ABSTRACT
Crime is one among many costs of the dominance of market values and institutions - part of the 'dark side' of a system that is often promoted as a beneficent and progressive engine of prosperity. Goldsmith's famously plaintive lines from his poem 'The Deserted Village' (1770/1996):Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay. Criminological thinking explicitly focused on the critique of market capitalism remerges most strongly with the explosion of New Left social-science scholarship, particularly in the United Kingdom. Rates of homicide and other serious crimes of violence rose sharply, along with other social pathologies, in Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union after the market-oriented economic reforms at the end of the 1980s. Some of the most illuminating empirical confirmations of the strength of the links between market capitalism and crime have come from ethnographic studies of communities hit hard by the destabilizing-and demoralizing-influence of global consumer capitalism.
