Marx and Engels on prisons and capitalism

Abstract

This paper rethinks Marx and Engels’ comments on imprisonment and capitalism. While there has been a tendency to suggest the authors’ comments on crime and punishment were peripheral and secondary to their major projects, such as Marx’s Capital, this paper claims, in fact, their writings on incarceration were guided by their shared theoretical project which included historicizing systems of punishment as correlating with modes of production. Also, while more has been written on their ideas of criminality, instead, this paper excavates their thoughts on prisons, which have often been neglected. Overall, it shows there has been a tendency to underestimate the ways the authors viewed prisons as an important disciplinary mechanism for class control, and a part of the capitalist state more generally. Their work provides an important conceptual foundation for critical sociological perspectives on incarceration.

Introduction

This paper examines what Marx and Engels wrote about prisons. It suggests their analysis of the role of incarceration in capitalist society provides a foundation for critical sociological theory on the role of prisons in the history of capitalism. While there were, of course, many aspects of the topic they did not explore, such as racialization, the angles they did examine, in the context of their critique of bourgeois political-economic thinking, creates conceptual space for analyzing the creation of different modes of punishment that historically correlated with different modes of production in a non-deterministic way.

It is perhaps surprising that in Marx’s writings he did not discuss prisons more. After all, Marx would spend much time writing petitions and engaging in activism for allies who were political prisoners. He also experienced the inside of a jail himself, albeit for a short time. As Engels reported, while living in Brussels, in early March, 1848, Marx, along with several others, received a government order to leave the country. Next, “he was engaged in arranging his trunks for the journey, when, at one o’clock in the morning, and in spite of the law which forbids the violation of the dwelling of a citizen from sunset to sunrise, ten police agents, armed, headed by a commissary of police, broke into his house, seized upon him and led him to the Town Hall prison” (MECW 6: 561). His wife, Jenny Marx, was also placed in prison, first in a room with prostitutes, later in a cold room without a fire. Meanwhile, “M. Marx had been put into a room with a raving madman, whom he was obliged to fight every moment. The most brutal treatment on the part of the jailors was joined to this infamous conduct” (MECW 6: 562). Jenny Marx was finally released the next afternoon, Karl Marx the next evening.

While Marx personally experienced the inside of a jail, as did many other socialist and communist activists, Marxist theorizations of punishment and criminality, with some exceptions, including Rusche and Kirchheimer and Pashukanis, for instance, did not become a large source of debate until the 1970s and after. In these discussions, it was repeatedly pointed out that while not just prison, but crime more generally, was a concern of both Marx and Engels, neither systematically wrote on the topic (Adamson, 1984; Bonds, 2019; Brantlinger, 2018; Brown and Schept, 2017; Camp, 2016; Camp and Heatherton, 2016; Coyle and Nagel, 2022; Epstein, 2021; Gilmore, 2007, 2022; Gordon, 1973; Hobsbawm, 2000; Jay, 2019; Jefferson, 2017; Linebaugh, 2006; Montford and Moore, 2018; Montford and Taylor, 2022; Murakawa, 2014; Pashukanis, 1924; Rudolph, 2023; Rusche and Kirchheimer, 2017; Russell, 2002; Shelby, 2022; Sims, 1997; Taylor, 2019; Tetrault, 2023; Thompson, 2013; Vitulli, 2013; Vogel, 2003; Wacquant, 2014; Wang, 2018; Weis, 2017).

To review some perspectives, the most common position, repeated by Greenberg, suggests, “Marx and Engels wrote from time to time about crime, law, and criminal justice, but gave them no systematic treatment” (Greenberg, 1993: 11). From this perspective, while Marx and Engels did not develop a criminology, nor was it a “central interest” for them, their discussions of crime are perhaps useful, but it is more important to use their “general theory” as a basis for developing a Marxist analysis of crime (Greenberg, 1993: 11, 21, 38). Greenberg drew from other works that also argued, while there are some lessons to draw, Marx, for instance, did not discuss factors such as criminal motivation or provide a clear and systematic analysis of criminal law (Taylor et al., 2003: 217). Garland’s classic overview of social theories of punishment also argues, similarly, Marx and Engels did not make a “substantive contribution” to analyzing penal organizations (Garland, 1990: 83–84). Again, the general framework is said to be more useful than the analysis of crime itself.

From a different perspective, in Italy in the mid-1970s, Melossi wrote an article titled, “The Penal Question in ‘Capital’.” This perhaps overlooked paper remains in many ways unsurpassed in its analysis of Marx on prisons. His analysis does reflect a theme similar to other perspectives in that it acknowledges Marx didn’t systemically expound on the role of crime or prisons in the capitalist mode of production. For the author, while other mentions of crime in Marx’s work might be useful at times, for the most part, “however, it is in Capital only that the social phenomenon of criminality is looked at in the context of the general Marxian scientific theory” (Melossi, 1976: 26).

