Our project has existed for roughly a month now, and in that time we have yet to explain publicly what we’re doing here and why we’re doing it. It's quite clear to anyone with even a basic aesthetic sense to see what we're going for with Labour & Leisure, the visual register we employ, our rhetorical style, our allusions to existing publications and aesthetic forms. We ape the Financial Times pink on our Substack, we aim for a stark, clean, professional register in our communications, and we have so far refused to engage in the mud-slinging and ragebaiting that dominates the present condition of Marxist discourse. This comes primarily from a shared sentiment between myself and co-editor S.E.P. that the labour and Marxist movement (particularly in Britain) doesn't take itself seriously enough, doesn’t project institutionality, prestige, or legitimacy, pertains to a stifling folk-political conceit, its praxis amounting to palliative care for a knowingly terminal enterprise.

We strive for one aim, to create something which serves our class in the same manner that the FT or Bloomberg serve the enemy. The pursuit of this form of institutionality, however, presents innumerable snares, principal among them being the hideous discontinuity of where we are now and what we want to become. The movement we come from finds itself circling the drain of mediocrity and immobility, both physical and theoretical, and the posture we take in response is one of preemption or premonition of a journal-to-come, something which we can’t fully realise in the here-and-now, by the basic fact of our present size and reach, but a form which we will continue to hold up as a lodestar for what we want to see realised, the aesthetic and contextual world we believe the labour movement must inhabit and outwardly project for its present survival and future victory. And yet, in the pursuit of something better, something which can give our movement a sense of stature and sovereignty, we find ourselves confronted, as ever, by the creeping spectre of idealism, precisely the thing which our project and the whole of our movement seeks to vanquish, being in this instance the privileging of a specific, discrete form over and above the actuality ceaselessly confronting us. So we’re caught in a bind, one which permits a covert pathology in the infrastructure of our thinking, a morbidity which threatens to corrupt the edifice entirely, to make our preferred form in the aspirational projection of legitimacy collapse by an inadequacy to achieve this ambition, the prospect of annihilation before we can realise ourselves as the real formal expression of a social content which itself we find find wanting.

In a dispute with my co-editor the other day, we arrived at a proviso agreement that our science, historical materialism, can’t be conceived of in discrete terms, that we have no right to make claims in the abstract which might prove themselves valid within the perceived theoretical boundaries of our discipline. Of course, as is true for physics or mathematics, advancements made in the abstract can be proved highly practical, even essential, for the development of technologies necessary for the advancement of the human species at later stages of historical development. Just as Henry Ford can be called the most authentic Marxist of his century and Karl Marx can be read and understood as the poet of commodities, so too are we incapable of knowing the degree of genuine historical import that our contributions might disclose, to how our theoretical interventions might realise themselves at a later time. But this wager doesn’t satisfy; we must concern ourselves as much with the optimism of the future as with the reality of the here-and-now. We are not allowed to sit idle, nor hold ourselves above anyone or anything without proof.

Precisely in its scientific character Marxism is ‘theological’, pertains to being the queen of the sciences rather than one discrete science amongst other sciences. If Communism is true, if it’s the ‘riddle of history solved’, then we can’t afford to take our articles of faith as they are, nor can we conceive of the universal validity of our conception of reality as if we were resigned to sagely catalogue and index all of creation according to an airtight and immovable hermeneutic. I will say with no hesitation that Marxism is correct, and that we can prove it, but that our proof requires explication, that it is at once absolutely realised in the present and at the same time completely beyond our grasp.

In this way, Labour & Leisure ought to be seen as the outward-facing product of a conspiracy, and in so being we are to maintain our edifice of obscurity. However, at this still early stage in the unfolding of our conspiracy, we can't afford not to let people in. We inevitably will have to make concessions to you, to where we come from, that my co-editor and I share the same ground as you do, that we are you, and that we soberly recognise the obvious tension that you may well have seen yourself between this shared space we inhabit and our ambition to rise above it. If you’re to be seduced by our project, which is our intention, then we’re forced to tease a little out for you, to allow you in just enough so that you can make it a part of yourself, to identify with the ambition, and to realise it with us.

