“Previously, the workman sold his own labour-power, which he disposed of nominally as a free agent. Now he sells wife and child. He has become a slave-dealer.” – Karl Marx, Capital vol 1 (p. 519)

In Chapter 15 of Capital volume 1, Karl Marx goes into detail on how the expansion of capital necessitates the “appropriation of supplementary labor-power” i.e. the labor of women and children. There are two aspects to this: the first is that the crushing immiseration of capitalism tears apart the notion of family, forcing some, as the author’s ancestors did, into selling off their own children. The other aspect is that the expansion of capital also requires a reserve army of labor that will drive down the cost of labor-power in the market.

Marx further describes the “pliant and docile character” of women and children. Children, for instance, are very vulnerable. They are malleable, helpless, and of small stature. In Marx’s era, women did not enjoy the rights of independent adults; it was practically legal to murder them if they were your blood relation and certainly if they were working class and their murderer a rich man. Therefore, they become the ideal workers to force into dangerous working conditions at low wages, because not only are they unable to defend themselves, but society is generally unwilling to come to their defense. Their dismal conditions form a new floor for all other labor, whose wages and conditions are thereby throttled.

In what way do these societal conditions today encourage the hyper-exploitation of women and children in our modern economy? We can see that with the rollback of women’s rights around abortion and DEI comes an exodus of millions of (mainly Black) women from the productive workforce, pushing them back into the shop floor of the home. Those who are unable to afford to do so are forced back out into a MAGA job market that, through its cultural products, increasingly pushes the idea that a woman’s true nature is as sexualized property. A woman who is not married, who is not a mother at home with children, is a woman who is out of bounds. She must be punished. Likewise, a woman working in the home must put up with her working conditions there, no matter how fraught or subject to abuse, rather than face the harsh realities of the same job market that afflicts her sisters.

What stands out about many of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims is that they were once very ambitious young women. They often came from West Palm Beach trailer parks and poor countries. His victims wanted to make something more of themselves. One of them wanted to be a massage therapist. The other wanted to be an airline pilot. Yet another wanted to become a professional artist. They wanted to be scientists, actors, business owners, athletes, linguists and mathematicians. Yet, due to their station in life, they had to pass through Jeffrey Epstein first.

There are even rumors, gleefully circulated by Epstein himself, that he was the one who introduced the young Melania Knauss, later Melania Trump, to the Don himself. If true, then even the First Lady had to pass through Epstein’s grubby network to reach the White House.

Virginia Giuffre’s unpublished memoirs do not begin as one might expect, with Ghislaine Maxwell introducing herself to the fifteen-year-old author at Mar-A-Lago, but two years prior. Jenna Roberts, as she was known at the time, begins her life story as a runaway crying on Miami Beach. “My eyes were glazed over with tears,” she writes, “not from being wind-whipped by the rough sea breeze, but from reflecting on the abuse I encountered as a young girl and how everyone in my life who was supposed to be there for me had now turned their backs on me in abandonment.”

This is a theme that weaves its way through the entire text. Young Jenna is picked up on the beach by Ron Eppinger, a man in his sixties who would later die in jail after being arrested by the FBI for international sex trafficking. Her first story of trafficking and abuse is almost unbelievable in its brutality. If the details are difficult to recount in print, one can only imagine the challenge of living with them.

Jenna is picked up during the FBI raid, and her father arrives to collect her from the police station. Jenna begs him not to take her to another “lockdown facility”, the mental health wards that girls like her are involuntarily committed to in Florida via the Baker Act law. Her pleas to him go unanswered and she spends much of the following week in a “bare room with concrete flooring, no toilet or even a chair to sit on.” She decides to enroll again in high school, and her father, a maintenance worker at Mar-A-Lago, is able to get her a job in the spa locker rooms, where she is soon picked up by Ghislaine Maxwell while reading an anatomy textbook. Here, her story with Jeffrey Epstein begins.

On first pass, it boggles the mind that Virginia Giuffre had the horrible luck of being so brutally trafficked and abused before her nightmare saga with Epstein even began. Revealing this pre-existing condition to him and Maxwell condemns her to being labeled a “naughty-girl” by Epstein, who rapes her at their first meeting, which doubles as her job interview. She is hired as his personal masseuse, and, because she is still too young to legally operate a motor vehicle, her father becomes responsible for driving her to and from the Epstein mansion in Palm Beach. She suspects that he knows everything.

“I told myself ‘I wasn’t going to ever be worth anything at all and this would probably be as good as it gets for me’,” she writes. After all, she thinks, “what have I been trained up for until now.”

If it seems difficult for the reader to extrapolate several systemic-level crimes against humanity from Giuffre’s story, it might be because the reader is not a woman. Women and girls from certain areas, say, South Florida, are familiar with the themes. Florida is the home of Daytona Beach, of the Girls Gone Wild franchise, of large income gaps and half of all families living paycheck to paycheck. Incidentally, several work restrictions for 14-17 year olds have been lifted in the past decade. These realities of families living in poverty are scattered among and between plastic surgeon offices, community colleges and pain clinics.

Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices were able to reach into this morass of suffering and take their pick of vulnerable victims. He was able to appeal to their desire for escape. Given what we know so far, he did not keep any of them in physical chains. His coercion was primarily economic. They were lifted from relative poverty into the jet set, trafficked on private planes and sat at tables next to the 1% of society. He helped these girls get into Bard, NYU and Columbia. He paid for flight lessons and massage schools.

