Epstein Geopolitics And the Age of Primitive Accumulation

The last time I wrote about the geopolitics of Jeffrey Epstein it went viral, but I sensed that many readers missed one of my key points:

Epstein sought to move geopolitical realities (actual events and US policy) in ways that would allow for favored firms to extract wealth from national security decision-making…effectively validating what Naomi Klein once called disaster capitalism.

Naomi Klein’s language, “disaster capitalism,” is fantastic, but also merely one kind of primitive accumulation—a mode of grabbing surplus value (ie, extracting wealth) through bare-knuckle means (ie, not wage-labor exploitation). Are you profiting from ethnic cleansing, dispossession, settler colonialism, frontierization, sacrifice zones, or resource theft? Then you’re engaged in primitive accumulation.

Here’s the theory that, after finishing my memoir, I’m hoping to develop into a book.

In a sentence, “primitive” forms of capital accumulation are much more likely to occur and become more pervasive in a low-growth world where no sectors of the economy seem promising. The dark hell-world that we’re living through is not because human beings are fallen creatures of god (although I guess we are), and it’s not because our natural condition is one of predation and dog-eat-dog. Rather, it’s that owners of capital want returns on their wealth, they’re willing to bend politics (oligarchy) to get it, and the capitalist world-system as we’ve known it is both in crisis and has been paying fewer dividends, leading to the proliferation of primitive accumulation.

Capitalism has never been without primitive accumulation, but in my lifetime, the prevailing mode of capitalist relations has been the capture of surplus value from labor productivity in exchange for a wage. That can be done very brutally, and “normal” capitalism exploits unequal power relations…but it’s a way of life that many people worship. A system of exchange where owners profit from the work of others who are paid a wage for their labor is just literally what we think of when we think of capitalism.

But that’s not the activity from which capitalism originates historically, and my theory, which our modern times validate further every day, is that primitive forms of capital accumulation—the truly heinous geopolitical forms we’re living through now—constitute a growing share of global wealth as global growth shrinks. Inter-imperial rivalry between the US and China is not just some status competition; it has emerged as capitalists in both countries have allied with the state to hoard wealth in ways that are zero-sum and use state power to strengthen state power. Geopolitics is the name we give to the sum of states pursuing “national security” in this way. And geopolitics as practiced today is increasingly a way of unlocking wealth through primitive accumulation (dehumanizing others by stealing their shit, killing them, poisoning their environments, or forcing them to flee their land).

Readers of this newsletter know that drawing attention to primitive accumulation is a recurring theme in my work, and that brings us back to Jeffrey Epstein.

Two of the documents from the most recent tranche of three million Epstein Files stand out among many crazy and damning snowflakes.1 The first has Epstein in touch with Peter Thiel, with whom he was in frequent contact.

Epstein to Thiel in 2016:

Brexit, just the beginning…return to tribalism, counter to globalization, amazing new alliances…and as I said in your office, finding things on their way to collapse was much easier than finding the next bargain.

The second, again with Peter Thiel but in 2014, has Epstein saying the following:

I keep hearing your “intentionality” argument. Imagine if this mess is what Obama really wanted, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt—we would have to admit a strategy brilliantly executed…

Thiel responds:

The “intentionality” argument would center on making sure the US gets less involved with the rest of the world (I think that’s the “plan”). The more of a mess, with just lots of bad guys on different sides, the less we will do…

It’s possible to have multiple interpretations of the second email exchange. They seem to be saying that Obama was playing 3-D chess, making the Middle East unstable on purpose to justify US withdrawal from the region. That makes no sense to me but maybe it does to a billionaire’s drug-addled mind.

That second email also recalls an exchange between Epstein and Ehud Barak from the previous tranche:

On February 21, 2014, Epstein wrote to Barak to say that “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak replied: “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow. A subject for Saturday.”

These guys are thinking and acting in terms of the primitive-accumulation thesis.

The first email above, however, is a real smoking gun. Epstein says, “I said in your office, finding things on their way to collapse was much easier than finding the next bargain.” Everyone knows the Game of Thrones “Chaos is a ladder” quote, and it’s true, but that’s not enlightening enough. They want to profit from dehumanization, unsettling geopolitics, because it’s “much easier” than doing normal capitalist exploitation.

Epstein was an agent of neoliberal globalization—moving within elite circles to exploit power for profit trasnationally—but he was also presiding as a power-elite at a time when the world was transitioning from neoliberalism to something much worse. Epstein was, in many ways, pioneering this transition. The era of the past decade of “post-neoliberalism” is sometimes reduced to “great-power competition” or “nationalism” or even “neo-royalism,” but these are all not-good-enough ways of talking about the end of neoliberal globalization, which, we should recall, was a fix to the crisis of industrial capitalism in the ‘60s. We are well and truly into an age of primitive accumulation, and it fucking sucks.

Where does this all leave us? In the same place I concluded from the last dump of Epstein files:

Oligarchs and financial capital are running the world. Scumbags are still brokering backroom deals between democrats and autocrats. Corruption reigns. The difference now is that the national state form is amassing unprecedented levels of capacity to control its populations while the old regime ruling-class solidarity is breaking down and interstate conflict becoming normal again.

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