Stockholm Noir: Neoliberalism and Gangsterism in Easy Money

Abstract

The gangster story is a warped Horatio Alger tale. Carl Freedman notes that it connects to the mystery of the origins of capitalism in what Karl Marx called ‘primitive accumulation’, the consciously repressed history about how common lands and natural resources were privatised and how companies, backed up by national armed forces, plundered non-European continents of their riches. The greedy and ruthless gangster’s rise to social success is but a small-scale reflection of the genocides and the violent redistribution of wealth that gave birth to modern-day capitalism. Gangsterism is also the ultimate expression of what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called Gesellschaft. While his other key concept Gemeinschaft describes the ‘natural’ personal relations and values often found in rural communities, Gesellschaft stands for the ‘constructed’ impersonal relations through business and formal interaction that characterise life in the urban capitalist era. As national identity became a central issue in twentieth-century Europe – Fascism being the most extreme ideological project – gangsters and other social, legal and moral transgressors were often defined in popular culture as an alien intrusion of an otherwise idyllic Gemeinschaft.