Riccardo Taddei, comune-info,11/2/2026
Translated by Tlaxcala
Riccardo Taddei is an Italian legal scholar, an expert on the Mashreq, and author of the book L’ordine del Chaos. Anatomia del conflitto tra Israele e Palestina [The Order of Chaos. Anatomy of the Conflict Between Israel and Palestine (Ombre corte)].
Can one spend a lifetime denouncing capital and the commodification of bodies, then accept the company, favors, and intimacy of a pedocriminal* capitalist who built his power network also on the trafficking of young girls? If we take seriously what Chomsky wrote about power, the answer is brutal: yes, it is possible.
Chomsky today is the living demonstration of his own theories on the manufacturing of consent, not because he was hypocritical from the start, but because no one is immune to the dynamics he describes once one acquires sufficient prestige. The most devastating lesson of the Epstein-Chomsky affair is that contemporary power does not primarily function through open repression of dissidents, but through their incorporation.
“The political stakes are not to erase Chomsky or burn his books. The stakes are to stop projecting onto our masters an aura of purity…” writes Riccardo Taddei — We are left with the obligation to build forms of critique of power that are more collective, less dependent on isolated charismatic figures… And we are left, perhaps above all, with the responsibility to apply systemic critique to ourselves, to our circles, to our practices. What are our “Epsteins,” perhaps on a smaller scale?… (Ed. note comune-info)
I esteemed Noam
Chomsky for years. I read him, cited him, used him as a moral and intellectual
compass. It is precisely for this reason that seeing his name appear so
frequently in the Epstein files – not as an occasional contact, but as a
recurring presence, complicit, grateful for the access Epstein could guarantee
him – is not merely judicial information: it is a symbolic slap, the collapse
of a certain image of the radical intellectual.
What emerges from the
documents is now clear: Chomsky did not just “meet Epstein once,” he maintained
this relationship for years after the 2008 conviction for sex crimes against
minors, considering him a valuable interlocutor for understanding the global
financial system, flying on his jet, and benefiting from his connections. One
cannot reduce all this to a simple misunderstanding, a distraction, an “I didn’t
know.” At this level of information, at this age, with this analytical
lucidity, knowing who Jeffrey Epstein was, was not an optional detail, it was
the starting point – which Chomsky amply crosses, even going so far as to
justify him.
From this arises the
question that left me astounded: can one spend a lifetime denouncing
imperialism, capital, the commodification of bodies… and then accept the
company, favors, and intimacy of a pedocriminal capitalist who built his power
network also on the trafficking of minors? If we take seriously what Chomsky
wrote about power, the answer is brutal: yes, it is possible. Not because it is
“right,” but because the system he himself described is so pervasive that it
encompasses even its most radical critics, when they see in a power node like
Epstein a privileged channel of access to information, relationships,
resources.
Here emerges a
devastating paradox: the intellectual who spent decades deconstructing the
mechanisms of manufactured consent, who taught us to look with suspicion upon
any form of concentrated power, who unmasked the connections between economic
and political elites, found himself sitting at the table of one of the darkest
nodes of that same network. And the justification – wanting to “understand the
financial system from the inside” – sounds terribly hollow when we think of the
young girls whose suffering made the existence of that table possible.
Symbolic
co-optation as a strategy of power
Here, it is not only
Chomsky’s personal consistency that is at stake, as painful as the
disappointment may be. It is the very image of what it means today to be a “critical
intellectual.” The Epstein affair shows us that elites do not only want
billionaires, bankers, and politicians at their table: they also want
philosophers, linguists, scientists, Nobel laureates, leftist voices. Not to
discuss their books, but to be able to say: “everyone, even your masters, come
through here.” It is symbolic co-optation. On the material level, the bodies of
the victims; on the symbolic level, the reputations of those who should have
been on the other side of the barricade.
This is perhaps the
bitterest lesson: power does not need to convince its critics to remain silent.
It is enough to make them complicit through proximity, through access, through
that grey area where “socializing” does not necessarily mean “approving” but
certainly means normalizing.
Every time Chomsky got
on that plane, every shared dinner, every conversation on global finance while
elsewhere young girls were being reduced to commodities, constituted a small
victory for the system: even the most radical critic can be drawn inside, if
offered enough intellectual curiosity to satisfy.
