A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #6-26 - The Customs of Fathers. The Epstein Case and Its Surroundings (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The millions of documents that comprise the so-called Epstein Files 
aren't gossip. Rather, they allow us an unfiltered glimpse into how the 
ruling classes operate. From Silicon Valley giants like Peter Thiel and 
companies like Palantir Technologies, to Wall Street titans and 
political elites spanning the main US parties; from Bill Clinton to 
Donald Trump, to government figures in France and members of the British 
royal family. The files reveal a ruling class that operates beyond 
official morality, beyond the law and beyond controls.

The Jeffrey Epstein case is not an anomaly of modernity, nor can it be 
considered merely a resurgence of forms of management of domination 
typical of clan-based social models, which find their expression in the 
exploitation of vulnerable bodies. Without wishing to trivialize, it 
must be said that this is and has always been the ruling class. Just 
think of Suetonius's "Lives of the Caesars," or the customs of the papal 
Curia during the Renaissance, or the scandals of the French financial 
aristocracy during the reign of Louis-Philippe.

The complex web of violence and oppression perpetrated by members of the 
privileged classes, revolving around Epstein, is understandable only 
within a society where money has become dominant and the division of 
labor has reached advanced levels.

The resurfacing of ancestral behaviors reminds us that the relationship 
of domination is based on violence, a violence that in prehistory led 
the victorious groups to seize and feed on the bodies of the vanquished; 
it reminds us that only the increase in labor productivity meant that 
the vanquished were no longer killed but worked for the victors. 
Capitalism is merely a form of society that masks, under monetary 
relations, the violent act underlying all social forms based on class 
division and exploitation. When the social mechanisms that guarantee 
exploitation no longer function, the master/slave relationship reappears 
in all its brutality, giving rise to fascism on a political level and to 
social phenomena such as those revealed by the criminal behavior of 
Jeffrey Epstein and his associates.

The violence narrated in the files is the violence of the capitalist 
mode of production, extremely concentrated in time and space. The 
specific depravities are the depravities that the bourgeoisie imposes on 
the body of society.

The violent domination of bodies, male supremacism, is a model that cuts 
across classes, shaped by a deep and ancient history of patriarchy and 
sexism. But the configuration that this desire for domination takes in 
the Epstein case, as in the many grim stories of sex and power that 
characterize the ruling classes, has its own specificity.

Jeffrey Epstein sought to create new needs for his associates, to bind 
them into complicit relationships, to reduce them to a new dependence 
and push them towards new satisfactions and thus to economic and 
political subjugation. Just as in bourgeois society, the sphere of alien 
entities to which people are subjugated grows with the mass of objects, 
and each new product is a new intensification of mutual deception and 
mutual dispossession, so Epstein subjugated his associates by offering 
them dehumanized bodies, reduced to a state of slavery.

The need for money is the true need produced by bourgeois society, the 
only need it produces. The quantity of money increasingly becomes its 
sole attribute of power: just as money has reduced every being to its 
own abstraction, so it is reduced in its own movement to mere quantity. 
Its true measure is its boundless and immoderate nature. Money 
transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, 
virtue into vice, vice into virtue, the servant into master, the master 
into servant, stupidity into intelligence, intelligence into stupidity. 
In the background of the documents circulated by the United States 
Department of Justice, beyond the names hidden or revealed according to 
political expediency, looms the specter of money and finance.

Capitalist production produces man not only as a commodity, man in 
function of a commodity; it produces him, corresponding to this 
function, as a dehumanized being. Immorality and monstrosity on the part 
of workers and capitalists accompany this production.

The alienation of labor, that is, of people's practical activity, 
manifests itself primarily in two aspects: the worker's relationship to 
the product of labor, considered as a foreign and oppressive object, and 
the worker's relationship to his own activity, considered as an alien 
activity that does not belong to him. This alienated labor alienates the 
individual from his own body, both external nature and his own humanity. 
This results in the alienation of the individual from the other. This 
alienation, this dehumanization, is the common feature of the acts of 
violence revealed by the documents in the Epstein archive.

These events are also an expression of the psychology of the financial 
aristocracy. Among this class, contempt for people appears as arrogance, 
as the squandering of what could sustain a hundred human lives, and 
partly as the vile illusion that work, and consequently the sustenance 
of others, are conditioned by the unbridled waste and unregulated, 
unproductive consumption of the privileged classes. The financial 
aristocracy considers human fulfillment only as the fulfillment of its 
own non-existence, its own whims, its own arbitrary and bizarre whims.

We should not be surprised if among Epstein's accomplices we find, in 
addition to capitalists and financiers, also politicians, rulers, and 
scions of royal houses.

In societies divided into classes and based on exploitation, there are 
inevitably winners and losers. Government, which is the prize of 
struggle and a means of ensuring the victors the results of victory and 
perpetuating them, will certainly never fall into the hands of the 
losers, whether the struggle takes place on the terrain of physical or 
intellectual force, or on the economic level. And those who fought to 
win-that is, to secure better conditions than others, to gain privileges 
and dominion-will certainly not use it to defend the rights of the 
vanquished and impose limits on their own arbitrariness and that of 
their friends and supporters. The winners will be those who have been 
the most violent, the most deceitful, the most treacherous, the least 
committed to respect for others. Even in a democratic system, the "best" 
are the least scrupulous and possess a psychotic need to dominate 
others. "Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. 
Great men are almost always bad men," said Lord Acton. It should 
therefore come as no surprise that the Epstein files contain people who 
hold or have held the levers of political power.

The events narrated refer to a network of relationships so vast that it 
cannot be reduced to an aberration, nor to the simple resurfacing of 
atavistic instincts. They are the synthetic expression of today's 
society, a society based on political, economic, and religious 
domination; the product of the struggle between people and the 
unleashing of the victors' bestial instincts on their prey.

It's time to get rid of all this. It's time to replace a society based 
on exploitation and predation with a new society based on solidarity.

"Solidarity-that is, the harmony of interests and sentiments, the 
contribution of each to the good of all and of all to the good of 
each-is the state in which alone man can express his nature and achieve 
the greatest possible development and well-being.[...]It is the superior 
principle

that resolves all current, otherwise insoluble, antagonisms and ensures 
that the freedom of each individual finds no limit, but rather its 
complement, indeed the necessary conditions of existence, in the freedom 
of others." (Errico Malatesta)

Tiziano Antonelli

https://umanitanova.org/i-costumi-dei-padri-caso-epstein-e-dintorni/
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