Capitalist Accumulation and Urban Crime, 1950-1971

Abstract

Capitalism is a system of accumulation that organizes production and social reproduction to extract surplus value. As it does so, accumulation generates those behaviors registered as by the state. This exploratory paper traces the impact of accumulation processes on urban variations in U.S. rates following the Second World War. The analysis focuses on the transition from industrial to corporate capitalism, core-periphery aspects of domestic investment shifts, and the effects of these trends on police and victim estimates of Contributing to an empirically grounded theory of in advanced capitalism, findings show that selected personal and rates vary with accumulation trends. In the United States, has increased steadily since the Second World War (Jacobson, 1975; Gurr, 1977) and, as a phenomenon requiring explanation, has led some scholars to examine the underlying economic and social processes generating it. Marxists, in following this approach, take street crime as an indication of the absolute deterioration of social life accompanying unemployment and underemployment (Crime and Social Justice, 1976). Although this tradition views unemployment and therefore as systemic consequences of economic crisis, it overlooks the possibility that economic expansion also generates By broadening the research problem to include the incidence of in stages of both expansion and contraction we confront accumulation, the organizing process of capitalism. Accumulation organizes production for the extraction of surplus value but proceeds unevenly; capitalist investments shift, accelerating industrial development in one area but retarding it in another. Thus, we examine regional and metropolitan differences in the accumulation process and look at their impact on patterns. The evidence to be presented bears on the following generalizations about the effects of capitalist accumulation on the distribution of In areas affected by the withdrawal of capital, the out-migration of highly paid workers and the marginalization of the remainder, accompanied by the absorption into the labor force of low-paid workers, women and youth, intensify central city distress and interpersonal conflict over the distribution of shrinking resources. High rates of interpersonal conflict, registered as crime, characterize these metropolitan settings. In areas affected by the infusion of capital, the absorption of new workers into the manufacturing labor force depresses and personal crimes. Expansion of the manufacturing labor force, however, occurs in the context of broader developments that signal the emergence of low density cities characterized by a comparatively even pattern of urban-suburban growth. Such dimensions of urban structure contrast sharply with the structural features associated with violent They offset the low incidence of attributed to increases in the size of the manufacturing labor force and are linked to high rates of property-threatening acts, recorded as property crime.