Electric Chair
Electric chair
Communism and the death penalty
Given the absurd number of pseudo-socialist police states and their adoption of draconian punishment and more than occasional public education, a casual observer would have every reasonable reason to believe that Communism is in favor of capital punishment. China, the former Soviet Union, and Cuba all executed people for various crimes against the state or, at least from their perspective, its people.
To start with, many of those executed by these phony police states were done so for purely political purposes, namely to secure power and destroy potential enemies to the state. In all cases they were more extreme and wild when they started and gradually became milder and less frequent in intensity. This is standard to many dictatorships as there are fewer and fewer “enemies” available. Some few (generally fascists) buck this trend and continue to maintain an edge in despicable atrocities throughout their reign (with the worst actually intensifying).
I am afraid I cannot go along with this absurd inhumanity and I find it contrary to everything that socialism seeks to accomplish. Not only do I find myself against the obvious horror of political violence but I also do not accept the proposition of the use of capital punishment as a panacea to ordinary or extraordinary crime either.
As a rational political-economic system socialism must deal in facts and reality as much as possible and therefore should be contrary to any irritating religious texts demanding death for this thing or that. With regards to how it is currently used, the death penalty in the US has been an unmitigated failure and has almost certainly resulted in the deaths of innocent people. The facts are that those states that have the most per capita executions have a violent crime rate higher than those states that forbid capital punishment. Even if you attempt a chicken-egg argument, wouldn’t you expect lots of killin’ to eventually make Texas peaceful?
It is difficult to imagine a properly rational system to mete out this extreme form of punishment and the empowerment of the state with this power is antithetical to the very nature of communism. For capital punishment to exist in a communist state we would be empowering a large number of people with life and death which could result in the sort of unruly and vindictive killings during the French terror (or the aforementioned pseudo-socialist states.)
Furthermore, since communism is a materialistic political philosophy it does not imagine a perfect afterlife where all crime is punished and all wrongs resolved. As I will point out in some future essay, it does not refute it completely; it merely doesn’t regard it as relevant in determining justice. As far as Communism is concerned, death is final so the sanction of death is far more extreme a punishment than a system that actively acknowledges a religious post death experience. Moreover this makes it all the harder to deal with a mis-execution since there will be no righting of that particular wrong.
Because of the finality of death versus the materialist paradigm, theoretically communism demands a level of certitude fairly improbable even in this high tech CSI age. Where would the power to investigate, prosecute, and judge fall to? Is it possible to create a trustworthy system? Because of all of these questions it may be best to deal with such potential offences as requiring imprisonment instead. A wrongly jailed man can be freed; a wrongly executed man is still just as dead.
It is easy to argue, with a greater equality of resources and opportunity, that there would be less violence and, despite not being communist, many western European nations enjoy less violence (save during soccer games) possibly in part due to their reduction of deprivation among their citizenry. With communism, real communism and not stupid Russian and Chinese style dictatorships, it isn’t hard to imagine having even less useless and stupid violence. And with less violence there is less need for the threat of executions.
There has been made Utilitarian arguments in favor of the death penalty as a means to increase satisfaction in justice or in punishment and/or to reduce fear. These arguments are, of course, absurd and have little place in the real world. It feels like a strange mirror reflection of the argument by Deterrence (and about as rational).
Utilitarianism holds that whatever makes the most people the happiest, at the greatest quality of happiness is good. And before you imagine death arenas for the masses it determines that death (quite obviously) causes intense unhappiness to people. A real communist needs no proof of the system as there is no system, but merely the citizens.
Deterrence has never been a compelling proof against violent crime as is implied by the Texas example above. “Crimes of passion” of rage and rarely involve reason and therefore do not consider consequence. Crimes of greed have made their calculation and the mugger with the gun has made the same decision with a cost-benefit analysis that an auto company does when it knowingly releases a car that is especially unsafe. Those rare and strange murders that are caused by mental insanity are impervious to deterrence as well.
A good communist must be against capital punishment. We should oppose it for all purposes. The capitalist may sell us a rope, but we cannot fall to the murderous barbarism of his lynching. Perhaps we might merely use it to bind him or at least to tie shut the doors to the New York Stock Exchange.
