Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time: 3 mins.)

The news about the sexual predations of Mohammed Al Fayed, owner of Harrods and Chelsea Football Club, was not news to many. His predilections, we learn now, were well-known in his circles. Yet only after his death are these stories made public.

Again and again we learn these stories of sexual predators, even paedophiles, whose predations come to the attention of the public only after their deaths. Entertainers such as Rolf Harris and Jimmy Saville, for example, who preyed on children.

Fayed wasn´t an entertainer but he was very rich and preyed on young women – in this world in which we live, some entertainers are often very rich too. With wealth comes protection, not just of the privately-hired variety but of the public kind also – the police force.

Their victims, at least the adult ones, knew that their words would count less with the police than would those of the rich. In the end, the police know instinctively who are their employers. The government ministers and senior police officers mix in the same circles as some of the rich.

The victims are aware of how the vertical power structure in society is constructed. They know or are soon taught that the rich have not only direct protection but retribution for those who offend also. There are penalties beyond police harassment or lack of police response to complaints.

There is the jeopardising of employment for the employee, lacking of job reference, unfavourable comment in another employer´s ear … The employers also have a network of mutual interest.

HR managers of one company will wish to further their career progression through the capitalist network. Players know how the game is played.

WHY AND HOW

The predators do not do what they do merely because they like to – there are many temptations in people´s heads that are not acted upon, that remain in internal fantasy or perhaps acted out only with consensual partners.

The famous predators functioned out of a sense of entitlement – like their wealth which they felt they deserved,¹ they believed also that they were entitled to do what they wanted to “lesser” beings because they themselves were famous and rich (like Harris and Saville) – or just rich, like Mayed.

Just as their wealth was the accumulation of the wealth created by the work of many others, with their sense of entitlement went also the reality of their ability to do what they wanted. They did it because they could.

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were eventually arrested and went to jail, Epstein dying there. Far from being a vindication of the justice of the system, their victims were initially ignored by the police and even harassed – and Epstein died in mysterious circumstances before trial.

All around the world people are suffering these kinds of abuses to one degree or another, have done so for centuries and will continue to do so. Yes, even with the occasional exposure of this or that person.

For as long as the system of status, wealth and privilege exists. Which means at least for as long as the capitalist system exists – and even beyond that, perhaps.

So in organising to overthrow the capitalist system we must ensure that we do not replace a system of unquestionable authority and power with another.

Yes, well, that´s for the future, right? No. It starts now. In our treatment of one another. In how we conduct ourselves. In ensuring we do not claim a special entitlement or the right not to be be questioned.

And when we err, individually or organisationally, to act to correct and remedy the ill.²

End.

FOOTNOTES

1Let us remember here too that no-one can get rich by their own work, no matter how hard – it requires the work of many others to make one person wealthy.

2Let us not forget the one example among many: the past history of the ostensibly revolutionary socialist organisation of the former Workers Revolutionary Party. Its General Secretary Gerry Healy was accused of the sexual abuse of 26 young female activists in the organisation. A painfully honest description of the replication of systems of unquestioned privilege in the former Party and the process of the expulsion of Gerry Healy and of his defence (for example by famous film actors Corin and Vanessa Redgrave) can be found here: https://libcom.org/article/break-wrp-horses-mouth-simon-pirani