Posted on July 06, 2026.
"If there are no laws of the State to constrain people's freedom and their actions, how does an anarchist society deal with crime?" Anarchists are used to hearing this question; in response, they highlight the role of existing social structures and State policies in the emergence of crime. We shall also wonder, "Why hasn't the State done a perfect job at eliminating crime during its long presence?" On the back of anarchism and any radical thought rests not just a political direction but also a critical analysis of how existing authorities actively relate to social reality.
Radical analyses of crime tend to involve a certain presumption of social determinism. Despite being hidden, this presumption hits upon the eyes of some people and triggers an emotional response that opposes its truth and that desires to defend the belief in their free will. Overall, such an emotional conflict pushes one to counter the claims of determinism and eventually downplays the systemic outlook on social phenomena. In other words, rarely do we want to believe that we lack free will and that we are powerless in the face of socialization. Nevertheless, instances of hard determinist thought are not as rare as we imagine in the hegemony, and they can supposedly justify acts of crime.
In this text, I discuss the reception of hard determinism, the stance that a person's actions are necessarily determined by causes beyond their will, and the emergence of crime from structure by applying a radical determinism.
It is a source of infuriation, upon hearing the news of crime, that one proposes a cause-and-effect relationship between the criminal's background and the act of crime. "If they've hurt another person, this was their decision; if I am able not to hurt others, then so are they," is likely the underlying thought pattern. These reactions are not unreasonable; when we remove free will from the scenario, we tend to infer that the action was justified, as this would imply that the criminal was compelled to commit the crime.
Against this perception, we must ask ourselves, "If crime is a free choice, doesn't the world appear to be a more unpredictable, scarier place?" Any arbitrary disagreement that one has with common morality, which is supposedly independent of a determinist chain in its conception, can now lead one to commit a crime. Can we even do anything to prevent crime if we are the slaves of our free will?
Once the shock lightens, the path to reducing crime shines in increasingly authoritarian policies or the betterment of education, as though some forces could indeed influence people's actions. It appears that even in people's observations and expectations resides a hidden belief in determinism, reflecting a desire for predictability, driven by that for safety. I define this instance of determinism as hegemonic determinism, where one's trust in the State object is not confronted but more authoritarian policies are desired, where the criminal's agency is deferred to the criminal's familial conditions as though the family were an isolated unit from the broader culture of patriarchy, and where causes and proactive solutions are regarded as irrelevant. It seems to arise only at times of helplessness and marks a break from the dominant belief in free will.
In the solution scenario, the frustration at determinism is succeeded by the hope for a determinist future. Underneath, one's own belief in free will conflicts with their desire for safety (and predictability) in a society of required attendance, and the sorrow at the failure of this fantasy (i.e. "Free will and safety are compatible, and I'm safe.") drives the inflation of the criminal's agency in the first place. To cope with such sorrow, one consults the search for rational data to reduce the intensity of pain. Then arises not only the desire to understand why crime happens and how it can be prevented in the future but also, a feeling of defeatedness, which is in turn fought by adopting hegemonic determinism. For the person who considers themselves to be metaphysically free, the determinist solution resembles the "I'll do it just in case!" attitude, echoing an attempt to strengthen their trust in the State object or the "safe" status quo. Indeed, the architecture that claims a monopoly on protection has been functionally defeated; the news has worked to expose its failed vows.
As long as we cling on to the notion of free choice, however, we ignore the reality of neuropsychological reactions that run the mind and behavior. In cultivating one's belief in free will and false consciousness, we could point at one's identification with the State object and the bourgeois worldview. Indeed, the subject is not as rich and powerful as the State and the ruling class are to have such freedom, even metaphysically. Firstly recognizing the power of the capitalist authority and secondly regarding its defeat and failure as unimaginable, the criminal's accountability lands on either (1) a blank, abstract target or what does not exist materially in the first place to be held accountable or (2) the enemies constructed by the said authority like marginalized groups. Somehow, these enemies are taken to be more powerful than the capitalist State object; the attack against them reflects a desire to protect the object back from their hands and to disregard the competing authority of rationality ("It is because of immigrants, the feminists, gay people..."). For the obedient citizen, the State behaves like an object of idealization, whose actions and instilled beliefs are received to exceed rationality. We could go further to claim that the disconnection of the Problem of Free Will in metaphysics from the liberal ideas of freedom in political philosophy, in itself, reflects a liberal bias.
To take a step back, the attempts to understand the causes of crime stand on a shaky ground. On one hand, identifying some causes but viewing them in isolation reinforces the hegemony; on the other hand, referring to a systemic causation chain can threaten the status quo and attack existing power relations. Even so, these attempts, even if they make no progress towards fulfilling their goals, help us overcome the feelings of fear, sorrow, and defeat.
