It is the methods of the capitalist state, even under the admission of this social-chauvinist writer, that would be used against the capitalist class. The sexual torture at U.S. military prisons would later be used by Hollywood executives to humiliate the revolutionary workers in the media. The denial of due process to millions of prisoners would later hurt job security at all levels of the corporation. Yet these methods will not remain in capitalist hands forever, because they will be used by the workers during revolutionary upheavals to free themselves. Trotsky wrote in Their Morals and Ours that the violence of the slave acting to free himself is morally superior to that of the slavemaster, though writers like Eric London may argue differently. The surface level similarity cannot, as they would have it, obfuscate the difference, allowing the moral reproof of the slave by holding him to higher idealist standards.

The breakdown of the rule of law comes from a contradiction from within the law itself. This can only be understood from a historical materialist perspective, not from the idealist view purported in the article. The law exists, first and foremost, to protect the material interests and security of the community, nation, state, or group of states. It does not exist because it pre-existed the material world, because it has always been the ideal. The presumption of innocence only became an “ideal” when repression from the state became a greater threat to the material interests or security of the nation than common violent criminals.

This had to do with the development of the productive forces of society to the point where the state could always outnumber and overpower the common criminal. Before this point, murderers, thieves, highway men, kidnappers, and others could cripple an economy, making them the primary threat. Absolutist Kings were welcome then, as progressive in comparison to lawless tribes. Those lawless tribes were destroyed in numerous wars, unless they incorporated themselves into the new society economically.

The progress of the productive forces, however, does not eliminate the need for law, the punishment of murderers, rapists, and thieves. To do away with this protection of the law would be to introduce terror masked as common crime. Our job should not be to maintain the mask upon the rapists’ faces, but to unmask them and reveal the bourgeois terror they really serve.

The choice of the WSWS to highlight and enshrine the opinions of Ida B. Wells, without referencing Marx on the subject of Lynch Law, shows their inconsistency on the subject of identity politics and general disregard for Marxist theory. Ida B. Wells wrote for an African American newspaper and organized groups for African American women, not for the working class or for Socialists. One can find in her writing a racialist perspective: “The white man’s dollar is his God.” (Ch. 6 of Southern Horrors.) There is very little of the wider sweep of history or the class analysis of the end of slavery. The theory has more to do with the “reputation” of racial and gender groups: black men, white women, white men, and black women. The detailed facts she put together in her newspaper, for which she deserves credit, do more to condemn the Southern Planter aristocracy, as a class, than any argument about the presumption of guilt.

In Ch. 5 of the same book, she advocates collective punishment, war on the social order, not due process, for the entirety of the South: “The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages, are particeps criminis, accomplices, accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with the actual lawbreakers who would not persist if they did not know that neither the law nor militia would be employed against them.” Yet when #metoo uses the very same argument, that the perpetrators of the crime “would not persist if they did not know that neither the law nor militia would be employed against them,” this fact, according to the WSWS, must not be mentioned. The sexual predators accused by #metoo are similar to the… (at this point the record is lost to history, and the remainder must be rewritten from memory.) …Southern Planter Aristocracy, in that they did not have to fear the law. Only a war on capitalist industry, similar to that prosecuted against the Southern Plantations, can root out the class system at the heart of capitalist relations, in which workers are hopelessly exploited at the expense of dictatorial policy, human and environmental atrocities, and the abandonment of all the just causes of humanity.

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