Material World: The closed world of billionaire power (2026)

The Material World column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

You can’t throw a brick these days without hitting one… philanthropic billionaires. One of them has been in the capitalists’ news cycles: Bill Gates has been in the news recently not so much for the atrocious spyware-laden Windows 11 operating system, but for his business ties and friendship with serial child exploiter Jeffrey Epstein. Yet Gates is still treated by the media as a kind of global saviour. A benevolent technocrat. A trusted voice on health, population, food, and development.

Philanthropy or social currency of ‘soft power’

Gates’s relationship with Epstein reveals the closed world of billionaire power. According to recently released documents, Epstein first contacted Gates in 2013 to propose a ‘donor-advised fund’ that would serve as ‘cloud computing for the giving world’, a vehicle to attract ‘the most money any charity has ever had’. Over 18 months, Gates’s family office head and foundation general counsel engaged in extensive correspondence with the convicted sex offender about this charitable vehicle.

But here’s the thing: why did the world’s second wealthiest individual require introductions to wealthy donors from a registered sex offender? The answer lies in understanding that billionaire philanthropy operates not as charity but as a mechanism of class consolidation an exclusive club and you’re not in it. Where the extraction of surplus value is celebrated through tax advantages. Barry Josephson and Epstein revelling through criminal interactions. Bill’s conundrum: what to do about the poor.

And we know exactly what they discussed. In an email exchange, Epstein wrote to an associate: ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about that question that you asked Bill Gates ‘how do we get rid of poor people as a whole’ and I have an answer/ comment regarding that for you’ (from the document provided, dated 3 February, 2011, showing correspondence between Jeffrey Epstein and Barry Josephson). This is what they talk about on the island. This is what billionaire philanthropy really means.

The population … problem?

Gates believes that the problem isn’t over-extraction, capitalism or the profit motive. Greed or billionaires don’t concern him, instead he sees African birth-rates as a threat to global capitalist progress. He has stated in a TED talk that he wants to reduce global population by 15 percent.

The Gates Foundation’s 2024 budget totals $8.6 billion, with family planning separate from the $8.3 billion for ‘fertility management’. Gates pledged $100 billion for this on World Population Day, not International Women’s Day. Fertility management in the Gates Foundation has its own budget and targets: $150 million for 2024 and $143 million for 2025. Not through maternal care or with improving material conditions like clinics that could continue afterwards. The money does not flow from charity to women; it flows from tax sheltered wealth to pharmaceutical corporations.

The Depo-Provera scandal

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), backed by hundreds of billions, claims moral authority to influence the health, agriculture and family lives of millions across Africa and the global south. This is about Sayana Press, Pfizer’s injectable contraceptive, a reformulated version of Depo-Provera that was previously subject to over 2,000 brain tumour lawsuits in Florida. The UK and US government both subsidise the use of this drug.

A 2024 study in the British Medical Journal revealed that women using Depo-Provera face a 550 percent increased risk of developing intracranial meningiomas, AKA brain tumours, requiring invasive surgery, radiation, and often causing permanent neurological damage. Pfizer knew of these risks for decades while failing to warn patients. European and Canadian labels now carry meningioma warnings; the US label was only updated in December 2025 after litigation began.

The Maxwell precedent: intelligence and institutional power

Robert Maxwell, press tycoon, scam artist, and former Labour MP too knew how to create institutional power. He had intelligence contacts in Mossad and with the KGB and did work for British intelligence. He also hobnobbed with the queen, (prince) Charles, Thatcher, Mother Teresa, George Bush and so on. He was the go-to guy for dirt on the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

The Epstein-Gates nexus is modelled on these earlier networks of elite control. Epstein’s own operations, his ‘black book’ of contacts, his mysterious wealth, his lenient 2008 prosecution, suggest similar intelligence community protections. The ‘Lolita Express’ flight logs and island visitors represent not merely criminal activity but the mechanisms through which ruling-class loyalty is ensured through mutual incrimination.

The socialist alternative

Socialists do not oppose access to contraception, nor deny the importance of reproductive choice. On the contrary, we insist that women must be free from economic compulsion in deciding whether and when to have children. The Gates Foundation model, in which pharmaceutical corporations, backed by billionaire ‘donations’ and government co-funding, experiment on vulnerable populations, represents the antithesis of reproductive freedom.

True reproductive freedom requires the social ownership of pharmaceutical production, democratic control over healthcare priorities, and the elimination of economic coercion in all its forms. When contraceptives are developed through producer-controlled research, distributed through publicly accountable health systems, and provided as genuine choices rather than population control measures, then we will have achieved something worth calling family planning.

Until then, we must recognise billionaire philanthropy for what it is: the velvet glove of the ruling elite sanitising exploitation while the iron fist of king capital maintains its grip.

A.T.

World Socialist Radio - Peter Mandelson: Arch Labour Party Careerist (2026)

Adapted from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Peter Mandelson: Arch Labour Party Careerist byThe Socialist Party of Great Britain

Peter Mandelson exemplifies a lifelong “careerist” within the Labour Party. His political trajectory was driven more by personal advancement than by principled commitment to socialism. He rose through the party not from grassroots activism but via roles in communications and media management, becoming a key architect of “New Labour.”

This episode uses Mandelson as a case study to criticise Labour, arguing that figures like him demonstrate how the party is dominated by professional politicians focused on power and status, rather than pursuing genuine socialist change.

