3. After Censure

Many local authorities and agencies, often staffed by those who had studied in the expanded HE and FE sectors during the 1960s and 1970s (Young 1988: 170), became radicalised in opposition to Thatcherism. These bodies, despite their own limited resources, helped to fund some research such as the victim surveys carried out by the left realists (Rock 1988: 197).

Later, Sumner (1994: 295) would write that Policing the Crisis, with its central focus on the deviant category of mugging as an ideological or cultural formation within a period of hegemonic strain, was a marker of the transition from one field (the sociology of deviance) to another (the sociology of social censure).

In addition to these review essays, two shorter pieces (Sumner 1980, 1981c) found him in typically “combative” (Rock 1988: 193) form. For example, he criticised Phillips’ Marx and Engels on Law and Laws for its portrayal of Marx “as a crude economic determinist who sees legislation as the product of class interest” (1981c: 293) whilst neglecting the wealth of commentary that rejected that idea including, of course, Sumner’s own.

This piece appeared in Kapitalistate, a journal produced between 1973 and 1983 by a rotating international editorial collective and aimed at furthering the Marxist analysis of the state. It was perhaps not the most conventional outlet for a Cambridge academic.

This is, quite plainly, work that is very much of its day. Consider also Sumner’s musings on the role of violence in socialist strategy which, to the contemporary reader, are quite remarkable. He writes: “It might be objected, against my suggestions, that rights struggles have been tried and failed and that, therefore, violence is the only answer. I am sympathetic to this view, and feel cynical about the fact that the current political debate amongst the (middle class) Left centres on law, rights, political organisation, reform and gradual change. There has hardly been a word about the value of armed struggle. That seems inexcusable when so many groups at the sharp end of the capitalist weal have been forced into violent resistance […]. Obviously, it seems to me, armed struggle is the only option for some groups and for some oppressed classes […]. However, successful armed struggle requires massive support from the whole community (or class base of the movement) and that support will not usually be forthcoming unless rights struggles or established channels of political action have been tried first” (1981d: 88).

This focussed on Habermas’ work up until the end of the 1970s, including Legitimation Crisis (1976), but was too soon for his important later works such as The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987) and Between Facts and Norms (1996).

Indeed, Sumner (1981d: 80) had previously argued that the “main problem” with Habermas was that he did not ground his visions of popular democracy and ideal communication situations “in an historical materialist analysis of the economic and political conditions under which they do or might come about in practice”. Here he returned to this theme with gusto.

Habermas’ view that the capitalism of the nineteenth century was effectively depoliticised and free from issues of legitimation was rejected by Sumner in a memorable passage: “The bourgeois ideology of justice rooted in the exchange of equivalents legitimated precious little. Indeed, it required the formation of the police, extensive criminal law legislation, more prisons and reformatories, mental hospitals, considerable softening of bourgeois attitudes, Methodism, the legalisation of the unions, football, cricket and an awful lot of ale, before anything remotely like stability occurred” (1983a: 148).

This chapter was later reprinted in Worsley’s Modern Sociology reader (Sumner 1991b).

For Sumner, the most obvious weakness of orthodox analysis was its failure to consider the crimes of the state itself, and the fact that huge inequality meant that such states rarely commanded consent. As a result, “domination has to rely heavily on various types of coercion” (1982d: 28). The criminal law had played an important role in the penetration of capitalism “by force not by consent”, perhaps second only to direct military conquest. Crime could therefore be seen as not only the result of ‘development’, but also a primary cause of it (1982d: 30). Sumner (1982d: 35) praises van Onselen’s (1976) account of the development of gold mining and the system of slavery in what was Southern Rhodesia between 1900 and 1933 for providing “a cameo of the whole process” and showing how “criminal laws were thus used and abused to provide labour for capital”. So-called modernisation, often regarded as the ‘civilising’ of a stagnant system by a dynamic one, is revealed as “the coerced growth of capitalist domination in areas of resistance” (1982d: 35–6).

For its part, Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment was generally well received. Solomos (1983: 489) suggested that Sumner’s chapter would become a “central text”, Mahabir (1984: 186) praised it as a “fine introduction” and there were generally positive reviews from Parsloe (1982), Jorgensen (1983) and Coleman (1984). Hill (1982) made clear that he would have preferred a work of a more practical and less theoretical bent, whilst the US-based academics Nanda (1983), Marenin (1983) and Vogel (1984) were uncomfortable with Sumner’s avowed Marxism.

Sumner’s incredulity about the approach of one particular newspaper was barely concealed: “As the Mail’s ludicrous feature put it, the violence of the riots is linked with beating up old ladies, criticising the police, not wearing a tie and John McEnroe’s ‘curses at Wimbledon’—‘IT’S ALL PART OF THE SAME SICKENING MALAISE’” (1982f: 29).