I and my co-editor instinctively deplore parasociality, what it’s done to the human psyche and to society in general, and for that reason we find the prospect of streaming and podcasting distasteful. We both belong to Gen Z, and in that we are still tethered in some manner to a nostalgic yearning for those brief few years of our youth wherein institutions meant something. We don’t breathe the air of the digital age quite as deeply as the generation now coming up, so there is a degree of hesitation in our approach to this world, even if we can’t deny its immense significance to our own maturation. This personal dislike we have, however, means nothing in the face of what has to be done, to the commitment we have to realising our aims. Our period is a parasocial one, and parasociality ultimately spells the end of the old form of institutionality, both socialist and bourgeois, to which Labour & Leisure is posturing. We can’t afford to float above reality when we have no command of the reality we are enmeshed within, that which gave rise to us, and that we will always inevitably be expressions of, to greater or lesser degrees of self-conscious awareness. If we were to just opaquely present ourselves as the ‘paper of record’ for the working-class to only a small cohort of the theoretically interested then we would only ever remain one blog amongst many, a blog with perhaps a somewhat idiosyncratic and pompous self-presentation. We belong to this era, and therefore must concede a part of ourselves and pay our debt to reality.

This doesn’t mean abandoning the edifice of institutionality entirely. The contemporary period is just as defined by combinatorics, nostalgia, yearning for prior forms as that which Marx encountered. The traditions of dead generations continue to weigh on the brains of the living like a nightmare, and as such the adoption of a certain register of institutionality pertaining to dead or dying forms doesn’t disqualify us in our striving to project as a legitimate standard-bearer of contemporary Marxism. Rather, we chart a course along the knife’s edge between various forms of appearance now in existence, adopt whatever guise fits, and extend our conspiracy as far as it might go. Before we raise ourselves out of the gutter completely, we must become worthy of the gutter.

NISI GRANUM FRUMENTI CADENS IN TERRAM MORTUUM FUERIT, IPSUM SOLUM MANET: SI AUTEM MORTUUM FUERIT, MULTUM FRUCTUM AFFERT.

It’s been a surprisingly warm week in London – clear skies and rising temperatures, all leading up to the start of an early British summer this Friday on May Day. I had the pleasure of watching local men prance about in foliage around my town to enact a Victorian Jack-in-the-Green revival, and to later hear a talk from RMT boss Eddie Dempsey in commemoration of International Workers Day. Dempsey spoke to the argument that trade union power ought to come before political expression, to which I wholeheartedly agree. If workers seek to change the world in favour of labour interests, then unions need to take the lead and put aside petty sectarianism in favour of maximising the total strike power of the class (editor’s note: if this point annoys you, read here).

I have also been watching this week with interest the fallout of Your Party’s dismal failure, as the embers of the movement seek to recoup and reassess their standing in the aftermath. Whilst large sections of the rank-and-file have either reverted to their home socialist groups or have joined to the ascendant Green Party, some – such as the author of State & Confusion – have sought to provide a more rigorous political analysis, in what seems like an earnest endeavour to build from past mistakes. What is to come from this is yet to be seen, though I hope the more fragile material circumstances become, the more the RMT’s efforts to expand overall strike power and build broader organised labour fraternity will manifest in more compelling and resilient political experiments.

This week has seen the ramping up of competition and insecurity in global energy markets, as the AI sector faces its first major market wobble and the UK prepares to go to the polls on politically meaningful but materially meaningless terms. Mao-era national planning organisations at the heart of Chinese government are rapidly matching the investment capacity of entire Western stock exchanges in order to accomplish feats of engineering deemed impossible for any country only a few years ago, whilst US infrastructure is struggling to match the requirements needed for the country’s last-ditch bid for dominance in the AI sector. The patheticism of the moment is rather well captured by the malaise of British politics, where right- and left-wing pretenders are closing in on a political establishment steadfast in its refusal to embark on state capacity expansion, all in the name of keeping the peace with bond markets one might very well expect to see collapse into an artificial chaos in the coming months. With the UAE ending its longstanding membership of OPEC, and no end in sight for the blockade over the Strait of Hormuz, workers in the West should be asking themselves the same questions regarding what relevance the existing form of party politics has for the emerging global conditions.

— S.E.P.

‘Bragawatts’

A new white paper from the Oxford Smith School and Marex reveals a significant delivery gap in AI infrastructure, suggesting that 35-50% of planned AI data centres are behind schedule. The report claims several contributing factors, including what the authors refer to as ‘bragawatts’: commodities like copper and electrical steel priced on the basis of announcement curves (buildout claims) rather than actual delivery, causing short-term overpricing followed by oversupply and market crashes.

