Peter Linebaugh - The London Hanged, Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century
|
Peter Linebaugh - The London Hanged, Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century
[Verso 2006] Peter Linebaugh's groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form of punishing transgressors. Rather it evidently served the more sinister purpose - for a privileged ruling class - of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and new forms of private property. Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the changing property laws such that all the working-class men and women of London had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's triple tree. — In criminology as in economics there is scarcely a more powerful word than 'capital'. In the former discipline it denotes death; in the latter it has designated the 'substance' or 'stock' of life: apparently opposite meanings. Just why the same word, 'capital', has come to mean both crimes punishable by death and the accumulation of wealth founded on the produce of previous (or dead) labour might be left to etymologists were not the association so striking, so contradictory and so exact in expressing the theme of this book. For this book explores the relationship between the organized death of living labour (capital punishment) and the oppression of the living by dead labour (the punishment of capital). The intensification of capital punishment has become a worldwide trend since the mid 1970s precisely when capital, reacting to the prior period of colonial emancipation, unprecedented wage demands and cultural revolutions, gained a new lease of life. Considering five of the countries that have utilized it most frequently or broadened its application, we find that South Africa has executed more than a hundred a year since 1980; that Iran since 1979 has tripled the annual number of executions, now measured in the thousands; that Nigeria between 1974 and 1977 extended the death penalty to include crimes against money; that large numbers have been executed in China since 1980; and that in the United States, following an unofficial ten-year moratorium, the execution of the death penalty was resumed in 1977. All told, acccording to Amnesty International, there have been about a thousand executions a year since 1985, a figure that excludes unofficial deaths that governments have nevertheless acquiesced in - the 'disappeared', the assassinations, the victims of death squads. Thus, the tendency to capital punishment has been clear, alarming and specific to a historical period that has been reactionary in every sense. In contrast to eighteenth-century London when news of hangings, the last words of the condemned, their biographies and descriptions of their behaviour were widely published, remarkably little is known about the recent victims of capital punishment, or about the attitudes oif their peers. This is unusual considering that nineteen countries permit public executions. The international press is strangely silent, and the national press is terse. One reason for such silence is suggested by a Pakistani journalist who, following a public execution in 1988 before 10,000 people, observed 'Such punishments will project the image of the state as a perpetrator of violence.' Occasionally, such violence has met a violent response, despite unequal forces. The prisoners of the Virgina State Penitentiary rioted unsuccessfully in April 1985 to prevent the execution of James Briley. Very few condemned have had their last words recorded. In China, it is said, a choke cord around the neck of the condemned prevents the uttering of sounds during the 'public humiliation' ceremonies that precede execution. An exception to this silence was provided by Dr Nawal el Saadawi, who recorded the words of Firdaus, executed in Egypt in 1974. Firdaus has declined to plea for a pardon when asked to do so by the warden. 'Everybody has to die,' she explained, 'I prefer to die for a crime I have committed rather than to die for one of the crimes which you have committed.' Thus she did express a contradiction inherent in capital punishment and which poses a problem that must be faced by all who contemplate it. Free alike of hope and fear, Firdaus approached her fate with concentrated fortitude. 'This journey to a place unknown to everybody on this earth fills me with pride.' […] The [seventeenth-century London] hangings were permitted and ordered by men of a ruling class who had studied the applications of death throughout human history and had power to apply that knowledge. The hanging was one of the few occasions (coronations were another) that united the several parts of the government (monarch, courts, Parliament, City and Church). Equally important to the meaning of these awful dramas was the renewal of the 'social contract'. Most of those hanged had offended against the laws of property. It could therfore be argued that, just as each hanging renewed the power of the sovereignty, so each hanging repeated the lesson: 'Respect Private Property.' So, if the hangings are to considered as dramas, the conflict that they represented was the conflict of the Powerful and the Propertied against the Weak and the Poor - a futile, unchanging conflict whose lesson, it seemed, was never learnt. Malcolm X, a prisoner at the Norfolk Correctional Facility in Massachusetts, recognized this in 1949. He was a member of the debating team that defeated MIT. In arguing the affirmative to the proposition, 'The Death Penalty is Ineffective as a Deterrent', he reminded the judges that the eighteenth-century pickpocket plied his trade within the crowd at the hanging of another pickpocket. […]
Contents
(For an extract, see the workers of the world: relax post.) |
Sun, 31st Dec 2006 11:07:11 +0100
Highly recommended.
Using