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No to Marxism
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As May 5, 2018, it is the 200th birthday of one of the
famous atheist and founder of Marxism, Karl Marx, we will post this article
from the International Communist League.
We, the comrades of Unit 1012, are truly well aware that the ACLU
Demons work to end the death penalty and also abolish LWOP.
We, the comrades of
Unit 1012: The VFFDP, DO NOT TRUST them at all and we know that they
are nothing but liars who value the lives of murderers and evildoers, with the
plan on putting innocent people’s lives at risk of getting murdered.
Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, the founders of Marxism, both wanted to end the death penalty. Sadly,
many people were influenced by their ideas. We will present these articles from
Marxist to educate the public on one of the early pioneers of death penalty
abolitionism. Most Marxists are Anti-Death Penalty campaigners.
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Karl Marx was a douche
bag, he never worked a day in his life. Born to wealthy parents he squandered
his inheritance, he then sponged off of wealthy friends and ended up spending
time in debtors' prison.
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Capital Punishment
and the Capitalist State
Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
In 1976,
the American Law Institute provided the U.S. Supreme Court with the
“intellectual framework” to restart the state’s machinery of death—which had
been idled since 1967 and officially put on hold by a 1972 Supreme Court
decision. Over three decades later, in the fall of 2009, the Institute, in the
words of the New York Times (2 January), “pronounced its project a
failure and walked away from it.” This “project,” as it is so benignly called,
provided judges, prosecutors and law professors with a “learned” rationale for
the state-sanctioned murder of close to 1,200 people and for the continued
incarceration in death row dungeons of more than 3,000 others, the majority of
them black and Latino.
A study
by the Institute discovered, as if it were news, that “capital punishment was
plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense
lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent
people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.”
Racial
disparities? Raw racism has been at the core of the death penalty in the U.S.
since the days of slavery. In 1986, a suit was brought before the Supreme Court
by black Georgia death row prisoner Warren McCleskey. Drawing on an
authoritative statistical study by law professor David Baldus, McCleskey’s
lawyers provided raw figures showing, among other evidence of racial
disparities, that black people in Georgia convicted of killing whites were
sentenced to death 22 times more frequently than those convicted
of killing blacks. In rejecting McCleskey’s appeal in 1987, the Supreme Court
openly acknowledged that to accept his premise would throw “into serious
question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.”
Incompetent,
underpaid defense attorneys? Nothing new here. A study of death penalty cases
in Texas, the kill-capital of the U.S., showed that one-quarter of those
sentenced to death were represented by attorneys who had at some time been
“reprimanded, placed on probation, suspended or banned from practicing law by
the State Bar.” Innocence? That was ruled out by the Supreme Court’s 1993 Herrera
decision, which held that executing an innocent man was not
unconstitutional.
The
decision of the American Law Institute to “walk away from”—but not oppose—the
death penalty reflects increasing exposure of blatant frame-ups of the innocent
and the barbarism of the state’s executioners. Since the death penalty was
reinstated in 1976, more than 130 of those sentenced to die at the hands of the
state have been exonerated, over one-third of them in the past ten years. In
2000, after 13 Illinois death row prisoners were found to have been falsely
convicted, Republican governor George Ryan first called a moratorium on
executions and then commuted the death sentences of Illinois’ death row
inmates. (Having faced blowback for this decent act, Ryan was sentenced in 2006
to six-and-a-half years in prison on mail and tax fraud and other charges.)
Public exposure of grisly torture in death chambers—California executioners
digging into the arms of Stanley Tookie Williams to find a vein for lethal
injection or Florida death row inmate Angel Nieves Diaz writhing in agony as he
was shot up with two doses of poisonous chemicals before dying—led to further
temporary moratoriums in other states. The purpose was to allow the capitalist
state time to find a more “humane” means of killing.
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Karl Marx chose hell
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As
Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle—for the guilty as well as
the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to determine who lives and
who dies. We welcome any measure against the death penalty or that curtails the
reach of the state’s killing machine. But we also understand that this will not
fundamentally change the violently racist and oppressive nature of capitalist
class rule. It won’t change the reality of cops in the inner cities gunning down
black and Latino youth who have been written off as permanent “outlaws” by the
rulers of this society. Nor will it alter the slower death of the growing ranks
of poor and unemployed from homelessness, disease and poverty. We seek to arm
the working class with the understanding that it will take nothing short of a
proletarian socialist revolution to sweep away the barbaric institutions of the
capitalist state, which—with the cops, courts, prisons and military at its
core—is nothing other than an apparatus of organized violence for the
repression of workers and the oppressed in defense of the power and profits of
the capitalist rulers.
