This paper proposes to examine some of the core philosophical issues to have arisen out of the recent calls to move "beyond criminology". It will be claimed that the dismissal of crime as a "fictive event" is premature, as crime does indeed have an "ontological reality". Nevertheless, it will be asserted that the relation between harm and crime is contingent rather than necessary. Accordingly, this paper will argue that there is merit to the claim that we should unify research on social harm through the creation of a new field, a step which would have the added benefit of constructing an alternative venue for crimes of the powerful scholars who wish to explore the destructive practices of states and corporations unconstrained. This paper, therefore, will also offer a dialectical definition of social harm based upon classical Marxist strains of ontological thought

Over the past six decades researchers interested in the crimes of the powerful have developed a respectable body of literature. Owing to the empirical and theoretical richness of these contributions, the crimes of the powerful sub-field is ready for critical interventions to be made on the plane of scientific method. Moreover, such interventions have become increasingly necessary owing to the disciplinary hegemony of an orthodox empiricist approach which erects a problematic boundary between empirical representations of the crimes of the powerful and theoretical explanation. To aid a critique of this approach, this paper will employ the scientific framework of classical Marxism to decipher the peculiar problems which flow out of the orthodoxy's method. It will be concluded that while classical Marxism offers a more rigorous framework for penetrating analyses of the crimes of the powerful, orthodox scholars have nevertheless made significant contributions which should also be utilised in future research.

Marx, on several occasions, registered his plan to devote a volume of Capital to the state. At the time of his death, however, this volume remained unwritten. Subsequently, students of Marx have proven hesitant to theorize the distinct organizational schema of modern state power, and the way it mediates and enriches those tendencies identified by Marx in Capital’s first three volumes. Instead, the capitalist state is often distinguished by pointing to its disaggregation from the economic structure of society. The following paper will return to Marx’s proposed volume on the state, using a number of recently published scholarly tracts to consider its potential analytical orientation. Particular attention will be paid to Foucault’s late work on governmentality which, it will be argued, offers a useful starting point for conceptualizing modern state power, and the historically distinct ways it forms part of capitalism’s interior.

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