Justice & Law Quote by Friedrich Engels

Engels lands the punch by flipping the moral hierarchy: the state, supposedly the referee, becomes the offender. The line isn’t a vague complaint about hypocrisy; it’s an accusation that “crime” is a label deployed by power, while the violence of law gets laundered as order. Calling anti-crime laws “even more criminal” reframes the real scandal as structural: punishment and policing can produce harms larger than the harms they claim to prevent, and do so with official impunity.

The intent is polemical and strategic. Engels is writing in a 19th-century Europe where industrial capitalism is rapidly expanding, mass urban poverty is treated as a public threat, and the state is tightening surveillance and discipline over the working class. In that setting, “curbing crime” often means criminalizing survival (vagrancy, petty theft, labor agitation), and protecting property over people. Engels wants the reader to see that the law is not neutral, because the society producing the law is not neutral.

The subtext is class war in administrative clothing. “Some laws” is doing work: he’s not denying that violence exists outside the state; he’s saying the state’s response can be more predatory than the disorder it condemns. The audacity is rhetorical: he steals the state’s own moral vocabulary and turns it against it, forcing a question that still stings in modern debates about stop-and-frisk, mandatory minimums, and “public safety” laws that manage inequality by punishing it.