The case of Jeffrey Epstein is symptomatic of the morally depraved social hell that the ruling class has created on this planet, writes Rosa Janis.
On July 6th, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on order of the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York on one count of sex trafficking and one count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. This act opened up the media floodgates, swallowing the rich and powerful across partisan lines with accusations implicating both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. Trump has been accused of raping a 13-year-old girl in Jeffrey Epstein’s New York apartment along with saying some truly touching things about how Jeffrey Epstein was a terrific guy with a taste for “young women”. In a puff piece that was done on Jeffrey Epstein titled “The Man of Mystery”, the 11 times Clinton’s name appeared on the flight logs of the Lolita Express (Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet which he used as a Flying House of child prostitution) were discussed. (1) Hollywood celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Phil Collins, and Mick Jagger are either listed in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book or on the flight logs of his private jet. (2) Even men of science such as Steven Pinker and Stephen Hawking have been caught in photos that implicate them in the vast conspiracy of Epstein. Pictures show Stephen Hawking with a few of Jeffrey’s girls on his private Island and Steven Pinker enjoying a luxurious meal with the Man of Mystery himself. (3) Everyone in the ruling class is drowning in this flood.
It seems unlikely that all the people who were involved in the sex ring will be prosecuted. Epstein himself almost got away with his horrific crimes with a light sentence of 18 months in prison (which ended up being 13 months in a private wing of a jail with his own security detail and permission to go to work in his downtown West Palm Beach office 6 days a week) thanks to former U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, Trump’s Secretary of Labor, who resigned yesterday. Then in 2011, the then Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance was instrumental in securing Epstein the lowest level of sex offender status. In fact, it would not be surprising if Epstein himself managed to wiggle his way out of this situation. His pedophile sex trafficking ring was basically an open secret that could be easily discovered just by one simple Google search revealing a wide variety of semi-mainstream sources ranging from the liberal Gawker to the conservative Washington Post all covering the interconnected web of Epstein. Jeffery preyed upon poor young girls looking to make it big as models through a modeling agency that acted as a front for recruitment, along with a network of other child sex slaves who lured more girls to be raped. Numerous victims tried to come out and expose the ring only to be met with apathy by mainstream media. Epstein’s friend Donald Trump also has a modeling agency for teen girls and is known for being the head of youth beauty pageants. This conspiracy of mass rape continued on in the open while a feminist “movement” to deal with rape called #MeToo bloomed, the majority of those involved being mostly from Hollywood with a few notable exceptions. One would think that someone could have used the platform of #MeToo (especially those celebrities that were the vanguard of this movement) to bring attention to Epstein, considering how many people in Hollywood probably had direct knowledge of what Jeffrey Epstein was doing. Yet #MeToo left Jeffrey Epstein unscathed. So how has Epstein been able to get away with it for so long?
The answer to the question is obvious: he had the money to do it. Jeffrey Epstein is super-rich and thus has countless connections to other wealthy and powerful people. Because of these connections, it was and is extremely hard, if not impossible, to make Jeffrey truly pay for his crimes. However, this answer requires a deeper examination into why exactly these men end up being in positions of power within our society in the first place, and how we fail to understand the force behind men like Jeffrey Epstein.
