A sick system needs sick bastards to run it
by Alexandra Day and Aislinn Shanahan Daly
As the newly released Epstein files reveal new horrors and give rise to a fresh wave of conspiracies, Alexandra Day and Aislinn Shanahan Daly explain how this is not the result of a satanic death cult that rules the world, but of a rotten capitalist system that needs to be torn down.
A sick system needs sick bastards to run it. This sentiment is as true in 2026 as it was in 1848, when Marx scathingly critiqued the nature of class struggle in France:
“Since the finance aristocracy made the laws, was at the head of the administration of the state, had command of all the organised public authorities, dominated public opinion through the actual state of affairs and through the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere, from the court to the Café Borgne to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others, Clashing every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society – lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapuleux [debauched], where money, filth, and blood commingle”.
Whatever rational vision of the world neoliberalism posited to us, in which no alternative was possible, is collapsing with the speed and impact of a supernova. For much of the post-war period, Western power has presented itself as a superior moral project. Democracy, the rule of law and human rights were not merely political arrangements, but values to be emulated to address the “savagery” of the nations of the Global South, and forced upon them as a foil for imperial plunder. This neoliberal common sense has always been little more than a cover for war, sanctions and territorial expansion.
The genocide in Gaza, Trump’s naked imperialist aggression against Venezuela and Greenland, and the brutality visited upon communities by ICE in the United States have all acutely highlighted the mythic nature of Western values. Of course, this was all summed up surprisingly well by Trump himself, who stated that he does not “need international law”, only his own “morality”. When the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney argued in Davos that international law was a “useful fiction…applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused and the victim”, this was a cynical and self-interested attempt to distance the neoliberal order from the unvarnished, unmasked aggression of the Trump regime. The unravelling of the Jeffrey Epstein story has thrown a proverbial grenade into this global context. Capitalism is wrestling with itself to consolidate its hegemony, caught between the need to enact coercive barbarism, yet secure a sustainable level of mass consent.
Over the past few decades, while the language of freedom and legality was being exported abroad by the barrel of a gun, leading figures within the very societies that alleged to champion those ideals were operating in a parallel world. This was one marked by sexual exploitation, secrecy and impunity. The revelations surrounding Epstein are not simply a question of personal depravity, or a shadowy cabal of evildoers at the heart of a global economy. Indeed, Epstein’s significance is not that his behaviour was an exception, but in his embeddedness. He was not a shadowy outsider, but a man with routine access to heads of state, financiers, intelligence-linked figures and cultural elites. His wealth was a passport, granting entry into circles where scrutiny was minimal. Epstein, and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, successfully made these same circles of elites dependent on them. The extent of the photographic evidence of the sexual crimes that occurred on ‘Epstein island’ is harrowing.
When Epstein was first prosecuted in 2008, the leniency of his plea deal was unsurprising. The legal system behaved exactly as it so often does when confronted with extreme wealth. What becomes visible here is not simply corruption, or uniquely aberrant behaviour, but a product of a system predicated on dehumanisation and exploitation. Under capitalism, elites more acutely relate to the world as something to be acquired and managed rather than shared or respected. Markets, territory, labour and, at its most grotesque, human bodies are absorbed into a logic of ownership. The boundaries that constrain ordinary life for the most part – law, consent, consequence – grow increasingly abstract at the top.
The abuse and trafficking of women is integral to imperial domination. This is evident in the tens of thousands of so-called “comfort women” that are coerced into serving US occupation forces across overseas bases and in the imperial fetishisation of submissiveness and poverty in countries devastated by US intervention. The same logic is visible in Israeli soldiers documenting themselves posing in the underwear of those they have killed. These practices show imperialism in operation, producing immiseration, squandering human lives, and turning the human body into a commodity. Epstein’s crimes are part and parcel of this system. It arises from a reactionary and brutal political system that demands complete dismantling.
The public reckoning now underway has been driven less by institutions than by survivors themselves. Women who were young, poor or socially marginal at the time of their abuse have refused to disappear quietly, some at great personal cost. Virginia Giuffre, an outspoken advocate who was victimised by Epstein and Prince Andrew, tragically died by suicide in suspicious circumstances last year. Even against the grain of such trauma, the insistence of women on being heard has shifted the debate from mere scandal to systemic violence and abuse. These women have made it no longer a story about one man’s crimes, but about how entire networks function to protect the powerful and exhaust those who challenge them.
