I don’t think fear is a good reason to be using the death penalty. Tho tbf, considering the topic question, it does sound pretty right-wing to be wanting to use fear as a tactic to control people.
i know deterrence doesn’t work for regular crime but maybe it does for white-collar crimes that are premeditated conspiracies and continuously reaffirmed by the perpetrators?
I mean, I’m not against state intervention in suppressing the capitalist class during the transition to where class doesn’t exist. That’s an important thing. I’m not even opposed to China’s handling of corruption, which sometimes involves death sentence as far as I know - I don’t know what reasoning they’re operating from and why they think that makes sense for them, so it wouldn’t make sense for me to weigh in on it.
But as a general principle concept of promoting death penalty to “scare” “bad people”, I don’t see how it would accomplish anything on that alone. If regular people commit crimes in spite of scary repression when they are desperate enough, capitalists and the like no doubt will some of the time too because the inertia of their class circumstances drive them toward financial crimes. And fearing getting caught may deter some people some of the time, but it doesn’t address the inertia.
I can however think of at least one other reason more directly practical that a socialist state might go for death penalty for some financial crimes. Which is, in dealing with imperialism along with concerns about internal reactionaries, there’s always the possibility that a corrupt figure who is influential enough / has strong enough ties can escape or get released later by some form of opposition and used further against the working class.
The difference is that capitalists aren’t desperate. They commit crimes just to make numbers get bigger. Just fining corporations for doing crimes doesn’t do anything, because then it just becomes a cost of doing business. You must attack the people in the corporations making the decisions to make money, and the death penalty is one of the tools for that.
To understand the use of the death penalty, imagine how many worker hours a capitalist who steals a billion dollars takes away. Assuming the average US salary (~$66,000) and working lifespan (77.43 years - 20 yr childhood), they’ve stolen the entire life earnings of 264 Americans. These calcs look even worse for any non-U.S. country because the theft is usually done in the USD, but all the workers make a much less valuable currency.
As of now, China mostly uses death sentence with reprieve for financial crimes, which means that if the sentenced person doesn’t commit another crime in a couple years, their sentence gets demoted to life sentence. Actual execution has only been used for extreme cases, such as Sichuan mining tycoon Liu Han, worth $6.4 billion, for his crime syndicate of gambling, loan sharking, illicit arms trading, contract killing, and actual lethal shootings.[1]
Death penalty is good actually, as long as it isn’t used just on minorities. Super useful to scare capitalists.
Death penalty, but only for the bourgeoisie and for politicians who betray the proletariat
And child pr3dators
Oh fuck yes, no list for them, just straight to the guillotine after sentencing
And for supporters of death penalty
Found Luigi’s account. hi
I don’t think fear is a good reason to be using the death penalty. Tho tbf, considering the topic question, it does sound pretty right-wing to be wanting to use fear as a tactic to control people.
i know deterrence doesn’t work for regular crime but maybe it does for white-collar crimes that are premeditated conspiracies and continuously reaffirmed by the perpetrators?
I mean, I’m not against state intervention in suppressing the capitalist class during the transition to where class doesn’t exist. That’s an important thing. I’m not even opposed to China’s handling of corruption, which sometimes involves death sentence as far as I know - I don’t know what reasoning they’re operating from and why they think that makes sense for them, so it wouldn’t make sense for me to weigh in on it.
But as a general principle concept of promoting death penalty to “scare” “bad people”, I don’t see how it would accomplish anything on that alone. If regular people commit crimes in spite of scary repression when they are desperate enough, capitalists and the like no doubt will some of the time too because the inertia of their class circumstances drive them toward financial crimes. And fearing getting caught may deter some people some of the time, but it doesn’t address the inertia.
I can however think of at least one other reason more directly practical that a socialist state might go for death penalty for some financial crimes. Which is, in dealing with imperialism along with concerns about internal reactionaries, there’s always the possibility that a corrupt figure who is influential enough / has strong enough ties can escape or get released later by some form of opposition and used further against the working class.
The difference is that capitalists aren’t desperate. They commit crimes just to make numbers get bigger. Just fining corporations for doing crimes doesn’t do anything, because then it just becomes a cost of doing business. You must attack the people in the corporations making the decisions to make money, and the death penalty is one of the tools for that.
To understand the use of the death penalty, imagine how many worker hours a capitalist who steals a billion dollars takes away. Assuming the average US salary (~$66,000) and working lifespan (77.43 years - 20 yr childhood), they’ve stolen the entire life earnings of 264 Americans. These calcs look even worse for any non-U.S. country because the theft is usually done in the USD, but all the workers make a much less valuable currency.
As of now, China mostly uses death sentence with reprieve for financial crimes, which means that if the sentenced person doesn’t commit another crime in a couple years, their sentence gets demoted to life sentence. Actual execution has only been used for extreme cases, such as Sichuan mining tycoon Liu Han, worth $6.4 billion, for his crime syndicate of gambling, loan sharking, illicit arms trading, contract killing, and actual lethal shootings.[1]
https://time.com/3700907/liu-han-execution-china/ ↩︎