Social Control and the Question of Class from a Criminological Perspective

Abstract

The local protest movement has raised a series of specific criminological issues (e.g. various forms of corruption, plunderage and violence) that one way or another relate to the question of control. Who or what controls the individual, capital, society and the state? Is the ethical and political ideal of individual and collective self-determination still able to inspire people, symbolized by the (ironic or cynical?) fatalism, feeling of helplessness, inner emptiness, jailhouse isolation, chronic fears, rumination of the media stupidity, crisis (spasmodic, but uncertain) management of everyday banality, and maybe even nasty impression that to the individual in these hopelessly ruined/perverted world remains only imbecilic/idiotic (hypocritical?) existence of the "zombie"? The answers to these questions should be sought from the perspective of maintaining social class power and the capitalist and labour struggles, thus this is the most appropriate theoretical basis for understanding and evaluating of the current criminal economy, which was formed as a counterrevolutionary reaction (of the "new liberalism") on the contradictions of "Keynesian project".