Running Commentary: About hanging
Who cares about hanging? Perhaps the thousand-odd people serving life sentences, who may have hanged before 1965, care. Probably a few million workers who, we are informed by such weighty organs as the News of the World, are seething with vengeful intent towards murderers, care. And perhaps those politicians who, although they are able to eat hearty dinners after taking decisions which will result in thousands of deaths, enjoy a public display of what they call their conscience — perhaps they too care.
Since hanging was abolished in this country in 1965, there has been a statistical battle over whether such a cruel and final penalty has any effect on the frequency of the crime which it punished.
This battle has been rather more civilised in tone than the mob hysteria which demands that one killing be expiated by another (how many politicians would, in all justice, survive for long if that were strictly applied?), and which assumes that the harsher the penalty the more effective the deterrent.
If this were so, the job of capitalism’s crime fighters would be a lot simpler. There would be no need for a massive structure of laws detailing sentences. All that would be needed would be one sentence for all offences — something like prolonged torture, followed by public execution, preferably by slow strangulation. That would abolish crime at a stroke.
In fact, human motivations are not so simple. And crime — even the most violent and ruthless — is not the acts of wicked people. Much of it springs from the very conditions which capitalism foists upon us — the slums, the degrading lifetime of exploitation, the mediocrity, the despair.
At the moment, the abolitionists seem to have won the statistical battle, which leaves only the hysteria to be debated. And it is in this that politicians will be able to show us (hoping we will remember it, come the next election) how tortured is their conscience over this great moral dilemma.
In this debate, an important fact is liable to be overlooked. Even if hanging is brought back, it would mean only a handful of people being executed each year. Sickening as that prospect is, it must be seen in proportion to the fact that capitalist continuously organises the deaths of millions of people — in war, famine, avoidable illness, in ‘accidents’.
No politician’s conscience ever suffers over that. The hanging debate will provoke a lot of nonsense, from both sides. As always, it is essential that the working class (to use an inappropriate phrase) keep their heads.
Paradise in Brazil
Brazil, one of the world’s foremost football countries, is now also climbing the economic league table. It has the eighth most powerful economy in the world, and at the present rate of development will by the year 2000 be inferior only to the USA, Russia and Japan. What does this mean to the Brazilian people? Do they reap the rewards of this, and live in plenty and freedom?
The truth is very different. Brazil’s climb began with the military coup in 1964, in which the trade unions and free political activity were effectively abolished and strikes were outlawed. Under this dictatorship, the Brazilian workers squirm as the exploitation screw is turned ever tighter upon them.
As a recent television programme and an article in The Observer highlighted, in Sao Paulo millions of workers live in appalling slums, while just a short distance away there are glittering shops and international banks, evidence of the foreign investment in the country. The child mortality rate increases remorselessly, and hundreds of thousands of children, their parents unable to afford to feed them, are abandoned to roam the streets as beggars, prostitutes or thieves.
Above this desperate misery a small, parasitic minority of capitalists live in apparently boundless luxury. It is a blatant assertion of the reality of the social system — of the fact that the majority of people work, and are exploited, to perpetuate the privileges of the ruling class, and therefore their own servitude to that class.
Brazil has a lesson for the workers in Britain which has nothing to do with their superior football team. Much of the political debate here is about the allegedly irresponsible attitudes of British workers. The implication of all this is that a disciplined, compliant working class would also be a prosperous working class, sharing in the extra profits which their docility brought their masters.
The experience of the people of Brazil provides yet more evidence to disprove this comfortable (for the capitalists) theory. It illustrates the opposition of interests between the classes and the necessity for the workers to struggle in trade unions to protect their interests.
And finally, it shows that capitalism is a society where profits take precedence over people a society which merits only implacable hostility until the day it is swept away.
What the eye doesn’t see . . .
We have all heard of the many refugees leaving Vietnam in small boats and getting into trouble at sea. If they are lucky they get picked up by (mainly) British boats and taken to Hong Kong. Being already almost unbearably overcrowded, the Colony is understandably reluctant to allow them to land. They therefore spend weeks — sometimes months — on board ship, lying offshore while one or other government finally, reluctantly, agrees to accept them. The latest and most publicised were the nearly 1,000 aboard the Sibonga. After some haggling they have been allowed to come to England. However, Margaret Thatcher quickly pointed out that in permitting them to come she was not setting a precedent, and other such refugees would have to look elsewhere for a new home.
One effect of all this had not been mentioned until an item in the Daily Telegraph of 31.5.79 by Ian Ward, under the heading “British Ships Will Avoid Refugee Routes”.
For a ship the size of the Sibonga, every day spent waiting for someone to agree to take the refugees means a loss of £7,000, and there is no way of recovering this money. On the other hand, it is a ‘law of the sea’ that ships pick up people in distress.
It has not taken British owners long to find a solution (it is said that owners in other countries thought of it some time ago) — re-route the ships. Apparently most of the emergencies occur in the first two hundred miles from the Vietnam coast. Admittedly, re-routing to avoid this area means extra fuel costs, but these represent far less expense than that incurred for days wasted at anchor waiting to offload the ship’s human cargo.
Refugees will of course continue to find themselves in danger and distress, but, to use another old saying, ‘time is money’. If, by re-routing, the ship isn’t there, no-one can blame it for not picking up drowning men, women and children.