The threats went mainly unspoken: refuse, and this all goes away. His FBI files reveal credenzas packed with framed photos of Epstein with presidents, royalty, tech billionaires. His email correspondence ranges from current Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick to former president Bill Clinton, from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to anarchist theorist and linguist Noam Chomsky. It would be unwise to go against a man, against a network that was so well-heeled, so well-connected.

Consider what this means for labor as a whole. The men in the richest, most powerful echelons of society expect an unlimited supply of beautiful young women and girls. As a woman of means might hold onto a Birkin bag, for men of certain stature, it seems that only a barely legal blonde will do.

If the men at the very top treat women and girls like this, it becomes the gold standard set for the rest of class society, articulated by the resignation that Virginia Giuffre felt after Epstein raped her: this was what she had been trained up for. To her, this was the dismal opportunity of a lifetime. As she saw it, she “wasn’t going to ever be worth anything at all and this would probably be as good as it gets for me.”

The grand conspiracy goes beyond Epstein. It is a rank misogyny that is used to subjugate women and provide men with a deep pool of unpaid labor. Girls are groomed not just by human traffickers, but by a society that brings us up to feel and act as if we are worthless. We are trafficked by the rich and powerful, but also experience the everyday indignations of sexual harassment, catcalling, bullying, groping, low-paid labor, belittling, marital rape, infantilization, erasure, and so on.

The MeToo movement exposed a number of rich and powerful men engaging in everything from sexual harassment to rape and abuse, but in doing so it threatened unequal sexual relations at all levels of society. The movement’s death knell was the televised testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, against Brett Kavanaugh, a future Supreme Court justice. Despite her courageous testimony, her racial and class privilege, Blasey Ford was forced into hiding by death threats and Kavanaugh, supported loudly by President Donald Trump, became a Supreme Court Justice. The petering-out of MeToo became a full-on backlash.

As Roe v. Wade was overturned, a new kind of female archetype, the tradwife — a woman who represented meek and submissive femininity in service to patriarchy — became popular. At its centennial, pundits and activists began to suggest repealing the 19th Amendment. MeToo represented progress in that women felt empowered to voice their accusations against their rich and powerful abusers. Yes, some powerful men had their careers ended, and others even apologized for their general mistreatment of women. But the backlash was tremendous and unexpected: powerful men closed ranks and doubled-down on promoting “identity politics” as divisive.

Likewise, the Epstein fallout threatens women and girls with a similar backlash. While some of the more powerful men who appear in his file, such as the former Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom and the former Prime Minister of Norway, are facing charges, American politicians seem to be breathing easy, led by the most powerful member of their cohort: Donald Trump himself. These monsters might just get away with it.

Behold: the class from which Epstein hails has already started to run interference for his crimes. Some are even accused of being paid by men who appear in the Epstein files to do so. The defense boils down to some uncomfortable assertions: a sixteen-year-old is not too young to have sex with in most US states; twenty-year-olds coerced to sell their bodies to rich and powerful men in exchange for money or favors is really no different from working at Taco Bell, or from being in a relationship with an older and wealthier man; and that, until recently, it was not such a big deal for men to have sex with women who could be their granddaughters — think famous pornographer Hugh Hefner as example. Indeed, even child marriage is still legal in the United States, and researchers estimate that since the year 2000, more than 66,000 children were married to men who would have otherwise been arrested because of the spousal age difference.

Marxists should rush to challenge these vile rationalizations, this class cover-up of gender oppression. The more the ruling class tries to play down certain forms of it, such as having to offer your body to British Royalty in return for a massage license, as Virginia Giuffre did, the easier it becomes to justify other forms of oppression, such as lowering the age of consent and stripping women of the right to vote.

Make no mistake. Women’s oppression is a brutal front in class war. After all, the most astonishing revelation, the most uncomfortable truth that emerges from all this is that, as feminist Moira Donegan writes, “while sexual violence is technically illegal and frowned upon in the abstract, in practice it is accepted, ubiquitous, de rigueur, and a primary vehicle for male bonding.”

Just as white workers have access to the “wages of whiteness” — their ability to simultaneously mimic and serve the ruling class by enacting racism, so too do men of all classes enjoy the ability to abuse women and girls in service to Epstein and his friends. Their ability to get away with it ensures that men of other class backgrounds can also escape accountability. The result is a deepening fissure between the two major halves of the working class.

This is precisely why justice for Epstein victims is not only a working class demand, but one that must be echoed by its working class institutions. It is also a democratic demand, as the government refuses to follow its own disclosure laws in releasing the Epstein files. Hand-waving away the Epstein crimes as misguided conspiratorial thinking not only assists in the class cover-up, but also gives power to those trying to sensationalize details for their own profit.

Epstein himself has escaped accountability. His network is trying to wriggle its way back into the shadows. It’s only by exposing and relentlessly fighting male chauvinism wherever we encounter it that we can unite the working class to build the kind of society that not only delivers justice for the Epstein victims, but prevents such abuse in the first place.

The opinions of the author do not necessarily reflect the positions of the CPUSA.

Images: Epstein’s Injustice. Fred Barr. CPUSA; Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein mugshots. Creative Commons. Release the Epstein files. Geoff Livingston/Wikimedia Commons; Minnesota Women’s March. Fibonacci Blue/Wikimedia Commons.