Demonology and Capital
In his book Marx’s Inferno, William Clare Roberts traces the development of Marx’s Capital through the early socialist rhetoric of “social hell” as used by Charles Fournier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon back to Christianized Aristotelian morality. Roberts argues that Volume I of Capital is purposely structured in a similar manner to that of Dante’s Inferno, but that the key difference between Marx and his social republican, utopian socialist, and heretical Christian predecessors is that they see the roots of such evils in the individual corruption of men, in particular, that of merchants, while Marx sees the root as something rooted in the practices that structure our lives. This inversion of Christian morality gives us a deeper understanding of evil that goes beyond simple condemnation. We all know what Jeffrey Epstein did was evil; pedophilia in American society is one of the most widely agreed-upon sins and Americans revel in punishing pedophiles. However, he got away with it for so long because the vicious exploitation of young girls is something that is not only normal but at the very heart of the social hell that is capitalism. The labor that makes the lives of Jeffrey Epstein and the rest of his class possible is done by 14-year-old girls in sweatshops all across the Global South. They are beaten, raped, and murdered at the hands of cruel managers who push them as hard as humanly possible to make as many commodities as needed for pennies a day. It is this labor, along with the labor of other members of the working class, that keeps the Inferno burning. All the members of the capitalist class along with their closest servants (politicians, Hollywood elites, and mainstream media propagandists) know that this kind of violent exploitation is what keeps the system they are at the top of afloat and functioning. The weak-willed among the bourgeois are weeded out through the competition of the market or the more direct forces of violence and slander; see what happens to noble politicians like Allende of Chile or how the cooperative movement in Britain died under the weight of capitalist competition. Only those who turn their heads away from the Inferno of capital while feeding it and successfully ignoring its evil, or those who not only feed the flames but take an act of pleasure in doing so, can be the devils that rule over our hell.
People know this almost unconsciously. It is a common cliché to see pop-science articles on the sociopathic tendencies of the rich. While the scientific validity of said articles is as questionable as the category of sociopathy (given that it is a term generally avoided by modern psychologists) there is a truth to these little blips of clickbait trash floating around on the internet. Antisocial traits are necessary in order to be a capitalist in the first place. You must have predatory instincts in order to function as a helmsman of a system that is based on exploitation. It’s a basic quality of leadership, as we are told over and over again by these pop-science articles. It is normal to have people who are not only unable to feel empathy for others but actively enjoy causing suffering and harm to get what they want. Evil is normal. It is intrinsic to the social hell of the capitalist system.
When we understand that evil acts are the basis of capitalism itself, we begin to see how Epstein’s case fits into the broader picture, as the exploitation of young girls is normal under capitalism. Whether it be through sweatshops or suspicious modeling agencies, this is how capitalists make their money. Sure, Jeffrey Epstein and everyone involved loved raping young girls, but it also allowed Jeffery to profit from their suffering and blackmail other members of the ruling class with the evidence of their pedophilia, thus consolidating more powerful connections than his competitors. Epstein is the most evil kind of parasitic demon within a class full of demons, and he has thrived because we live in a social hell. Capital is an inferno that melts the will of men to do good within it.
The would-be Exorcists of #Metoo vs The Anti-Woke Left’s Priest
Before we get into criticism of the overarching goal of #MeToo, we must remember that to address the prevalence of sexual abuse in society is a noble cause and worth fighting for. Many critics of #MeToo tend to downplay the prevalence of sexual abuse in our society, in particular among the ruling class. For example, a commentary on #MeToo given by Anna Khachiyan and Amber A’Lee Frost of the Red Scare and Chapo Trap House podcast respectively in an interview done by Spiked magazine:
“Khachiyan says ‘a lot of these people are tyrannical narcissists’. ‘They are noncommittal, incapable of tolerating conflict or taking consequences. So they would rather have a system like polyamory where you kick that can down the road.’ Frost adds that many millennials ‘think they can eliminate jealousy… But sometimes you’re going to have bad sex, sometimes you’re going to be jealous. It’s not the end of the world.’“(5)
Admittedly, there is a level of truth to certain parts of this jazz ensemble of “hot takes”; #MeToo was mainly focused on the suffering of bourgeois white women in Hollywood, tactically committed to symbolic acts like wearing all black outfits to the Oscars. #MeToo was not a working-class phenomenon but a response within the ruling class to abuses by other members of the ruling class, which is why in all the noise of #MeToo, men like Jeffrey Epstein who targeted poor, young would-be actors and models without any social power remained untouched by the #MeToo movement. (6)
Frost and Khachiyan’s commentary is laughable when one considers how common pedophilia and rape is among the ruling class. Anti-woke social democrats like Amber A’Lee Frost cannot deny the existence of Jeffrey Epstein’s rape conspiracy or even that of Harvey Weinstein, so why do they find it so hard to believe that a few bourgeois white women could have been caught up in the orgy of sexual violence taking place among the ruling class?
