The criminal breaks the monotony

As I was reading this pamphlet, I was struck by Marx’s humor. But days later, what stuck was his discussion of the interplay of the dark and the productive.

The driving dark

⊕This essay brought to mind the opening epigraph of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, from Bayard Taylor’s translation of Goethe’s Faust: “Man’s active nature, flagging, seeks too soon the level; / Unqualified repose he learns to crave; / Whence, willingly, the comrade him I gave, / Who works, excites, and must create, as Devil.”The criminal breaks the monotony and everyday security of bourgeois life. In this way he keeps it from stagnation, and gives rise to that uneasy tension and agility without which even the spur of competition would get blunted. Thus he gives a stimulus to the productive forces.

This part spoke most to me. The deep pull from the shadowier, crunchier parts of ourselves and our cultures. The punk, the hacker. Counterculture, evil, challenge and deviance as a source of creativity. Not morally good, but generative.

The thing outside the settled order forces the settled order to move.

And has not the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?

That what we call Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us Sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without exception; there we must look for the true origin of all Arts and Sciences; and the moment Evil ceases, the Society must be spoiled if not totally destroyed.

A criminal reductio ad absurdum of GDP economics

A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes.

[…]

The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law.

[…]

The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police and of criminal justice.

[…]

He produces art, belles-lettres, novels, and even tragedies.

[…]

Thus he gives a stimulus to the productive forces.

⊕Around the same time I read this essay, I read Tyler Cowen’s short Marginal Revolution pointer, “Bastiat’s telephone?” It summarizes an article about Oakland car break-ins falling, and window-repair shops losing business as a result. The funny bit is that Marx’s version is parody, while almost the same argument can also appear as a sincere, or at least tongue-in-cheek, economics point.I did not know Marx was funny.

An effective parody of GDP economics by reductio ad absurdum. Not GDP literally, since the statistic comes later, but GDP-brain: count every paid activity as production, then congratulate the social order for the jobs and commodities produced by its own harms. Crime produces professors, police, judges, locks, forensic chemistry, tragic drama.

His 150-year-old read on cybersecurity GTM

Crime, through its ever new methods of attack on property, constantly calls into being new methods of defence, and so is as productive as strikes for the invention of machines.