The phrase “Epstein class” is now in use as a shorthand for the forms of networking and mutual patronage practised by the rich and powerful who moved in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle. As a journalistic artefact calling attention to the horrific misdeeds of such people, it is effective and impactful.
However, when a social analysis is extrapolated from it, or “Epstein class” is used as a synonym for the ruling class, the usage becomes harmful. An example of such extrapolation could be seen on the London demonstration against the US-Israel-Iran war on 7 March, where at least one protester held a placard saying, “Iran is fighting Epstein regimes”.
This positions the Islamic Republic of Iran, a dictatorship which murders protesters and violently oppresses women, as an agent of justice and progress.
Another example of groups on the left implying world politics was organised via a conspiracy headed by Epstein, and somehow remains so today, is the public meeting hosted by the Lambeth branch of Your Party, titled “Iran: The Epstein War”.
The idea of “Epstein regimes” fighting “Epstein wars” also reflects a broader pattern of conspiracy-theorist thinking. A perennial feature of such thinking is a tendency to treat even loose forms of association and adjacency as if they represent a singular, compact entity.
Antisemitism provides the most readily-available theoretical framework for such thinking, by appearing to illuminate, concretise, and personalise, in the figure of “the Jewish financier”, forms of domination and social harm whose causes seem abstract, incorporeal, and hidden.
Capitalists, including Jewish ones, exploit workers. They do that not out of personal malevolence, but driven by structural imperatives. Some capitalists, like Jeffrey Epstein, are guilty of monstrous personal crimes in addition. That does not mean capitalism was organised by an “Epstein conspiracy” when he was alive, or is organised by a similar personal conspiracy now.
Treating all association as a singular conspiracy miseducates about how class power is actually enacted. Epstein maintained a network. He seems to have thrived on the process itself. He didn’t control the US government via that network, people in the network were not simply carrying out his orders, and many capitalists operated through other networks. There is much to criticise Noam Chomsky for, but he is not a sleeper agent for an “Epstein regime”.
Conspiracy thinking is anathema to genuine class politics. If one believes the world is run via a conspiracy of the “Epstein class” or “Epstein regimes”, the implied form of action isn’t to collectively organise in your workplace, strike to win better conditions, and aim for the socialisation of production, it is simply to hunt out the various nodes in the network.
Is the idea that the vast majority of capitalists worldwide who were not part of Epstein’s network are harmless? The implied logic maps neatly onto the old antisemitic idea that there are decent, honest, nationally-rooted capitalists who make material goods, and then there are bad, transnational capitalists, who make their money through incorporeal processes of finance and money exchange.
The stereotype “honest” goods-producing capitalist would be strait-laced and dislike sexual abuse or even Caribbean-island parties. Some capitalists actually fit that stereotype. But the transnational financiers? For them, everything is an abstraction, so why not trade in women and girls the same way they trade in stocks and shares? Such arguments have long been integral for various forms of “Red-Brown” politics, syncretic ideologies that combine critiques of finance with antisemitic nationalisms.
As well as distorting class politics, extrapolating a world-shaping conspiracy from the actions of Epstein and his associates undermines efforts to centre the victims of their sexual abuse. It reduces violence against women and girls to a mere epiphenomenon of the conspiracy, rather than something socially endemic.
Capitalism (all of it: the “materially productive” and the “financial”) does treat human bodies as raw materials to be churned up and exploited. It is easy to imagine how people trained in techniques of social command and domination might extend that into their sexual psychology. But treating women and girls as disposable sex objects is not simply a byproduct of capitalism.
The specific forms of abuse Epstein and Maxwell were able to perpetrate were facilitated by their particular wealth and power, but there are undoubtedly many other little “Epsteins” throughout society, and amongst middle and working-class people too. As one of Epstein’s victims told journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley: “Obviously it makes a lot of things different that Epstein was a billionaire. But it’s not just about the most powerful people in the world. It’s about the people who are the most powerful in your neighbourhood, your school.”
Many of those casually resharing memes or other online content promoting the idea of an “Epstein class” or “Epstein regimes” may not have thought through the implications, just as many who share memes about the Rothschilds may see them simply as critical of greed and exploitation. It is tempting to see criticisms of individual financiers, or of “financial elites”, as most of the way to socialist good sense, just needing to be nudged a little further. But a critique that sees social ills as caused by a conspiracy of financiers must be challenged at the most basic level, not treated as if it is merely limited.
When the Occupy movement exploded in 2011, its predominant narrative framing, “the 99% versus the 1%”, became popular. Much of the organised left went along with that framing, seeing a potential shortcut to political hegemony by presenting socialism as simply a slight extension of the catchcry radicalism already prevalent in the movement. The 99% versus 1% framing, like its even looser equivalent “For the many, not the few”, has merits; it is an easily-graspable expression of the deeply undemocratic nature of a society organised through vast inequalities of wealth and power. But in actual fact, the ruling class and its close-knit retinue are more than 1%. Plenty of smaller capitalists and fairly high-up managers are not in the top 1%. The working class may be 80% of the population in developed capitalist countries, and a majority globally, but not 99%.
Such framings therefore blur class politics, rather than sharpening them. By failing to challenge them in the hope of making easy political gains for ourselves, the socialist left gives an unwitting leg-up to reactionary political currents whose ideas really do appear to provide inchoate “anti-elite” populism with an explanatory theoretical framework. To go along with narratives about an “Epstein class”, implying some non-“Epstein class” contingent of harmless capitalists, or, worse, “Epstein regimes”, would be to repeat the mistake, in a much worse form.
This article originally appeared on the website of the Alliance for Workers Liberty.
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