Down With
Capitalist Repression!
The
decline of death sentences and executions at the state level has not done
anything to lessen the commitment of the executive power of U.S. imperialism,
now headed by Barack Obama, to the death penalty. In fact, the number of
federal prisoners on death row continues to grow. Against complaints of trying
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the purported mastermind of the September 11 attacks on
the World Trade Center and Pentagon, in New York City, Obama declared: “I don’t
think it would be offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death
penalty is applied to him” (Daily News, 18 November 2009).
Nor has
the Supreme Court been the least bit deterred from pushing to execute the
innocent. On January 19, the court vacated a 2001 decision by federal district
court judge William Yohn that overturned the death sentence against Mumia
Abu-Jamal and virtually wrote the script for its reinstatement by the Third
Circuit Court of Appeals. Mumia is an innocent man who was framed up and
falsely convicted for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia cop. The capitalist
rulers want to kill or entomb Mumia for life because they see in this eloquent
journalist, MOVE supporter and former Black Panther Party spokesman the spectre
of black revolt, of defiant opposition to their system of racist capitalist
injustice. Free Mumia now!
Every
court before which Mumia’s case has been brought has rejected the mountains of
evidence of his innocence and the equally voluminous evidence that the cops,
prosecution and judges conspired in framing him up. The reformists and liberals
who for years have looked to these same courts for “justice” now turn to the
Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder. Socialist Action leader
Jeff Mackler put it baldly: “Today, having exhausted most all legal remedies,
Mumia’s supporters are engaged in an important campaign to demand a Justice Department
civil rights investigation into charges presented by his supporters that
demonstrate illegal collusion between Pennsylvania prosecutors and the
judiciary (Socialist Action, November 2009).
This
hat-in-hand appeal to America’s top cop and the Commander-in-Chief of U.S.
imperialism is a savage indictment of the reformists’ belief in the “democracy”
of the capitalist state. Obama’s open support for the death penalty won him the
backing of right-wing radio broadcaster Michael Smerconish, who has stood at
the head of the crusade for Mumia’s death. Obama’s election was aimed at giving
a face-lift to U.S. imperialism, and the message to black people is to shut up
and eat it because the coming to power of America’s first black president shows
that there is equality for those who “earn it.”
The Death
Penalty in America: The Lynch Rope Made Legal
Opponents
of the death penalty often point to the fact that nearly every other advanced
industrialized country has abolished capital punishment. Outside of Japan, no
other major capitalist power has the death penalty as part of its criminal
code. But that doesn’t stop these countries’ rulers from deploying other means
of brutal repression and death at the hands of their cops and other state
forces.
Historically,
capital punishment is a barbaric relic of ancient religious codes of
retributive justice. But its endurance in the U.S. is rooted in the origins of
American capitalism, which was built on the backs of black slaves. Under the
Slave Codes, slaves were killed with impunity for “crimes” ranging from
insolence toward whites to rebellion against the slave masters. It took a
bloody Civil War to smash slavery. Only after that revolutionary victory were
the freed black slaves recognized as persons, with full rights as citizens. In
the ensuing period of Radical Reconstruction, the most democratic period in
American history, more blacks per capita held political office than at any
other time. But the promise of freedom for which 200,000 black troops fought so
courageously was betrayed by the Northern capitalists.
All
remaining Union troops were withdrawn from the South by 1877, and shortly
thereafter a rigid system of legal segregation called Jim Crow was imposed and
maintained by Klan terror and police-state repression. At the heart of the Jim
Crow system was the lynch mob, whose purpose was to enforce the subjugation of
black people through terror and murder. Although the number of those so
hideously put to death will never be known, the Tuskegee Institute estimates
that nearly 5,000 lynchings took place between 1882 and 1968. By the 1930s,
extralegal lynchings were increasingly supplanted by legal lynching. From 1930
to 1967, more than two-thirds of those executed were black.
