By Bhabani Shankar Nayak
Jeffrey Epstein’s scandal is not merely an abnormal aberration of a perverted, prodigious pedophile and his group of rotten socialites who were enjoying the architecture of impunity that shields abuse and exploitation based on access to power, privilege, and wealth. It is not an isolated event but a product of hyper-carnivorous capitalism, which produces and promotes a libidinal market of female bodies as mere objects of pleasure. The rotten system of capitalism enables different forms of heinous crimes like the sexual exploitation of children and the culture of sexual trafficking of women. The Epstein files are unmasking the rotten core of capitalist high society and its perverted networks, where celebrities, leading politicians, diplomats, journalists, kings, so-called liberals, democrats, conservatives, bankers, and businessmen pay to realise their perverted sexual desires at the cost of human dignity by exploiting vulnerable children and women.
Jeffrey Epstein’s files reveal a strong network of people from the Wealth Management Industry (WMI), which enabled people like him. The WMI has not only been catering to the needs and desires of high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth individuals and their families in matters of money, but also working as pimps for these people to realise their perverted sexual fantasies. The systems, processes, and networks are designed to facilitate a predatory culture empowered by wealth, which transforms convicted sex offenders into successful celebrities. Capitalism and its WMI not only provide money but also, in effect, offer political and legal protection to people like Jeffrey Epstein. Such a criminal system led by the WMI promotes predatory capitalism, and capitalism in turn promotes its inseparable, legalised criminal syndicate, exemplified in the operations of people like Mr Epstein and his associates.
The network of Mr Epstein also reveals the unity of the billionaire class, who use their capital to exploit children and women and shield each other in times of crisis and crime. There is absolute class unity among the capitalist classes. These parasitic classes survive and derive their pleasure by exploiting the most vulnerable people across the world. Trafficking human beings for cheap labour and sexual pleasure is normal for these capitalist classes, who dominate and domesticate society, people, and culture to ensure the growth of their pyramid of profit.
The so-called upper echelons of capitalist society and their networks reveal the nature of solidarity among the capitalist classes in the pursuit of their pleasure—the “happiness industry”—entirely without regard for morality and basic human decency. However, these forces form alliances with reactionary religious and cultural forces in society to promote mass morality, thereby domesticating people in accordance with the requirements of capitalism. Dominance, fear, shame, surrender, and compliance are the five core features of the capitalist governance system, disguised in the form of religious morality that capitalism promotes.
There is no moral compass to measure the moral decay in capitalist society and its commodification of human life, love, emotion, sexual pleasure, the objectification of bodies, and labour. Moral decay defines the predatory capitalist network and the decadent culture of capitalism, where different forms of exploitation are normalised in the name of individual choices and a predatory market that enables the ability to buy sexual pleasure without any qualms about the women and children who become victims of their rotten network. This new form of sexual and other forms of slavery is naturalised under a capitalist economic, social, cultural, and legal system that often facilitates the activities of people like Jeffrey Epstein, who lived a criminal life with impunity. What the Epstein files reveal is that the rottenness of capitalist society, its governing elites, and their predatory culture is fundamentally opposed to human values. Capitalism and its culture are not compatible with basic human values. Therefore, the struggle against capitalism and its culture is a struggle for survival of basic human values of life.
The writer teaches at the London Metropolitan University
