Steinem, the CIA, and Death Penalty (was Re: Politics ofCrime...)

[Max Sawicky]

> Well, both of us know that lots of political activists have been executed
> ostensibly not because of their politics but with a charge that they
> committed a murder or something like that. Like Joe Hill, for instance.
> Though the state may execute people for explicitly political reasons as in
> the case of the Rosenbergs, most of the times, the state uses some other
> charges, as in the case of Mumia. You may make a distinction, but the
> ruling class and their machinery of repression don't.

Of course.  But I though were talking about the legitimacy of executing the
other sort of criminal, as opposed to those fabricated by repressive state
agencies.


> More broadly, for American leftists to accept the legitimacy of death
> penalty for individual murders while the U.S. government may use
> covert and overt means to murder and otherwise destroy its political
enemies at home and abroad seems to me to be the same as being 'in favor of
capital punishment in the realm of politics,' as you put it.

The US Gov would (and has) do that entirely irrespective whatever our laws
or practice on capital punishment happen to be.  It's at the core of state
power, the thing least vulnerable to change.  What's the relevance?  That
all killing (except for abortion) is wrong?  If you want to make a pacifist
case, fine, but then you can't urge righteous mobs of workers to string up
capitalists and be consistent, can you?  As I noted with Doug, we seem to
have very rigid criteria against capital punishment under capitalism, but in
the name of Revolution, whatever that turns out to be, the sky's the limit.

mbs