Drawing from Capital, alongside some of Marx’s other writings, and Marx’s idea of (so-called) primitive/original accumulation, in a way that would be further discussed in The Prison and the Factory, the author shows that, for Marx, the rise of capitalism was built through dispossession and proletarianization, and as a working-class formed, “the emerging bourgeois society produced widespread vagrancy, and the bourgeois state proceeded to criminalize it” (Melossi, 1976: 27–28). Capital’s analysis of criminalization, for the author, compared to Marx’s discussions of labor in the 1844 Manuscripts or The Holy Family, differs in that it more concretely identifies the mechanisms through which the working class was historically subordinated, including with the penal arm of the state (Melossi, 1976: 28).

For the author, expanding a Marxist analysis to include the penal side of the state did not mean developing a “criminology” within the confines of bourgeois academic thought but:

when Marxism takes possession of new fields of knowledge, such as criminology, it destroys criminology as such, while it enriches its own basic concepts; capital and labor, class struggle and so on. So the problem of criminality, or of “deviance,” in a given situation, becomes the problem of primitive accumulation; the problems of prisons becomes that of training proletarians to factory discipline, etc. (Melossi, 1976: 31).

Punishment, from vagrancy laws to prisons, were part of an overall history whereby the oppressive bourgeois state played a key role in both creating and controlling the working-class. As the co-author would continue to discuss in The Prison and the Factory, the rise of the “house of correction” was fundamentally about socializing workers into capitalist subordination (Melossi and Pavarini, 2019).

Of course, well before this, some Marxists were already incorporating criminalization and criminal law into their analysis. For instance, Evgeny Pashukanis was doing this in the 1920s. In his criticisms of bourgeois law, the author saw that with the formation of capitalism came the reduction of various concrete human actions to “abstract man” and “abstract human labor time” (Pashukanis, 1924). This led to a context in which taking a person’s “abstract freedom” became a punishment for crime: “deprivation of freedom – for a definite term previously indicated in the judgment of a court – is the specific form in which modern, that is, bourgeois capitalist criminal law, realizes the basis of equivalent retribution” (Pashukanis, 1924). This was a universalized and measured process, as criminal law created standard norms for punishing crimes with imprisonment based upon the severity of the crime.

It also must be mentioned that Foucault’s work has, of course, provided a critical foundation for countless studies of power and penal control (Foucault, 1995). Foucault also draws sporadically from Marx. Most directly, in Discipline and Punish Foucault cites Marx multiple times. He cites the first volume of Capital four times, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte once, and an 1857 letter to Engels once (Foucault, 1995: 163, 164, 169, 175, 221, 280). More than Marx, though, he relies on the Marxist inspired work of Rusche and Kirchheimer for the political-economic foundation of his own perspective (Foucault, 1995: 24). Foucault’s approach, and his relationship with Marx’s thought, is a major source of controversy outside the scope of this paper. Still, I might suggest that before jumping to Foucault, it would be useful to revisit, rather than dismiss, what Marx and Engels did, in fact, write about prisons.

From a different starting point, expanding from Marx, a variety of scholars have explored the question of relative surplus labor, and some of these perspectives have included analysis of the relationship between the relative surplus population/reserve army of labor and incarceration (Alder-Bolton and Vierkant, 2022; Bernards and Soederberg, 2021; Bird and Schmid, 2023; Gilmore, 2007; Hall, 2021; Li, 2010; McIntyre and Nast, 2011; Nguyen, 2023). From this perspective, capitalism creates more workers than it does jobs. This surplus population has various roles in capitalist society, from creating fear in employed workers that they may lose their jobs and join this group, to holding down wages with the threat of worker replaceability. The surplus population also tends to be those social groups that have been the most marginalized and oppressed throughout the history of colonialization and racialization. While scholars developing these insights have not worked toward a general theory of incarceration in capitalist society, nor has it been their goal, these perspectives overlap with the goals of this paper in that they find useful insights in Marx for constructing critical sociological analysis of incarceration.

Still, while much has been written on crime from a Marxist perspective, Marx and Engels own analysis of prisons, specifically, has been neglected. In this light, this paper aims to revitalize Marx and Engels’ own analysis of prisons. My argument is that their perspectives on prisons, and the role of prisons in capitalism, has too often been overlooked and underappreciated. Additionally, I am writing against the idea that their perspectives on prisons, or crime, in various scattered writings, is significantly less systematic than their “general theory,” if such a phrase captures what the authors tried to do in their life works. Rather, the authors’ ever-developing frameworks inevitably shaped their views on prisons.

To accomplish this, the paper returns to Marx and Engels, chronologically extracts what they did write about prisons, and examines them in context to show how they provide a systematic analysis of the role of prisons in capitalist society. I am primarily drawing from the classic fifty volume Marx/Engels Collected Works (MECW). While the ongoing project of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) may be more thorough, for purposes here, the MECW contains enough material for the case I am making. Lastly, while I acknowledge the debate over potential differences between Marx and Engels, in the case of prisons, I find their views generally overlap, and I am treating both here as engaging in a collective project of developing a critique of capitalism while, of course, emphasizing the authorship of their individual writings (Mavroudeas, 2020; Stanley and Zimmermann, 1984).