Delivery has also been impacted by energy demands, with national grids not developing rapidly enough to meet the demands of larger AI data centres. This Thursday, the UK National Grid produced a request for all new AI developments – now heavily encouraged by the government’s ‘Sovereign AI’ scheme – to set up base in Scotland, as the English grid cannot handle the projected burden. This has also encouraged the development of off-grid solutions in energy production such as natural gas turbines and fuel cells, expected to contribute to higher electricity prices, gas prices, and delayed fulfilment on Net Zero goals. Regardless of the concerns, however, energy facilitation is not meeting demand, causing serious worries about long-term sustainability not just for the energy market, but for AI RoI.

On Tuesday OpenAI revealed it had missed several key performance targets, causing share prices to fall sharply. SoftBank stocks dropped as much as 9.9% in Tokyo, whilst infrastructure and cloud providers Oracle and CoreWeave dropped 5% and 6.2%, respectively. Semiconductor chip makers also saw a decline of roughly 4%, compounding fears around a potential bubble-burst as a result of AI over-speculation.

The overall picture is that of speculative over-ambition, and the limitations of physical reality. Credit exists as an exercise in imagination, positive assertions about potential profitability in the short-to-medium term. This leaves it physically divorced from the material circumstances on which those predictions are built. That we can see AI models developing and interact with them in the imaginary is more important for market growth than the hard requirements of infrastructural resourcing. Of course, data clouds are physical and not metaphysical entities; Hyperscalers can only do so much, particularly in an America which has taken great pains over the course of the last few years to severely hamper its resourcing capabilities through trade wars and geopolitical grandstanding, on top of stagnation in the labour market matching none of the employment boosts expected by deportations and public sector trim-downs.

State Fusion vs. Venture Capital Fusion

The race for fusion-based nuclear energy continues as Western governments continue their desperate search for locally-sourced and dependable large-scale energy supply. This week, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, one of America’s leading fusion research groups, declared its expectation to reach capacity for grid supply within the early 2030s. This marks the first large-scale supply target worldwide for fusion technology, competing with the expectations set last week by OpenAI spinoff Helion to supply fusion energy to Microsoft by 2028. Of contrast here, however, is a promise to provide grid-scale solutions, potentially offering far greater gains for nationwide energy security than the modular reactors promised by Helion.

Successfully reaching this target would be a tremendous boon to US energy security, as fusion technology remains a mainstay of US research departments. The Chinese Fusion Energy Company (CFEC), a state-led venture backed by the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation, is rapidly catching up with US projects, as the PRC wields its immense state investment tools to match 8 years’ CFS investment in 1 year. CFEC aims to have its fusion reactors supplying grid power by 2035, and is actively seeking to be the first reactor to do so, marking both a geo-strategic and political race for the claim to the world’s first grid-supply fusion power.

UK Local Elections

The British public will go to the polls this Thursday in a string of local and devolved government elections that will likely turn out the most politically upsetting results some areas have seen in decades. Polls have consistently demonstrated a disastrous outcome awaiting the governing Labour Party, as Reform UK and the Green Party hope to take control of several Labour heartland councils, including areas which have been led by Labour councils for over a century. Nationalist parties SNP and Plaid Cymru are also expected to perform well in Scotland and Wales, respectively, as a short-lived Labour revival comes crashing down into the latest existential crisis for the British union.

Mainstream electoral politics in the UK has been struggling to maintain its footing ever since 2014 when the question of Scottish independence was put to referendum, followed by the victory of the Vote Leave movement during the Brexit referendum in 2016. The properties of a first-past-the-post system in which voters are encouraged to hedge in order to achieve governmental results has thus far been enough to keep the mainstream parties stable, even as both the Conservative and Labour parties experienced populist turns in the run-up to the COVID-19 pandemic. A string of political disasters coupled with a loss of political appetite for populism saw the newly centralised Labour Party assume power at the 2024 general election for the first time since 2010, but in the years since populism has reasserted itself.

Whilst local elections can serve as good indicators on popular sentiment at the halfway point of a government tenure, the outcomes are less than decisive; municipalities across England are overstretched to the point of no return, with a growing number forced to issue Section 114s (effective bankruptcy notices) as central government funding legally required for the operation of these municipalities dries up under a regime of fiscal conservatism intended to satisfy bond markets. This leaves the vast majority of would-be councillors with very little tangible goals to offer the electorate, besides aiding in a party-building exercise with national governing ambitions. Nonetheless, Reform UK and the Greens are making incredible promises in order to secure local votes, knowing full well the limitations of their potential office.