Communism and the death penalty
Given the absurd number of pseudo-socialist police states and their adoption of draconian punishment and more than occasional public education, a casual observer would have every reasonable reason to believe that Communism is in favor of capital punishment. China, the former Soviet Union, and Cuba all executed people for various crimes against the state or, at least from their perspective, its people.
To start with, many of those executed by these phony police states were done so for purely political purposes, namely to secure power and destroy potential enemies to the state. In all cases they were more extreme and wild when they started and gradually became milder and less frequent in intensity. This is standard to many dictatorships as there are fewer and fewer “enemies” available. Some few (generally fascists) buck this trend and continue to maintain an edge in despicable atrocities throughout their reign (with the worst actually intensifying).
I am afraid I cannot go along with this absurd inhumanity and I find it contrary to everything that socialism seeks to accomplish. Not only do I find myself against the obvious horror of political violence but I also do not accept the proposition of the use of capital punishment as a panacea to ordinary or extraordinary crime either.
As a rational political-economic system socialism must deal in facts and reality as much as possible and therefore should be contrary to any irritating religious texts demanding death for this thing or that. With regards to how it is currently used, the death penalty in the US has been an unmitigated failure and has almost certainly resulted in the deaths of innocent people. The facts are that those states that have the most per capita executions have a violent crime rate higher than those states that forbid capital punishment. Even if you attempt a chicken-egg argument, wouldn’t you expect lots of killin’ to eventually make Texas peaceful?
It is difficult to imagine a properly rational system to mete out this extreme form of punishment and the empowerment of the state with this power is antithetical to the very nature of communism. For capital punishment to exist in a communist state we would be empowering a large number of people with life and death which could result in the sort of unruly and vindictive killings during the French terror (or the aforementioned pseudo-socialist states.)
Furthermore, since communism is a materialistic political philosophy it does not imagine a perfect afterlife where all crime is punished and all wrongs resolved. As I will point out in some future essay, it does not refute it completely; it merely doesn’t regard it as relevant in determining justice. As far as Communism is concerned, death is final so the sanction of death is far more extreme a punishment than a system that actively acknowledges a religious post death experience. Moreover this makes it all the harder to deal with a mis-execution since there will be no righting of that particular wrong.
Because of the finality of death versus the materialist paradigm, theoretically communism demands a level of certitude fairly improbable even in this high tech CSI age. Where would the power to investigate, prosecute, and judge fall to? Is it possible to create a trustworthy system? Because of all of these questions it may be best to deal with such potential offences as requiring imprisonment instead. A wrongly jailed man can be freed; a wrongly executed man is still just as dead.
It is easy to argue, with a greater equality of resources and opportunity, that there would be less violence and, despite not being communist, many western European nations enjoy less violence (save during soccer games) possibly in part due to their reduction of deprivation among their citizenry. With communism, real communism and not stupid Russian and Chinese style dictatorships, it isn’t hard to imagine having even less useless and stupid violence. And with less violence there is less need for the threat of executions.
There has been made Utilitarian arguments in favor of the death penalty as a means to increase satisfaction in justice or in punishment and/or to reduce fear. These arguments are, of course, absurd and have little place in the real world. It feels like a strange mirror reflection of the argument by Deterrence (and about as rational).
Utilitarianism holds that whatever makes the most people the happiest, at the greatest quality of happiness is good. And before you imagine death arenas for the masses it determines that death (quite obviously) causes intense unhappiness to people. A real communist needs no proof of the system as there is no system, but merely the citizens.
Deterrence has never been a compelling proof against violent crime as is implied by the Texas example above. “Crimes of passion” of rage and rarely involve reason and therefore do not consider consequence. Crimes of greed have made their calculation and the mugger with the gun has made the same decision with a cost-benefit analysis that an auto company does when it knowingly releases a car that is especially unsafe. Those rare and strange murders that are caused by mental insanity are impervious to deterrence as well.
A good communist must be against capital punishment. We should oppose it for all purposes. The capitalist may sell us a rope, but we cannot fall to the murderous barbarism of his lynching. Perhaps we might merely use it to bind him or at least to tie shut the doors to the New York Stock Exchange.