In defense of a radical determinism, it must be emphasized that other determined, inevitable events are that the victims of crime suffer from the harm committed by the perpetrators and that some moral claims reflect this situation. Hence, it would be a mistake to see the act of holding perpetrators accountable as meaningless and moral claims to be avoided; it is exactly these responding conditions that combat the occurrence of crime in the future and the violence of the status quo. Similarly, the witness inevitably desires to understand why crime happens in response to their pain, though with a less intensity than the victim experiences. Such a determinism cannot leave out empathy for the victim, as though they had a choice not to suffer. Don't we have to operate on our illusion of free will to survive? In this sense, moral claims now represent desires from and dissatisfaction with the current state of the world as responses.
Readily, structural crime analyses exist today without holding the label "radical determinism." We have argued that a presumption of social determinism lies behind these crime evaluations, and this can leave them vulnerable during their reception due to a psychological conflict. Having mentioned the implications of a radical determinism, we now put into application a radical determinist and critical analysis of crime, where I primarily focus on the system of patriarchy.
"If there is such a skew towards men, could this mean that the whole
process of crime is connected to gender? It must be a strong
probability. We are not of course saying that all men are criminal and
all women are not; but we are suggesting that there is something about
‘masculinity’ – or at least certain forms of it – that makes it more
probable that men will commit crimes. We need, for instance, to explain
why it is that men commit more crimes and women fewer. And indeed, once
we start to raise these issues, a whole new field of questions and
problems arises."
— from
Criminology: A sociological introduction, Second edition
Crime statistics demonstrate that the gender identity of the majority of perpetrators is male. Is this a surprise in the culture of patriarchy, where masculinity becomes associated with strength and dominance while femininity, with delicacy and passivity? Then, the nuclear family appears to have two main functions: (1) it instills gender norms on children, in other words, it is an actor of gender socialization and demands that girls be raised more strictly than boys, and (2) the size of this nuclear family unit encapsulates people in small, disparate circles, supporting the capitalist segmentation of wealth and conditioning children into selfishness.
We can sketch a rather vague structure of the former function of the nuclear family. While the parents repeatedly tell the child that he exercises the "male" category, any desire of his that deviates from this rank is met with punishment and builds the other category of "female," which is communicated to him as a shameful position, a sign of inferiority, a funny girlish thing. Only then does a binary flourish; the gender binary is not as neutral as it appears to be, and its persistence relies on an implicit misogyny.
Beyond this conceptual learning process, the child witnesses the gender binary in the gendered division of labor between the parents. Isn't the father freer than the mother, who is still occupied with her unpaid domestic labor? The child's perception of this legitimized imbalance in labor extends to normalize the capitalist class relations. Further, the child runs a set of identification relations between the father, the ruling class, and the State - as long as gender norms have branded the father as "the protector" of the family and the "male" as the representation of the "strength" ideal. If the child has internalized the male identity, he likely relies on his resemblance to the father and the glorification of masculinity and also identifies himself with the said authoritarian objects, falsely and unconsciously.
Following his socialization, the male child grows to navigate his life with a consciousness of superiority to another group of people - by virtue of an unearned trait, like his father is to his mother, like boys are to girls. On one side, there is his unchosen, non-gendered, non-sexed body; on the other, there is his gender identity, which presents a sense of superiority and prescribes a set of cultural performances to his will. An association made between the former and the latter sides brands both gender assignment and gender norms as laws of nature rather than artificial constructions, and he senses that hierarchy and competition are the state of nature. It is no surprise that he relocates the fact that men exercise power over women from crime statistics to human nature (which defaults to male nature), nor if he argues that men are naturally driven to dominate and that the feminist cause is detached from reality. Such a naturalization turns 360 degrees around itself to arrive at the gender essentialist theories of the TERFs. Who knows, the idealist search for essences to human structures might be tied to the unquestioned belief in gender essentialism.
Much can be said about the latter function of the nuclear family; at least, Freud might have something to say. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that a society must repress each member's libidinal drive to share it among other people to sustain a wider social network, which is necessary for the productive tasks, and must drive them to sublimate the libido to enforce the task of labor.
When Freud predicates such a repressive phenomenon to an essential principle of civilization, however, he presumes a human nature driven to monogamy and ignores the progressively narrowed size of the family unit. On the contrary, the nuclear family has adapted to capitalism to prevent the circulation of wages among working-class families, to hinder worker solidarity, and to continue to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few people who constitute the ruling class. One effect of the nuclear family is that it has also restricted children's interaction with other children during their upbringing; hence it can as well boost an attitude of selfishness, reinforcing the capitalist hegemony.
In the same book, Freud claims that a society must similarly repress each member's death drive, responsible for aggression, to further sustain social cohesion. When Freud treats the death drive as an innate, universal drive, his assertion reflects a patriarchal bias. He also ignores possible underlying phenomena like socialization into gender norms and related material conditions.
