Death Penalty: Politics of.

[Carrol Cox]

Max asks what the political arguments I referred to were? I
thought most of my arguments (and Michael's and Yoshie's) were
political in that for the most part we emphasized not the cruelty
to the accused but the damage to the public in general and
the working class in particular that the death penalty did. But
specifically, I was referring to the following post, which I
sent last Wednesday. As its heading suggests, it was not
intended to be comprehensive, but at least it raises issues
which cannot be handled either by references to Gallop Poll
like reports on the "working class"  or maunderings about the
victims of crime (as though the death penalty was any help to
them).

As to Guthrie, if you think him a sentimentalist, very well, I've
retired as a teacher of remedial reading.

I don't intend to participate further in this thread for the
time being.

Carrol

A few observations.

1. I'm amazed at how few bring to this subject the Epicurean
insight that death is a tragedy for the living, not the dead. The
death penalty primarily penalizes the relatives and friends of
the executed person.

2. As Linebaugh points out, the use of the death penalty always
increases during periods when the working class is being transformed
in some way or other.

3. The primary victim is the public -- the death penalty pollutes the
public mind in innumerable different ways. It is in fact much worse
than private vengeance, for it brings the whole magesty of "The
People" (i.e., the Ruling Class masquerading as The People) to
bear in the most  dramatic way possible on one isolated individual.
And the way common sense (which I have come to regard as
a better phrased than "ideology" to get at this social mechanism)
operates, it generates the general mass consensus that *the*
great menace to human happiness is from individual criminals.
(Why would "we" go to so much trouble to kill this one person
with such pomp and ceremony if there were not really great
concerns involved? Common sense (ideology) is never either sensible
or conscious.)

4. Emphasizing the execution of the innocent obscures the real
issues involved. by suggesting that all would be well if only
the guilty were punished. As is usually the case with opportunism,
it is in fact impractical and inopportune. From the perspective
of humaneness, it would be better to carry out executions within
a week or so, even at the cost of killing many more innocent,
because the real horror of the death penalty for those subject
to it is the long stay in the death cells, which are torture
chambers. The illogic here is not mine but the "logic" of the
penalty itself.

5. Emphasizing the sanctity of human life (and all other pacifist
garbage) is also inopportune. It opens up endless irrelevant
arguments and only increases the corrupting effects of the
death penalty on the public mind.

6. Someone mentioned approval of the death penalty by African
Americans. That is the one thing I use to really tangle with my
black students on.

Carrol