In the Preface to Crime, Justice and the Mass Media, Sumner (1982g: ii) noted that “there were no holds barred during the discussions. […] I have had to sanitise it a little due to the laws of the land, principles of confidentiality, and fears of redundancy”.

Indeed, according to Sumner (1990d: 5), the book’s “most immediate aim was to counter the alienating and counterproductive individuation that is an acute feature of doctoral research in Cambridge”.

Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice was published as part of the Open University Press’ ‘New Directions in Criminology’ series, edited by Sumner and featuring socialist and feminist work carried out at Cambridge (Sumner 1990c: xi), in “an Institute not known for its role in the development of socialist criminology” (1990d: 5). Sumner (1990d: 5–6) maintained that socialist criminology was possible within an Institute that he felt was “fundamentally independent of the Home Office”, but nevertheless conceded that it had been “a struggle rather than an accommodation”. The series also included works by Gelsthorpe and Morris (1990), Green (1990), Ahire (1991), Vogler (1991), Sparks (1992), Lo (1993), and Cain and Harrington (1994).

The chapter was the final iteration of his 1981 ASC conference paper and the subsequent essay on ‘Rethinking deviance’ (Sumner 1983b). Sumner (1990e: 37) states that “this revision improves the clarity and precision of the 1983 article considerably, with the benefit of its continued use in teaching, and thus supersedes it”.

This applies even to those acts whose status as crime is generally uncontroversial. Murder, for instance, “is not a behaviour but a censure, applied to certain killings, whose pattern of application is thoroughly ideological” (Sumner 1990e: 34).

In a similar vein, Sumner and Sandberg (1990: 188) argued that “social censures are rarely simple class instruments expressing undiluted economic ideology. Class domination in Western societies is usually also the domination of white, male nationalists. Therefore, dominant class ideology does not just entail the censure of subordinate classes, but also of blacks, women, devolutionists, and all kinds of dissidents.” Indeed, because ideologies can emerge from all kinds of social relations, not just economic ones, “there will inevitably be some unholy mixtures of ideology in individual consciousness and institutional practice” (Sumner and Sandberg 1990: 165).

In passages that hint at the direction he would soon take in the Obituary (1994), Sumner suggests that this increasing censoriousness had revealed how the concept of deviance was rooted in what were, on the surface at least, the relatively consensual politics of post-Depression, New Deal, social democracy; in the 1980s “ideology is again blatant, and the concept of social deviance stands disrobed, as rude as its forerunners, the concepts of moral degeneracy and social inadequacy” (1990e: 17).

Sumner acknowledged this in the Introduction to Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice, noting that socialism was increasingly being questioned by those on the left. “Perhaps it was a political vision too closely tied to the limited goals of new proletariats”, he wrote; a more pluralistic route forward was required which needed to move beyond the “antiquated politics of the old men of the labour movement” (1990d: 2). Of course, noteworthy Marxist work, often with the explicit aim of reviving the tradition, did continue to appear during this period. See, for example, the work of the ‘analytical Marxists’ such as Cohen (1978), Wright (1985), Elster (1986) and Roemer (1988); the ‘post Marxism’ of Laclau and Mouffe (1985); the landmark studies of postmodern culture by Jameson (1984, 1991) and its socio-economic and political correlates by Harvey (1989). Meanwhile, Eagleton remained a staunch and elegant critic of postmodernism (see e.g. 1996).

Sumner (1993) suggested as much in his ‘Series editor’s introduction’ to Lo’s Corruption and politics in Hong Kong and China (1993). “This is not a time for socialistic capitulation on questions of theory”, he wrote. “The theoretical work done by socialists within sociology of crime and law […] remains the most vibrant and the most explanatory available. The old labels are becoming increasingly redundant and misleading. Until agreeable new ones evolve, we will retain the old one, insofar as it refers to and advances the values of cooperation, democracy, development and freedom from oppression” (1993: x). He went on, “for the many socialists who have for years been critical of the regimes in China and the former empire of the Soviet Union, and who have been developing Marxian social science as a rigorous form of sociological analysis, it now seems somewhat bizarre to be told that socialism is passé when all along we have been emphasising the importance of democracy in politics, the importance of ideological beliefs in social development, and the importance of justice in any critical analysis of any society. Our critics can say that what we were doing was not socialism, and that socialist theory and politics must always be economistic and dictatorial, but what nonsense! Life is just not that simple, and maybe now there is no cold war our critics on the right will be able to see that it is, ironically, they who are allied to a dirigiste economism. No doubt, we socialists will then be dismissed as idealists who overemphasise values and pluralism in the face of economic necessity. Such is politics” (1993: xii).