SOCIAL BANDITS - BADDIES WHO ARE ON OUR SIDE

Bandits; highwaymen; bushrangers; Us-Them thinking

Since the 1960s, Marxist historians have written excitedly about crimes that resemble small rebellions - micromutinies - against some unjust ruling class. They call it ‘social crime’. Let’s take a look at it.

Social crime constitutes ‘a conscious, almost a political, challenge to the prevailing social and political order and its values’.[i] Think of poaching, rioting, ship-wrecking, bushranging. To some they barely look like crimes at all: certainly not to the perpetrators or their communities.[ii] By the nineteenth century, social crime could be something as petty as theft of water from public pumps.

‘Who are the real thieves?’citizens used to ask each other, then as now. ‘No, really who are the real thieves? Those who take a little extra bread for their children, or those who hoard wheat to make prices go up?’ When the law was made by and for thieves, there was surely no fault in thieving from them. Anyway, everyone was at it. In a world of thieves, it does not pay to be an honest citizen. There was a Them and there was an Us. One group as remote, unknowable, inhuman. The other was all around. We knew which side social bandits were on.

Most notorious of these criminals is the social bandit. This exciting character pops up wherever economies switch gear, out of agriculture, up into capitalism. Peasants’ lifestyles are destabilised by forces they can neither comprehend nor control. They are unable to fight back. They need a champion, a hero, a badass. Brave and resourceful, the social bandit dares to do what they do not. His very existence makes the weak a little stronger, the frightened a little braver, the small a little bigger. He fights against the existing economic, social, and political order by:

‘challenging those who hold or lay claim to power, law, and the control of resources. That is the historical significance of banditry in societies with class divisions and states […] Most country people since the development of farming, metallurgy, cities and writing (i.e., bureaucracy) have lived in societies in which they see themselves as separate as a collective group from, and inferior to, the group of the rich and/or powerful […] Resentment is implicit in this relationship.’[iii]

The social bandit is made of special stuff. When it comes to hiding, he is invisible; when it comes to fighting, he has superpowers; when it comes to thieving, he steals from the rich and, well, all the rest. Since no one can catch him by fair means, his career ends only if and when he is betrayed. One of Us gives him up to Them.

Social bandits became so popular, other criminals sometimes dressed up in their clothes, false advertising be damned. Here’s the Mob boss Frank Costello: ‘I’ve been trying to figure out just what a racketeer is […] I never went to school past the third grade, but I’ve graduated from ten universities of hard knocks, and I’ve decided that a racketeer is a fellow who tries to get power, prestige, or money at the expense of entrenched power, prestige, or money’.[iv]

For three centuries, Early Modern Europe proved the perfect habitat. (Definitions of Early Modern period appear a bit elastic in nature, but we’re talking, more or less, about the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.) Into history the social bandit walked, or, rather, swaggered. If he’d been any more superhuman, he’d have flown. Rob Roy Macgregor (1671–1734) remains a Scottish folk hero to this day, owing his reputation to the occasional half-hearted skirmish with the Duke of Montrose. His contemporary was France’s ‘beloved bandit’, Cartouche (1693-1721), as famous for suavity as crime. He once broke into the house of a duchess and demanded champagne. When the quality disappointed him, he had a better vintage delivered to her door. Doncho Vatach, who worked in Bulgaria a century later, was one of the few bandits who made a genuine habit of stealing from the rich and donating to the appropriate recipients. Sometimes, at least. By contrast, the Sicilian Salvatore Giuliano was barely more than a murderer. He gave the poor ‘nothing but grief’.[v] He was still giving it to them as late as the 1940s.

Mexicans continue to treat certain narcotrafficantes like social bandits, especially if they invest in parks, football fields, and other gifts to the people. The notorious social bandit El Chapo, for instance, was caught only when betrayed by his partner, El Mayo (betrayal is always part of the legend.) Modern-day Indonesians respond to unpopular government reforms by turning to ‘strong men’, who defend the community one minute, but dabble in crime the next.[vi]

It may seem odd that civilians should make heroes even out of those who steal directly from themselves. Conceivably, bandits may do good, so to speak, by accident. Perhaps it’s satisfying to see them breaking the laws created by predatory governments.[vii] Wherever you may live, you can probably think of examples from your own country. Badass, tough guy, narcotrafficante: he may be bad, but at least he’s Our kind of bad.

Social bandits swarm all over Sardinian history. Natives regard the Italian state as a marauding invader. Their own Barbagian Code is far dearer to their hearts than Italian law. More than the police, Sardinians reserve their respect for the balenta, proud owner of a supercharged reputation somewhere between Raffles and Hercules. In reality, he is usually little more than a common rustler but that barely matters. He is made of dreams and fantasies as much as flesh and blood.[viii] So, at least, the sociology books say. The Sardinians I have met have tended to shrug and say something along the lines of, ‘Whatever’.

