> OK, I have looked up the article on Marx and
> Retribution, which is by Jeffrie Murphy (not Jeffrey
> Reiman, as I misremembered) in PPA, reprinted in
> Cohen, Nagel, & Scanlon, Marx, Justice & History,
> Princeton 1980. If we are going to get Marxological
> here, we should look at the text where Marx actually
> discusses the issue.
>
> According to Murphy, and I think he is right, because
> I know Marx's writing pretty well and cannot recall
> any other discussion of the topic directly, his only
> extended treatment of punishment in criminal law is
> the article "Capital Punishment," NY Daily Tribune, 18
> Feb 1853. This is mature Marx, not early Marx, and may
> be said to reflect a fairlt considered view.
>
> In this piece, Marx says mainly two things that Murphy
> expands to modern philosophy essay length -- not that
> convincingly, in my view. I mean I think a beter job
> could be done, not that Murphy's ideas are bad in
> outline.
>
> OK, Marx says, (a) that the _only_ theory of
> punishment worthy of the name is Hegel's retributive
> theory, that Punishment is the right of the criminal
> that represents the act of his own will, and (b) that
> there is "something specious" about this theory in a
> class-divided society where (for all the reasons Marx
> set forth in his critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
> Right and his theory of the state as a class
> instrument), it is not reasonable to think of the
> state as representing the will of the criminal -- at
> least the poor criminal.
>
> Two points. One is that this endorses retributivism as
> the correct theory of punishment for a worker's state,
> where presumably the laws _would_ represent the will
> of all the people. (b) In capitalist retributivism
> would still apply without any speciousness to the
> crimes of the bourgeoisie, whose will the state
> largely represents, according to Marx.
>
> So, Marx is more on my side than yours on this. He
> might have been inconsistent with his won premises. I
> have argued that in other contexts. But we have to be
> clear: Marx does not reject retributivism. He rather
> worries about its full applicability in class society.
> If we are worried about Marx's views, that is where we
> must start.
>
The relevant part of Marx's article is available on the web.
> On capital punishment
> Monthly Review, May, 1984 by Karl Marx
>
> In view of the resurgence of capital punishment in the United States
> we thought MR readers might be interested in Marx's observations in a
> dispatch from him that appeared in the New York Daily Tribune of
> February 17, 1853. The occasion for writing on this subject was a
> leading article in The Times (London) that provided, in Marx's words,
> "no less than a direct apotheosis of the hangman, while capital
> punishment is extolled as the ultima ratio of society." The following
> extract gives the gist of Marx's rebuttal. --The editors.
>
>> It is astonishing that the article in question does not even produce
>> a single argument or pretext for indulging in the savage theory
>> therein propounded; and it would be very difficult, if not altogether
>> impossible to establish any principle upon which the justice or
>> expediency of capital punishment could be founded in a society
>> glorifying in its civilization. Punishment in general has been
>> defended as a means either of ameliorating or intimidating. Now what
>> right have you to punish me for the amelioration or intimidation of
>> others? And besides, there is history--there is such a thing as
>> statistics--which prove with the most complete evidence that since
>> Cain the world has neither been intimidated nor ameliorated by
>> punishment. Quite the contrary. From the point of view of abstract
>> right, there is only one theory of punishment which recognizes human
>> dignity in the abstract, and that is the theory of Kant, especially
>> in the more rigid formula given to it by Hegel. Hegel says:
>> "Punishment is the right of the criminal. It is an act of his own
>> will. The violation of right has been proclaimed by the criminal as
>> his own right. His crime is the negation of right. Punishment is the
>> negation of this negation, and consequently an affirmation of right,
>> solicited and forced upon the criminal by himself."
>>
>> There is no doubt something specious in this formula, inasmuch as
>> Hegel, instead of looking upon the criminal as the mere object, the
>> slave of justice, elevates him to a position of a free and
>> self-determined being. Looking, however, more closely into the
>> matter, we discover that German idealism here, as in most other
>> instances, has but given a transcendental sanction to the rules of
>> existing society. Is it not a delusion to substitute for the
>> individual with his real motives, with multifarious social
>> circumstances pressing upon him, the abstraction of "free will"--one
>> among the many qualities of man for man himself! This theory,
>> considering punishment as the result of the criminal's own will, is
>> only a metaphysical expression for the old jus talionis: eye against
>> eye, tooth against tooth, blood against blood. Plainly speaking, and
>> dispensing with all paraphrases, punishment is nothing but a means of
>> society to defend itself against the infraction of its vital
>> conditions, whatever may be their character. Now, what a state of
>> society is that which knows of no better instrument for its own
>> defense than the hangman, and which proclaims through the "leading
>> journal of the world" its own brutality as eternal law?
> <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_v36>