In an
article titled “Black Man’s Burden: Race and the Death Penalty in America” (Oregon
Law Review, Spring 2002), Charles Ogletree rightly argued that “the
racially disproportionate application of the death penalty can be seen as being
in historical continuity with the long and sordid history of lynching in this
country.” Pointing to the fact that the Southern states that account for more
than 90 percent of all executions today significantly overlap with those with
the greatest number of lynchings and other extralegal terror during the Jim
Crow period, he concluded: “Given the many similarities between the illegal but
often officially sanctioned practice of lynching, and the current imposition of
the death penalty, it seems at times that the only difference between lynching
and capital punishment is the gloss of legality and procedural regularity that
the latter enjoys.”
In 1967
executions were put on hold; five years later the Supreme Court ruled that the
death penalty was “wanton and freakish” and ordered states to rewrite their
laws. This ruling came in the context of the tumultuous civil rights struggles,
growing mass protests against U.S. imperialism’s dirty and losing war against
the Vietnamese workers and peasants and, in 1970, a mounting strike wave. On
the world stage, the images of black protesters demanding basic equality being
viciously attacked by racist cops and mobs were an embarrassment to U.S.
imperialism and its posturing as the champion of “democracy” in the Cold War,
particularly in competition with the Soviet Union in the Third World. In this
context, America’s rulers judged that it was time to refurbish their
much-tarnished “land of liberty” credentials.
But this
was a brief and unusual moment in U.S. history, a period when the capitalist
rulers were trying to contain, co-opt and eventually destroy the mass civil
rights movement and the burgeoning radicalization centered on the Vietnam War.
And they succeeded. After the 1973 U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, the antiwar
movement disappeared. The civil rights movement, whose leaders banked on the
courts and the Democratic Party for redress, was broken when it confronted the
vicious segregation of blacks in Northern ghettos, which was based not on Jim
Crow law but on the reality of American capitalism. Most of the more radical
black militants who opposed the policies of the civil rights leaders were
either cut down by the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation or co-opted into the
Democratic Party.
By 1976,
when the death penalty was reinstated, the winds of reaction against 1960s
liberalism and particularly black rights were blowing hot. Busing for school
integration was defeated through a combination of racist mobs in the streets
and liberals in Congress. The nomination of “born again” Baptist Jimmy Carter
to head the Democratic Party ticket in the 1976 elections was not
accidental—Carter openly proclaimed the virtues of “ethnic purity.” A year
later, the ten-year moratorium on the death penalty ended with the execution of
Gary Gilmore. The racist “war on crime,” which was kicked off in the 1970s by Republican
Richard Nixon, was augmented in the 1980s by the “war on drugs” under Ronald
Reagan, with the support of leading black Democratic spokesmen such as Jesse
Jackson and Al Sharpton. This racist war led to a massive increase in black
incarceration, with the U.S. now housing 2.3 million prisoners, the largest
prison population in the world. One of every three black males born today can
expect time in jail.
At the same time, as industry was
being decimated in the late 1970s and ’80s, the prison population grew by a
million—one place for every job lost on the assembly line. The lives of the
majority of the black population, which once supplied a “reserve army of labor”
for American capitalism, were now deemed by the rulers to be irrelevant to
production for profit, while social programs seen as benefiting the ghetto and
barrio poor were slashed, culminating in Democratic Party president Bill
Clinton ending “welfare as we know it” in 1996.
That same year, Bill Clinton gave
a major boost to the death penalty. His Antiterrorism and Effective Death
Penalty Act gutted the habeas corpus right of state prisoners to have
federal courts review their convictions and vastly expanded the federal death
penalty, giving a green light to the execution machinery to go full speed
ahead. And, indeed, the assembly line of death was kicked into high gear,
reaching a high of 98 executions in 1999.
Written in this history, in the
negative, is the fundamental truth of Karl Marx’s statement at the time of the
Civil War: “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black
it is branded.” Fomenting racial and ethnic hatreds has long served America’s
capitalist rulers in ratcheting up the exploitation of the working class as a
whole, keeping the workers divided and obscuring the fundamental class nature
of the capitalist system of exploitation. Writing off the lives of the ghetto
poor as worthless is aimed at exalting those who will work at any wages and
under any conditions. The results can be seen in the trail of broken unions,
the slashing of wages, the increasing speedup and the general deterioration of
living conditions for most working people. In all this, the rulers have been
ably assisted by the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucrats, whose policies of
class peace and promotion of the capitalist Democratic Party as a “friend of
labor” have sapped the fighting strength of the unions.
