Death takes a holiday-on a small scale
The Labour back benchers supported by a handful of Conservatives and Liberals defeated the Home Secretary, backed by the majority of the Conservative Party, on the question of the death penalty. They voted in favour of the abolition of capital punishment for a trial period of five years.
The attitude of the Labourites is a reflection of that of many a decent man in the street, who, although he may enjoy the News of the World and “No Orchids for Miss Blandish,” shrinks from taking the life of a fellow human being in cold blood, is touched by the agonies of the murderer in the condemned cell, and who on reading Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Jail” (the most powerful indictment of capital punishment) decides to become a life-long opponent of “legal murder.” One can argue at length on the relative evils of hanging and fifteen years’ imprisonment in a “reformed” jail, but the abolition of the death penalty is a small triumph for humanitarianism in a brutal world, but how powerless are humanitarian ideals when faced with the relentless facts of capitalism.
The well-meaning Labour back-benchers and the workers who follow them with their muddled conception of the role of the State, their lack of understanding of the cause of war, their blind support of their own capitalist class against all others, and the vicious nationalism that springs from it, quite rightly do not wish to send a murderer to the gallows, but see no alternative to the killing of millions. Humanitarians of all lands unite in mutual slaughter. And as the weapons of war become more devastating, their supposed motives (cloaking the real capitalist struggle for markets) become nobler. Workers today are only called upon to butcher each other for the highest ideals.
Crime and war today have the same cause—capitalism. Centuries of capital punishment have not wiped out murder from the face of the earth, and the defeat of Germany in two major wars will not prevent a third. Only the establishment of a society where the world will be owned by all its inhabitants, and where goods will be produced solely for use and freely distributed to the whole of mankind can do away with the economic conllicts which cause war in the modern world. Crime will cease to be a problem when private property relationships, poverty, slum conditions, frustration and unhealthy and puritanical moral codes are things of the past. Socialism alone can abolish war; Socialism alone can set the jailers free.
The Labour Parly and its supporters have done much to defer one execution. The Socialist Party has stood alone in demanding the death penally for capitalism, and is confident that a greater number of workers are coming over to its point of view.
T. M.