That dynamic is clearest when the focus moves beyond Epstein as an individual and onto the long silence that surrounded him. Silence was maintained not through conspiracy so much as shared interest. Media caution, legal intimidation and reputational management all worked in tandem. For many involved, it is apt to say that the violent systematic abuse of children and women was simply not all that deplorable. As Giuffre remarked in her memoir, “…even the men who didn’t partake of the favours Epstein offered could see the naked photos on his walls and the naked girls on his islands or by his swimming pools. Epstein not only didn’t hide what was happening, he took a certain glee in making people watch”. However, what finally disrupted this equilibrium was collective pressure. Survivors acted together, supported by wider movements that have spent decades contesting the idea that sexual violence is a private matter rather than a political one.
The reach of the scandal has also unsettled figures long associated with institutional legitimacy here in Ireland, north and south. The appearance of George Mitchell’s name in connection with Epstein, regardless of the absence of direct allegations, has been enough to prompt public institutions in Northern Ireland to distance themselves. Queen’s University Belfast has already cut ties with Mitchell, denaming its research centre. Mitchell has also previously been a recipient of the freedom of the city of Belfast, and there are calls for this to be revoked. Mitchell has been widely regarded as a central architect of the Good Friday Agreement and, along with the Clintons, lauded by the political establishment across Ireland.
There are further Irish links, with recently revealed emails showing that Epstein was part of a potential €3 billion deal involving Allied Irish Bank (AIB) at the peak of the recession. These emails indicate that investor David Mitchell met with Epstein in 2011 to discuss a ‘deal’, which they hoped the now-disgraced Labour MP Peter Mandelson would join. These meetings and email exchanges occurred after Epstein was convicted for soliciting a minor in 2008.
It is bizarre to observe the eruption of conspiracy theories that mystify this affair as rooted in satanic practices, that these elites are simply possessed by demons, or that it’s all part of an anti-Semitic plot. One must wonder if the reality of the situation is simply too much to bear – that their power and ability to wield it with such cruelty is something that can actually exist in the natural world. The fundamentalist Christian right are capitalising on this to amass followers, elevated by the sensationalism surrounding it, and obscuring any systematic critique. Touted by the very elites that perpetrate, conspiracy merely acts as a false comfort. Furthermore, what the Epstein affair ultimately reveals is a crisis of moral authority rather than individual morality. It can be explained as such: capitalism, with its inherent tendency to concentrate wealth and power, inevitably corrodes the ethical frameworks it claims to result from.
Perhaps it is time for feminism too to reckon with Amia Srinivasan’s claim that despite the sexual revolution of the 1960s, “we have never yet been free”. Neoliberal feminism has peddled the idea that we can choose this freedom, as individuals. Sexual subjugation remains a key device of the capitalist system – from the overt scapegoating of LGBTQ+ people and the criminalisation of abortion, to the liberal attempts to convince women that we must assimilate into the class hierarchy and crush one another in order to prove our equality to men. Furthermore, the far right are not shy about their aspiration of forcing women into the home and stripping them of sexual autonomy as the emotional reward for men’s loyalty to their authoritarian ideals.
The spectre of Epstein’s right-hand woman Ghislaine Maxwell dispels the existence of this neoliberal choice feminism, which has utterly failed to deliver gender justice and equality. Some have even debated whether Maxwell was a victim herself – coerced into her position as an international paedophilic sex trafficker. This illuminates the discomfort we as a society may have in accepting that women can be involved in perpetrating such sexual crimes. Maxwell was as deeply embedded in this entitled, aspirational culture of bourgeois exploitation as Epstein was. To this end – gender is not enough to explain this political economy of sexual violence.
In fact, no one body is worth the weight of this unravelling. Epstein allegedly “hung himself” in prison once the surface of this labyrinth began to break open. His body became disposable once it was implicated in the restriction of elite freedom to sexually exploit with impunity. This exposes the very nature of the system, which at once relies on the gender binary to proliferate itself, yet discards its associated privileges once threatened by a public aberration such as Epstein.
What remains of those great Western values, freedom and democracy, which are deployed in an attempt to paper over the damaged, sinking hull of neoliberalism? In a decade marked by a pandemic, a brutal genocide in Palestine, and the simultaneous mass witness of genocide on our mobile phones, the extraordinary has become ordinary. Socialists are faced with the task of exposing this dispossession. We must rally against the normalisation of bourgeois violence at every turn, from Gaza to the island of Little Saint James.
The question now is not simply whether further names will be released or reputations revised, but whether this moment forces a deeper reckoning. Without that, the language of values will continue to unsuccessfully mask a new reality that only the few were meant to see. Our conclusion is the same as Marx’s in 1848; the only remedy to such a sick system is for the many to take it down.
This article was originally published at Rebel on February 6, 2026