The death penalty stands at the
pinnacle of the American capitalist state’s arsenal of repression. While the
face of death row may now be mainly black and Latino, fighters for labor’s
cause have also been targeted for death by the capitalist state: the Haymarket
anarchists, abolitionists and labor organizers who fought for the eight-hour
day, in 1877; IWW organizer Joe Hill in 1915; anarchist workers Sacco and
Vanzetti in 1927. This does not include the hundreds of working-class fighters
who have died at the hands of the strikebreaking cops and scabs. But it was out
of such struggles that the industrial unions in this country were forged in the
1930s, bringing into their ranks as militant fighters masses of black workers.
Breaking the chains forged by the trade-union misleaders that have shackled the
working class to the class enemy means fighting to build a new class-struggle
leadership. It will be out of hard-fought class battles that the vital
instrument for getting rid of this decaying system of exploitation, racial
oppression and death will be forged—a multiracial workers party to lead the
fight for a socialist America. Such a party must be rooted in the understanding
that the fight for black freedom is central to the struggle for the
emancipation of the proletariat.
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“It would be very difficult, if not altogether
impossible, to establish any principle upon which the justice or expedience of
capital punishment could be founded in a society glorying in its civilization.”
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Abolish the Death Penalty Everywhere!
More than 150 years ago, Karl
Marx attacked the London Times for upholding capital punishment as a
necessary defense of “civilization”:
“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 glorying in its civilization. Punishment in general has been defended as a means either of ameliorating or of intimidating. Now what right have you to punish me for the amelioration or intimidation of others?... 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?”—“Capital Punishment” (January 1853)
When capital punishment was
reintroduced in the U.S., amid an anti-crime hysteria, we noted in “Abolish the
Death Penalty” (WV No. 117, 9 July 1976): “The
Marxist attitude toward crime and punishment is that we are against it….
Socialists do not proceed from the standpoint of punishing the offenders. Such
a vindictive penal attitude is fundamentally a religious rather than a
materialist conception of social relations.” Marxists fight for the
creation of an international socialist society based on material abundance.
Only then will the material conditions exist for the eradication of crime—which
is born of deprivation and otherwise is a small-time reflection of the theft
and terror on which capitalism is based—and for eradication of the need for a
repressive state apparatus. Such a society cannot come into being without the
victory of socialist revolutions internationally, especially in the advanced
capitalist countries.
Today, the Chinese
bureaucratically deformed workers state leads the world in executions. This is
one of the hideous expressions of Stalinist rule—not only in China but also in
North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba—which is based on the reactionary utopia of
building “socialism in one country”—i.e., opposition to the struggle for
international socialist revolution. A brittle caste that parasitically sits
atop the workers state, the Stalinist bureaucracy uses the death penalty and
other forms of repression to maintain social order. We fight for the
unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state. But the
fact that 1,700 human lives were snuffed out through capital punishment last
year in China only underlines the need for a proletarian political revolution
to overthrow the ruling bureaucracy and establish working-class soviet
democracy, based on the program of proletarian revolutionary internationalism.
The “Budget” of Crime and
Punishment
In the U.S., public support for
the death penalty has been shaken, falling from a high of 80 percent in 1994 to
65 percent today. States like New Jersey and, more recently, New Mexico have
abolished the death penalty, as juries have become increasingly reluctant to
impose a death sentence. Here the calculus of state-sanctioned killing runs up
against the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. A 2009 year-end
report by the Death Penalty Information Center noted: “The costs of the death
penalty became an increasingly important issue as states faced severe budget
deficits. High expenses with no measurable benefit were frequently cited in
legislative debates about the death penalty.” The report also cited the
increasing introduction of life-without-parole sentences—which the Dallas
Morning News gleefully, and correctly, called “death by prison”—as a
central factor in the decline of death sentences to their lowest in a decade.
Pointing to New Mexico Democratic
Party governor Bill Richardson’s statement that cost of the death penalty was
“a valid reason” for its repeal, an article by the reformist Workers World
Party (WWP) notes: “One way to save hundreds of millions every year is to end
the very expensive and wasteful death penalty and use those millions for job
programs, education and health care. Every cost study in the U.S. shows that
the death penalty is far more costly than life in prison” (Workers World,
13 January). That WWP advises the capitalist rulers on reducing the overhead of
state repression and death is simply one of the more outrageous expressions of
“money for jobs, not prisons” reformism.
