Since the Jeffrey Epstein scandal sent shockwaves around the world, many Western critics have warned that something has gone profoundly wrong, and that capitalism, in its contemporary form, bears much of the blame for the deterioration of politics, values, and morality.
Accordingly, some outlets and websites have pointed the finger at the “barons of global capitalism,” and spoken of a “collapse of trust in big business.” Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has also contributed to the discourse, writing a column in The Guardian that calls for rebuilding trust in politics, though he admits that it is difficult to repair politics once it has been shaken.
Today, we find growing calls for transparency, curbing financial interference in elections and public affairs, cracking down on tax evasion, ensuring that the powerful and the wealthy - individuals and states alike - cannot evade accountability, and enhancing institutional and ethical oversight to prevent corruption. In other words, there is an urgent need to rein in unbridled capitalism by consolidating a responsible form of capitalism that is more humane, more principled, and more constrained by the law.
These policies and mechanisms, as well as others, must be continually sharpened and reinvigorated to push back against scandals, which can be immense and dangerous, as is the case today, but could recede and contract under other circumstances. Yet, the idea that scandal could be eradicated once and for all remains a utopian aspiration that will never be achieved.
In the face of this insistence on solving the problems of unbridled capitalism through a capitalism of law, however, we find another vision spread between the marginal groups in the West and the segments of the mainstream in the Third World and the Arab region. The problem, in this narrative, is fundamentally and inherently rooted in capitalism - it is the pathogen behind this disease. This reading, though it is now built on the Epstein scandal, long predates this scandal - going at least as far as the texts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau - and had never needed an Epstein.
The struggle is not being waged by two forms of capitalism in this reading, it is a struggle against capitalism itself. That, in fact, leads us down a bottomless rabbit hole. An alternative model implicitly proposed has ceased to exist since the two major communist powers, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, adopted market economies, with chasing Western direct investment turning into a national sport in the non-Western world since then. Anyone who revisits 20th century leftist theory will find a ubiquitous question that has never been given a real answer: why hasn’t capitalism collapsed?
The truth is that capitalism, which does inevitably fuel scandal and which has a long history of cruelty and aggression, is what made our world, and it is the source of all the immense gains that our world has precipitated. In this sense, unequivocal verdicts about “capitalism” amount to facile rhetoric that branches out into countless militant caricatures. We had seen a case of this caricature when some rushed to explain the uprising against Bashar al-Assad through his adoption of “neoliberal policies,” overlooking the history of Syrian state oppression that dates back to 1963.
Moreover, only democratic capitalism engenders scandals, be they sexual, political, or tied to security, because they represent violations of certain binding principles which are already functioning. To give a few of many examples, the Profumo-Christine Keeler scandal shook Britain in the 1960s, the United States was home to the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, and scandalous politicians, like Berlusconi in Italy and Sarkozy in France have emerged under this system.
But who could claim that Uday Saddam Hussein’s crimes against women were a “misogynistic scandal” or that Brezhnev’s reliance on astrologers in his final years was scandalous, or that Kim Jong Un and Idi Amin are walking scandals? These men were not caught up in scandals because they are features of this system, not bugs; that is, the public life is itself the scandal under their rule.
Here, one could make an equivalence between the crime novels of Western countries and the criminal life - with no novel - that is found in non-Western countries. This equivalence leads to rejecting capitalism wholesale to the conclusion that the crime novel’s presence in the West proves that Western life is criminal, while the absence of crime fiction in other societies prove that they have no crime.
The fear is that such a convoluted critique amounts to recycling dated arguments along the lines that Khomeinism and other nationalist currents recycled Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism.
Our region offers extremely fertile ground for such practice. As far back as 1923, attending an international conference on women’s rights in Rome, the first Arab feminist Huda Shaarawi declared that she had not gone there to “demand the abolition of polygamy, the suspension of the engagement system, or restrict the grounds on which men are entitled to divorce.” Rather, she stressed that she had gone to “present a genuine image of Egyptian women to the women of the West, who know nothing about them or have been misled by what they have read in books published for colonial ends... and to show that the civility of modern Egyptian women is almost equal to that of their Western sisters.”
Eulogies of Western civilization, which has “collapsed” and seen the family “rust,” belong to this same discourse, to say nothing about the antisemitism that has long been hidden beneath the surface of critiques of capitalism and that finds its strongest argument in the Epstein scandal today.