Prison, dispossession, and bourgeois property

As has been discussed, young Marx’s first inclination that crime and dispossession were linked came from the debates over wood theft, as published in Rhienische Zietung (Bensaïd, 2021; Linebaugh, 1976). In these discussions, he would also begin to form a nascent theory of the prison in an increasingly privatized form of society. He saw the customary right of people to collect fallen wood was being decimated due to privatization. While it might have been considered theft to take wood that was still growing, or that a forest owner had somehow processed with their labor, collecting fallen wood had not been a crime because, “the owner possesses only the tree, but the tree no longer possesses the branches that have fallen from it” (MECW 1: 227).

This is perhaps even a precursor to Marx’s understanding of property through a lens of labor embedded within nature. In laws regarding forests, property had been seen, in a sense, as something established by the manipulation of nature by people. A forest owner owned a tree both because they legally owned it, and because they manipulated its nature and put their labor into it. Fallen, dry wood, though, was no longer part of a tree, nor did it contain dead labor, and had customarily been free for the taking. Changing the law, and charging wood collectors with wood theft, although of course not put in these specific terms at the time for Marx, was an advancement in commodification under an emerging capitalist type of law. For Marx, as state authorities worked with forest owners to punish poor and propertyless wood collectors, a type of theft was occurring against the dispossessed. The extension of private property laws created a theft of their customary right to take wood. And those who benefited were the owners of the forests as the legal system protected their economic interests (MECW 1: 228).

In this context, he reveals hypocritical attitudes toward the imprisonment of so-called wood thieves. There was a proposal for owners of the forest to take wood thieves to the political authorities, who would punish them by having them work for the forest owners doing penal labor (MECW 1: 245). Previously, deputies had suggested it would be for the good of the thieves to go to jail like common criminals. Now it was being said in jail they would be exposed to the corruption and influence of, “inveterate thieves.” Instead, it was suggested that wood thieves be put to work under the same owners of the land and resources who were taking away their rights. Generally, by penalizing those gathering wood, “innocent persons were turned into criminals” (MECW 1: 247).

Forest owners had been required by Rhine Providence law to provide services by working manually on communal roads. The commission investigating the situation, though, was suggesting that instead of prison, wood thieves would replace forest owners, doing the manual labor on the roads. In this context, Marx wrote, attitudes changed. Prisons were not seen as good but, “suddenly reformatories have been metamorphosed into institutions for corruption, for at this moment it is of advantage to the interests of the forest owner that prisons corrupt. By reform of the criminal is understood improvement of the percentage of profit which it is the criminal’s noble function to provide for the forest owner” (MECW 1: 247). From this angle, “the wood thief has become a capital for the forest owner” (MECW 1: 247). Wood stealing benefits the forest owner, transforming the captured thief into free labor for capitalists.

For Marx, the subordination of the state to the private interests of forest owners, the destruction of the commons and its replacement by a state system legislating in the interests of the propertied class, and the possibility of using prison labor for the benefit of forest owners, was highly unjust (MECW 1: 260–261). His writings on the wood theft issue were a precursor to his later analysis of original accumulation. They also reflected a nascent theory of the state as captured by private interests. As would be echoed later in the concept of the state as manager of the common affairs of the capitalist class in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, he wrote:

this logic, which turns the servant of the forest owner into a state authority, turns the authority of the state into a servant of the forest owner. The state structure, the purpose of the individual administrative authorities, everything must get out of hand so that everything is degraded into an instrument of the forest owner and his interest operates as the soul governing the entire mechanism. All the organs of the state become ears, eyes, arms, legs, by means of which the interest of the forest owner hears, observes, appraises, protects, reaches out, and runs (MECW 1: 245).

In these writings he began to see the functional economic relationship between the prison system and political and social power, along with the ways that attitudes of criminality and imprisonment were shaped by class interests. Whether or not the lower class should be imprisoned, and how they should be punished generally, Marx saw, was shaped by at times hypocritical or contradictory statements, wherein ideas about punishment for state authorities or the propertied class were shaped less by an internally consistent argumentative logic, and more so by how power shapes ideas to fit with and justify concrete class interests.

