>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 01/24/00 12:45AM >>>
Justin wrote:
>I am puzzled on what basis Yoshie condemns rapists, racist thugs, and violent
>cops, since she rejects morality.
I don't reject morality out of hand. I'm simply saying that the notion of desert, retribution, personal responsibility, etc. do not prevent crimes; nor will they make criminal justice less oppressive toward the working class.
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CB: Socialist jurisprudence does not need personal responsibility or retribution ( an eye for an eye) to rationalize the existence of punishment and criminal law. An individual may be made or formed or determined by the social forces of capitalism and the residual forces of capitalism in socialism, and require rehabilitation or reeducation. Also, there may be others who must be deterred from making the same errors. Or deterrence is social and preventive pre-education to a crime. As I say, even my criminal law professor, teaching bourgeois legal principles, described retribution, the Old Testament law, as obsolete. Socialist or Marxist or progressive legal principles need not fall below these liberal bourgeois principles to provide a socialist rationale for jailing rapists, racists thugs and violent cops. The state is does not whither away under socialism ( See Cuba ).
Marxist "rejection" of morality is exactly in the vein that Yoshie describes. It is to dissassociate with the long, rotten, hypocritical history of Christian moralizing. Marxism has ethics, but must use a new name, like "practice" or "praxis" or "guides to action" to describe it, because the words "morals" and "morality" , et al. , have been so contaminated by the Christian ruling classes.
CB