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 and would-be associates 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 slave-master, 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.

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 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 original article was cut off and the rest was excised) white supremacist mobs of the south in that they had no fear of the law. Only a war on the entirety of capitalist industry, a collective punishment, like the war on Southern slavery, could end the atrocities inherent to the economic system. That is the essence of Ida B. Wells position, but that did not enter into the arguments of London’s article.

To address the issue in current events, look at the strike of Marriott workers. 58% of hotel workers have been sexually harassed, according to a union study. Often times they are cornered in a hotel room. A former chief of the IMF has been accused by a hotel worker. The workers want a panic button device, in order to protect them from such attacks. Yet the WSWS would oppose that security measure, because upon pressing the button the workers would be denying the assailant, the IMF chief guilty of not just sexual assault but also the starving of children through anti-social economic policies, the presumption of innocence or the right to a trial. (The position of the WSWS on Henry Kissinger is also inconsistent; is he a war criminal or an alleged war criminal?) Where are those starving children’s trials? The WSWS might ask, “How can they push the button and so callously deny the hotel guests and managers their elementary democratic rights?” The workers cannot be moved by such arguments. They must defend themselves and push those buttons. They would rather be imprisoned for defending themselves then allow someone, even a high level official, to violate them.

If the WSWS is not defending the workers, then who do they speak for? That is revealed by their own quote of a university law professor: the methods of social control introduced by the war on terror “has had pernicious effects upon the American legal system and severely harmed America’s international standing.” This is primarily a social-chauvinist argument, the type that Lenin confronted within Social Democracy, and on which he laid the blame for the inability of the party to take revolutionary positions against imperialism. Imperialism, Lenin argued, is not a choice made by parliamentary leaders or judicial appointees, and the war on terror is not a choice or a mistake made by American elected officials or judicial appointees. It is the natural outgrowth of an economic system based on corporate monopoly exploitation of the world.

Furthermore, the “American legal system”, even in its purely theoretical form, is not the ideal they make it out to be. It stands in the way of a proletarian law which would address the social roots of crime, preventing it before it happened, by alleviating the suffering of the downtrodden and socializing away anti-social, sociopathic disorders. Even those guilty of crimes would go free if the social conditions they lived in made criminal behavior necessary. Behavior could be corrected through therapy and the guarantee of economic rights to victim and perpetrator. The ideal “American legal system”, even in its purely theoretical form, stands in the way of much progress that can be made in the way of reducing the social ills created by capitalism, basing itself as it does on a defense of the capitalist system.

As for defending “America’s international standing”, that should be of no concern for the working class. We must defend the international standing of the world revolution and the international standing of socialism! We want proletarian law, not bourgeois law!