Abstract

Surplus labor and crime have complemented one another since the nineteenth century, when social philosopher Karl Marx propounded a now classical theory of surplus labor, exploitation, and crime in the material sense. As illustrated in Volume 1 of Capital (Marx, 1867/1976), Marx's concept of “surplus labor”—a type of unpaid labor—represented a moral injustice, a sort of crime against humanity. In the twentieth century a distinct form of surplus labor was linked to crime in a wider range of studies, which redefined this concept as labor surplus or surplus in labor. As an expression of the twentieth-century neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School, Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure, first published in 1933, was among the first studies to link surplus labor and crime where the former was meeting the criteria both for a classical theory concept of “surplus labor” and for a revised concept of “surplus in labor” or “labor surplus.” Most studies along a sociological–criminological spectrum were now dedicated to this revised concept.