The
law and order card is always the trump that governments use to divert
attention away from any crisis created by the system they help to
run. If all else fails, find a scapegoat, a sacrificial lamb. The
only developed Western state that still applies the death penalty is
the United States, the land where its constitution proclaims the
right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Whereas
many individual states in America exercised capital punishment, the
Federal government had a moratorium on executions Attorney General
William Barr has directed the Bureau of Prisons to
resume executing death-row inmates after a 16-year pause. Five
inmates have been scheduled to be executed in December 2019 and
January 2020.
Any
sincere socialist is appalled at the idea of the state having the
right to execute its citizens. The death penalty in any form is a
blatant violation of human rights — the most undignified and
irreversible of all punishments. How do you resurrect an innocent
person? State executions are in reality the state taking revenge on
the wage-slave for a mistake he or she committed because of the
frustrations caused by the contradictions of the capitalist system
that they are conditioned to exist in. State executions is capitalism
at its ugliest. It is the state giving up on the individual and
admitting that the social system under capitalism is not working —
that the only solution to capital crimes is death.
Many
point to the dissolute nature of the death penalty, to how it
degenerates civilized society. It is all of this indeed, but,
morality aside, state execution has always been racist and
class-biased in the USA. The death penalty rarely targets the rich
and never the company directors knowingly responsible for corporate
manslaughter. If you are wealthy, then you can afford the best legal
representation money can buy. In a system in which money tips the
scales in favor of justice, the poor are clearly at a disadvantage.
The
World Socialist Party of the United States would dearly welcome the
abolition of the death penalty, but as a revolutionary party, it is
just yet another injustice among thousands of others, many equally
deserving. We have no intention of appearing uncaring, but while only
a few dozen are executed in the US each year, tens of thousands of
children die of hunger and its related illnesses every single day.
Millions of people suffer from the effects of war. And daily, many of
our fellow-workers suffer death and injury through corporate health and safety negligence. The working class is murdered and dehumanized each and every day.
Yes,
the WSPUS loathe the death penalty, as much as we detest every other
inequity perpetrated against our class, but the problem is in the class
war that is waged against us. Our duty is to respond by urging our
class to end capitalism and, in so doing, finally eliminating all the
social problems that presently plague us; forever changing a society
that sees its poorer and more desperate members killing one another
and thus ending up victims themselves at the hands of the capitalist
state’s killing machine.
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