The revelations emerging from the Jeffrey Epstein files in 2026 should shock us. Peter Mandelson, architect of New Labour and embodiment of its "modernizing" project, exchanging sensitive government information with a convicted sex trafficker. Tony Blair, the humanitarian interventionist, introduced to Epstein through Mandelson's networks. Birthday notes referring to Epstein as "best pal." Payments totaling $75,000. These aren't peripheral scandals involving minor party figures—they implicate the very core of the New Labour project, the men who redefined British social democracy for a generation.
Yet perhaps the most disturbing aspect isn't the revelations themselves, but how unsurprising they feel. The Epstein connections don't contradict New Labour's legacy—they crystallize it. They reveal with stark clarity what "pragmatism" actually meant in practice: the subordination of ethical principles to elite networks, the conflation of "what works" with what serves power, and the transformation of a working-class party into a vehicle for imperial capitalism dressed in the language of social justice.
The Seduction of Pragmatism
To understand how we arrived here requires returning to New Labour's foundational premise: that the left had to abandon its "ideological" commitments to win power and deliver results. Blair and Mandelson didn't present themselves as betraying Labour's values but as fulfilling them through more effective means. The Third Way, they argued, transcended outdated left-right divisions. Markets could be harnessed for progressive ends. Business leaders weren't class enemies but partners in prosperity. Global capitalism was an unchangeable reality requiring accommodation, not opposition.
This framing proved devastatingly effective because it appropriated the language of maturity, realism, and responsibility. To question it was to reveal yourself as naive, dogmatic, trapped in the past. When Mandelson declared himself "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich," he positioned opposition not as principled disagreement but as petty resentment. The Private Finance Initiative, opening public services to private profit extraction, wasn't neoliberal capture—it was "pragmatic" resource mobilization. Embracing globalization wasn't subordination to transnational capital—it was recognizing "the world as it is."
This rhetorical strategy accomplished something profound: it made ethical critique itself appear unreasonable. If you opposed privatization, you were against "modernization." If you questioned military intervention, you lacked "seriousness" about humanitarian responsibility. If you resisted the courtship of corporate donors and elite networks, you preferred opposition's purity to governance's complexity.
The Epstein connections reveal what this "pragmatism" sanctioned in practice. When the distinction between political principle and elite networking collapsed, when "what works" became defined by those already wielding power, when the measure of seriousness was comfort in rooms with the very wealthy—then friendships with predatory financiers weren't aberrations. They were logical extensions of New Labour's foundational assumptions about how progressive politics should operate.
The Imperial Architecture of Third Way Politics
New Labour's domestic "pragmatism" cannot be separated from its enthusiastic embrace of Anglo-American imperialism. The Iraq War, supported through fabricated intelligence and presentational manipulation, wasn't a deviation from Third Way principles but their foreign policy expression. Blair's doctrine of "humanitarian intervention" performed the same ideological work internationally that "pragmatic centrism" did domestically: it positioned imperial violence as transcending ideology, as simply responding effectively to global realities.
The overlap between New Labour's domestic and foreign policy logic is instructive. Both subordinated structural critique to elite consensus. Just as challenging neoliberal economics domestically became framed as unrealistic, questioning Western military dominance globally became framed as naive about humanitarian responsibility. The same networks that connected Blair and Mandelson to corporate boardrooms connected them to Washington's security establishment, to neoconservative intellectuals, to the architecture of liberal imperialism.
Epstein himself embodied these overlapping worlds—finance capital, intelligence networks, elite social circuits, Israeli connections. His role wasn't simply as wealthy donor but as node in the transnational networks where economic, political, and security power intersect. That Mandelson moved comfortably in these spaces, sharing government information during financial crises, seeking Epstein's help with "deals," reveals how thoroughly New Labour had integrated itself into imperial capitalism's social infrastructure.
The depravity here isn't just personal but structural. It lies in a political formation that taught its adherents that proximity to such power was sophistication rather than compromise, that cultivating these relationships demonstrated seriousness rather than corruption, that operating within elite networks was pragmatic navigation rather than cooptation.
The Weaponization of Identity Against Structural Critique
Jeremy Corbyn's destruction offers a parallel lesson in how imperial power deploys progressive language against structural challenge. The sustained campaign portraying Corbyn's leadership as an "existential threat" to Jewish life in Britain—culminating in coordinated media attacks, internal Labour sabotage, and institutional investigations—demonstrated sophisticated understanding of how identity discourse can neutralize anti-imperial politics.
This wasn't accidental. Corbyn represented the first serious challenge to New Labour's settlement since its consolidation: opposition to privatization, skepticism toward military intervention, solidarity with Palestinian liberation, critique of neoliberal economics. The response mobilized genuine concerns about antisemitism—concerns that deserve serious engagement—as weapons to destroy his leadership specifically and delegitimize left anti-imperialism generally.
