By Nikos Mottas
The much-publicized Epstein scandal is persistently described as a “dark anomaly,” a moral rupture inside an otherwise functioning system. This description is false. What it conceals is more important than what it reveals. The affair did not expose a deviation from capitalism but one of its normal, if usually less visible, operations. By treating Epstein as an exception, bourgeois discourse shields the system that made him possible.
Jeffrey Epstein was not an outsider who infiltrated elite circles. He operated comfortably within them, because capitalism systematically produces both extreme vulnerability at one pole and extreme impunity at the other. Where wealth is concentrated, power follows; where power follows, accountability retreats. This is not corruption of the system. It is the system functioning according to its own laws.
Capitalism rests on exploitation presented as free exchange. The worker “chooses” to sell labor-power only because material conditions leave no alternative. Marx described this contradiction with precision when he noted that the sphere of exchange appears as “a very Eden of the innate rights of man,” while in reality it conceals relations of domination. Formal equality masks material coercion. As Marx put it bluntly, “Between equal rights, force decides.” In capitalist society, that force is economic necessity, socially organized and legally protected.
This coercion extends far beyond the workplace. It penetrates education, housing, healthcare, and personal relationships. When higher education is transformed into an individual investment rather than a social right, capitalism does not merely abandon young people — it actively pushes them toward market solutions for survival. The outcome is not accidental. It is systemic.
In recent years, advertising campaigns in European cities (Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, etc) openly promoted the idea that students could solve their financial problems by entering “relationships” with wealthy older men who would cover university costs. The message was explicit: financial relief in exchange for intimacy, presented as personal choice and empowerment. This was not criminal underground activity. It was publicly advertised, legally defended, and normalized. Here the ethics of capitalism reveal themselves not as abstract principles but as concrete practice: when social provision is dismantled, the market advances — even into the most intimate spheres of life.
This phenomenon is not separate from the Epstein affair. It is its everyday, legalized expression. In both cases, inequality produces dependence, and dependence is converted into access. What differs is scale and visibility, not substance. The student pushed toward transactional intimacy and the victim exploited by elite trafficking networks occupy different positions within the hierarchy, but both are shaped by the same social relation: vulnerability confronting power under conditions falsely described as choice.
Engels observed that bourgeois society dissolves human relations into cash relations. When everything becomes a commodity, the human body is not exempt. Capitalism does not invent predatory behavior, but it organizes society so that predation is facilitated by wealth and protected by impunity. The Epstein network did not endure because institutions were absent, but because class power neutralized them. Law, media, and politics operate selectively, disciplining the powerless while shielding the powerful through delay, silence, and controlled exposure.
For this reason, liberal outrage leads nowhere. By reducing the issue to individual depravity or ethical failure, it obscures the social relations that reproduce exploitation. Calls for better regulation, transparency, or moral accountability do not touch the core. Exploitation cannot be regulated away because it is structural. A system built on inequality cannot eliminate predation; it can only manage its visibility.
Epstein was not a glitch. He was a function. Those who insist on seeing an ‘aberration’ are not misunderstanding reality; they are actually defending it. The real scandal is not that such crimes happened—but that capitalism makes them possible, profitable, and repeatable.
Capitalism rests on exploitation presented as free exchange. The worker “chooses” to sell labor-power only because material conditions leave no alternative. Marx described this contradiction with precision when he noted that the sphere of exchange appears as “a very Eden of the innate rights of man,” while in reality it conceals relations of domination. Formal equality masks material coercion. As Marx put it bluntly, “Between equal rights, force decides.” In capitalist society, that force is economic necessity, socially organized and legally protected.
This coercion extends far beyond the workplace. It penetrates education, housing, healthcare, and personal relationships. When higher education is transformed into an individual investment rather than a social right, capitalism does not merely abandon young people — it actively pushes them toward market solutions for survival. The outcome is not accidental. It is systemic.
In recent years, advertising campaigns in European cities (Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, etc) openly promoted the idea that students could solve their financial problems by entering “relationships” with wealthy older men who would cover university costs. The message was explicit: financial relief in exchange for intimacy, presented as personal choice and empowerment. This was not criminal underground activity. It was publicly advertised, legally defended, and normalized. Here the ethics of capitalism reveal themselves not as abstract principles but as concrete practice: when social provision is dismantled, the market advances — even into the most intimate spheres of life.
This phenomenon is not separate from the Epstein affair. It is its everyday, legalized expression. In both cases, inequality produces dependence, and dependence is converted into access. What differs is scale and visibility, not substance. The student pushed toward transactional intimacy and the victim exploited by elite trafficking networks occupy different positions within the hierarchy, but both are shaped by the same social relation: vulnerability confronting power under conditions falsely described as choice.
Engels observed that bourgeois society dissolves human relations into cash relations. When everything becomes a commodity, the human body is not exempt. Capitalism does not invent predatory behavior, but it organizes society so that predation is facilitated by wealth and protected by impunity. The Epstein network did not endure because institutions were absent, but because class power neutralized them. Law, media, and politics operate selectively, disciplining the powerless while shielding the powerful through delay, silence, and controlled exposure.
For this reason, liberal outrage leads nowhere. By reducing the issue to individual depravity or ethical failure, it obscures the social relations that reproduce exploitation. Calls for better regulation, transparency, or moral accountability do not touch the core. Exploitation cannot be regulated away because it is structural. A system built on inequality cannot eliminate predation; it can only manage its visibility.
Epstein was not a glitch. He was a function. Those who insist on seeing an ‘aberration’ are not misunderstanding reality; they are actually defending it. The real scandal is not that such crimes happened—but that capitalism makes them possible, profitable, and repeatable.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
