Chomsky and moral of the so call left….

The controversy surrounding Noam Chomsky and his association with Jeffrey Epstein has generated intense debate within the left, but much of the discussion reveals a deeper political confusion. The focus has largely shifted toward personal morality and individual guilt rather than examining the social structures that allow power, wealth, and influence to concentrate in the first place.
Capitalist society consistently brings intellectuals, politicians, financiers, and academics into overlapping networks because access to funding, publishing, and institutional influence depends on proximity to wealth. This is not primarily a question of individual virtue or hypocrisy, but of how a system organized around capital inevitably connects cultural authority with economic power.
Sections of the left tend to respond to such controversies through moral denunciation, as if removing flawed individuals could purify politics. Yet history shows that replacing personalities does not alter the underlying social relations that reproduce inequality and elite influence. The problem is systemic, not psychological.
A serious socialist perspective therefore avoids both personal hero-worship and moral panic. Intellectual contributions should be evaluated critically and independently of personal reputation, while recognizing that meaningful change cannot come from reforming elites but from conscious democratic control of social production by the majority itself.
In that sense, the debate should move beyond personalities and return to the central question: what kind of social organization continually produces these concentrations of power, and how can society collectively move beyond them?