The world in crisis

Picture: ICE agents fire on protestors. Mineapolis, MN, January 24, 2026

It is only February 2026, and already this year has confronted us with a cascade of crises that expose the violence at the heart of the global order. From escalating US intervention in Latin America, to the brutal repression of protesters in Iran, to the deadly intensification of ICE deportation operations across the Atlantic, the message is unmistakable: state power continues to be wielded against the vulnerable with impunity.

And as if the geopolitical storm were not enough, the release of millions of documents from the Epstein network has laid bare – again – the scale at which elites facilitate and profit from sexual exploitation. No country is untouched, every country appears as a transit hub in this machinery of abuse.

For socialist feminists, none of this is surprising. Our rage comes from recognising the pattern: these are not isolated scandals but expressions of the same violent structures – capitalist, patriarchal, racialised – that shape the justice system and protect the powerful. We are not just witnessing events; we are witnessing the system revealing itself.

Layered on top of this political reckoning is a technological one. AI, sold to us as efficiency and progress, is already being weaponised to reproduce misogyny in grotesque new forms – from non-consensual pornographic deepfakes to apps that generate the fantasy of a compliant, programmable girlfriend. Meanwhile, social media algorithms continue to shape our reality, radicalising users and providing fertile ground for the far right to spread its politics unchecked, undermining hard-won feminist gains in areas such as reproductive justice.

ICE AND THE VIOLENCE OF LIBERALISM

In Minneapolis, two US citizens – Renée Good and Alex Pretti – were killed in the street this year during intensified ICE operations. Good was shot while reversing her car as agents approached; Pretti, who legally owned a firearm, was disarmed, pinned to the ground, and then shot. At least six more have also died in dealings with ICE so far in 2026: Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Parady La, Luis Beltrán Yáñez-Cruz, and Heber Sánchez Domínguez.

These are not isolated tragedies. They are the predictable outcome of an agency built on racialised policing, impunity, and the dehumanisation of migrants.

ICE functions as a modern apparatus of state terror. Its violence extends far beyond street killings: forced sterilisation, sexual abuse in detention centres, and the routine degradation of migrants have been normalised under a bipartisan political order. As the article in this issue shows, this brutality did not begin with Trump. It is embedded in a capitalist 'liberal' system that treats migrant lives as expendable and offers no real protection from state violence.

Protests continue across the United States, especially in Minneapolis. People are confronting the reality that liberalism has its eventual limits and creates a fertile ground for authoritarianism to flourish. It is a poison ivy wrapping itself around us until we are no longer compliant. And once such disobedience is displayed, as we are seeing now in America, it is met with extraordinary violence. Whether this moment of psychological rupture will translate into sustained political transformation remains uncertain, especially in a year already defined by crisis after crisis.

THE UK: LIBERAL DECAY AND THE FAR-RIGHT ADVANCE

Here in the UK, we are not insulated from the consequences of liberal decline. The far right is encroaching on the political terrain, and with local elections approaching across 106 English authorities, socialists are watching closely. Many in Workers’ Liberty are campaigning to prevent Reform candidates from gaining ground – a fight that is fundamentally about class politics.

At the same time, the Green Party is gaining momentum, particularly among young people. Zack Polanski’s platform gestures toward redistribution and taxing the rich, and it resonates with a generation exhausted by inequality. Yet the absence of explicit alignment with trade unions – and the lack of a consistent presence on picket lines – reveals the limits of a politics that gestures left while remaining structurally detached from the organised working class.

This issue does not cover the Greens or local elections directly, but our organisation’s fight continues: within the Labour Party, within trade unions, and within every space where class politics must be defended against both liberal complacency and far-right advance. If you are a member, you already know how fatal it is to ignore class. If you are new to this magazine, consider it an invitation to recognise that feminist issues are class issues – and that if you are tired of this system, now is the time to act.

EPSTEIN FILES AND THE UK

On 30 January, the US Department of Justice released a further three million pages of material from the Epstein investigation, including 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. Yet this represents only half of what remains sealed: around six million files are still being withheld. The Department has insisted that this latest batch will be the final one made public and that it has now fulfilled its ‘legal obligations’. But fulfilled to whom? Because what is increasingly clear is that the obligation has been fulfilled to protect the powerful – not to inform the public.

Despite the scale of the release, many emails and documents indicating trafficking, abuse, and the facilitation of violence have been heavily redacted. The names of those involved – the perpetrators, the enablers, the network – remain hidden. Lawyers representing Epstein’s victims have condemned this process, arguing that the system has prioritised shielding abusers while forcing survivors to fight for justice under the anonymity of ‘Jane Doe’. That anonymity has been undermined further by the fact that many survivors’ identities are now widely known, since their privacy was not protected in the files at all.

