Epstein was not just a pimp for the more dissolute members of the global elite. As Gerard Baker wrote in his column in the Times (6 February), headed ‘Epstein saga is a fable of modern capitalism’, ‘sexual scandal aside, the attraction of the financier was that he ran a global network of the rich and powerful’.
Epstein’s email contacts, Baker suggested, would be a representative sample of those in top positions in government, finance, law, media, academia and big tech, ‘the most advantaged individuals [who] moved around a borderless world’ and ‘who have wielded the controlling influence over our lives, our culture, our jobs and much else for most of the last quarter century’:
‘Thanks to Epstein’s crimes, we have been given a glimpse into the way the liberal capitalist global order has worked. And in the process, perhaps, we can see even more clearly why so many people want to sweep it away.’
There is a temptation, amongst those who want this, to see a network like Epstein’s as part of some set-up whereby some global elite make decisions about what happens in the world. Some have not resisted this temptation and have concluded that the world actually is run by a global elite who plan what to do at their meetings in Davos or at the Bilderberg group or on Epstein’s island. Baker adds some credence to this when he wrote of them ‘wielding the controlling influence over our lives’.
In reality, they are not fundamentally in control of what happens under capitalism. They don’t plan booms and slumps or wars or revolutions. Some of them, in their role as the government of a state, do secretly organise — conspire, if you like — to bring about political changes in other countries in the interest of their particular state or group of states. Stock exchange speculators conspire to influence share prices. But nobody controls, or could control, the way the capitalist economic system works; that depends on impersonal market forces which impose themselves, even on the members of the global elite. That’s ‘the controlling influence over our lives’.
Baker corrected himself when he went to write that ‘Epstein enticed them into his web not with his harem of adolescent girls but … the chance for a few words in the ear of someone who could make you even richer, even more powerful; a little inside info, a potential deal…’ That is the limit of what goes on, not some grand conspiracy.
To some extent the situation resembles that described by Marx on the eve of the overthrow of French monarchy in 1848 when under the dominance of the ‘finance aristocracy’:
‘the same prostitution, the same blatant swindling, the same mania for self-enrichment – not from production but by sleight-of-hand with other people’s wealth – was to be found in all spheres of society, from the Court to the Café Borgne. The same unbridled assertion of unhealthy and vicious appetites broke forth, appetites which were in permanent conflict with the bourgeois law itself, and which were to be found particularly in the upper reaches of society, appetites in which the wealth created by financial gambles seeks its natural fulfilment, in which pleasure becomes debauched, in which money, filth and blood commingle. In the way it acquires wealth and enjoys it the financial aristocracy is nothing but the lumpenproletariat reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society’ (The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850).
But even if people like them were swept away (as they were in 1848) there would still be capitalism, the real problem and controlling influence.
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