13.04.1995

Death for capitalism’s rejected scapegoats

THE DEATH last Saturday of Nicholas Ingram, who was executed in the electric chair, marked the end of another grisly episode in the history of the United States ‘justice’ system. As if the method of execution was not stomach churning enough, the attendant media circus only compounded the sickening nature of the spectacle.

So why did the British media go into overdrive over Nicholas Ingram? After all, in Texas last week another prisoner was executed and we heard nothing about it. Indeed, Ingram is the fourteenth person to be executed this year, not the first. The answer is simple, of course: Ingram was British-born, one of ‘us’. As The Observer aptly put it, for the British media “the elements of nationalism and voyeurism would be irresistible” (April 9).

Ingram’s death is part of a general trend towards barbarism in the United States, where alarmingly large numbers of people are looking towards capital punishment as one of the methods by which social decay, violence and crime can be arrested, if not reversed - the other main ‘weapon’ being savage cutbacks in welfare benefits and social provisions. Naturally, the fact that working class black prisoners constitute 40% of death row inmates, even though they only make up 12% of the population, is just a ‘coincidence’ for the advocates of the death penalty.

Thus, more and more states are reintroducing it in America. The latest state to convert was the previously ‘liberal’ New York, which takes the number with the death penalty to 38 - and Iowa and Wisconsin are expected to follow suit soon. With 3,000 on Death Row the bottle-neck is worsening. In Arkansas last year the first triple execution for 32 years was carried out, on the ‘sensible’ grounds that it saved overtime pay and reduced stress on the poor old jail staff.

Unsurprisingly, America’s ‘war against crime’ is attractive to all manner of bourgeois politicians in Britain. Many of them want to reintroduce the death penalty to Britain, although it is surely beyond question that it has no deterrent effect whatsoever (the Deep South, where it is mainly used, has by far the highest murder rates). All that matters is that bourgeois society exacts revenge on its officially designated scapegoats.

Communists treat with contempt the bourgeoisie’s ‘war against crime’ and the never ending hysteria and bigotry that the ‘war’ generates, aided and abetted by the media. Not because we approve of murder, but rather because we genuinely believe in being ‘tough on the cause of crime’ - ie, capitalism. The poverty, inequality and alienation produced by capitalism as it struggles to survive is the cause of crime, not the deranged ‘psyche’ (or genes) of ‘evil’ criminals. To eradicate the pervasive social phenomena of crime and violence, you first have to eradicate capitalism, through revolution.

Funnily enough, you do not hear that very often in the media. Now, I wonder why?

Frank Vincent