Taken from the March 2026 edition of The Socialist Standard.

RSS Feed for Peter Mandelson: Arch Labour Party Careerist

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

To read more news, views, and analysis please visit: worldsocialism.org/spgb

or, for a free three-issue subscription to The Socialist Standard: spgb.net/podcast

Featuring music: ‘Pushing P (Instrumental)’ by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Peter Mandelson: arch Labour Party careerist (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

A friend and former Labour councillor reported to me how Peter Mandelson spoke at an online seminar. He had been impressed by one comment, summed up as: ‘If you have a good idea, don’t bother asking everybody, just go ahead and do it’. This seems to sum up all that was wrong with the New Labour project, even if you are achieving good results, not asking people makes them feel divorced from the outcomes. Even worse, it can lead to disastrous and unintended consequences, as those who know more could warn you about in advance.

Mr. Starmer thought appointing Mr. Mandelson as ambassador to Washington was a good idea, and he just went ahead and did it. The consequences have been disastrous for him.

Mandelson’s biography is well known. Grandson of wartime Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, he had a natural ‘in’ into the Labour Party and movement, beginning his career (much like many Labour figures, including Jeremy Corbyn) as an employee of the trade union movement, working for the TUC.

It’s not necessary here to reprise his whole biography: it is widely available. Suffice to say that, apart from a short stint working in television, he worked as a Labour movement staff member, specifically in charge of communications. Once in parliament and then in government, he twice stepped down as a cabinet minister: once for taking an unsecured loan from a cabinet colleague, Geoffrey Robinson, for a house worth (at the time) £475,000. The second scandal was around him intervening in the passport application of billionaire businessman Srichand Hinduja. Although in both instances formal inquiries cleared him of any wrongdoing, the perception was that he was into palling around with – and getting favours from and doing favours for – very wealthy people.

It’s notable, now, that he lives in a £12 million house. This was paid for by the infamous revolving door of government ministers going into private lobbying and well-remunerated directorships after leaving office. While a well-known phenomenon, thanks to the publication of all of the notorious paedophile Jeffery Epstein’s correspondence, we now get a glimpse of the process working in practice.

Epstein advised Mandelson on how to apply for directorships, including with Deutsche Bank, that could have been worth $4-10 million per year. In the end, Mandelson didn’t want to work full time, and so got a job with a firm called Lazard for one day a week, worth a mere $1 million per year. He also set up his own lobbying firm, Global Counsel, which, as Mandelson said in one email to Epstein, paid his expensive mortgage. Epstein advised him on how to find clients for that firm. Global Counsel has had firms such as JPMorgan, Palantir and Anglo-American as clients.

These roles sought were, in part, to avoid regulation around former ministers taking jobs that relied on their former political roles or were intrinsically linked with them: and it is clear that what was for sale was general political, not financial advice, how to get things done, including introductions and network access. This is clearly not an uncommon situation. Epstein, it seems, also gave similar advice to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. After all, as we have written in these pages before, this was Epstein’s business, helping manage other people’s wealth, for a cut.

Itch to live like them

It is, perhaps, not surprising that people who find themselves rubbing shoulders with the fabulously wealthy should not feel the itch to be able to live like them, especially as, when entering the room as government officials they are functionally treated as peers of the wealthy: individuals of power and respect. It is equally understandable that the wealthy should want to encourage such feelings and throw a few crumbs to the politicians to win their loyalty.

As the case of Mandelson demonstrates, it does not have to be the naked bribery of plain brown envelopes. Continued loyalty (in his case as Business Secretary in the UK, and Trade Commissioner of the EU) can be generally rewarded by these advisor roles, directorships or other supposed jobs where the ultra-wealthy can name the price. We’ve noted before that the book-publishing and speaking-tour game is a simple way to transfer substantial sums to former politicians in ways which no set of rules could ever stop. Any attempt to ban such channelling of funds will always simply be circumvented, as Mandelson and Epstein managed to do.

Epstein gives us a great example, in one of his emails, where he leadenly says ‘supporting [Gordon Brown] will be seen as bad form commercially’: Mandelson’s own interests in the subsequent selling price of his skills and contacts depended on him being seen as helpful to commercial interests. That he had the lack of sense to forward secret and commercially sensitive government documents to Epstein will certainly come to be seen as bad form commercially. It is inconceivable that other ministers through the ages have not, in private conversations and communications, given wealthy friends and acquaintances tips and winks about what was coming up, but that would never be provable. There have just never been email dumps like this one before to let the cat out of the bag. And even if, again, Mandelson is formally cleared, his misjudgement in leaving evidence behind will be remembered.

What should also be remembered is that all of this flows, not just from personal cupidity, but structurally, from a society of immense inequality. A society in which a handful live in luxury, and can spare some of their wealth to tempt and buy whomsoever they please. Journalists have come out, after Mandelson’s fall, with stories of how he would threaten their jobs because he knew their boss (shades of the Savile playbook). Where people depend for their livelihood on their job, such threats have power.

His wealth of money and connections fed back into his ability to influence the machinery of the Labour Party, and restore it as a party safe for capital. But, again, it is not him alone as some sort of cuckoo in the nest – any party that seeks to manage an unequal society will inevitably end up being run for the benefit of the people who benefit from that inequality.

Pik Smeet