Along with young Marx, young Engels also saw how prison functioned as one mechanism of a broader system of class oppression. For instance, writing as early as 1843, he saw members of the Irish working class could be thrown in prison as victims of landed property class oppression. He does make racist claims about the Irish being uncivilized, writing, among other descriptions, “the Irishman is a carefree, cheerful, potato-eating child of nature” (MECW 3: 389). He describes a potential scenario in which the Irish are forced into English factory towns due to hunger and poverty. Here, they clash with Sir Robert Peel’s famous police force. But, partially inspired by the politics of Daniel O’Connell, when it is time to harvest potatoes, the Irish person returns home. Here, they find that after digging, the tenant, working under the landowner, demands rent. The result is, “the principal tenant is responsible to the landowner for the rent, and therefore has his property attached. The Irishman offers resistance and is thrown into gaol. Finally, he is set free again, and soon afterward the principal tenant or someone else who took part in the attachment of the property is found dead in a ditch” (Engels, 1843: 390).

In this case, for Engels, the jail serves as a tool used to discipline the Irish proletariat, albeit one that fails. Important for purposes here, though, is the way that prison is embedded in the broader political economy of worker-tenant-landowner class relations. Prison is inseparable from class and serves as a mechanism of regulation of class conflict, however effective or ineffective.

Engels also saw this in his criticisms of the 1834 Poor Law, which he and Marx were both very critical of. He wrote, for instance, “indeed, it will be very advantageous to declare poverty a crime and to turn poor-houses into prisons, as has already happened in England as a result of the new “liberal” Poor Law” (MECW 3: 437). And, generally, by 1844 he was already writing on the ways that the legal system and prison operated as a mechanism of class control, and how the legal system allowed for associations to form between the rich, but not the working class, especially if such associations were potentially oppositional. He noted the police had a history of shutting down meetings of Chartists or socialists, while it was much easier for wealthy organizations to find lawful support. They also had more money as, for instance, the Anti-Corn Law League could raise large amounts of money while Chartists, or the Union of British Miners, could not. He then wrote, “the right of Habeas Corpus, that is, the right of any accused person (high treason constitutes an exception) to be released on bail pending the start of the trial, this much-praised right is once more a privilege of the rich. The poor man cannot offer surety and therefore must go to prison” (MECW 3: 506). And only the poor and working class were punished with prison for trying to organize.

He also commented on the barbarism of the English criminal code. He wrote, “as recently as 1810 it was in no way inferior in barbarity to that of the Carolina; burning, breaking on the wheel, quartering, disembowelment while the person was still alive, etc., were widely used types of punishment” (MECW 3: 509). After, while these “outrageous” punishments had been eliminated, the death penalty still existed for various crimes, as did either transportation out of the country to places with horrible conditions or punishment and imprisonment that would reduce offenders of the law to, “the level of beasts” (MECW 3: 510). In 1844 he also commented on London’s “model gaol,” most likely Pentonville, (which will be discussed below) that opened 2 years previously. He wrote, “the prisoner in solitary confinement is driven insane; the model gaol in London, after only three months of existence, had already three lunatics to transfer to Bedlam, to say nothing of the religious mania which is still usually regarded as sanity” (MECW 3: 510).

Contrary to the developing ideology of the penitentiary as a place of reform, Marx and Engels also commented on the oppressive nature of solitary confinement, even mentioning Beaumont and De. Tocqueville’s (1833) well-known book. Marx and Engels also criticize French novelist Eugène Sue who saw solitary confinement in prison the best way to prevent prisons from corrupting morals. This, supposedly, could counter the fact that prisons were increasing the spread of crime as criminals associated in prison. Instead, they write, “in the debates on solitary confinement in the Chamber of Deputies this year, even the official supporters of that system had to acknowledge that it leads sooner or later to insanity in the criminal. All sentences of imprisonment for more than ten years had therefore to be converted into deportation” (MECW 4: 186).

They also saw that different modes of life coalesced with different systems of social control, and prisons were not necessary in other societies. Engels, for instance, wrote on utopian communal experiments in the US. He saw that the Shakers did not have poorhouses or poor people. He continued: “in their ten towns there is not a single gendarme or police officer, no judge, lawyer or soldier, no prison or penitentiary; and yet there is proper order in all their affairs. The laws of the land are not for them and as far as they are concerned could just as well be abolished and nobody would notice any difference for they are the most peaceable citizens and have never yielded a single criminal for the prisons” (MECW 4: 216). Beyond the prison itself, Engels also presented hints that industrial working-class life was prison-like. He positively cites Carlyle’s description, which notes, “this world is for them no home, but a dingy prison-house, of reckless unthrift, rebellion, rancor, indignation against themselves and against all men” (MECW 4: 414).

In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels also acknowledges a case of an attempt to create a system of forced wage labor that failed due to working class pressure, as labor laws were historically shaped by class conflict. Inserted into a bill regarding the master-servant law was a stipulation that conferred the power, “upon the employer the power to bring before any Justice of the Peace every working-man who had contracted verbally or in writing to do any work whatsoever, in case of refusal to work or other misbehavior, and have him condemned to prison with hard labor for two months, upon the oath of the employer or his agent or overlooker, that is, upon the oath of the accuser” (MECW 4: 569). This bill was shot down, though, due to the power and fury of organized labor’s opposition to it. As well, Engels criticized the cyclical system of workhouse imprisonment, whereby paupers would circulate in and out of the workhouse, stuck in an endless cycle of destitution and suffering (MECW 4: 573–576).

