Over the last several months the federal government has been slowly, and partially, releasing thousands of heavily redacted files related to the case of convicted billionaire child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. These incomplete revelations expose the inner workings and collusion of the highest echelons of the global capitalist class at a level of granular detail that has not been seen in many years. In essence, the releases demonstrate how Epstein and his network cannot be seen as a true crime side-story to global politics, but an integral component of how the global capitalist system functions.
The files, while heavily redacted and difficult to search, still reveal thousands of exchanges between dozens of individuals from every sector of the ruling class and Jeffrey Epstein’s network. For every individual implicated in a specific crime related to the Epstein case, dozens more are revealed in the files to have found no issue integrating themselves into Epstein’s power brokering network. This demonstrates how deeply integrated, even unavoidable, Epstein was in the highest levels of bourgeois society, from politics and finance to academia, technology, art, culture, and spirituality.
Every one of these individuals and institutions implicated in these files should be investigated and held to account by every possible means. It is so important to understand the reality and details of this situation, not out of a perverse curiosity, but it is so our movements can join in the demands for justice for the victims, even within this current flawed and complicit legal system. That said, it is also critical to understand that the only way to truly achieve justice is to build a revolutionary movement that deposes this depraved and twisted capitalist class once and for all.
Revelatory, not unprecedented
To understand the Epstein network, we must look at historical precedents, parallels, and the structural components of the underbelly of capitalism and imperialism that shaped it. This is not to disregard the importance of understanding the particularities of this case, but to contextualize it fully. What we know is that Jeffrey Epstein operated a long running power brokering operation from the mid-to-late 1980s until the late 2010s, during which time Epstein, Maxwell, and their associates enjoyed wide reaching influence across all sectors of elite society.
This network demonstrates practically the broad unity of the imperialist bourgeoisie across lines of difference and implicates major institutions of the ruling class—from intelligence agencies and political officials to the institutions and individuals that shape culture, science, and public opinion. The files reveal that day to day this operation looked like simple networking, demonstrated by the vast number of email exchanges that essentially amount to making a connection between two or more powerful figures. This service greased the wheels of the capitalist system’s highest levels and was clearly valued by wide swaths of our societal elites. It would be naive to assume that it is the first or only such network to exist within the ruling class.
There are attempts from all parts of the political spectrum to exceptionalize certain elements of the Epstein network. There are Democrat partisans pointing fingers at Republicans who are implicated and vice versa. Some have made laughable attempts to connect the Epstein network to official enemies like Russia. There are those that want to downplay the revelations—to protect themselves, their brands, institutions, or perhaps out of simple contrarianism. Still others have sought to moralize and exceptionalize these crimes as representative of a particularly depraved and evil ruling class, perhaps motivated by some variety of esoteric belief system.
What we can say for sure is that the Epstein network is not historically unique. The history of the capitalist era, the last 500 years of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, is overflowing with examples of the bourgeoisie accumulating more and more wealth and power and influence on the basis of human trafficking, murder, financial crimes, and sexual abuse, in particular of children.
The sexual abuse of children is, as previously reported in Liberation News, “a historical practice of the American elite class dating back to at least the time of chattel slavery. Slave owners traded Black teenagers and children as young as 10 years old– known as “Fancy Girls” or “Fancy Boys”— specifically for purposes of prostitution. These children were considered to be high-end luxury products, often kept separately from other enslaved people and sold or auctioned off for prices several times higher.” The rape, abuse, and psychological torture revealed in the Epstein files are the same crimes that defined the system of chattel slavery in the U.S. South.
The point in highlighting these examples is to demonstrate that while the Epstein network is a unique phenomenon, it is not exceptional and is in fact part of a long tradition of how power is brokered and accumulated within the bourgeoisie. Even in recent decades, Epstein is not the first to be alleged to be running specifically a child sex trafficking ring. Simultaneous to the beginnings of Epstein’s operation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the so-called Franklin Scandal, which dominated the news. Alleged to be an elite sexual blackmail operation, the story was widely reported until a federal grand jury declared it a “carefully crafted hoax” and buried the story.
The roots of Epstein’s network in particular stretch back to the 1980s when he was working for the Intercontinental Assets Group, a consulting firm that operated in gray areas between international finance and organized crime: shipping disputes, arms and aerospace deals, and what Epstein described as helping “governments to recover money looted by African dictators.” This world of so-called “black money” is an integral part of the global capitalist system, and before Epstein’s ascendancy as a powerful node in this system, there were others.
Epstein and the Empire
The history of the intersections of high finance, imperialist geopolitics, organized crime, and sexual blackmail are constitutive of modern capitalism itself. The world that Epstein cut his teeth in during the 1980s was dominated by figures like Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer who has long been accused of using women and girls as “sexual bait,” and being one of the “greatest whoremongers in the world.” Khashoggi, like Epstein’s key co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, was a major Cold War era intelligence operator with deep ties to the Israeli state.
Khashoggi was a significant financial middle-man in the Iran-Contra scandal, which saw U.S. intelligence running a globe-spanning arms and drug smuggling operation to fund the genocidal Nicaraguan contras. Khashoggi’s role was laundering money for the operation through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which collapsed in the early 90s as it was revealed that the bank was in fact a vast money laundering operation used to finance covert operations.
Khashoggi was also a member of the “Safari Club,” a secret alliance of the intelligence services of Egypt, France, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran (under the pro-U.S. dictatorship of the Shah), which was organized by the C.I.A. during the late 70s and early 80s to launder covert operations targeting anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements in Africa without congressional knowledge or oversight. During this period, and after, Khashoggi was a client of Epstein’s, likely through IAG. This milieu in which the Epstein network arose explains to some degree the specific obsession that Epstein and Maxwell had with the Arab world.
