David Broder, in Jacobin:
The Paris court ruling on Monday, with a sentence applied immediately, means that [Marine Le Pen] cannot stand for election or hold office for five years...No one is above the law, and the court could not rule based on Le Pen’s personal popularity. But banning candidates from running for office due to financial crimes is highly dubious. The damaging effect on democratic choice seems out of proportion to the crime…
While I appreciate that Jacobin will never be on board some of the more illiberal approaches to class warfare that other Marxist tendencies call for, this take strikes me as utterly baffling. Even liberal philosophy accepts that the state may curtail certain liberal rights for criminals, and every liberal democracy in the world bars people from holding office under some circumstances. This logic cannot justify any such punishment, of course, but it does mean that the “damaging effect on democratic choice” of banning someone from office is not necessarily “out of proportion to the crime”.
That’s a case Broder would have to make on the merits, but he doesn’t even attempt to do so. Instead, most of this article is just preoccupied with optics and the potential for political backlash.
The case for Le Pen’s temporary ban, meanwhile, is quite easy to make — especially for Marxists. As Marxists, a major part of our political project revolves around insisting that economic assaults on the working class are just as serious as any other form of violence. This is an argument we make against liberalism, which insists that privatizing property is not aggressive. What did Le Pen do? She literally abetted the privatization of over $4 million dollars in public funds. Broder may try to trivialize this as a mere “financial crime,” but a Marxist perspective will rightly see this as an aggressive assault on the working class.
Stalin, in correspondence with Kaganoich and Molotov, stressed how crucial it was for socialists to take public embezzlement seriously:
Capitalism could not have smashed feudalism, it would not have developed and solidified if it had not declared the principle of private property to be the foundation of capitalist society and if it had not made private property sacred property, with any violation of its interests strictly punished and with the creation of its own state to protect it. Socialism will not be able to finish off and bury capitalist elements and individualistic, self-seeking habits, practices and traditions (which are the basis of theft) that shake the foundations of the new society unless it declares public property (belonging to cooperatives, collective farms or the state) to be sacred and inviolable. It cannot strengthen and develop the new system and socialist construction, unless it protects the property of collective farms, cooperatives, and the state with all its might, unless it prevents antisocial, capitalist-kulak elements from stealing public property.
Stalin’s remedy for public embezzlement — the death penalty — was charactistically draconian, and the David Broders of his day would have been right to call it “out of proportion” to the crime. Meanwhile, Lenin, in The Enemies of the People, suggested a more reasonable response:
The Jacobins of 1793 belonged to the most revolutionary class of the eighteenth century…The Jacobins proclaimed enemies of the people those "promoting the schemes of the allied tyrants directed against the Republic"…The “Jacobins” of the twentieth century would not guillotine the capitalists…It would be enough to arrest fifty to a hundred financial magnates and bigwigs, the chief knights of embezzlement…
Le Pen, of course, is not even being imprisoned. That she is merely being barred from office for five years is hardly an example of “disproportioante” tyranny — on the contrary, it illustrates how seriously we don’t take public property.
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