Marx and Engels’ critiques of prisons were also part of a broader critique of bourgeois morality. In The German Ideology, engaging with Stirner, they suggest the need for a materialist, rather than idealist, theory of prisons and write, “that when a man is imprisoned for a crime of this kind, it means that “moral purity” is confining him in a “house of moral correction”—just as jails in general seem to him to be houses for moral correction—in this respect he is at a lower level than the educated bourgeois, who has a better understanding of the matter—cf. the literature on prisons” (MECW 5: 162). But houses of correction are not, for the writers, just the result of moral deviance. Rather, as we have seen, they are the result of material conditions and class oppression. And while, as noted in the introduction, it has been suggested Marx had no theory of criminal motivation, it can be seen here that he did. They criticize the idea that a thief might commit a crime, “just because of a desire to break the law” (MECW 5: 338). Again, for the authors, it is the material conditions of class society through which bourgeois law is made, and working-class lawbreaking is created, that motivates people in the struggling working-class to resort to crime out of desperate economic and social conditions.

Later, writing in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, they also mention a criticism of the idea of prisons as institutions of reform. They criticize the idea of “bourgeois socialism,” what might be considered social democracy today, wherein some members of the bourgeois society work to alleviate, to a limited extent, the problems of capitalist society with charity. In this context they write, “free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform [solitary confinement]: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class” (MECW 6: 514). Bourgeois philanthropy, including supposed humanitarian approaches to the penitentiary, in other words, reenforced the way prison was a method of working-class oppression, within an ideology suggesting incarceration was for the good of the working-class.

Generally, too, it is perhaps not surprising that, for Marx and Engels, prisons did appear to be tools of the bourgeoisie to protect their class power. After all, they often were. For instance, one piece of writing commenting on Prussian politics and the bourgeoisie comments, “the bourgeois Ministry reserved bayonets, bullets, prisons and constables exclusively for the people “so as to restore the shaken trust and revive commercial activity”” (MECW 8: 176). The authors see that one function of the prison in capitalist society is to stabilize the commerce. More broadly, of course, prison was one part of the overall bourgeois legal system of punishment based upon a false guise of liberty. For instance, commenting on a case in which several leaders of a Workers’ Association in Cologne were on trial, it is noted, first, they were imprisoned and treated like low level criminals. Secondly, they could not expect a fair trial because, “we regard the jury system as at present organized as anything but a guarantee. The register qualification gives a definite class the privilege of choosing the jury from its midst” (MECW 8: 188). Jury members generally came from privileged class positions and, “the “conscience” of the privileged is precisely a privileged conscience” (MECW 8: 189).

They also note that part of the legal system was that attacks on property, the supposed sacred foundation of bourgeois society, were punished with prison. Commenting on the assertion of Prussian law over Rhinelanders and the influence of French law, Marx writes, “the French September legislation states: Anyone who attacks property and the family, the foundations on which civil society is based, or incites citizens to hatred or contempt for one another, is liable to be punished by imprisonment for up to two years” (MECW 9: 52). Violence and prison were also ways the bourgeoisie asserted its power. Marx notes a case in which workers and the bourgeois order clashed in France as, “it was a fight for the preservation or annihilation of the bourgeois order” (MECW 10: 67). In this, under the oppressive military arm of the state, “it is well known how the bourgeoisie compensated itself for the mortal anguish it suffered by unheard-of brutality, massacring over 3000 prisoners” (MECW 10: 68).

While Marx rarely mentioned debt imprisonment, he does mention that, as part of the response to workers struggles, the French state repealed an act limiting the workday to 10 hours and, “imprisonment for debt was once more introduced” (MECW 10: 73). Marx has at least some idea of debt imprisonment as a form of bourgeois class and social control. This targeted the petty bourgeoisie as well: “the petty bourgeoisie saw with horror that by striking down the workers they had delivered themselves without resistance into the hands of creditors” (MECW 10: 74). Part of this meant that debtors’ prison was used against them. The prison, in other words, generally developed to control and oppress the working-class, but other classes were not entirely exempt from its threat.

Paupers, criminals, and incarceration in an age of prison reform

Marx and Engels both wrote in an age of British prison reform when the first penitentiaries were being constructed. Historically, during the rise of capitalism in England, jails generally served as places to hold the criminalized while awaiting decisions as to how to punish them. Meanwhile, the two main modes of criminal punishment were, first, public humiliation, torture, and capital punishment or, secondly, transportation to the American colonies, and after the American Revolution, to Australia. This began to change as the prison reform movement picked up steam in the 1770s and after, led by figures including John Howard, Sir William Blackstone, and William Eden (Devereaux, 1999). These changes were symbolized by the opening of Pentonville penitentiary in 1842, which became a model for the next several decades (Ignatieff, 1978). Rather than public humiliation and corporal punishment alone, prisoners were to be cordoned off from society and be re-habituated to fit into the capitalist labor market (Melossi and Pavarini, 2019; Rusche and Kirchheimer, 2009).