Epstein’s three
powers
Epstein, in this
framework, is not an isolated monster but the concentration of three powers:
financial, relational, and biopolitical. Financial, because he managed opaque
capital and assets and acted as an intermediary between wealth moving out of
public sight. Relational, because his agenda mixed former heads of government,
scientists, intellectuals, tech and finance managers, creating a grey area
where decisions and agreements were made far from any oversight. Biopolitical,
because his “service” was not only financial advice, but also access to bodies,
especially vulnerable bodies, treated as luxury goods and instruments of
blackmail.
This tripartition is
crucial to understanding why Epstein was so central and why his fall shook so
many different spheres. He was not “merely” a pedocriminal, not “merely” a
wealth manager, not “merely” an elite networker. He was all of this at once,
and it is precisely this convergence that made his power so absolute and his
impunity so lasting.
Financial power gave
him access to the corridors where the fates of entire economic sectors are
decided. Relational power made him an indispensable hub for anyone wishing to
connect to other power centers. And biopolitical power – the most obscene –
guaranteed him both direct control over the bodies of victims and a form of
indirect control over those who, by associating with him, potentially rendered
themselves vulnerable to blackmail, exposed, compromised.
Beyond Marx:
possession, impunity, shared secrets
Marx spoke of the
possession of the means of production; with Epstein, we see something even more
naked: the possession of bodies and the purchase of impunity. Not only the
bodies of abused young girls, moved like commodities between islands, villas,
and planes; but also the social body of entire elites, held together by shared
secrets, exchanged favors, potential scandals suspended like swords of
Damocles. It is a capitalism that does not limit itself to exploiting labor: it
buys silence, it buys access, it buys even the possibility of never being fully
judged, as demonstrated by today’s substantial silence.
This is the evolution
– or perhaps better, the revelation – of what capitalism had always been, even
in its earlier forms, but which today manifests itself with brutal clarity.
From slave plantations where masters claimed the right to possess not only the
labor power but the very bodies of slaves, to the nineteenth-century industrial
magnates who exercised sexual power over female workers, capitalism has always
had this biopolitical dimension. Epstein simply takes it to the extreme,
globalizing it, financializing it, making it an integral part of a
transnational network of power and perversion.
And there is an
additional, even more subtle element: possession through shared secret. Those
who frequented Epstein, those who accepted his favors, those who boarded his
planes, became members of a community of silence. Not necessarily accomplices
to his crimes in the strict sense, but certainly bound to him by an implicit
pact: I do not speak of what I know, you do not speak of me. It is a form of
power that goes beyond direct blackmail: it is the creation of a class that
recognizes itself through what it knows and keeps silent about, through shared
privileges that remain invisible to the public.
The short-circuit,
then, is this: a theorist of systemic critique who agrees to enter this
constellation, not as an undercover investigator, but as someone rubbing
shoulders and therefore grateful. This is not the mistake of a naive youth; it
is the choice of an aging intellectual who decides that Epstein’s informational
and relational value counts more than the moral scandal attached to his name.
We can rationalize as much as we want – curiosity, studying elites “from the
inside,” the desire to understand financial mechanisms – it remains that
certain lines, if one wishes to remain an example of consistency, one does not
cross. The Epstein line was one.
And here we must be
honest with ourselves: if it were a conservative intellectual, a neoliberal
economist, an apologist for capitalism who had frequented Epstein, we would
have dismissed it with a shrug. “Obviously, they’re all the same, power
attracts power.” But with Chomsky, it hurts precisely because we expected
something different. We expected his theories to translate into consistent life
practices, that analytical lucidity would also generate ethical vigilance.
Instead, we discover that one can be the most brilliant analyst of power and
nevertheless succumb to its seduction when it presents itself in the “right"
form – not as direct corruption, not as explicit purchase, but as privileged
access to the heart of the system one studies. It is the intellectual version
of that dynamic which Chomsky himself described for the media: it is not
necessary to directly buy journalists, it is enough to create structural
conditions where certain behaviors become natural, obvious, inevitable.
Beyond the person:
the system that encompasses even critics
For this reason, the
political stakes are not to erase Chomsky or burn his books. The stakes are to
stop projecting onto our masters an aura of purity that places them outside the
world they describe. Chomsky is not a saint who fell from his pedestal: he is a
man inserted into a power network who, at a certain moment, chose to value
access over critical distance. This makes him, despite himself, a perfect case
study of what he himself analyzed for decades: the integration of intellectuals
into the machinery of power, their legitimizing function, their vulnerability
to the seduction of inner circles.