The mechanism is crucial to understand. Pro-Israel advocacy groups, intelligence services, sympathetic media, and Labour right-wingers didn't need to fabricate antisemitism wholesale. They needed to amplify marginal incidents, conflate criticism of Israeli state violence with prejudice against Jewish people, and establish that supporting Palestinian rights indicated antisemitic disposition. The EHRC investigation found Labour had unlawfully discriminated against Jewish members, while leaked documents revealed factional warfare exacerbated these problems—both can be true, but the political effect was Corbyn's neutralization.
What's revealing is the differential application of such scrutiny. New Labour's architects, now demonstrably connected to a convicted sex trafficker, face nothing comparable to the sustained assault Corbyn endured for his foreign policy positions. Mandelson's resignation and investigation in 2026 came only after incontrovertible documentary evidence emerged—and even then, defenders emphasized these were personal friendships rather than systemic ethical collapse.
This isn't whataboutism but pattern recognition. Imperial power deploys identity discourse selectively, weaponizing it against structural critique while granting immunity to those operating within acceptable ideological boundaries. The message is clear: you can participate in networks connected to sexual predation, share government secrets, embrace policies that immiserate millions—so long as you maintain proper positions on Israel/Palestine and don't threaten neoliberal consensus.
Communicative Inversion and the Performance of Progressive Values
What New Labour perfected was communicative inversion—the deployment of progressive language to advance regressive ends while rendering this contradiction invisible through rhetorical sophistication. Blair didn't justify the Iraq War through crude imperialism but through humanitarian responsibility to protect. Mandelson didn't defend inequality through social Darwinism but through celebrating aspiration and entrepreneurship. Privatization wasn't framed as corporate giveaway but as modernization and efficiency.
This required extraordinary communicative labor. Every policy that subordinated working-class interests to capital accumulation needed reframing as ultimately serving working-class flourishing. Every alignment with imperial violence needed repositioning as ethical internationalism. Every cultivation of elite networks needed presenting as pragmatic governance rather than class collaboration.
The Epstein revelations pierce this rhetorical veil. When Mandelson calls a predatory financier his "best pal" and shares sensitive government information, the gap between performed progressive values and actual elite integration becomes impossible to obscure. These aren't isolated personal failings but the logical endpoint of a politics that systematically normalized elite proximity as political sophistication.
The deeper lesson concerns how structural violence operates through precisely such normalization. Imperial capitalism doesn't primarily advance through crude coercion but through making its logic appear as common sense, its networks as natural, its violence as unfortunate necessity. New Labour's genius was packaging this as the left's maturation rather than its subordination, as socialism's evolution rather than its negation.
The Capitalist Capture of Working-Class Political Infrastructure
We must name clearly what occurred: the deliberate transformation of a political party built by working-class movements into an instrument of capitalist class interests. This wasn't inadvertent drift but systematic project. Blair, Mandelson, and their allies viewed Labour's union ties and socialist commitments not as strengths requiring evolution but as obstacles requiring elimination.
The process followed predictable patterns. Marginalize the membership. Centralize decision-making. Court corporate donors. Embrace business-friendly policies. Purge left-wing candidates. Frame all resistance as backwards-looking. Present capitulation to capital as modernization. The result was a party that maintained working-class iconography while advancing ruling-class interests—a shell institution performing opposition while enabling domination.
This captures how neoliberalism operates not through dismantling working-class organizations but through hollowing them out, maintaining their aesthetic and formal structures while evacuating their oppositional content. Labour under Blair became what Gramsci termed "transformism"—the absorption of potentially antagonistic elements into the hegemonic bloc through selective incorporation of leaders while neutralizing their constituencies.
The Epstein connections illustrate where such integration leads. When a party's elite becomes indistinguishable from the capitalist class it nominally opposes, when its networks overlap completely with corporate and security establishments, when its members move seamlessly between government positions and private consultancies—then "scandals" become inevitable. They're not aberrations but symptoms of successful cooptation.
Depravity as System Rather Than Deviation
Perhaps the hardest lesson is recognizing that the depravity exposed through Epstein isn't exceptional but characteristic. The issue isn't that some Labour figures made poor personal choices about friendships. It's that New Labour's entire project rested on normalizing integration into networks where such relationships flourish, where predatory accumulation and political power intermingle, where elite socialization obscures structural violence.
Sexual violence, economic exploitation, imperial warfare, and environmental destruction aren't separate pathologies but interconnected expressions of how capitalism organizes social relations. The networks enabling Epstein's predation overlap substantially with those enabling financial extraction, weapons proliferation, and military intervention. These worlds aren't accidentally connected but systematically integrated.
When we examine New Labour through this lens, the continuities become clear. The same comfort with elite power that made Epstein's friendship unremarkable to Mandelson enabled the Iraq War's lies, the PFI's profit extraction, the financial sector's deregulation. The same subordination of ethical principle to pragmatic calculation that justified embracing "filthy rich" wealth creators justified bombing Baghdad in freedom's name. The same networks connecting Labour elites to corporate boardrooms connected them to intelligence services, weapons manufacturers, and predatory financiers.
