Introduction

Howard Becker, in his famous article ‘Whose side are we on?’ (Becker, 1967), suggests that one possible way to avoid ‘taking sides’ in the research endeavour is to adopt a ‘third point of view’. Such a point of view is simply one that is different to those that are under scrutiny. However, for Becker, this also ultimately involves taking a side as it:

With this, Becker confirms his general argument that it is impossible to remain neutral.

In these passages, Becker uses Marxism as his example of a ‘third point of view’. By doing so, he unintentionally raises questions that demand renewed attention from Marxist criminologists: whose side are they on, and what values guide their work? These questions are intensely problematic for Marxist theory today. Revisiting them in a contemporary context is vital given the current feeling, alluded to by Downes and Rock (2007, p 232) and evidenced by recent work by Cowling (2008), that Marxist criminology may be on the cusp of renewal.

In what follows, the two questions will be explored and the difficulty Marxism has in answering them will be outlined. In response to the first question, it will be contended that due to the massive social changes that have occurred over the last four decades or so, the class that Marxism is ‘for’, the class that supposedly will ultimately vindicate the theory in practice, no longer exists in any coherent form. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult for Marxists to provide a robust response to Becker's first question. As for the second question, the suggestion will be that the very structure of Marxist theory renders it extremely challenging to definitively specify which values it should be guided by, or which ones it should promote. Thus, attempting to answer Becker's second question, or questions like it, is a long-standing and intractable problem for Marxists.

Marxism's fall from prominence in the discipline of criminology (see Taylor, 1999a; Russell, 2002) is partly down to its inability to answer such fundamental questions as these convincingly.