Genesis of Crime and Victim in a Commodity-exchange Society: Theoretical and Empirical Underpinnings of the Rise in Cyber Crimes in India

Abstract

How is criminality, as a social relation, defined and redefined? Scholars have often explained the same through change in material realities in the political economy. This article attempts to answer the same by premising on Pashukanis’ theory of commodity exchange. He claimed that the definition and progression of criminal liability as a social category resulted from how commodity was exchanged in any particular epoch. It was in the bourgeois epoch that this liability was widened, and this could be possible only after the universalization of the rights-based category—the legal subject. Is this theorization visible, in its materiality, in Sutherland’s comprehension of the white-collar criminal? In the twentieth century, Sutherland, in his work titled ‘White-Collar Crimes’, observed that a novel kind of crime was being committed because of the creation of the middle class in the United States of America. Its victims were the consumers. Is a similar phenomenon visible in twenty-first-century India? What does the universal access to data and greater commission of cybercrimes suggest? This article aims to tie a thread between these three scholars by asking a question—does criminal liability, as a social category and the creation of novel victims, get defined by how the commodity is exchanged in a particular epoch? In other words, this article suggests that the rise of cybercrimes in India should be looked at through the lens of Pashukanis’ commodity-exchange theory.