While the price of death at the
hands of the state may be a factor in curtailing its present use, sectors of
the bourgeoisie have also been screaming over the inordinate costs of the
bloated prison system. Yet even in the context of a declining crime rate, and
with no immediate prospect of upheavals in the inner cities, they continue to
throw more people behind bars and keep them there. A recent article in the New
York Times (30 January) noted that despite a New York State law
liberalizing the release of old or sick inmates who are physically incapable of
committing a violent crime, few have been let go even though each inmate costs
the state $150,000 a year.
Nor do the rulers tinker lightly
with their machinery of death. The Workers World article, titled “Death
Penalty Changes Spur Optimism,” points to the recent Supreme Court decision
granting a new evidentiary hearing for Georgia death row prisoner Troy Davis.
This was a real victory. Davis, a black man falsely accused of killing an
off-duty cop, has three times come within hours of being executed despite the
fact that seven of the nine witnesses who testified he was the killer have
since recanted.
The sanctimonious declaration by
Supreme Court Justice Paul Stevens that “the substantial risk of putting an
innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an
evidentiary hearing” may sound enlightened. But one need only look to the fact
that a few months later the Court ruled against the appeal of Kevin Cooper
despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence, including a 103-page statement
by five judges in California’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This was quickly
followed by the Supreme Court’s move to have a death sentence reinstated
against black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Reformists like WWP seek to
tinker with capitalism because they imbue this system of exploitation and
oppression with inherent democracy and rationality. Marxists, whether on the
question of the death penalty, life in prison or imprisonment in general, do
not offer advice on how to administer the capitalist state. We are opposed to
the bourgeoisie’s entire machinery of repression, including the vast
enhancement of repressive tools adopted under the “war on terror,” which has
been wholeheartedly embraced by the Obama White House.
Following the first U.S.
execution since 1967, we wrote in “State Butchers Gilmore” (WV No. 141,
21 January 1977):
“The reinstitution of the death penalty is not just another legal argument lost before an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court. It is one among many proofs of the failure of capitalism in its death agony to fulfill its promise of a decent life…. Only the victorious proletarian revolution that overthrows the bourgeois state will abolish the death penalty for good and smash the prisons, in the course of rooting out the whole vicious cycle of crime, punishment and repression caused by capitalism.”
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/952/deathpenalty.html
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“No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no
nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits - and
everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by
the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes
among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge
threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a
civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although
there were many more matters to be settled in common than today - the household
is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land
belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the
households - yet there is no need for even a trace of our complicated
administrative apparatus with all its ramifications. The decisions are taken by
those concerned, and in most cases everything has been already settled by the
custom of centuries. There cannot be any poor or needy - the communal household
and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those
disabled in war. All are equal and free - the women included. There is no place
yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes.”
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2900919.Friedrich_Engels]
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“It would be very difficult, if not altogether
impossible, to establish any principle upon which the justice or expedience of
capital punishment could be founded in a society glorying in its civilization.”
Karl Marx's birthday on May 5 is conicidentally
on Europe Day (May 5). Most probably that is why those EU are so Anti DP....
10/10 World Day against
the #DeathPenalty:
“It would be very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to establish any
principle upon which the #justice
or expedience of capital #punishment
could be founded in a #society
glorying in its civilization.” [Karl Marx] #HeSaid
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OTHER LINKS:
“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 glorying in its
civilization. Punishment in general has been defended as a means either of
ameliorating or of intimidating. Now what right have you to punish me for the
amelioration or intimidation of others?... 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?”
- Karl Marx: “Capital Punishment” (January 1853)
- Karl Marx: “Capital Punishment” (January 1853)
The forgotten victims of Communism, they
forfeited their lives to tell us a tragic story! (VIDEO SHARED)
Protests as China's Karl Marx statue
unveiled in German city of Trier
New York celebrates his 200th
birthday…
Titan of
Terror: The left-wing acolytes who say Karl Marx can't be blamed for the
millions slaughtered in his name are deluded - bloodshed was at the heart of
his philosophy
Allen West on Karl Marx https://www.facebook.com/VictimsFamiliesForTheDeathPenalty/posts/1548082095313751
Is Religion Evil? BY Alister McGrath
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“To hell with your theory of evolution Darwin, I am not related to those
idiots!”
- King Kong to Charles Darwin
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://me.me/i/17094252]
[ALBUM SOURCE: https://me.me/t/theory-of-evolution]
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