It is clear Marx and Engels were aware of these changes, and even commented on them. For example, the authors criticize Thomas Carlyle’s pamphlet on “Model Prisons.” For Carlyle liberal prison reforms had been taken too far, and incarcerated Chartist leaders who should be punished for their behavior were instead given too much freedom and leniency while imprisoned (Siegel, 1976). How to contain the spread of the “heavy miseries” of the “deranged condition” of society “on the great dumb inarticulate class” that spread upward to other classes was a big social problem. Model prisons, in which the goal was to reform criminals and reincorporate them into society, pushed by philanthropists, was not the solution. Criminals needed to be punished, not coddled (Carlyle, 1850).

For Marx and Engels, Carlyle’s writing demonstrated a perspective against prisoners that had, “a fury which sheds even that little shame which the ordinary bourgeois still for decency’s sake display” (MECW 10: 310).  Already “the English bourgeoisie equated paupers with criminals in order to create a deterrent to pauperism” with the Poor Law of 1834 (MECW 10: 310). For the writers, the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie to power went along with the rise of an idea that somehow their class position was the result of their genius. Carlyle expands on this by showing that paupers and criminalized “scoundrels” must be left out from this genius. For Marx and Engels, though, the poor and criminalized were not, of course, any less intelligent or morally depraved, but their class position was the result of the history of industrial bourgeois society. Later, Marx would again mention Carlyle. He commented on, “a government inquiry into the cruelties practised upon the prisoners in Birmingham jail, cruelties which have induced several of them to commit and others to attempt suicide” (MECW 12: 302–303). Yet the person behind these abuses, Lieutenant Austin, is someone Carlyle had singled out in “Modern Prisons” as being an “officer” of “the pauper and the criminal” and someone who was not harsh enough (MECW 12: 303).

Marx was also very aware that laws existed to imprison workers for collectively organizing. He notes, for instance, a law passed on November 29th, 1849, that included, “imprisonment for a period not exceeding three months, and a fine to an amount not exceeding 3000 francs, is decreed against all working-men who may unite for a rise in wages” (MECW 10: 569). This was also part of a broader state policy of surveillance and policing of working-class organizations. Additionally, the police and prison systems played a role in creating negative attitudes of the working class for other classes. Marx describes a policy in which, “every working man is supplied with a book by the police—the first page of which contains his name, age, birthplace, trade or calling, and a description of his person” (MECW 10: 578). He then must write the name of the master he works for, who would then take the book and deposit it with the police. Upon leaving his job, the working person would have to retrieve the book, then to work again, repeat the ritual. The result was, “the workman’s bread is utterly dependent on the police” (MECW 10: 578). If the worker proves to be disobedient, the police make a note in the book, forcing the worker to return to their parish. For Marx, this system was more oppressive than feudalism in Europe or “pariahdom” in India. It went along with the use of the prison system against working people. This resulted in creating and circulating a fear of lower classes within the middle class (MECW 10: 579).

This does not mean, for Marx, that the prison’s only function was disciplining the working class. For instance, he notes in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that imprisonment was also used to attack bourgeois journalists who were opposed to “Bonaparte’s usurpation desires” as they attempted to protect their political rights (MECW 11: 172). More broadly, though, in cases like this Marx still sees imprisonment as, effectively, a means of class control and a result of class tensions. Imprisonment was a tool to control the proletariat, but also for states to regulate resistance from other social classes who might overstep the bounds of power acceptable to the relatively autonomous political elite.

And although the authors did not discuss prison labor in great detail, they had some awareness of it. For instance, Marx discusses a British transportation bill that would abolish much of the transportation of convicts of Australia:

after a certain period of preliminary imprisonment the offenders will receive tickets of leave in Great Britain, liable to be revoked, and then they will be employed on the public works at wages to be determined by Government. The philanthropic object of the latter clause is the erection of an artificial surplus in the labor market, by drawing forced convict-labor into competition with free labor; the same philanthropists forbidding the workhouse paupers all sort of productive labor from fear of creating competition with private capital (MECW 12: 253).

In a hypocritical move, while prisoners in workhouses might not compete with private capital, for that reason, the state would, with this new legislation supported by the same philanthropists, employ them for wages, which would compete with the private sector. Here, we see Marx examines the economic role of prison labor in relation to the capitalist mode of production more generally.

