Capitalism is built upon selfishness, inequality, and exploitation. Under the dictatorship of the bosses, workers are treated as objects to be used up and thrown away–with impunity. For years, the parasite Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor faced no consequences for his ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Though he was belatedly stripped of his royal titles, he faced no criminal charges for his role in driving Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s victim and bravest accuser, to suicide. Finally, on February 19, four months after Giuffre’s posthumous memoir told how Mountbatten-Windsor repeatedly raped her when she was 17, he was arrested and briefly detained–not for the sexual abuse of children, but on suspicion of sharing state secrets that Epstein might cash in on.
The Epstein files expose the stark reality of a system where violence against the vulnerable is the norm, where the legal system is a travesty and the courts and cops exist to serve the rulers and crush the working class. Epstein didn’t operate outside the bounds of capitalist society. He was a monstrous product of the profit system, rewarded by it, and for many years protected by it–until he became too dangerous to even bigger fish in the rotten and degraded ruling class.
We now know that hundreds of filthy rich and powerful individuals–people who actually run things for the bosses–cultivated Epstein for access to money, influence, children, or all three. They stood by him and partied with him for decades after victims began reporting his abuse. They looked past the damning events of 2008, when investigators found that Epstein had raped and abused dozens of girls as young as 14 and he went to jail for 13 months–the ultimate sweetheart plea deal, complete with a work-release program (Forbes, 9/19/25). Many of these ruling-class pillars flew on the Epstein’s private jet, infamously dubbed the "Lolita Express," or wangled invitations to his Florida mansion or his New Mexico ranch or his private nightmare island. They were Republicans and Democrats, husbands and grandfathers, politicians and academics and philanthropists–a toxic stew of capitalist power and privilege. The enormous roster of Epstein pals includes Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, one-time Harvard president Larry Summers, ex-Labour peer Peter Mandelson, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, former prime ministers of Israel and Norway, Emirati billionaire Ahmed bin Sulayem, arch-Zionist attorney Alan Dershowitz, Bob Kerry, Steve Bannon, Noam Chomsky, and Woody Allen. Predator-in-Chief Donald Trump, a serial abuser in his own right, flew on Epstein's plane at least seven times and rated thousands of mentions in the documents, though we can’t know what’s been redacted or omitted.
And while there’s been a tiny handful of arrests and some forced resignations and lost endorsement deals, not one of these animals has faced real justice. While the bosses may throw a few more of their gang under the bus to keep their broader cover-up intact, they’ll never stop sexist violence against women and children–it’s an organic part of their system. Sexism can be smashed only by overthrowing capitalism with communist revolution. We need a society led by and for the working class, where Virginia Giuffre would have been valued and protected.
Capitalist justice system protects its own
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who ignored Epstein’s crimes as Florida’s attorney general, is now running the same play in Washington: burying evidence, shielding favored names, harassing lawmakers doing any oversight, and turning her back on survivors in open congressional testimony (NPR, 2/12). As Lenin wrote in State and Revolution, the bosses’ state apparatus is a machine for protecting capital and suppressing the working class. The Epstein cover-up isn’t a failure of capitalist democracy. It’s proof that the system is working as it was designed.
The racist character of capitalist injustice could not be clearer. The same court system that let Epstein off easy keeps filling prisons with Black and Brown workers who can't make bail or afford a real defense. The same state that shielded Epstein’s billionaire network is rounding up tens of thousands of migrant workers and throwing them into toxic concentration camps. Meanwhile, Trump, a felon convicted on 34 counts, walks free while his ICE and Border Patrol gestapo commit mayhem and murder. Capitalist society is run not by the laws on the books, but by the brute force of those who hold state power.
Trafficking of women and minors: business as usual
In the United States, a country created by genocide and slavery, racist and sexist terror is foundational. Indigenous women were captured and forced to become wives, while Black people were bought and sold on auction blocks. The reproduction of the slave labor force required the rape of enslaved women and the violent discipline of their bodies. Slavery didn’t disappear after the Civil War. It evolved into new atrocities: mass incarceration and human trafficking. While only a small fraction of traffickers are prosecuted, it’s estimated that tens of thousands of women and children in the U.S.--and possibly hundreds of thousands–are forced into sexual slavery each year (deliverfund.org).
Like the capitalist system that spawned it, it’s a global abomination. In 2023, more than 27 million people were trafficked worldwide for either forced labor or coerced or underage sex (dhs.gov). Today, mass sexual violence devastates women in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These are not isolated crises. They reflect a system that renders certain lives disposable and treats their suffering as collateral to the interests of those in power.
The files on Epstein's transnational trafficking revealed the abuse of as many as 1,200 women and girls, some as young as eleven. He targeted those failed most miserably by capitalism: runaways, girls in foster care, survivors of domestic violence. He cast his net in impoverished communities in the U.S., South America, and the former Soviet republics. When survivors resisted or attempted escape, they were threatened, isolated, and stripped of identification and financial security.
Capitalism requires unemployment to discipline labor, racism to divide workers, and sexism to legitimize unpaid and underpaid work. As Engels observed in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, prostitution recruits disproportionately from those with the least property.
Generating billions in profits, it represents the commodification of the working class in its purest and most disgusting form.
Only communism brings justice
Workers cannot look to the bosses’ legal system or mad-dog cops for protection. What makes us safe, time and again, is working-class solidarity.
We’re protected when neighbors organize to defend their communities, when workers resist ICE raids in Minneapolis, when Epstein survivors risk everything to speak publicly, when women in Sudan form grassroots committees against mass sexual violence in wartime. These examples demonstrate a material truth: Working-class people defend one another when the system will not.
For real justice, we’ll need to abolish money and profit, the roots of inequality. Without the profit motive, sexual trafficking would have little purpose. Without sexist inequality, sexual coercion and gendered violence would be collectively confronted and, over time, eliminated. Under communism, people would be kept safe by their shared commitment to an egalitarian world.
In the early Soviet Union, the communists aimed to address prostitution through social welfare and rehabilitation, one of the first state-level attempts to treat sexual exploitation as a capitalist social problem rather than a private moral failing. In China, one year after their communist revolution, the 1950 Marriage Law banned forced marriage and concubinage. The new socialist government moved aggressively against trafficking and other feudal practices. These efforts were uneven, but they pointed in the right direction–to the communist world we’re fighting for today. Join Progressive Labor Party to help make that future a reality.