>>> Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> 01/26/00 02:42PM >>>
At 01:15 PM 1/26/00 -0500, Charles Brown wrote:
>CB: It is not so amazing if one understands that the bourgeoisie have
always gone back and forth between democratic-republican methods of rule
and open terrorist rule as in slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and fascism.
As Lenin taught, the bourgeois democratic republican form (what you are
observing and amazed by above)
-- snip
The most amazing thing is not that bourgeoisie does it, as you correctly pointed out, but that most people still buy bourgeois crap as legitimate.
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CB: Well, I must admit that I am a little amazed that bourgeois crap is selling like hot cakes. But I think we have to give the bourgeoisie credit. Was it you I had an exchange with on this in the last few days ? I do not buy the idea that the bourgeoisie have just stumbled unconsciously into the tremendous worldwide success they are enjoying now , including in the U.S. Of course, I hate them, but my hatred does not prevent me from also soberly assessing their success and skill.
Of course it is not entirely skill at really convincing everybody that they are legitimate. For most people all they have to do is convince them that it is hopeless to fight them. That an individual's chances of success are not 100% for going along with the system, but they are a lot higher than being a radical. The bourgeoisie and their social and psychological scientists have calculated this calculus very skillfully. And of course they have almost absolute control of the mass media that influence opinion, etc., etc.
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Wojtek: As to the supposed draconian treatment of criminals by the state - i fail to see how opposing, say, the death sentence for that Texas man King, or for the Delaware ex chief prosecutor (forgot his name) who killed his girlfriend and put a contract on witnesses against him, can advance the interests of the working class in this country. I can see that that the sacrificial ritual of executing these men will not help the working class either - but why should the Left spend any energies to save that scum from the gallows?
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CB: Our energy is spent on opposing the general principle of the death penalty, not on the specific cases you mention. This is because on balance the death penalty in the sense you are discussing , as carried out by the state, contributes to legitimizing ( as you mention above ) the state and system as it is. What about the fact that the system and state CAUSE murderers and racists to be made, systematically ? So, how can the state execute this criminal that it helped to make.
Notice this issue comes up more clearly in the recent Michigan case trying a child as an adult for murder. In Texas, they have executed incompetents and people who committed crimes as children. It is gross.
CB
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PS. Probably the only logically consistent argument against death penalty is that proposed by the Roman Catholic Church on the principle that all human life is sacred (god-given, etc.). I do not buy that principle, however, I do not think that human life is any more sacred than, say, the life of animals we eat. Hence I have no fundamental problems with abortion, euthanasia, or death penalty any more than with slaughtering farm animals or terminating stray pets. They are reprehensible on emotional grounds, but they all represent forms of killing socially constructed as legitimate.
wojtek