully legislate away. Crime is therefore reduced, not abolished.

Because these acts are stripped of any systemic social-class character, they are handled directly, humanely, and non-coercively—through socialized healthcare, neurological support, and community mediation rather than through a punitive state.

The social response is governed exclusively by empathy, scientific care, and collective safety, completely free from the moralistic, vengeful, and exploitative logic of the capitalist penal state.

X.Limitations and Open Questions

A theory this broad is always at risk of explaining everything and therefore nothing. Several limitations qualify the argument above and mark the points at which it could fail.

These are boundary conditions, not fatal concessions. The argument is strongest read as a falsifiable prediction about how the volume and distribution of violence should move with material conditions—and weakest if pressed into a total, unfalsifiable account of every harmful act.

—Conclusion

Most crime is not a permanent feature of human life; it is, in the main, a historical byproduct of class exploitation. Communism does not address crime by enforcing a stricter moral code or deploying a more progressive state police; it cuts crime down by demolishing the material conditions that generate the overwhelming bulk of it. This must be stated plainly: crime is never abolished outright. People will still harm one another out of jealousy, grief, family conflict, impulsivity, illness, or even for their own amusement—motives that are personal rather than economic. What ends is the vast, systemic engine of scarcity-driven offending, and with it the great majority of violence.

By transforming the human social environment from an anarchic, competitive jungle of capital accumulation into a conscious, coordinated commonwealth of socialized labor, communism heals the somatic and psychological wounds inflicted on the human species by prehistory. The result is not a utopia free of all wrongdoing, but a society in which crime has fallen dramatically in total—reduced to a small, manageable residue of personal and clinical cases, and freed at last from the mass production of violence that defines class society.

—References