On the question of the Arab world, commentators on both the anti-Zionist left and reactionary right have correctly identified the deep connections between Epstein and both Israeli intelligence specifically and Zionist ideology and geopolitical goals more generally. These analyses often then proceed to misread the evidence as a smoking gun that the Epstein network was a purely Israeli operation to “control” the United States. In fact, what this connection reveals is the structural alignment and organic unity that defines the relationship between the U.S., Israel, and the unity of the imperialist ruling class.
The released files also show extensive interactions between Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, deep relationships with major U.S. Zionists like Alan Dershowitz. Epstein himself was also an ardent Zionist as evidenced by his correspondences that reveal a deep belief in eugenics and the racial supremacy of white people, and in particular of European Jews.
There are countless examples of Epstein and Maxwell’s deeply rooted Zionism, including an email that Maxwell sent to dozens of people in the weeks after the September 11th attacks which contains a short speculative poem, set in the year 2032 after the complete genocide of “the Arabs.” It is clear from these connections that Epstein and Maxwell were ideologically committed Zionists, and also deeply invested (financially and politically) in shaping the future of the Middle East through networking politicians and business leaders across Israel and the Gulf.
The destruction of countries by war and imperialism is an integral part of global sex trafficking, high finance, and technological enterprises that undergirded Epstein’s operation. It is no coincidence that Epstein found many of the girls who would become both his victims and assets in the wreckage of countries destroyed by imperialism. The files are full of references to girls from Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet and socialist republics in Europe, from a Central America reeling from the Contra wars of the 80s, and too from working class communities in the United States likewise economically gutted by neoliberalism and deindustrialization.
It is no coincidence that the files reveal Mexico, a country long subjugated by the U.S. and used as a playground by U.S. drug traffickers and Delta Force operatives, as the site of many of these crimes, including an email that asserts that former U.S. ambassador to Mexico and American University professor Earl Anthony Wayne raped and impregnated a child and, upon being sentenced to a life sentence was able to arrange for an “ex-U.S. marine to stand in his place” in an “agreement worked out between our U.S. State Dept and a judge in Mexico after a huge payoff.”
It is no coincidence that in a redacted correspondence from November 2016, a redacted associate of Epstein emailed him saying: “Fidel Castro died now a lot of possibilities for me.” In more than a metaphorical sense, Cuba before the revolution was run as a giant version of Little Saint James, the so-called “Epstein Island.” That is: as a haven for the sex trade, drug trafficking, and the most illicit aspects of the capitalist world system to operate openly. It is not hyperbolic to identify that decadent dystopia as the dispensation the current attacks on the Cuban people and their revolution seek to restore.
The “distraction” narrative
Another common narrative, in particular from those aligned with the Democratic Party, over the last several months has been that any provocative action of the Trump administration—the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, the public executions by ICE of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, or the illegal and escalating war against Iran—are a “distraction” from the release of the Epstein files.
However, this narrative relies on the idea that this capitalist system, the same system that creates the conditions for the most anti-social people like Epstein to not just survive, but thrive and exert power over billions of people in this world, is capable of bringing justice to the victims and bringing down the perpetrators. That is a lie that we cannot afford to believe.
The Epstein network is not reducible to Epstein himself, nor is it historically unique in the development of capitalism. However, noting the timing of these revelations is significant, because what it is actually a distraction from is the historic moment of class struggle, dissent, and consciousness raising that we are in now.
Our social media feeds, mainstream, and alternative media outlets, are instead flooded with horrific details of abuse and trauma and the idea that we can demand and win justice for these crimes is made to seem more impossible than ever. The mainstream media is content to continue circulating these past crimes. The partisan political theater and finger pointing is in itself the distraction from the momentous immensity of popular resistance in this country right now.
These documents, and their steady partially-redacted release, are extremely psychologically distressing for our people, survivors, children, and victims of similar crimes, and yet they are redacted to the point that keeps the key patrons and organizers of this network obscured. At its worst, this narrative threatens to turn the justified outrage of millions of people about the crimes of the ruling class into passive observers, rooting for a fully complicit system to bring justice to the victims.
This is a debilitating tool on the mass psyche meant to frighten us into submission, pacify growing working class resistance, and obscure the unifying sentiment among our people that we need a new system entirely. The victims of these criminals should absolutely pursue the utmost justice under the legal mechanisms that exist under this current system, but we also know that we need a new system to deliver true justice.
We need a new system
Capitalist institutions will not be our route to justice. In fact, if the capitalist system tried to hold to account every persona directly implicated in the files, the system would collapse under the contradictions. This reality can be a wake up call for millions of people who wish desperately to see justice for Epstein’s victims: we can win justice in the struggle for socialism.
Over the last 5 years, we have undergone a pandemic that left our communities to die, police brutality, climate catastrophe, billions of U.S. tax dollars sent to fund genocide, and are now witnessing ICE terror, kidnappings, and executions in broad daylight. Mass consciousness of socialism as the solution, a system run by workers and not billionaires that meets people’s needs, is skyrocketing.
The release of the Epstein files cannot be a distraction from the gains we are witnessing in real time as our movement unites across historic lines of division. They cannot be a distraction from the high school youth activated against ICE terror and walking out of schools daily across Houston, Atlanta, New York City, and Minneapolis. Nor can they be a distraction from the rising anti-war movement growing in opposition of our tax dollars being used for the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, instead of funding healthcare, education, and basic needs.
This is the moment in which the ruling class wants us silent, cynical, and pacified. However, we know that our power, strength, and path to liberation comes from organizing and uniting in the masses and being clear that while the capitalist institutions continue to reveal their harms and their truths, we will not be deterred in our resistance.
