LOS ANGELES (USA), April 15— Everyone’s appalled by Jeffrey Epstein’s web of child sex-trafficking. But take a few steps back, and we can see how deeply the sex-trafficking of girls (especially) is bound up with racist US capitalism.
In capitalism, everything is a commodity to be bought and sold for a price.
US capitalism rested on human trafficking: the slave trade. Enslavers turned children and adults into commodities. Commodities whose labor produced profits for the enslavers themselves and for Northern merchants and bankers.
But there was a twist.
“The youngest and handsomest females were set apart as the concubines of the masters,” wrote a formerly slaved man calling himself John Brown in his 1855 autobiography. “The slave-pen is only another name for a brothel.” These “fancy slaves” sold for two or three times as much as a strong male worker.
The sex-trafficking of these children and young women shows the interconnection of racism and sexism in the very foundation of capitalist America. That commodification of girls and women is deeply embedded in US society even now.
Beauties and the Beasts
The modeling and entertainment industries make a business of fetishizing young girls. The Epstein/Maxwell sex-trafficking ring worked through the Elite Modeling Agency, Brunel’s MC2, and Trump Modeling Agency.
For a model, your body is a product. It’s what you have to sell. And while you are exploited for the agency’s profits, you’re conditioned to be exploited sexually.
Trump bragged about barging into beauty pageant dressing rooms while contestants were undressed. Even underage girls at Teen USA.
The American Psychological Association concluded in 2007 that “the sexualization of girls is a broad and increasing problem.” It made detailed recommendations. But here we are with the “Epstein scandal.” Reforms can’t solve a problem baked into capitalism itself.
CNN reported in 2014 that at least thirty-five Disney employees were arrested for sex crimes against children over an eight-year period. Most worked at Disney theme parks. What happier place for a predator!
Disney’s children’s programming sexualized girls. “From the time I was 11, it was, ‘You’re a pop star!’” Miley Cyrus said, recalling pressure to “put on some glittery tight thing.”
Former child star Cole Sprouse said in 2022 that “the young women on the [Disney] channel were so heavily sexualized from such an earlier age [more] than my brother and I.”
A 2024 docuseries, Quiet on the Set: The Dark Side of Children’s TV, focused on Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon’s “iCarly” (2007-2012) included weird shots of children’s feet and sexual double-entendres. Its producer, Dan Schneider, had young Ariana Grande perform eroticized scenes masked as gross humor. In 2024 she reflected that “so many adults had to approve those…. It was for the bottom line.”
These networks helped the sexual commodification of children go mainstream. “Commodified pedophilia has become a systematic pathology because of capitalism,” says a therapist who works with sexual trauma patients.
Capitalism commodifies everything and everybody.
Today’s wage slavery forces workers to sell their own bodies for the wages they need to survive.
Communist revolution will overthrow this system of production for profit. In communism, nothing will be bought or sold. Everything will be produced for use and shared according to need. The material basis of commodification will be destroyed.
Communism will end the abject poverty and alienation that can drive young people into the claws of an Epstein or a Trump. With a collectivist way of life, children will have many safe and supportive adults. They will no longer be taught to be compliant. Healthy approaches to sex will replace today’s sexual negativity and prurience.
A long-term struggle will continue against capitalism’s poisonous ideologies. Those include sexism, racism, and the individualistic mindset that others are there to be used or abused.
Pedophilia will change from a systemic problem to an individual pathology. Rather than fighting against entire capitalist industries that profit from exploitation of often impoverished young people, we will just have to deal with isolated individuals who try to abuse others.
Our answer to “Epstein’s island” must be a communist world.
Read more about ICWP’s communist analysis of sexism here