Re: Death penalty

[Adam Rose <adam@xxxxxxxx>]

>
> Recently Rakesh wrote:
>
> Thanks Lisa for this post.  I have been informed that if one is to
> understand the importance of the death penalty to bourgeois society, then
> one must read Peter Linebaugh's *London Hanged*.  Has anyone read it?  I
> have been following his very disturbing work in *The Nation*.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is brilliant.

Through the prism of the deatb penalty, he examines the society of the time,
developing a case that the death penalty was related to replacement of
a system of "customary uses" by wage labour, and the only way the ruling
class could achieve this was by terror, particularly in an age where most
people were illiterate and therefore more "ideological" domination was harder.

He also argues that the struggle against this system lead to the scaling
down of the death penalty, since the tumults associated with any execution
became a serious threat to public order.

All in all, he conjures up a real living class struggle from hundreds of
years ago.

It is also a useful antidote to E.P.Thompson's "The making of the English
Working Class" , which, while brilliant in its own way ( showing the
development of class consciousness over a period of time ) and ground breaking
in its day, is a bit gradualist. In contrast, Peter Linebaugh gives us very
bitter, semi insurrectionary class struggle, in the century before the one
E.P.Thompson looks at.

PS. I was once browsing through a US orientated news group when I spotted
a conversation on "Limebaugh", and how horrible and right wing he was.
I intervened and said the only Limebaugh I knew was Peter, and he was
very left wing. It took quite a while for me to work out the difference
between Rush and Peter ( do they have slightly different surnames ? ) !

Adam.

Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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