Crimes of Class

— Learning from the lore of class struggle often starts in relation to small things, like where we test the boundaries and find out what happens when we don’t do what we’re supposed to do. Then those small things and the lessons we learn, the understandings we gain, can lead on to larger things and can be more collective and more powerful.

Two friends interview each other. The friends are from different generations and come from different national, cultural, and class backgrounds. But they share in a vision of a world and they teach, and learn from, each other in the articulation of this vision shaped by a lifetime of struggle, solidarity, and the kind of political education irreducible to theory or practice alone. In the interviews, the friends reflect on the lived experience of poverty, criminalisation, and organising in the Illawarra and south coast over the recent past: labour militancy, violent reaction, economic downturn, communal care. They reflect on the myriad crimes of class, and find insights into love, care, and solidarity as everyday revolutionary practices from below among the poor and criminalised. As the friends contribute to each other’s life story, the reader is invited into the book’s rich history, at once a history of a region and a story of communism as something lived in the now and reached for, as a horizon.

‘This is a truly moving work of political memoir and a profound reflection on the relationship between capitalism, crime and resistance. Gawne and Southall have an uncanny ability to connect the dots between personal and regional histories from below and capitalist backlash on a global scale. This book will become a classic of the Australian left.’
— Melinda Cooper, author of Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (2024) and Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (2017)

‘Crimes of Class explores the poverty, surveillance, love, violence, and solidarity to be found in some of the most marginal corners of this country. In part an oral history of how crime is experienced in the everyday, Mark Gawne and Nick Southall’s are two singular voices. Their honesty and vulnerability wonderfully show how larger politics and social practices are embedded in each of their worlds. This book is also a searing critique of life under capitalism, and how we might create something different. Essential reading for scholars, activists and the outraged, and for those who want to think more deeply about the chasm between legal notions of right and wrong and whose interests they serve.’
— Elizabeth Humphrys, author of How Labour Built Neoliberalism (2019)

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