Let’s take three more examples to illustrate the social bandit’s remarkable geography. Zorro, of course, is a fictional character, but the fiction itself is revealing. ‘The Fox’ is a masked and dashing hero whose flashing blade spells humiliation for every capitalist who thinks to invade his Pueblo de Los Angeles.[ix] Humiliation, in Zorro’s case, is always spelt with a trademark Z. Australia’s Captain Thunderbolt (Frederick Ward, 1836-70) spent seven years in ‘exploits of daring and generosity’. The law could never catch him, despite the fact that he seemed to be everywhere. The Australian countryside might as well have been his private hall of mirrors. He’d probably still be at it today, if knavish victims hadn’t gone and grassed him up to the authorities.[x] What were they thinking? The social bandit Rangine - brave, fierce, semi-invisible – was a one-man platoon in the war against the soldiers who brought the British Empire to Northern India.[xi] Rangine’s story is almost identical to that of his oppressors’ own Robin Hood.

But not even social bandits could accomplish their heroics alone. Every actor needs an audience willing to suspend disbelief. Indeed, the audience has to be exceptionally willing, if they are going to make heroes out of thugs like Billy the Kid or Jesse James:

‘It does not matter that neither the James gang nor Billy the Kid lived up to their legend. What matters is that in Missouri and New Mexico in the nineteenth century, as in England in the fifteenth century, men were ready to argue, perhaps even to believe, that criminals behaved with […] becoming charity. If the love of justice and adventure contributes to the survival of such tales, so also did human failings: gullibility and self-deception.’[xii]

In the second decade of the twentieth century, Mexico was all coup and revolution. Power corrupted one leader after another – Madero, Huerta, Carranza. The ultra-violent bandit-turned-general, Pancho Villa, sniffed an opportunity. He claimed to represent ‘the people’ (of course he did)  in their struggle against an ever-changing cast of exploiters united apparently only by their desire to annihilate them. Civil war followed. Mexico’s northern neighbour got up a committee to bureaucratise the problem away. The committee paused in its shilly-shallying only long enough to flip-flop. Villa attempted to provoke the USA into an intervention, a false flag operation to unite his countrymen in outrage. He was a canny politician who found an appropriate Enemy. But later events refused to follow his plan. A fearsome force of 11,000 gringos entered the country. They spent an entire year fox-hounding the ‘people’s representative’ back and forth. By the time they left, Mexico was calming quietly down.[xiii] We can’t help but wonder: Was Villa one of the world’s last social bandits, or simply a bloody-minded operator shrewd enough to pretend to be? The answer is yes.

England’s Robin Hood may be the international standard by which his imitators are judged, the exemplar of his kind. But he left Sherwood Forest as long ago as the seventeenth century. Capitalism was triumphant. Olde England was no more.

Some places seemed immune. German bandits were a different sort altogether - less romantic but much more practical. You could tell by their very names: the most famous was called ‘John the Knacker’.[xiv] Hardly the cognomen of a popular hero.

In some places, you’ll read that the German bandit was ‘a dreadful creature’, and that ‘outbursts of fury, jealousy and vengeance, caused in part by drunkenness, led to quarrels within [his] band...’[xv] But, while the fury surely put in an appearance from time to time, German bandits were rarely so violent or scary. They were, in fact, a minor concern. Minor, that is, to everyone and everything except the State itself. By his very existence, the bandit put two fingers up to it. He was living proof that not everyone accepted this modern, new-fangled invention or its modern, new-fangled laws.[1] Official literature certainly made him look bad: frightening, jealous, violently vengeful. But it was a propagandists’ portrait, ‘painted very much according to the state’s wishes, in broad, crude outlines, with the bandits all depicted as evil-minded individuals who had chosen a life of crime of their own free will...’[xvi] The bandit had to be evil, in order to make the state look good. He had to be frightening, in order to make it look necessary.

Shades here of George W Bush’s War on Terror: geometric exaggerations of the threat; pumped-and-jacked bar-charts of fear and fright. Like al-Qaeda in later times, the German bandit had his own purpose. As an agent of chaos, he showed what would happen if the state’s grip loosened. Things would fall apart; anarchy would be loosed upon the world. The bandit made a neat, convenient enemy, just like witches for the Early Modern Church. Batman is useless without his Joker.

