Marijuana grow operation, Northern California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Unlike Frederick Engels, I have never owned a factory, but like Engels I have been and still am a Marxist. For decades, I was also a capitalist in the cannabis world and a criminal, too, in the Marxist definition of the word. In Theories of Surplus Value, Engels’ buddy Karl Marx writes that a criminal “breaks up the monotony of bourgeois life” and also a major producer of both use and exchange value in capitalist society. I exchanged weed for a car and a teepee which provided a home for a couple of years.

“A criminal,” Marx explains, “produces crimes, criminal law, the police, criminal justice, penal codes, arts, bell-letters, novels.” As a criminal in the cannabis world in California when I was in my 30s and 40s I wasn’t alone. There were tens if not hundreds of thousands of us in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, cultivating, harvesting, transporting, selling and consuming weed. I left the commercial industry at about the same time that California voters approved Proposition 215 which legalized medical marijuana in the Golden State.

Becoming a marijuana grower and trafficker certainly enlivened my own life, and, while I don’t take sole credit for producing crime, criminal law, cops and penal codes I played a small part in the big picture. Also, as a marijuana journalist and as writer of fiction and nonfiction as well as a creator of a feature film about marijuana I helped to produce the literature and the culture that reflected the industry and its workers.

I had read about capitalism in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere before I entered the cannabis world but I had no direct experience as a capitalist until I grew and sold weed. From first hand experience, I learned about the rules of supply and demand, the fluctuations of the market, the role of the police in regulating the industry and in helping to set prices. Raids put a dent in the supply and jacked up prices. I also witnessed the vital role that marijuana dollars played in fueling the California economy when it needed fueling. Growers and dealers struck me as modern day pirates.

Ever since the early days of capitalism, crime and criminals helped with the “primitive accumulation of wealth.” Indeed, marijuana farmers and traffickers........

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