The truth is that for all Frost’s claims of being a Marxist-feminist, she thinks in the same simplistic moralism of the radical liberal intersectionalists. Both pay lip service to understanding structures of oppression and exploitation but fail to articulate said understanding. “Anti-woke” leftists’ current critique of the left is focused on the morality of woke leftists (merely a repeat of Nietzsche’s critique of “slave morality” that was articulated in Mark Fisher’s “Exiting The Vampire Castle”). They argue that woke leftists are petty, weak-minded moralists who cling onto leftism in order to hide how awful they are and use guilt to tear apart everyone who opposes them in their social circles (which are predominantly made up of bourgeois women or men who act like said women). While there is definitely some truth to this kind of Nietzschean caricature of the woke leftist, this does not explain why these people exist in the first place, much like how #MeToo feminists, for all their talk of understanding the intersections of oppression, cannot seem to grasp why men like Weinstein exist among their class beyond the fact that they are men in a patriarchal society.
The woke leftists and anti-woke social democrats both occupy places within the system that they do not like to acknowledge. On the one hand, woke leftists focus on issues of minority groups looking to join the ruling class, such as being sexually harassed while working as a big-time movie star or experiencing racism in a political NGO, both major problems for upwardly-mobile minorities. The neo–social democrats are in a somewhat similar situation, instead tending to be downwardly mobile petty-bourgeois and therefore wanting modest reforms like universal healthcare in order to keep themselves from becoming fully dispossessed. At the same time, to a certain extent, they still benefit from capitalism and do not seek to genuinely move beyond it. The conflict between the woke left and the anti-woke left is thus an internal conflict of the petty-bourgeoisie over what reforms to implement to preserve their various positions within capitalism. Given that the means of achieving their reformist goals is through the revival of the labor movement, it could be argued that the anti-woke social democratic left are potential allies to genuine Communists, but this fails to recognize as a class issue the prevalence of rape in our society. They are blinded by their crusade against the woke left regarding rape as much as they are blinded on issues of police brutality and border control. Whatever alliance we can make with them can only ever be temporary at best, no matter how much they talk about socialism. If we want to get rid of the pedophile demonic elite and the social hell that breeds them we must go beyond the limited discourse of reformism.
The Day of Proletarian Judgement is near
If the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign shifted the Overton window, then the Epstein scandal will smash the window, letting all sorts of assorted cranks into the political sphere, as it not only confirms the worst kind of conspiratorial paranoia deeply rooted in the American psyche, but also discredits almost everyone in the ruling class. Every mainstream pundit will be doing their best to contain the outrage. Responses will range from outright denial that this has anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein’s class position to spin this into a partisan problem. The servants of the ruling class know no shame and will do everything in their power to protect themselves. We cannot let them do this. Not only is this an opportunity of a lifetime for radicals, we can also assume that justice will be denied for those harmed by Jeffrey Epstein and his friends. To demand justice is to demand the liquidation of the class which made Epstein’s scheme possible.
Capitalism is in a death spiral, with long-term wage stagnation and the crisis of climate change looking more and more apocalyptic as we come closer to death. (7) (8) If we are living in the end times, or at least the end times of capitalism, let us act like it. Let us quietly organize our proletarian militias, learn survival skills, and develop mutual aid networks for the time of revelations and revolutions. Most importantly, let us make these final days into days of proletarian justice. Hell may not be real, but that does not mean we can’t punish the sinners on this wretched earth. Only the proletariat and its allies can make a living hell for the capitalist class that has raped our children.
