Nick Fredman
The execution by hanging in Singapore of convicted Australian heroin trafficker Nguyen Tuong Van on December 2 caused revulsion among people around the world — including among Singaporeans fighting for democratic rights and for the abolition of the death penalty in that authoritarian state.
While the hypocrisy of the Australian government — complicit in torture and child abuse in refugee detention centres and mass murder in Iraq — in publicly opposing the execution is sickening, and the issue was of course sensationalised by the capitalist media, the reaction among ordinary Australians was genuine and justified.
This tragic event highlights two related issues: how class societies generate crime, and how a brutal system of punishment is part of the means by which elites control the exploited and oppressed majority in such societies. The state murder of Nguyen was a particularly graphic example of the human cost of the criminalisation of some drugs.
Many people were particularly disgusted at this execution because Nguyen was clearly not a hardened drug overlord, but a young man desperate to help his family.
Poverty, oppression and alienation, endemic to all class societies, not least capitalism, drive many to such desperation. Systems of penal punishment blame individuals for social problems, and class-based hypocrisy abounds. Corporate criminals such as James Hardie can poison thousands with asbestos and then seriously suggest they should receive immunity and the public should pay some of the costs, while poor people who can't pay fines are regularly subjected to degrading prison terms.
Alienation caused by capitalism strongly contributes to the abuse of drugs, and the criminalisation of some of these drugs creates the conditions in which drug use can be physically dangerous, and drug trafficking extremely lucrative and especially attractive to those in dire economic hardship. Heroin is not particularly harmful in and of itself, being chemically very similar to the legal analgesics morphine and codeine. However, cut with toxic material and available in uncertain doses it can be deadly. The recent Australian film Little Fish powerfully portrays the damage caused by the interlocking webs of poverty, alienation, greed and police corruption involved in illegal drug markets.
The vast superprofits generated by the criminalised supply of commodities with such high demand means any sort of punishment has virtually no impact as a deterrent. The harshness of the Singaporean state towards drug offenders has far more to do with enforcing the rule of the city-state's corporate elite than with reducing the damage caused by the illegal drug trade. The policy is also irrational in terms of its stated aim, as Nguyen's willingness to help track down those higher up the heroin "food-chain" will now go unutilised.
Those fighting to overcome "all the old shit" associated with class society, as Karl Marx once put it, will have to come to grips with all these questions. First, the incentive to undertake crime will have to be overcome by the provision of decent jobs, social services and livable communities for all.
Secondly, problems caused by the abuse of drugs and the illegal drug trade will have to be tackled by the regulated legalisation of currently illegal drugs. The precise way to do this is controversial among both socialists and drug law reform campaigners, and like many specific policies will be worked out in the struggle to change society, but in the case of heroin should include at least the free availability of safe doses of the drug on prescription to registered addicts.
Thirdly, the penal system must aim not to "discipline and punish", as the late French philosopher Michel Foucault put in his study of penal systems under capitalism of that name, but to both protect society and rehabilitate those who have fallen into crime. Punishments should be minimised, facilities should be as humane as possible, and the death penalty banned.
However, in very exceptional circumstances, such as a civil war launched against a revolutionary government, this approach might not be possible.
The Cuban Revolution has used the death penalty, but very sparingly compared to the routine brutality of Stalinised "socialist" states (currently still existing in China and North Korea) and a whole range of capitalist countries including the US (where the 1000th person since 1976 was executed on December 2), Saudi Arabia, and, with perhaps with the highest rate per capita, Singapore.
Cuban leaders have argued for the exceptional nature of their government's application of the death penalty, including the execution of three high-ranking officers for serious drug trafficking and corruption offences in 1989, and confirmed that a society struggling for socialism should aim to abolish this practice.
There may always be some anti-social and irrational behaviour. However only by struggling to replace capitalism with a classless socialist society can we begin to tackle the real causes of crime and drug dependence. Nguyen Tuong Van's needless death should encourage us to campaign against brutal punishments in the here and now, and for a society in which the need for punishment in general withers away.
From Green Left Weekly, December 7, 2005.
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