The release of the Epstein files has opened a window onto the world as it actually functions—not the rules-based order of liberal mythology, but the real order: one of impunity, exploitation, and class power exercised without restraint or consequence.
Under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the Trump administration was obliged to release all unclassified files within 30 days. Trump’s shameless flouting of that requirement turns out to be entirely consistent with the world the files expose: laws don’t apply to people like Epstein and his circle. Raping children, avoiding tax, standing over elected governments and generally living lives without reference to moral norms are their birthright.
Trump is mentioned 4,000 times in the documents released so far, with millions more still withheld. But the files do far more than expose odious individuals. They are an indictment of the entire system of global capitalism—those who run it and those who hold positions of influence within it. The scope is staggering: politicians, bankers, scientists, media moguls, academics, intelligence operatives, royalty—all networked through money, mutual favours, and access to women and children trafficked for their gratification. Elon Musk exchanges emails asking when the wildest party would be thrown on Epstein’s island. Richard Branson writes that he’d love to meet up as long as Epstein brings his ‘harem’. Bill Gates, Google’s Sergey Brin, and an endless list of Wall Street bankers and businessmen are implicated. This is not the aberration of a few bad apples. This is the ruling class operating normally, confident in its own impunity.
The scale of abuse is industrial. The Department of Justice estimates Epstein abused more than 1,000 women and girls. His victims were overwhelmingly poor and working class—girls recruited from nearby schools, young women trafficked from Eastern Europe through a modelling agency he controlled. The drive from Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion to the neighbourhoods his Florida victims came from has been described as going from heaven to hell in fifteen minutes. In the richest country in the world, the poor live next door to presidents and bankers who treat them in every respect as bonded servants, if not outright slaves.
Sexism, state and class
This is not incidental to capitalism. To the ruling class, ordinary people are things—like a super-yacht or a Maserati, only much less expensive. Workers are mere factors of production from the point of view of those who control capital and their hangers-on. And exploiting people for their own enrichment is no distance at all to exploiting them for sexual gratification. But Epstein’s circle should be seen as more than just the excesses of the leisure class. Such practices are deeply rooted in the structures of capitalism. Abuse is made immeasurably easier when there is an extreme power imbalance between abuser and abused—and capitalism manufactures that imbalance on an industrial scale. The sexual exploitation of women is accessible to all men, rich or poor.
The files also confirm what Marxists have always argued about the state: that it exists to serve the interests of capital, not to deliver justice. Epstein’s 2008 conviction—on charges that should have brought federal prosecution for mass sexual exploitation—resulted in 13 months of comfortable detention, much of it served on day release in his own offices. The prosecutor who arranged the deal, Alexander Acosta, was subsequently appointed Labour Secretary in Trump’s first administration. JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank spent years shielding his shell companies and suspicious transactions from regulatory scrutiny, as a routine service to a high-value client. The victims—including dozens of identified minors—were not even notified of the deal. This is what bourgeois justice looks like.
One particularly revealing thread in the files is the bipartisan character of Epstein’s world. Republican and Democratic presidents shared the same social universe. Their elite solidarity transcended party lines, cutting across the supposedly furious divisions of political life to reveal what lies beneath: a ruling class that cuts diplomatic deals through back channels, mixes statecraft with personal interest, and regards the formal institutions of democracy as a useful facade. Lord Peter Mandelson—briefly Keir Starmer’s appointment as US ambassador—appears emailing Epstein about euro bailout plans and suggesting JPMorgan should ‘mildly threaten’ his own government over a tax on bankers’ bonuses. The class interests of capital trump national loyalty, party affiliation, and democratic accountability at every turn.
They keep their dealings secret because they know that exposure means not just personal embarrassment, but the delegitimisation of the entire system of wealth and power they represent. In that sense, the Epstein files is another of those increasingly frequent ‘scandals’ that rips the mask off the system. The Epstein circuit was a conduit to the accumulation of profit and power by individuals whose shared class interests cut across political party lines and national borders, and whose victims were poor and working-class women and children.
If anyone needed further argument for the overthrow of the class that produced this—that makes the domination and abuse of the many by the few not an exception but a structural feature—the Epstein files are it.
