Abolish the Death Penalty
While Trump is doling out pardons to world class criminals who served him, his parting gift to his racist bloodthirsty base is the pending execution of 5 federal prisoners whose lives are his to take or spare. The Trump mob are taking their last chance to do this and are apparently relishing the power. They set about taking these lives at the worst moment; worst for the additional grisly reason that the masses who could take to the streets and stop the execution spree are once again going into lockdown and are preoccupied of necessity, looking after their individual health as the pandemic death count soars.
Meanwhile the Democrats are full of triumphalism at having once again bamboozled the summer’s mass movement for Black Lives, and the fate of death row inmates gets relegated to obscure cable tv news outlets. The Communist Workers Group here denounces all the bloodlust and the callous indifference of the capitalist parties. With them in power there is no possibility of putting the death penalty in the past tense, back pages of history. The capitalists continue, not without interruptions, to resort to terror by execution. They keep rediscovering their need for this barbaric terror and we keep fighting against their societal power to murder by law.
We will not try to persuade the readers that all these prisoners are innocent; although if one looks deeply into these cases there are many reasons to call into question the logic of the sentences based on circumstances and conditions of life! And while there are many ethical and moral reasons to oppose the Death Penalty we will leave those arguments to others today,.
As Marxists, as materialists, our opposition to the Death Penalty is based on the class nature of the state, it is the ruling capitalist class that the prosecutor, the judge and executioners work for. In the capitalist state the billionaire class of employers kills workers at unsafe workplaces daily, and kill the poor with hunger, homelessness, inadequate medical care and impact the health of the rest of the population with cancer causing toxic, polluted water, air, and processed food stuffs. Yet they never pay, with their lives and rarely with jail time or fines, for the death and suffering their profits cost the rest of us. There is no ‘equal justice for all’ in the capitalist state as the roster of those executed during the 231 years of the U.S. Constitutional “justice” confirms. The ruling class and their lackeys who run afoul of the law are regularly exempted, pardoned and rehabilitated. Reduced sentences, early release, house arrest, and cushy prisons are available for the well-heeled, well-represented and those who cynically have their “Come to Jesus” experience as a pretext for their exoneration or special treatment.
The working classes, the poor and most specifically the Black and Brown population enjoy no such treatment. It is their bodies that are laid on the executioners’ gurney, and if Trump and Barr have their way, strapped into the electric chair, marched to the gallows, gassed or shot by firing squad! And this is how just a few die. Many more of the incarcerated and not a few awaiting trial are dying of COVID, out of sight of an anti-science ruling clique that psychiatry declares is out of their minds.
We remember the Haymarket martyrs, we remember IWW organizer Joe Hill shot by the state of Utah by order of the copper bosses! We remember immigrant worker organizers Sacco and Vanzetti, the victims of Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the named and unnamed thousands of Black persons lynched with a wink and a nod from the local sheriff from Reconstruction days down to today.
The legacy of the ‘masters right’ to discipline chattel slaves is the lynch culture that re-emerged after the end of the Reconstruction in 1877 and which continues today as the structurally racist death penalty, courts and police departments which occupy and terrorize Black, Brown and working class neighborhoods.
An unending spate of police violence, mayhem and murder has given rise to the Black Lives Matter mass protest movement. The aim of this movement in the streets is to resolve the unfinished tasks of the two bourgeois democratic revolutions in the U.S.A (1776 & 1865) to secure equal rights and opportunity for all; something the street activists and youth are quickly learning cannot be accomplished without Socialist Revolution.
Observers have learned that equal rights for all is more than an elusive thing. The politicians, pundits, theologians, lawyers and academics who are ideologically and materially committed to the capitalist system maintain and develop the ‘dominant paradigm’ bourgeois consciousness, the ‘civil consensus’. A consensus based on the negation of the relevance, rights and existence of the classes whose labor power is appropriated as surplus value, profits used to enforce the social miasma. But the conscious memory of the working class is not asleep.
We remember all those who were executed judicially and extra judicially by the orders of the bosses and their lackey judges, wardens, vigilantes and police. We know why Mumia Abu-Jamal was framed up and why Fred Hampton was shot down! Because we know the executioner is poised to cut down the leaders of the the poor and working people to protect the interest of the boss capitalists, we have no faith in their meting out justice to the unfortunates born into the wrong circumstance that led them to take or be accused and framed up for taking ‘unforgivable’ actions. The executions of the ‘worst of the worst’ is a sacrifice made of the lumpenized and criminalized populations; it is used to whip up racist hatred and reactionary approval creating the atmosphere for maintaining execution as a ‘legitimate’ option held in reserve for the leaders of the oppressed and working class who are regularly framed up by the FBI from from before the COINTELPRO and up until the present.
FREE MUMIA ABU JAMAL, FREE RUSSEL MAROON SHOATZ!
FREE LEONARD PELTIER! FREE MARIA BELL!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!
It is no surprise that those scheduled to be executed between now and inauguration day are 4 Black men and one woman, themselves all victims of capitalist poverty, broken families and institutions which fail to protect and serve youth in need. The life stories of those about to be executed are an indictment of the failure of Capitalism to meet the needs of the population and we know their stories of misery are compounded with every dip and downturn of the real economy.
Lisa Montgomery, is the first woman slated for federal execution in 70 years. She clearly is a victim of circumstance, a sex slave since youth whose act of self-defense became her death sentence. People Magazine reports that Brandon Bernard, a black man, who is to be executed next week on December 10 had diminished mental capacity, even the prosecutor who put him there thinks it is a travesty. Democracy Now reports, the jury of 12 had only 1 black member and now 5 jurors want the sentence reconsidered. Another black man Alfred Bourgeois , with an IQ in the 70s, is to follow on December 11th. “…On January 14th, Cory Johnson, another black man, is set to be put to death. According to Johnson’s attorneys, he has an IQ of 69, which means he is below the standard the Supreme Court used to determine if an execution would be cruel and unusual punishment. And on January 15th, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, the federal government is expected to execute Dustin Higgs, another black man, who was sentenced to die for his role in the murder of three women even though he did not kill them, under the so-called Law of Parties theory.” (ed. Note, the links are added)
There is a great moral responsibility to demonstrate solidarity with these 5 and all particularly helpless prisoners! All persons who see themselves as part of the social vanguard preparing for a human future are obligated by our class history to take up the battle against death penalties imposed by our oppressors, the capitalist state!
Abolish the death penalty!
An Injury to One is an Injury to All!
Pass resolutions in Trade Union locals and federations for Abolition of the Death Penalty.
Expel the Police, Prison Guards, Border Guards and Executioners from the Trade Union Federations!
Build Labor Black Brown self defense against Police terror and the Death Penalty.
For Labor Action to Stop the Executions!