There is a tragic
irony in all this: Chomsky becomes the living demonstration of his own theories
on the manufacturing of consent. This “intellectual class” he described as
structurally integrated into the power system, this tendency of experts to
gravitate around decision-making centers, this subtle complicity between those
who analyze power and those who exercise it – all of this materializes in his
own biography. Not because he was hypocritical from the start, but because no
one is immune to the dynamics he describes once they become sufficiently
prestigious, sufficiently “interesting” for the holders of real power.
The real question
And so the question
changes: no longer “how could Chomsky?”, but “how deep is a system, where even
the most radical critics find it convenient to orbit around those who possess
money, bodies, secrets?”. Epstein and his network demonstrate that at certain
levels, capitalism is not content with owning factories, banks, and media. It
also wants to hold the bodies of victims and, with them, the biographies and
reputations of those who might one day rise up and denounce. When you sit at
that table, you think you are entering “to understand the system”; in reality,
it is the system that enters you and makes you a participant in its stagecraft.
This is the most
devastating lesson of the Epstein-Chomsky affair: contemporary power does not
primarily function through open repression of dissidents, but through their
incorporation. It is not necessary to silence Chomsky when you can have him as
a guest on your private jet. It is not necessary to censor his critiques when
you can make him part of the landscape he criticizes. It is a form of
neutralization far more sophisticated than censorship: let them say whatever
they want, provided that then, in real life, they are willing to have a drink
with you.
And this extends far
beyond Chomsky. How many other critical intellectuals, activists, investigative
journalists find themselves in similar grey areas? How many accept funding from
foundations linked to questionable billionaires? How many participate in conferences
sponsored by companies they otherwise criticize? How many build academic
careers studying power while subtly becoming an integral part of it? The
Epstein affair is extreme, but the dynamic is widespread.
Preserving lucidity
in disappointment
I continue to
recognize the analytical value of many of Chomsky’s pages. But I can no longer
use them as if they were the discourse of someone who remained outside the
deadly embrace of the power he criticizes. This affair does not destroy the
theory, but it forces us to also look at theorists as subjects exposed to the
same logic of co-optation they describe. And it reminds us of an uncomfortable
thing: in a capitalism that demands not only profit, but impunity and the
possession of bodies, no one – not even the most lucid of critics – is
automatically safe from the risk of becoming, even if only in some trait, part
of the problem.
One could even say
that this affair confirms, in a perverse way, the validity of Chomsky’s
analyses of power. If the system were less pervasive than he described it, he
himself would not have fallen into it. The fact that even such a radical critic
can be integrated demonstrates exactly how powerful the mechanisms he spent his
life describing are. It is not a consolation, but it is a lesson not to be
wasted.
What to do with
this awareness
So, what remains for
us? Not gratuitous iconoclasm, not the destruction of everything Chomsky wrote.
Rather, a more difficult task remains: learning to read critical thought
through the contradictions of its authors, and not despite them. Using the
Chomsky-Epstein affair as a permanent reminder that ideas must walk on their
own legs, independently of who formulated them.
We also remain with
the obligation to build forms of critique of power that are more collective,
less dependent on isolated charismatic figures. If our analysis of capitalism
collapses when our reference intellectual guru collapses, then it was not solid
enough. The power structures Chomsky described exist independently of whether
he was consistent or not in his fight against them. Our task is to recognize
them and fight them, with or without perfect masters.
And we remain, perhaps
above all, with the responsibility to apply systemic critique also to
ourselves, to our circles, to our practices. What are our “Epsteins,” on a
smaller scale? What compromises do we make to gain access to resources,
platforms, information? Where do we draw our red lines, and how far are we
willing to move them when the access offered to us is sufficiently enticing?
The Epstein-Chomsky
affair is not an end, it is a starting point for a more mature reflection on
the critique of power. It takes away our innocence, it forces us to look
without veil at how difficult it is to remain consistent in a system designed
precisely to co-opt even dissidents. But it is precisely this awareness, as
painful as it may be, that can make us better critics – less inclined to the
adoration of masters, more attentive to the concrete dynamics of power, more
vigilant towards our own compromises.
The disappointment
burns. But if we manage to metabolize it without falling into cynicism, it can
become the foundation of a more lucid, more disenchanted critique, more capable
of looking at power – and at those who claim to criticize it – with truly free
eyes.
After all, my greatest
master, my docker father, had warned me as soon as I was young, first a high
school student then a university student: power devours you, especially if you
are an intellectual… always remain faithful to those you come from.
Transl. Note
*The original uses the unfortunately widespread term “paedophile” which does not seem to us to suit child and minor abusers, for which we prefer the term pedocriminal.
