The mother of revolution and crime is poverty. Do you agree?

Revolution is a radical and pervasive change in society and the social structure, especially one made suddenly and often accompanied by violence. It is dependent upon some need or want in man to change something which he feels is impeding him. Therefore implies that a revolution needs to have certain sense of dissatisfaction, repression or disappointment at its heart. Crime on the other hand is an action or an instance of negligence that is deemed injurious to the public welfare or morals or to the interests of the state and that is legally prohibited. Here is the link between these two: a man may commit a crime in order to get what he needs or wants. Take for example, if a person is poor and cannot afford to buy food, he might be forced to steal food. Hence this assertion rings its veracity like a fire alarm bell; I agree with Aristotle.

Indeed, poverty is the breeder of crime but there is a slight twitch. If a man chooses to be poor, he commits no crime in being poor, provided his poverty hurts no one but himself. However, if a man has others dependent upon him; there are a wife and children whom it is his duty to support, then, if he voluntarily chooses poverty, it is a crime. While a man who chooses to be poor cannot be charged with crime, it is certainly a crime to force poverty on others. It seems that the great majority of those who suffer from poverty are poor not from their own particular faults, but because of conditions imposed by society at large. Therefore I hold that poverty is a crime–not an individual crime, but a social one.

My theory is that poverty is related to crime but in exactly the opposite way, Crime causes poverty. All crime is about getting something stolen from you such as your name, property, innocence. When this happens, you become a victim of a crime and the consequence is poverty. To further prove my point, should the entire community be held hostage to criminals, no business would want to operate in the ghettos because of the high risks, people cannot go to schools because of fear and so forth.
I believe that crime has a direct link to family life. A large group of babies in New Zealand were studied over ten years of childhood, and then their risks of offending by the age of thirteen were analysed. It was found in 1992 that exposure to parental discord during middle and early childhood led to increased risks of offending later. Major changes at home of various kinds did not have the same effect. Another 1992 study of sixty five families in Texas with teenage sons looked at difficult child behaviour and parental relationship as perceived by the child. There was a strong link between parents who said they had great difficulties with their sons (out of control), and sons who said there was a lot of parental conflict at home. Thus the cause of delinquency is not poverty but parental strife.
Shifting our focus to revolution, in China, poverty is deemed to be shameful. The poor hide away or are told to do so thus they feel a “loss of face” caused by their condition. This creates resentment for being left poor, which can in turn lead to protests, riots and even a push for revolutionary change. However, there is a widespread perception that street protests are the first step to riots and ultimately revolution. This is misleading for there is a huge difference between protests and revolution. Revolution requires more than just an urge to change things; it needs a direction, where to lead the change.

Hence my stand is that poverty is not the causative agent it is made out to be for revolution. Empirical investigation shows that a country’s poverty has little correlation with its domestic violence. Moreover, a look at the biographies of leading revolutionaries makes clear that they come from middle and upper class families, and are usually well educated. This is clearly seen in the French Revolution. It was not poverty. Not a single poor man was a leader in the revolution. Every one of them was well fed and had a well-nourished brain.
As to what stimulates violence, it could be due to ethnic-racial issues, gender discrimination and so on.

To sum up my argument, there may be some truth in Aristotle’s philosophy but poverty is not the one and only root of crime and revolution. There are others as mentioned above.