This article is an attempt to examine the conflict-criminological nature of corruption. Corruption is analyzed as a process that transforms actions and their results into a commodity whose nature is «non-commodity» like. The authors prove that it is necessary to interpret this term in the context of commodity monetary relations as a process that encompasses a whole range of social connections and relations and, primarily, property relations. The authors show how the society and the state limit the scope of commodity monetary relations and how the attempts to commodify something which cannot legally be considered a commodity are condemned and punished by the state. The conflict highlights the phenomenon of corruption, the state criminalizes such actions and refers them to the realm of criminal law. The authors also outline the difficulties in the criminal law interpretation of corruption, which have a considerable influence of the formation of the legislative basis for its counteraction. The authors conclude that the causes of corruption lie in the very social structure, which is corrupted and destroyed by conflict, while corruption, recognized as a mode of destroying social order, becomes equal with conflict. Special attention is paid to the key disputable issues of interdisciplinary analysis of the phenomenon of corruption and scientific approaches to studying it. The authors stress the heuristic potential of the conflict-criminological paradigm of recognizing illegal corruption relations that destroy the society to the degree beyond which it cannot reproduce itself as a sustainable and stable organism.