Epstein: A marxist perspective
The disclosure of some of the emails and files of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has exploded like a bomb in the US political landscape. The dataset, comprising around 30,000 items, is only a small part of the “Epstein Files,” which, surprisingly, were approved for release on November 18 after years of delay by the “Epstein Files Transparency Act” in the US House of Representatives with 427 votes in favor (and one vote against) and are scheduled to be published over the next 30 days.
The data that will then be disclosed will, of course, have large parts of the incriminating details redacted – nevertheless, it will probably yield insights.
While the whole world is talking about the entanglements of the serial sex offender, the Marxist world is surprisingly quiet. We find this very unfortunate, because the Epstein affair is a godsend for reactionary idealists who see in Epstein’s geopolitical value-added evidence of a Jewish world conspiracy and of adrenochrome-worshipping Moloch elites.
Abuse Lobbyist
We will publish a detailed overview of Epstein’s foreign policy significance tomorrow in collaboration with a guest author.
At the same time, it is indeed very likely that Epstein worked on behalf of one or more intelligence agencies to compromise the entangled politicians, monarchs, and property owners with leverage and, conversely, to promote the interests of his clients as an abuse lobbyist (“Honey Trapping”). In the emails released so far, Epstein repeatedly, but in very different contexts, speaks of an authority whose “D’accord” he must await. Who exactly these authorities were can only be guessed.
Dylan Howard already claimed in his 2019 book “Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales” that Epstein acted, among others, on behalf of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Similar claims are made by the right-wing American podcaster Tucker Carlson and the America First bubble around Nick Fuentes.
We doubt a direct employment relationship, but Epstein’s role in Israeli foreign policy is already known: Emails between Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak reveal that they were jointly “looking for opportunities to promote US attacks on Iran.”[1]
Epstein helped Israel establish a channel to Russia to gain potential support for ending Assad – with the goal of weakening Hezbollah. The priorities in Syria shifted with the rise of Daesh, causing this plan to initially fail. To what extent these channels established by Epstein were used ten years later to prevent Russian support for Assad during the offensive of the Turkish-funded and pro-Israeli militia al-Jolani can only be speculated.
Clearer connections existed between Epstein and Russian officials, to whom he seemingly provided “insights” into Trump’s Ukraine policy during the war in Ukraine.[2] Epstein maintained contacts with the Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, likely with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and even almost met Putin’s Rasputin, Alexander Gelyevich Dugin.
Similar contacts existed with Saudi Arabia, whose current Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gifted him a luxurious tent out of gratitude (the reason for which is still unclear), possibly with the head of the Council of Europe[3], and of course with a whole series of US capital representatives, politicians, and presidents.
Now, some might be surprised by what we are about to say: None of this is even remotely unusual:
Despite everything, likely even shocking, that will be revealed in the coming weeks, the following can be stated with certainty: Jeffrey Epstein acted as an intermediary between various imperialist states, which, through cooperation with him, on the one hand had access to an extremely well-connected representative of capital and on the other hand presumably possessed leverage against competing states. With this, they could assert their particular national interests against others so as not to come out on the losing side in global capitalist competition. Behind this were not “the Jews” or anything similar, but the global logic of calculation, from which competition in turn arises.
That’s the sobering part. On the other hand stands the actual absurdity of this “Honey Trapping” tactic, i.e., gaining leverage by facilitating mostly sexual relationships. “Honey Trapping” is nothing new: The Soviet Mozhno agents seduced politicians and capital representatives for information gathering, the French double agent Nathalie Sergueiew spied for British intelligence by seducing Nazis, and as recently as 2010, MI5 published the document “The Threat from Chinese Espionage,” which warned British capital representatives about Chinese blackmail via affairs with female spies.[4]
Libertines
What of course distinguishes the Epstein case now is that the victims of his abuse ring were mostly minors and likely fell victim to the perpetrators’ abuse precisely for that reason.
The absurdity of this “Honey Trapping” consists – if we assume that those leverage points, which Epstein constantly talks about in his emails, were indeed the core of his abuse system – in the fact that here, unlike classic espionage methods, the seduction of adult, conventionally attractive persons was not used, but the abuse of minors; A “honey trap” that for the overwhelming majority of working people would never be one.
It is nothing new and no secret that the richest and most powerful in this world often act in a state of legal inviolability and from that immunity do things that are completely foreign to the morality of working people.
In Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), representatives of capital, the church, the judiciary, and the aristocracy meet for four months in a secluded castle to abuse young victims – boys and girls – in the most perfidious ways. They meet the suffering of these victims with complete apathy: The torment is an end in itself. It serves less the libidinal satisfaction of the libertines than the realization that these rich and powerful can do anything they want in a lawless space. The libertines completely separate themselves from the abused subjects – simply because they can.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, who controversially filmed de Sade’s book in 1975, justified his decision to visually represent de Sade’s grotesque descriptions in an equally grotesque manner with a reference to Marx: The film is a “oneiric representation of what Marx called the reification of man, the reduction of the body (through exploitation) to a thing.”[5]
Capital ownership is inextricably linked to the reification of labor. Pasolini argues that the reification of the body through mistreatment is merely the next, private consequence of the fundamental reification of all areas of life under capitalism.
It is therefore unlikely that everyone involved in Epstein’s abuse ring actually had pedophilic tendencies. Only about 1% of the population exhibits pronounced pedophilic tendencies[6] – a value that does not match the extent of pedo-criminality in the circles of the property-owning class. The frequency of abuse in the managerial and property-owning classes is thus not primarily an expression of sexual drives, but of the total availability of the victims’ bodies, which replaces the sexual drive in this social practice.
The same applies to the mistreatment of adult persons, although the fact of a child’s helplessness intensifies the mechanism. Here, inequality itself is eroticized – Catharine MacKinnon writes:
“I think men rape women because they get off on it in a way that fuses dominance with sexuality. I think that when men sexually harass women it expresses male control over sexual access to us. It doesn’t mean they all want to fuck us, they just want to hurt us, dominate us, and control us, and that is fucking us. They want to be able to have that and to be able to say when they can have it, to know that. That is in itself erotic.”[7]
A parallel can be found in the reports that seem grotesque about the so-called “Porta-Potty-Parties” of the oil capitalists in Dubai. Young working women, often from the modeling scene, are forced there – whether through large sums of money, where “voluntariness” cannot be spoken of, or through open coercion – to allow themselves to be severely mistreated by these elites. Part of these humiliations is defecating on the women, from which the name is derived. Several of the affected women were even murdered after these mistreatments.[8]
The mistreatment and humiliation of women, in the context of the Epstein situation minor girls, is an extreme expression of bourgeois morality, according to which reification spreads to every aspect of life.
One of Epstein’s victims reported to the Miami Herald;
“Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right. […] Most of the girls came from disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care. Some had experienced troubles that belied their ages: They had parents and friends who committed suicide; mothers abused by husbands and boyfriends; fathers who molested and beat them.”[9]
The victims of Epstein, originating from the working class, provide the perpetrators with a Homo Sacer, a body over which they can exchange their capital domination without restriction into direct physical domination. The “honey trap” argument assumes that the “allurement” by minors is in some way a society-wide phenomenon, whereas the absolute dominance over the epitome of the defenseless (minors) is the sole expression of the class that fundamentally functions through inequality.
Thus, the assumption that “the world is run by pedophiles” is mistaken because it confuses cause and effect. It is not pedophilia that makes one powerful, but power that generates those distorted forms of desire that express themselves in mistreatment and exploitation. In the logic of Deleuze and Guattari (schizoanalysis), desire is not a private, familial inner life, but is socially structured from the beginning. The libido immediately occupies the economic and political field; it is shaped not despite, but through forms of social power.
The Epstein complex is the extreme form of that “free zone” that power creates for itself: a space where social norms are suspended and where desire forms unhindered under the logic of hierarchy. Precisely this space produces a perverted desire – not because people with “deviant tendencies” gather there, but because the complete absence of consequences, the availability of socially dependent individuals, and the economic supremacy itself shift desire towards mistreatment, dehumanization, and absolute disposal. Power thus creates a laboratory in which desire is not liberated but deformed.
Bourgeois explanatory models, which either speak of a “rule of pedophiles” or dismiss the incidents as “isolated cases,” presuppose that sexuality is separate from power – in the sense of an early-socialized, then static Oedipus. But that is not the case: Marc Dutroux, the Catholic Church, the Franklin scandal – domination, particularly bourgeois domination, produces abuse and the spaces where it becomes possible.
[1] https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-ehud-barak-putin-israel-russia-syria-war-depose-assad?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2510348&post_id=177588780&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=25ytrh&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/12/jeffrey-epstein-donald-trump-russia-emails-00648919
[3] https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/us-sexualstraftaeter-epstein-suchte-kontakt-zu-europarat-wegen-russland-verbindungen-li.10005600
[4] https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/03/12/the-history-of-the-honey-trap/
[5] https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/511-salo-breaking-the-rules?srsltid=AfmBOoosWa-7oXOCZoRjikqwnvw72UWQQWC6LWFSj0YIipF02kDRwPOM
[6] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28526106
[7] MacKinnon, C.A. (1987). Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 91.
[8] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2r9y3kxy9o
[9] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/18/fpde-j18.html