Marx also called out the bourgeois ideology of freedom for its clash with forms of torture that occurred in prisons. He wrote, “Jail Inquiries are now a constant feature in the reports of the press. From what has been disclosed it appears that prison discipline in Birmingham consists of collars and mural torture; in Leicestershire of cranks, 300 and in Hampshire of the less artificial method of starvation. And “you call this a free country!”” (MECW 12: 419). He also commented on the prison-like nature of child labor. He noted that the middle classes shuttered at the idea of young women being kidnaped and put in nunneries, but the same logic did not apply, “for satisfying the lust of aristocrats or the caprice of cotton lords” (MECW 13: 119). He wrote, “last week a girl of sixteen had been lured away from her parents, enticed into a Lancashire factory, and kept there night and day, made to sleep there, and take her meals there, locked up as in a prison” (MECW 13: 119). When her father came to investigate, the factory had the police remove him. Meanwhile, the government did nothing about a child abduction for purposes of exploiting child labor in the prison-like factory. Here, we see Marx sees a gray area between prisons and factories in certain cases, and could see the ways that wage-labor was the result of force and coercion.

Of course, not surprisingly, for Marx, it was capitalism that created certain types and definitions of crime. This was especially the case given the number of paupers who had little choice but to become criminals. He wrote, “there must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery, and increases in crimes even more rapidly than in numbers” (MECW 16: 489). But the state and police systems continued to refine systems of punishment, for instance with, “the Criminal justice act of 1855, which authorizes the Police Magistrates to pass sentences for short periods, with the consent of the prisoners” (MECW 16: 489). As crime and criminal laws expanded so did the ability to lawyers to interpret or “improvise” crime.

Additionally, although not systematic, Engels did provide a note that serves as a starting point for thinking about how prisons changed in the history of capitalism. He suggests, for instance, in the case of Burma, “the government of Burmah is pure despotism, the king, one of whose titles is lord of life and death, dispensing imprisonment, fines, torture, or death, at his supreme will” (MECW 18: 285). Here, while in this mode of government, imprisonment is rooted in individual behavior, a kind of personalized punishment dealt out, this differs with, for instance, the English system with its more extensive criminal law and bourgeois system of punishment and criminalization.

Generally, throughout his commentaries, Marx criticized the 1834 Poor Law and the workhouse system for criminalizing paupers. To take one example, he was critical of the Poor Law’s “labor test.” This test, “requires the applicant for help to prove his “willingness to work”, before his application is granted, by breaking stones or “picking oakum,” useless operations with which criminals condemned to “hard labor” are punished in English prisons” (MECW 19: 246). After this, the worker could be paid half a shilling a week in money, half in bread, per family member.

Overall, as Engels noted, situating the prison in the economic structure of history meant understanding the role or function of the prison in society in different historical periods. He writes that at a certain point in history it became economically useful to exploit the labor prisoners of war, rather than just kill them. He explained:

but at this stage of “economic situation” which had now been attained the prisoners acquired a value; one therefore let them live and made use of their labour. Thus force, instead of controlling the economic situation, was on the contrary pressed into the service of the economic situation. Slavery had been invented. It soon became the dominant form of production among all peoples who were developing beyond the old community, but in the end was also one of the chief causes of their decay” (MECW 25: 167-168).

Slavery became a way to recycle otherwise prisoners of war to use their labor. How imprisonment and labor were organized are historically specific, correlating with different modes of social life.

Marx would also mention the economic role of prisons in an engagement with Ricardo. Here, he starts to form a connection between the idea of a surplus population and the workhouse. For instance, he comments on the fact that money capital may sit idle at times, rather than circulating and employing workers. Generally, “the constant artificial production of a SURPLUS POPULATION, which disappears only in times of feverish PROSPERITY, is one of the necessary conditions of production of modern industry” (MECW 32: 186). Following this, tracing the pathway of the distribution of wealth, he mentions, “finally, a portion will be consumed by the discharged workers themselves in a WORKHOUSE, or in a prison, or as alms, or as stolen goods, or as payments for the prostitution of their daughters” (MECW 32: 187). This reflects a starting point for developing a connection, in line with Marx’s other writings, on the prison, the workhouse, and the proletariat. As mentioned above, Marx sees capitalism as a system that usually cannot employ all workers and produces a surplus population who cannot get jobs. The poor then get criminalized, partly, perhaps do to the fact that some resort to crime simply because they have no food or means of living. Some of the criminalized poor then go to workhouses or prisons, where they might serve to produce surplus value for private producers using prison labor, or work for the state, which also profits from their labor. And, of course, Ricardo’s own way of thinking meant he was a, “prisoner of a capitalist standpoint” (MECW 32: 303). As were other “bourgeois political economists” who were, “themselves imprisoned in capitalist preconceptions” (MECW 34: 466).

Historically, for Marx, the history of the rise of the bourgeois mode of production transformed discipline and imprisonment, and violence and force had historically been a key factor in the creation of a working class. Violence, for that matter, was used to control wages and create and sustain the working class. Commenting on so-called original accumulation he wrote on the ways that, throughout the history of the formation of a working class in England, coercion was used, beginning with Henry VII and VIII. First, “beggars old and unable to work receive a beggar’s license” (MECW 35: 723). Yet, “on the other hand, whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies, then swear an oath to go back to their birthplace or to where they have lived the last three years and to “put themselves to labor”” (MECW 35: 723–724). After this, Henry VIII added, “for the second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is now repeated and the half ear sliced off; but for the third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal” (MECW 35: 724). The association, in other words, between criminality and poverty formed.