German bandits spoke a slang called Rotwelsch. Its most important terms were Wittstöcke (or Wittische) and Kocheme. Wittstöcke meant ‘someone who is neither willing nor able to learn the language of thieves, a stupid individual’. Kocheme meant ‘an artful, crafty and intelligent man, a member of the thieving profession’. Words to split the world. They created an Us and a Them. We were the bent ones, the wily ones who knew the score. They were the Others, the saddos who failed to be Us.[xvii]

‘Us and Them thinking’ of exactly this sort is a disastrously powerful force. The simple division of people into groups makes us regard our own as more valuable than others. It is implicated in the most serious crimes, up to and including genocide.[xviii] This kind of thinking is more powerful in our postmodern world than in perhaps any previous period of history. In the past, leaders (take Hitler, for example) actually had to work at identifying groups. Today’s social media does it for us. For more on the topic, you can follow this link.

When Kocheme appeared in court:

‘they were made [by the Wittstöcken] to fit the stereotype of “dangerous others”, step by step, beginning with their first interrogation or even before. The process culminated in a ritual of public punishment [...which...] effectively excluded convicts from the category of ‘normal’ persons’.[xix]

At length, the social bandit stepped off stage. Enter a sexy new understudy: a yuppie upstart with marvellous marketing. More chivalrous, daring, and romantic than his predecessor, the highwayman kept one eye on the audience. He was there to impress. The drama grew even more compelling.

This compelling fellow was still appearing on cigarette cards late into the twentieth century:

Taking an unscientific straw poll among friend and acquaintances I have discovered this: Our mental image of the social bandit and the highwayman are almost unique in so far as they tend to appear handsome. Both make rather dashing, attractive figures, unlike, say the petty thief, the pirate, the slave-trader. Why might that be?: Perhaps We like to feel as though these criminals are on Our side. After all, both social bandits and highwaymen supposedly redistribute wealth that has been unfairly taken away from Us.

By the end of the seventeenth century, highway robbery had become big business. But that’s a story for another time, Crime & Psychology fan. Right now you can practice your highway robbery skills simply by biffing the bright blue button below. You know it makes sense!

Don’t forget to come back next time when I have yet another stunning stich to add to the glorious tapestry that is Crime & Psychology. What will it be? Well, that’d be telling…

All pictures courtesy of WikiMedia Commons. References provided partly out of academic habit, but also so you can chase up anything you find particularly interesting.

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[1] Germany in the sixteenth century in fact pointed its fingers at three ‘Enemies Within’: those who went to fight for foreign armies; petty criminals; the ‘morally disreputable.

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[i] Hobsbawm, Eric(1): ‘Distinctions between socio-political & other forms of crime’, Society for the Study of Labour History Bulletin, no 25, 1975, p5

[ii] Sharpe, Jim, ‘Crime, order & historical change’, in John Muncie & Eugene McLaughlin (eds): The Problem of Crime, Sage, London, 2001, p113

[iii] Hobsbawm, Eric(2): Bandits, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2000, p8

[iv] Frank Costello, quoted in Raab, Selwyn, Five Families – The rise, decline & resurgence of America’s most powerful mafia empires, Robson Books, London, 2006, p65

[v] James, Clive(1): The Meaning of Recognition  - New essays 2001-2005, Picador, London, 2005, p58

[vi] Bakker, Laurens: ‘Gangster or social bandit – rise & fall of an Indonesian preman’, Terrain Anthropologie & Sciences Humains, March 2021, Avaiable at https://doi.prg/10.4000/terrain.21364, Accessed 5^th August 2021

[vii] Curott, Nicholas & Fink, Alexander: ‘Bandit heroes – social, mythical, or rational?’, The American Journal of Economics & Sociology, Vol 71(2), 2012, pp470-497

[viii] Preston, Douglas with Spezi, Mario: The Monster of Florence, Virgin Books, 2009, Kindle edition, Loc 933-950

[ix] www.zorro.com/history/, Accessed 14^th August 2019

[x] Thurgood, Noel: Thunderbolt – His last day, Evalt Graphics, Liverpool, NSW, 1996

[xi] “Snilloc”: Badmashes – Tales of freebooters & criminals of India, Thacker & Co Ltd, Bombay, 1943, pp9-18

[xii] Holt JC: Robin Hood, Thames & Hudson, London, 1989, p12

[xiii] Tindall, George Brown & Shi, David E, America – A narrative history, Brief Sixth Edition, WW Norton & Co., New York, 2004, pp813-4

[xiv] Danke, Ute: ‘Bandits & the state – Robbers & the authorities in the Holy Roman Empire in the late seventeenth & early eighteenth centuries’, in Richard J Evans (ed), The German Underworld (Routledge Revivals): Deviants and outcasts in German history, Routledge, 2015, pp75-107

[xv] Quoted in Danke, Ute, op cit, p77

[xvi] Danke, Ute, op cit, p101

[xvii] Danke, Ute, op cit, p98

[xviii] Waller, James: Becoming Evil: How ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing, Oxford University Press, USA, 2007

[xix] Egmond, Florike: Underworlds - Organized crime in the Netherlands 1650–1800. Polity Press, Oxford, 1993, p196