Disclaimer: I don’t want this to come across as downplaying the suffering of the victims, or the horrific nature of the crimes.
That being said, I think Epstein is becoming an obsession for people that is pointless, doesn’t advance the left wing movement, and is borderline unhealthy to be honest.
People on this site and beyond are doing borderline Q-Anon level baking, using random scraps from documents and making extremely tenuous connections. This shit is unhealthy, obsessing over it and staring into the abyss of depravity is just going to cause yourself psychic damage, and for what? It’s borne out of the same thing as all conspiracism: a feeling of powerlessness, a feeling that by uncovering the mystery, doing this “investigation”, finding some hidden truth, you are doing something tangible rather than just obsessing and suffering on the internet.
This isn’t to say I don’t think all things are on the table - “he was mossad”, “this or that person was involved”, “what if he’s still alive?”. But ask yourself, what changes? What changes if any of this is true? Are any of us shocked or surprised by 99% of the names dredged up? These are all people that we already consider ontologically evil for numerous other crimes and their class position. We already know that there are 10,000 ultra powerful, ultra wealthy people who control the world, who act with impunity, who are all interconnected and who all have bourgeois class solidarity that the workers can only dream of at this stage.
And what tactical or strategic advantage is offered to working class movements we are involved in by uncovering this hidden truth? We currently have no power to punish the guilty or prevent it from happening again. Epstein himself is likely dead, most of the people mentioned are dead, or ancient and on their way out. Should we be forming pressure groups and protesting our governments to thoroughly investigate and punish the guilty? If half of what is in the files is true, our governments are riddled with people who are complicit if not actively involved.
So what is the route by which the people’s justice can be served? The same as always - the working class needs to win political power. Our time is better served thinking about how we can advance the ball on concrete issues, work with our irl organisations to build working class power. I think driving ourselves mad on the internet and expanding so much mental energy tying red string between random names and events on our mental corkboards is deleterious to this mission.
Now, I’m open to the idea that using the Epstein angle in propaganda to disillusion workers of billionaires and capitalism could be useful, but that doesn’t require more than a cursory knowledge of the situation, knowledge we’ve all had for 6 years at this point.
As marxists we shouldn’t be hyperfixating on Epstein as the keystone of everything “evil” on earth. We have a class analysis and an understanding of the system superseding the role of the individual. Things such as “epstein was working for Mossad” - ok, that may well be true, but does it change our analysis of Israel? Does it affect how we view the settler-colonial relationship? Could it possibly make them any more morally bankrupt than the genocide we’ve been watching for 2.5 years? Than a century of ethnic cleansing?
I get this feeling that doesn’t sit well with me, that this is becoming some grotesque spectacle of “true crime”, motivated by an inability to look away, by the conspiratorial powerlessness I mentioned above, and by the same instincts that make endless podcast series and TV shows about gruesome murders eternally popular. And it is taking up so much oxygen on the left - ffs, the United States is about to try and topple its second government in a month and everyone is too busy combing through the epstein files to see if
or
are in there.
Tl;dr: don’t drive yourself insane trying to know the unknowable, focus on the concrete, focus on things you can change, advance the ball!
In the sense that this critique of capitalist is too narrow and does not in fact include some of the other prominent figures (such as Bezos and Zuckenberg, at least to my knowledge), it is indeed insufficient in criticizing capital as a whole. Moralistic critiques are great supplements to systematic ones, but can never take their place. They can certainly be introductions, but you're not going to get anywhere if they cannot accept the central thesis of capitalist exploitation. Especially with a guy such as Chomsky being in them, who sure as shit is not much of a capitalist (although most certainly a radlib). You're not exactly discrediting anarchism if you point that out. You're also not going to find someone such as Dick Cheney on the files, even though we know he's an evil piece of shit. Sure they have all the power to be the most morally depraved evil bastards, but that is inherently not a characteristic of capitalist production. This certainly isn't the "mother of all radicalizing catalysts", rapid economic deterioration is, which is why economism was so widespread in the Russian worker's movement, particularly with the Mensheviks.
Also the whole compromising thing with Mossad is a bit unconvincing considering that Trump is constantly in the files yet nothing has actually happened to him. Nobody cares about compromising material in the form of someone's dick pic or moral depravity, except for Starmer and his weird spy camera obsession I guess.
The capitalist class is not a monolithic entity; it is factional and tied to various concentrations of capital that settle around specific forms of commodity production and arbitrage (the Oil Barons, the Tech Lords, Wall Street, Legacy Media etc.) We've born witness to the exposing of a major decades old intelligence operation by the CIA and Mossad to utilize pedophiles for the purpose of blackmail and leverage, ensnaring a wide assortment of capitalists and capital supporters from a wide pool of factions
This reality is born right out of the unpunished criminality of the CIA and the state/capitalist self-preservational logic of the settler-state of Israel; this is an operation that took conscious advantage (proven by the most recent released files) of the fall of the Soviet sphere, kidnapping and trafficking young girls from Russia and Eastern Europe for the sake of political networking
This operation didn't require the ensnarement of every single capitalist on earth to work, they simply needed some of the most powerful, and they got all the ones they went after, because your assessment that capitialist production doesn't lead to moral depravity is incorrect, to be a capitalist is to devalue the lives of workers and their families, to set aside humanity to keep the circuit growing, the capitalists are human who through the pressures of competition and the imperatives of capitalist produtction transform themselves into anti-humans just to keep afloat
This is precisely why the moralistic vs. mechanistic binary is bunk theory no matter which side you fall on the binary
Trump broke containment in 2016 to become the avatar of carbon extraction capitalism, and he's done nothing that would warrant Israel challenging his status and the question you should be asking is why would they risk it anyway? You think the Israelis would risk alienating the MAGA base anymore than they've already done? Blackmail doens't have an infinite shelf life
No, of course they're not monolithic in the sense that they all realize surplus value in the same form. However, the profit of the bankers, rentiers, merchants, industrialists etc. all rests on commodity production and the realization of surplus value. This attribute of capital generally, standing in contradiction with that of labour in general, is why we're opposed to capital. Yes, all the people caught in this scandal all wield some sort of power, but that power in and of itself does not automatically assume that someone will stoop to that depravity, which is why I mentioned Bezos and Zuckenberg.
And since I'm going to assume we're talking about the radicalization of the american working class (since this is affecting the american political scene the most), that is not going to be realized by pointing out the exploitation of Easter Europe. It can only be realized by directly pointing to the contradictions inherent between capital and labour in America (although considering imperialism, who knows if a true radicalization of the working class in America is even good, let alone possible). The Russian, French and Chinese peasants certainly didn't rise up in arms because they were appalled by the treatment of Native or African Americans.
And that's exactly why it is not the "mother of all radicalizing catalysts"! It is not an all systematic, all-encompassing critique of capital as such, but rather a moral failing of a certain group of capitalist (and even non-capitalists). Sure you could say it leads to moral failure in the way you described, but it is not definitively and absolutely so. The capitalists aren't practicing their evil laugh, they all equally think they're saving the world whilst lowering wages. It also doesn't take a capitalist to be a piece of shit, thus the concept of "good billionaires" for the liberals. And again, at the end of the day, morality is completely subjective based on the country, as well as the time in human history and the advancement of human development.
The mistake is assuming Trump's policies are the result of blackmail, rather than the presupposition of him coming to power in America. Kamala and Biden too, enacted Israeli interests despite not being apparently compromised.