Chapotraphouse

Disclaimer: I don’t want this to come across as downplaying the suffering of the victims, or the horrific nature of the crimes.

That being said, I think Epstein is becoming an obsession for people that is pointless, doesn’t advance the left wing movement, and is borderline unhealthy to be honest.

People on this site and beyond are doing borderline Q-Anon level baking, using random scraps from documents and making extremely tenuous connections. This shit is unhealthy, obsessing over it and staring into the abyss of depravity is just going to cause yourself psychic damage, and for what? It’s borne out of the same thing as all conspiracism: a feeling of powerlessness, a feeling that by uncovering the mystery, doing this “investigation”, finding some hidden truth, you are doing something tangible rather than just obsessing and suffering on the internet.

This isn’t to say I don’t think all things are on the table - “he was mossad”, “this or that person was involved”, “what if he’s still alive?”. But ask yourself, what changes? What changes if any of this is true? Are any of us shocked or surprised by 99% of the names dredged up? These are all people that we already consider ontologically evil for numerous other crimes and their class position. We already know that there are 10,000 ultra powerful, ultra wealthy people who control the world, who act with impunity, who are all interconnected and who all have bourgeois class solidarity that the workers can only dream of at this stage.

And what tactical or strategic advantage is offered to working class movements we are involved in by uncovering this hidden truth? We currently have no power to punish the guilty or prevent it from happening again. Epstein himself is likely dead, most of the people mentioned are dead, or ancient and on their way out. Should we be forming pressure groups and protesting our governments to thoroughly investigate and punish the guilty? If half of what is in the files is true, our governments are riddled with people who are complicit if not actively involved.

So what is the route by which the people’s justice can be served? The same as always - the working class needs to win political power. Our time is better served thinking about how we can advance the ball on concrete issues, work with our irl organisations to build working class power. I think driving ourselves mad on the internet and expanding so much mental energy tying red string between random names and events on our mental corkboards is deleterious to this mission.

Now, I’m open to the idea that using the Epstein angle in propaganda to disillusion workers of billionaires and capitalism could be useful, but that doesn’t require more than a cursory knowledge of the situation, knowledge we’ve all had for 6 years at this point.

As marxists we shouldn’t be hyperfixating on Epstein as the keystone of everything “evil” on earth. We have a class analysis and an understanding of the system superseding the role of the individual. Things such as “epstein was working for Mossad” - ok, that may well be true, but does it change our analysis of Israel? Does it affect how we view the settler-colonial relationship? Could it possibly make them any more morally bankrupt than the genocide we’ve been watching for 2.5 years? Than a century of ethnic cleansing?

I get this feeling that doesn’t sit well with me, that this is becoming some grotesque spectacle of “true crime”, motivated by an inability to look away, by the conspiratorial powerlessness I mentioned above, and by the same instincts that make endless podcast series and TV shows about gruesome murders eternally popular. And it is taking up so much oxygen on the left - ffs, the United States is about to try and topple its second government in a month and everyone is too busy combing through the epstein files to see if or are in there.

Tl;dr: don’t drive yourself insane trying to know the unknowable, focus on the concrete, focus on things you can change, advance the ball!