This is what imperial capitalism's "normality" looks like from within—a world where horror becomes banal, where complicity becomes sophistication, where depravity wears pragmatism's face.
Toward Structural Rather Than Individual Accountability
The instinct when confronting such revelations is focusing on individual culpability—Mandelson's corruption, Blair's complicity. This matters for legal accountability and political consequences. But it risks missing the larger pattern: these aren't individual moral failures but structural outcomes of a political formation that systematically subordinated principles to power.
True accountability requires confronting not just individuals but the ideological architecture that made their actions appear reasonable. This means rejecting the entire framework that positions elite integration as political maturity, that treats proximity to power as sophistication, that frames structural critique as ideological while presenting capitalist accommodation as pragmatic.
It means recognizing that "pragmatism" unmoored from principled commitment becomes simply opportunism, that "realism" accepting imperial capitalism's permanence becomes collaboration with domination, that "electability" pursued through rightward drift becomes working-class betrayal.
It means understanding that genuine transformation requires not better management of existing power structures but fundamental challenge to how power itself is organized—economically, politically, militarily, socially.
The Path Beyond Empire's Pragmatic Left
Where does this leave movements seeking to build beyond New Labour's wreckage? Several principles emerge from confronting honestly what that project represented and enabled.
First, absolute clarity that progressive politics cannot be pursued through integration into capitalist and imperial elite networks. The Epstein connections aren't aberrations to be avoided through better vetting but logical endpoints of treating elite proximity as political resource. Transformation requires building power bases independent from and oppositional to such networks, not navigating them more carefully.
Second, rejection of rhetorical frameworks positioning structural critique as ideological while presenting capitalist accommodation as pragmatic. These aren't neutral descriptive categories but hegemonic strategies for neutralizing opposition. When everything challenging power becomes "unrealistic" while everything serving it becomes "what works," politics becomes impossible except as administration of existing domination.
Third, recognition that identity discourse, while addressing genuine oppressions, can be weaponized against structural challenge when deployed by those benefiting from existing arrangements. This requires neither dismissing identity concerns nor accepting their weaponization, but developing sophisticated analysis of how power operates through selective deployment of progressive language.
Fourth, commitment to building political formations that cannot be easily captured—through democratic structures, membership control, transparent financing, and principled red lines that cannot be compromised for electoral advantage. This means accepting that transformation may require longer timelines than capitulation offers, that building genuinely oppositional capacity matters more than short-term electoral gains.
Finally, understanding that confronting imperial capitalism requires international solidarity, particularly with those facing its most violent expressions. The campaign against Corbyn succeeded partly because anti-imperialism could be isolated and delegitimized. Building connections across borders, learning from movements confronting empire's violence directly, and refusing to sacrifice international solidarity for domestic electoral calculation become essential.
Conclusion: Naming What Was and Building What Must Be
The Epstein revelations offer a gift, however disturbing: crystalline clarity about what New Labour actually represented. Not the left's maturation but its subordination. Not pragmatic adaptation but principled capitulation. Not transcending ideology but serving power while denying it.
The depravity exposed isn't aberrational but characteristic—not of individuals but of a political formation that taught its adherents that such elite integration was sophistication rather than corruption, that abandoned working-class interests for capitalist approval, that embraced imperial violence while performing humanitarian concern, that deployed progressive language to advance regressive ends.
Confronting this honestly means abandoning nostalgic myths about New Labour delivering real gains despite flaws. It means recognizing that those "gains" came at the cost of transformative possibility, that they stabilized rather than challenged structures of domination, that they purchased temporary amelioration through permanent subordination.
But this confrontation also liberates. Once we name clearly what that project was and enabled, we can build consciously toward genuine alternatives. Not returning to some imagined socialist past, but constructing political formations adequate to confronting empire in its contemporary expressions—financialized, networked, violent yet performed through humanitarian discourse.
The task isn't purging individuals, crucial though accountability remains, but building structures that cannot be captured, that maintain oppositional integrity while pursuing transformative power. This requires patience, principle, and recognition that shortcuts through elite accommodation lead inevitably back to spaces where predators flourish and complicity becomes normal.
The left's awakening, if it comes, must involve not just electoral strategy or policy platforms but profound reckoning with how empire operates through precisely the "pragmatic" accommodations that seemed so reasonable, so mature, so sophisticated—right up until the moment we discover our "serious" leaders exchanging birthday notes with traffickers and calling them friends.
That moment is now. What we build from its ruins will determine whether we've truly learned what empire's pragmatic face conceals, or whether we'll simply repeat the pattern under new management, with new justifications, until the next inevitable revelation forces confrontation we should have chosen freely.