Luckily, the socialization project of patriarchy has not been perfect, and the gender binary already fails itself, as it has to communicate the categories of male and female simultaneously to allow for the internalization of either. Queer people's existential détournement against the gender binary and gender norms has often made them a target of the State and its apparatuses in social life. Who would've thought that the State which actively engages in hate crimes against queer people would come to care about the school shootings in its borders? The violence of the patriarchal, capitalist State has never ceased; it has changed its name to a suicide from mental health issues, an outcome of laziness and misfortune, an insult against the nation's ideals and public morality, a provocative dress, an uneducated family's son, men's biological inclinations...
Crime is often defined as an action that is punishable by the law. Otherwise, we could say that the State incentivizes a legitimate form of theft, committed by the bourgeoisie, by allowing the ownership of private property, but can we? Only when a working-class citizen is pushed into poverty and has to either starve themselves or steal does the crime of theft rise above their head. Being the enforcement of a hierarchy, the State depends on the ruling class to survive, and such a relation is sufficient to deem it a tool of the ruling class. We can then derive that the crime status of an action reflects the interests of the ruling class.
Lawfully, the working class must not revolt and must not desire to regain the ownership of the stolen surplus value. Not to mention, child labor has already been legally formalized under the name of vocational education, where children are paid off the taxes of citizens, constituting cheap labor for the capital. Wage labor already communicates the quantization of the individual. Considering these phenomena, crime in class society appears to be no anomaly but a perpetuation of existing authoritarian relations or a displacement of the desire to take revenge against them.
A crime can refer to a case of interpersonal violence, like rape and murder, or an attack against the status quo. Thus, the State plays a clever trick by categorizing both the defiance against its violent system and its resulting events under the same term. Such content of crime also reveals that marginalized groups and actual rapists are imprisoned in the same area, casting a great shadow on the justice of the State's punishment principle.
Of course, this realization pushes the writer to discuss their usages of the word "crime" until now. In this essay, crime mostly refers to cases of interpersonal violence, especially in the previous section, rather than the instances of political resistance against authorities. However, both meanings are adaptable for the first section, where I discuss the reception of crime.
In summary, socialization in a system of coercion and hierarchy entails that crime can be interpreted as the patriarchal outcome of normalized violence, the perpetuation of existing oppressive relations, a displacement of revenge against the oppressive forces, or a fight that is perceived to be on behalf of the State. Our evaluation of crime does not justify the erasure of accountability from the shoulders of perpetrators, but it only highlights the power relations at play.
Similarly to how intense one's attachment to a supernatural deity can get, the State object also entices its citizens by holding a similar property of being unsurpassable in its imagined power and by producing a fear of itself. While God is an abstract figure, the State is rather represented by governments, police organizations, and prisons across the world. Owing to this effortless and sensible visibility, the obedient citizen is more than charged to "fight for the State" and hold the perception that people who revolt against it are their enemies. From any motive that perpetuates the State's existing violence on marginalized groups to any stance that normalizes the punishment of people who speak against its injustice, such an act of altruism can range. Maybe, it is a fear of being punished by the State if they do not submit; maybe, it is a fear that the State will punish them along with their enemies if they do not show support; maybe, it is the love for the State object who carries a paternal crown. The Problem of Evil parallels the problem of crime and the problem of State violence, evoking the thoughts, "Evil is not caused by the State; it is caused by us," or "The State is evil because we are!"
We have mentioned before that gender norms attribute the strength ideal to masculinity and normalize such an attribution. It is also thought that patriarchy traces back to the first class antagonism. Regarding its place in the crime equation and its long presence, patriarchy codifies the act of violence as masculine and the state of victimization as feminine. On this foundation, the reduction of interpersonal violence has much to gain from the confrontation of patriarchy. By prioritizing the condition of victims and by calling out the State's incompetence in holding perpetrators accountable, we not only target the future occurrences of interpersonal violence but also the power imbalance that the patriarchal, capitalist State ultimately rests on. Until the police organization dissolves to defer the right to self-defense to autonomous and egalitarian communities...
As a reflective last note, it appears that material contradictions resolve through our vital illusion of free will, or that is how we experience the resolvement. This essay has been a long one, and to speak of my recent inactivity, I was bouncing between the stress of school and my feelings of burnout, affecting my ability to publish new things on this website. Of course, my perfectionism has added to the struggle; I had written many shorter drafts, but they appeared to be quite disconnected from each other in topic. Even in the preceding final thoughts, the scatteredness of my headspace has held a ceremony. Overall, I have been invested in reading psychoanalytic literature and being sliced by the bad news across the world. To feel intensely and to provide myself with explanations, the latter as a coping mechanism, happens to be my means of interacting with the world.