ADVANCES TOWARDS A CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY.

The article provides a view of the process of transformation of criminology into radical deviancy theory, which gives rise to a series of theoretical and practical possibilities, and that these possibilities relate to new forms of academic and political practice. Purposes for doing radical deviancy theory have now developed to the point where the radical deviancy theorist can no longer remain content with demystifying traditional correctionally oriented criminology. Materialist criminology must set about the task of seeking to explain the continuance, the innovation or the abolition of legal and social norms in terms of the interests they support, the functions they serve to particular material arrangements of production in propertied societies; it must also realize that the legal norms in question are inextricably connected with the developing contradictions in such societies. The mystification of social conflict in legal expressions is not a new phenomenon, and it was Karl Marx, defending himself against a charge of conspiracy in the Cologne Trials of 1849 in a speech which won over the jury, who advanced the arguments that should win over radicals to the understanding of law, and the creation of a materialist criminology. Society is not based on law, that is a legal fiction, rather law must be based on society. It must be the expression of society's common interests and needs, as they arise from the various material methods of production, against the arbitrariness of the single individual. Any attempted assertion of the eternal validity of laws clashes with present needs, it prevents commerce and industry, and paves the way for social crises that break out with political revolutions and propagates social crimes.