Doug Henwood:
> > > Dunno about that. Part of the U.S. international strategy has been a
> > > willingness to use extravagant levels of force to make a point -
> > > closely related to Henry Kissinger's "madman in the White House"
> > > negotiation strategy. Why not use the same strategy at home?
Gordon Fitch wrote:
> > I thought the "madman in the White House" thing was targeted
> > against supposedly rational regimes in a game-theoretical
> > manner; that is, one tries to hinder one's adversaries'
> > strategic calculations by introducing the possibility that
> > one's own behavior may be or become irrational.
Carrol Cox:
> The doggedness with which the ruling class holds on to the death
> penalty in the U.S. does call for thought. Abstractly, Gordon seems
> correct: it's not needed. But abstractly neither is racism or sexism
> "needed." (The question of what capitalism "needs" can get pretty
> opaque.)
>
> But insofar as in actual u.s. capitalism the radical subordination of
> black people *is* needed, then violence needs to be a fairly core
> part of the social order. (This is all very speculative here.) Police
> forces in any nation are apt to be fairly nasty, but they do seem
> particularly so in the U.S. -- and I would think that is linked to
> the importance of racism in u.s. history. Racism, it might be argued,
> *requires* lynch law to maintain it -- but lynch law works best if
> it is legal (death penalty) or semi-legal (what is euphemistically called
> "police brutality.")
>
> And we must of course maintain the morale of the police -- which
> in turn requires giving them a pretty free hand to brutalize at least
> part of the population. The deputies who recently quite carefully
> and deliberately kicked a prisoner to death in an anteroom of
> a courtroom in Chicago have been charged with first degree
> murder -- but are also out on bail!!!!
The ruling class has to maintain the class war (one of whose important resonances is racism) but in liberalism/capitalism, it also has to _obfuscate_ the class war. The death penalty looks like an inconvenience for the obfuscation part in that it is spectacular as well as overtly classist and racist.