Of course, this is not simply a US affair. Epstein’s trafficking network operated across borders – in its victims, its logistics, and its abusers. At its core, this is a global issue and, as many have pointed out, a class issue. The perpetrators were not marginal figures but members of the elite across multiple industries: from billionaires like Bill Gates to academics such as Mark Tramo, now at UCLA, and Martin Nowak, a professor of mathematics at Harvard. The network’s reach exposes how deeply embedded sexual exploitation is within the structures of wealth, power, and institutional prestige.

Unsurprisingly, the files also implicate a number of high-profile political figures. Among them is former Labour MP and UK ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, who maintained a close relationship with Epstein even after his first conviction. The documents reveal a pattern of behind-closed-doors political dealings carried out with no accountability or transparency – a reminder of the deep cracks in the liberal world order. Mandelson appears to have worked with Epstein to influence government plans to tax bankers’ bonuses, even asking Epstein to use his connections at JP Morgan to pressure then-Chancellor Alistair Darling.

And then, of course, there is ex-prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – a figure whose involvement has been known for years. Virginia Giuffre bravely came forward in 2014 to state that she had been trafficked by Epstein as a minor and abused by Andrew. Her testimony was credible, supported by a photograph of the two together. In 2021 she filed a civil suit, which resulted in a settlement. The newly released files only deepen the horror: one image shows Andrew on all fours behind a girl – a child. We do not know the full context, but we know the answer is not innocent. It is grotesque. It is unimaginable.

The files also confirm what Andrew repeatedly denied: that the photograph with Giuffre was real. A 2015 email from Ghislaine Maxwell references it directly. Emails between Andrew and Epstein further suggest that Andrew used his official role as a UK envoy to pass on discreet commercial and political information. Once again, we see the same pattern: the machinery of capitalism protecting its own, shielding men who believe they are entitled to exploit, harm, and abuse the very women and children who – seeking safety or a better life – were instead trafficked and violated.

TECHNOLOGICAL INVENTION: FURTHER ERASURE OF CONSENT AND CRITICAL THINKING

This issue of Women’s Fightback also turns to the rapidly evolving – and increasingly terrifying – terrain of algorithms and AI. It is no longer credible to treat social media or emerging technologies as somehow separate from politics, class struggle, or feminism. These systems are built and controlled by a tiny elite – overwhelmingly wealthy white men – whose profits depend on polarisation, outrage, and the erosion of democratic and bodily autonomy.

Algorithms have become pipelines to far-right radicalisation, constructing echo chambers where hateful content spreads unchecked, insulated from debate or fact-checking. Tech companies have created environments in which reactionary and conservative groups thrive, using platform design to amplify attacks on reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and feminist organising.These same companies are also driving the development of AI technologies that are already being weaponised against women. Deepfake tools have made it possible to generate sexualised images without consent – and the consequences are immediate and devastating. After the murder of Renée Good, deepfaked sexual images of her began circulating online, created from photographs taken from her own social media. Consent is erased at the click of a button.

In February, the UK government finally moved to criminalise the creation of ‘nudified’ images and the apps that produce them. Those found creating non-consensual sexual deepfakes could face up to two years in prison. Alongside this, the government has announced plans for a world-first deepfake detection evaluation framework, intended to establish consistent standards for assessing detection tools and technologies. Unsurprisingly, this brings it into direct conflict with platforms like Elon Musk’s X and its ‘Grok’ AI tool, which continue to provide fertile ground for misogynistic content and far-right organising. But is creating laws and framework around criminalisation enough?

INTERREGNUM AND NEW MONSTERS

Antonio Gramsci wrote, ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.’ Today, the monsters are not mythical. They are the capitalist class, the political elites shielded in the Epstein files, the institutions that reproduce violence while insisting on their own legitimacy.

What we are witnessing is the metastatic spread of the cancer that is dying liberal capitalism. Perry Anderson once described the conflict between neoliberalism and populism as a clash in which the former survives only by reproducing the very crises that threaten to destroy it, while the latter grows in magnitude without ever developing a meaningful strategy. That cycle of self-destruction – or, as Nancy Fraser names it, 'cannibal capitalism' – is now fully exposed.

When Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’, he imagined that capitalism had triumphed and that future conflicts would be fought along ethnic lines. What he did not foresee was the intensity of the breakdown we are living through – nor the technologies that would accelerate and amplify it.

What we face today is a rupture in class consent. The social contract that once stabilised the liberal order has collapsed under the weight of inequality, precarity, and political decay. The monsters are out in the open, visible to us all, shattering the illusion of moral order. This is the interregnum – a terrain that is frightening to enter, but one socialist feminist must confront head-on.

And this is precisely why we need a feminism that is rooted in class struggle. We cannot dismantle the structures that enabled Epstein, ICE, the far right, or the algorithmic machinery of misogyny without a feminism grounded in class politics. Only socialism and socialist feminism has the political substance and strategic clarity to confront these monsters, to tear down the system that produced them, and to build something new.

The old world is dying. The question is whether we will allow the monsters to inherit it – or whether we will organise, collectively and unapologetically, to shape the world struggling to be reborn.