What are `crime rates'?
Your March 22 front-page article about New York protests
against police brutality included a statement I found
confusing:
"What Ognibene [a Republican city council member] and other capitalist politicians don't talk about, however, is that the supposed drop in `crime rates' has been reached not by changing social conditions but by locking up a record number of U.S. residents."
It sounds like the Militant is condemning Ognibene's hypocrisy in covering up this "fact."
I'm not familiar with that individual. But a reduction in "crime rates" is about the only justification I've ever heard from his ilk for the "law-and-order" crackdown that's escalating in New York and other cities - which includes jailing more workers, and for longer periods.
As the Militant has often explained, of course, the horrors inflicted during the normal, legal operation of capitalist society - slaughter in Iraq, shooting of Diallo, starvation of mental patients in Sweden - constitute the real crimes.
But that doesn't seem to be the sense in which the word was used here. In bourgeois society, "crime" is generally taken to mean the antisocial actions of lumpen elements against individual targets, most often working people. Is it the Militant's view that jailing more workers has reduced that?
Steve Marshall
Detroit, Michigan
Crime rates II
In the front page article in the Militant dated March 22
entitled "Cop Killing in N.Y. sparks sustained protests," the
following sentence appears: "What Ognibene and other
capitalist politicians don't talk about, however, is that the
supposed drop in `crime rates' has been reached not by
changing social conditions but by locking up a record number
of U.S. residents."
I feel certain that the authors did not mean what that sentence seems to imply, i.e. that there is some relationship between the supposed drop in crime rates and the increased rate of incarceration that workers in the United States are now facing. It is not credible to believe that increased police brutality, longer jail terms, and more arbitrary imprisonments of people can lead to anything but a greater spirit of rebelliousness in all its forms. Their highly touted drop in crime statistics is most probably as crooked as the judicial system that is filling the jails at a record rate unmatched by any other country in the world.
John Votava
Chicago, Illinois
A correction
There was an error in the article " `Capitalism's World
Disorder': the book to sell and the book to be seen reading"
in issue no. 12. It is in a quote attributed to me in the
section subtitled "Scope of resistance." Somehow two
contributions by me to that discussion at a March 13-14
meeting of socialist workers in the trade unions got
telescoped together, introducing the error.
The quote was around the response of supporters of the Militant to the recent protests by United Auto Workers (UAW) members at the Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio. At one point I described a group of Latino workers I met at an immigrant rights protest last fall in Detroit. They came to the street protest from a conference entitled "Latinos in Labor." The next day I attended a protest organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers demanding a contract for supermarket workers in Toledo and saw them again. Six people at that protest, including a couple of the UAW members at Jeep, bought subscriptions.
Last month, while doing calling to win long-term readers to the Militant, we called the Jeep workers and learned about the overtime protest. We were unable to get to Toledo immediately. The Militant article in issue no. 10 on those protests made that point clear; it was datelined Detroit because it was based on telephone interviews.
The point the author was trying to make of the openings for fighting workers to link up and learn from each other was correct, but combining the points into one quote is not up to the Militant's high standards for accuracy.
Since the meeting in Chicago we have been able meet with a couple of Jeep workers. At least two are reading Capitalism's World Disorder. One has been a longtime Militant reader, the other is now.
John Sarge
Detroit, Michigan
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