Later, under Edward VI, those refusing to work or being “idle” were forced to become slaves, given to masters to work, and if they refused, could be enslaved for life and branded with an S. Different types of enslavement of the poor continued for centuries, into the 19th century, under the “roundsmen” system. Here, paupers were given to parishes, who could then control and hire their labor out for very low set wages. Marx follows this history by continuing to discuss various forms of physical punishment and forced labor the dispossessed suffered, including, for instance, whipping, flogging, and branding. He also mentions, in France and the Netherlands, different forms of forced labor were used, such as sending workers to the galleys in France (MECW 35: 724–726).

He follows this discussion with an analysis of the “dull compulsion” of capitalist economic relations, in which, “direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally” (MECW 35: 726). While in the age of the “historic genesis of capitalist production” the bourgeoisie used the state to control labor, wages, and collective organizing for so-called original accumulation, Marx suggests that these features become more exceptional as the system deepened and as it became perceived as “natural” and normal.

In this shift, there is perhaps a tension between Marx’s economic analysis, and his broader historical analysis of capitalism. At the same time he discusses dull compulsion he notes, for instance, that master-servant laws remained in place, and workers who break them are considered engaging in “criminal action” even in 1873 (MECW 35: 729). Given how much of his political work and writings concerned policing and imprisonment, it seems, perhaps, he may have overestimated the power of dull compulsion in his more theoretical claims.

Finally, much of Marx and Engels’ writings on prisons were about political prisoners. This was a topic they became quickly familiar with as, for example, many members of the Communist League were put in prison. To mention a few non-exhaustive examples, in 1849 Marx wrote several articles about the imprisonment of Ferdinand Lasalle, who was kept in prison for months while he was supposedly only under investigation (MECW 8: 344–346). In 1852 Engels noted Mikhail Bakunin was thrown in prison after taking a leadership role in a lower and working-class rebellion (MECW 11: 90). Both Marx and Engels commented on the Cologne trials in which various leftists were arrested for, “treasonable conspiracy” (MECW 11: 399). To take another case, Marx wrote much about Fenian political prisoners who the International Working Men’s Association supported (MECW 21: 3). He wrote about the imprisonment of members of the International Working Men’s Association in Brussels (MECW 21: 50). Many, if not most, socialist and far left leaders, at one time or another, were thrown in prison in Marx and Engels’ time, including, for instance, Karl Liebknecht and August Bebel, as Engels discussed (MECW 23: 129). Engels also wrote on the arrest and imprisonment of Theodore Cuno, a leading member of the International in Milan (MECW 23: 151).

Repeatedly in their writing and political activities we see commentaries on imprisoned socialists, along with campaigns to get them out of prison and out of unfair and unjust political persecution and trials. It might even be seen as surprising that Marx did not further develop an analysis of the penal arm of the state, or comment on the rise of the modern penitentiary, given how central it was to his political life. Perhaps because his focus in Capital was dismantling bourgeois political economy, at times, his main writings did contain an economistic emphasis, as opposed to his political writings that continually and directly engaged with violence, criminalization, and imprisonment. Or, perhaps, this would have been elaborated upon more had he written his book on the state.

Conclusion

This paper has examined the place of prisons in the trajectory of Marx and Engels’ conceptualizations. From Marx’s writing on the criminalization of forest thieves, to their various comments on the links between prisons and modes of production, to their activism for imprisoned leftists, incarceration was an important concern for both. It was more than secondary compared to Marx’s “general theory.” Overall, this paper aimed to demonstrate that when Marx, Engels, or Marx and Engels, discussed prisons it was not that they only did so in a journalist sense divorced from their theoretical constructs about the capitalist mode of production. Rather, for the authors, especially Marx, even when not writing in Capital, many aspects of his methodological and theoretical conceptualizations still shaped his writing.

This does not mean it is so simple as to, say, synthesize their thoughts on prisons and use this as a basis for an empirical framework for explaining the dynamics of mass incarceration today. Their comments on prisons do leave many angles unexplored: for instance, the important intersection between racialization and incarceration that has shaped much of the debate over prison injustice in the United States both historically and today. But I am suggesting that by revisiting their discussions of prison, they did emphasize the importance of locating the social and political organization of punishment in the context of ever-shifting modes of production. They also viewed the prison as an institution of working-class control—which in industrializing Britain it often was—and more than this. While, for instance, they do not provide an analysis of “white-collar crime,” their framework does create space to see law, punishment, and prison as something that historically formed, much in part led by bourgeois reformers, to control the working-class, and as an institution with greater reverberations throughout society.