Rob Schaap
Mon, 28 Feb 2000 21:41:57 -0800
Hi again, Chris,
>There are times when I think thaxis is a refuge for marxists from countries
>other than the USA who, in volume terms, dominate marxism lists. But if we
>are to become truly internationalist in "marxism-space" we need to be able
>to read and hear what is unique in the struggle in each country, but also
>to discuss what is common.
Crucial point, I reckon. Capitalism is a category into which we all fall,
but capitalism has many faces. It ain't as all-permeating (especially in
terms of subjectivity - but also in terms of structures) in Australia as it
is in the States, for a start. Stuff only *The Nation* and all points left
apprehend in America, are still mainstream common sense in most of Australia
(the survival of something not unlike a public health system, a public
education system, a public broadcasting system, a quasi-public
telecommunications system, the electoral significance of rural electorates,
the not-quite-dead ethos of semi-egalitarian 'mateship', the concentration
of wealth in very few nodes, the sheer impossibility of disguising the
plight of the indigenes (esp in light of some unprecedented - if inevitably
internally contentious - advocacy by publicly educated articulate
Aborigines) - all these things add up to a bunch of objective and subjective
states of affairs with which Australian lefties can work - and perhaps such
tools are not nearly as available to American lefties, who seem to me
further from their mainstream than we are from ours. That said, we have
been soundly thrashed and brutally decimated for twenty years now ... and
all the above are undoubtedly dissolving as we write.
>It seems to me that mandatory sentences are a sort of mirror image of
>individualist bourgeois rights. The latter treat all human beings as
>abstractly equal and ignore the class or other differences between them.
>Yet this affects what sort of lawyers they can hire to enforce their equal
>rights. So for this and other reasons, equal rights get enforced unequally.
Absolutely - the salient difference is that between equity and equality. A
regressive tax (like our imminent GST and your long-established VAT) is
equal but inequitable, for instance. Remember Anatole France's comment that
the law equally disallowed the rich to sleep under bridges as it did the
poor? As soon as we try to lend material content to rights and obligations,
we realise that (a) there's nothing natural about 'em - they're an index of
social struggle, and to stop struggling is to watch them dissolve, and (b)
we always, eventually, come up hard against the differential ownership of
the means of production - the definitive and decisive inequity whence spring
so many of those other inequities.
>Mandatory sentences are common, if I understand correctly, in the USA too.
>People are supposed to be punished equally for the same crime. The fact
>that this ends up with a system where black people are greatly
>over-represented among those lined up on death row, is dismissed as pure
>chance.
Or ignored as politically and economically of only marginal significance,
perhaps.
>What is a more socialist attitude to rights and punishment?
There's a danger in fighting on the other chap's home turf, I'll admit. But
categories more amenable to the socialist view of the world are all but
incommensurable today, and I reckon the language of human rights does have
potential for the likes of us - right now. As I keep saying, if we keep
insisting on filling those rights and obligations with substance, the fact
that we can't should be educative.
>To see the rights, and the undesirable behaviour within the individual's
>social context.
Yep. That's the sort of insight such a strategy has a hope of instilling.
>With crime, that does not mean ignoring the reality of the crime. It means
>asking the person to take responsibility for their decisions but the
>society also to take responsibility for the conditions in which the person
>found themselves.
It seems the law generally holds the individual absolutely responsible at
the point of establishing whether the range of punishments commensurable
with the deed should be brought to bear. And then, suddenly, social context
is brought in to help fix *the degree* of punishment. If that suspicion is
warranted, it means that mandatory sentencing constitutes the effective
dissolution of the only moment where the social dimension ever had a chance
of entering deliberations. Mandatory sentencing is, as Chris says,
neo-liberalism writ large. Formal equality is the closest to equity that a
world view based on the autonomous individual can get - and it ever
militates against equity..
>Crime is extremely common among young men and is almost normal affiliative
>behaviour, part of risk taking and maturation.
My guess is that this is not natural (or, at the very least, the degree of
difference is not natural). Once our society starts producing its females
more like it's been producing its males (as is beginning to happen), I
reckon we'll see all those 'male' pathologies exposed as liberal capitalist
pathologies.
>But what is cheaper, a youth club or a punishment youth prison camp?
And how must the bureaucratic technicians, over time, be tempted to make the
former more like the latter? Thin edges of wedges, mebbe?
>What is the cost of - is it really over 2 million prisoners - in the land
>of the free??
It's all down to where society allocates most of the costs and pay-offs, I
reckon. The people (and their loved ones) in gaols are paying, and the
people who pay most of the taxes (workers) are paying - gaol firms; those
with the greatest stake in secure private property; those with the greatest
stake in apparently healthy unemployment statistics etc; and those least
likely to commit, or be caught committing, or be convicted for committing,
the particular kind of felonies that get you banged up, are the ones copping
the best of the benefits.
>People are basically good.
I'd go so far as to say they are capable of being 'good', and that this
depends on what sorta institutional system pertains - but, while I'm careful
not to throw out the idea of 'basic' human essences altogether, I do hold I
can't know what is and isn't 'basic', and I definitely hold that an
institutional setting which makes 'good' behaviour easy and 'responsible'
behaviour rewarding will produce 'better' people. Hence my radical
democratic leanings.
>Only those who believe in the
>exploitation of the majority by the minority, or who are part of
>privileged minority of beneficiaries, believe otherwise.
Never underestimate our capacity for believing stuff that oppresses us,
Chris! That's 'hegemony' in a nutshell, ain't it? Just because most
American prisoners and gallows-swingers are black, poor, marginalised and
exploited, doesn't mean the vast majority of Afro-Americans aren't at least
as prone to 'law'n'order' election gambits and the simple appeal of
death-dealing governors as any other. Just like I hear more criticisms of
females' appearance and sexual behaviour from females than I do from males.
Remember also that the majority of victims of (non-victimless) crimes are
likely to be people who live where those crimes are most likely to be
committed. Whilst killing workers through corporate negligence, killing
residents through environmental despoliation, killing off the sick through
HMO-run health insurance systems, killing off the reserve army through
poverty etc are not recognised as the moral equivalent of a drive-by
shooting, it is wholly understandable that the poor and the coloured feel
compelled to aid and abet in the filling of gaols with their own kith'n'kin.
Cheers,
Rob.
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