The story is similar in Scotland and Wales where, despite some degree of political devolution, national governments are largely constrained by fiscal regulations and national policies. Wales in particular has long been controlled by the Labour Party, which looks to be facing a major political overturn as part of a revolt against Keir Starmer’s Westminster government, in favour of Plaid Cymru. Certainly the last thing the British government needs is yet another national cessation movement, yet the age is demanding political restructuring on a tremendous scale. The question then becomes as to whether unionists, either right or left, can properly articulate what a renewed British union might look like, given that everyone is in agreement that the present settlement is losing the last of its inertial legitimacy. What neither side can say with any degree of certainty is what effect a major restructuring will have for material economic growth; in any case, the situation would not appear optimistic.

UAE Leaves OPEC

The United Arab Emirates officially ended its involvement in OPEC this Thursday, in response to increasing instability on the global oil market led principally by the US-Israeli war on Iran. At its foundation in the 1960s, OPEC was intended as a bid to shore up sovereign oil interests against private prospectors by agreeing on joint production limits in order to control global prices, established concurrently with other inter-sovereigntist bodies such as the Non-Aligned Movement. Decades since its foundation OPEC has seen its overall market share and price-setting powers diminish drastically, with the US-Israeli war on Iran sending prices skyrocketing despite OPEC interventions. The UAE, described as the ‘naughty boy’ of the group in a now deleted tweet by a Saudi official, has often flouted the production limits agreed upon by the group, however its departure this week signals a significant shift in policy toward ramping up production in order to capitalise on market shortages and accelerate global competition on output. Some have suggested that the departure marks the beginning of the end to the group, however Saudi officials have asserted that they are unperturbed by the developments.

The Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Agenda 2026 report, published this week, stated that half or more of energy observers saw geopolitical rivalry as the greatest threat to energy security in the run-up to 2030, largely due to infrastructure requirements rather than outright conflict. As governments turn funding away from critical capacity development and towards arms manufacturing and defensive operations, long-term delivery capacity on energy targets lags or reverses, particularly with energy-intensive markets such as AI and space travel puting immense pressure on existing national grids.

The Atlantic Council also noted that China has positioned itself as the ‘dominant architect’ of energy capacity in the Global South, with investments in developing countries’ energy infrastructure rapidly outpacing US and Western infrastructure investments, establishing long-term energy dependence on Chinese parts. The Chinese have also firmly established their dominance in the renewables market, as Western countries like the UK and France seek to transition away from volatile fossil fuels toward more ‘sovereign’ green energy infrastructure.

Developments in energy markets are pointing towards the collapse of the post-war petrodollar world system and of some kind of cleavage between the interests of global capital on the one hand, and the requirements of growing geopolitical instability on the other. As bodies like OPEC and hegemonies such as the US’ start to collapse, the only apparent winner from the chaos is, at least for the time being and for some time to come, the People’s Republic of China.

INDEX Verdict

Global energy markets are in turmoil, speculative AI bubbles are expected to burst soon. Workers should be seeking to build anti-sectarian union-based alliances for the sake of effective strike action in order to push Western economies out of financialisation and toward state-led development, ignoring largely meaningless electoral contests.

(Read Part 1 here)

The labour movement in its 20th Century form underwrote a specific form of working-class citizenship, guaranteeing relatively stable wages, access to the reproductive apparatus of the welfare state, and a definite means of participation in the national community. This mode was characterised by a coterminal subjective relation to sovereign authority which was, if not uniformly affirmative, at least broadly intelligible, provided a baseline for civic recognition and social fixity. The Bevinist derivation affirms this historical compact directly, whereas the Trotskyist and Marxist-Leninist derivations presuppose it in the negative; the anti-imperialist postures of both latter tendencies still ultimately depend upon a stable national-civic frame within which solidarity can be projected outward without dissolving its economic foundation.

Through the tumult of the 20th Century, this stable form of British identity amongst the working-class was coterminal with a wage-form grounded in profitability. The level, composition, and security of this wage were the product of the development of collective bargaining between organised labour and an identifiable capitalist class; concessions made at this level translated into material improvements in the life of the worker-citizen, improvements which formed the content of what the Bevinist derivation is speaking to when they invoke notions of working-class patriotism. In contrast to this prior period, of a capitalism still nominally determined by profitability wherein all three named tendencies find their historical formal referents, our contemporary wage-form arrives pre-spent by the administered credit system, flows immediately into debt servicing, rent, and financialised consumption in a manner qualitatively distinct from its classical form as some kind of intelligible share of value, accounting on the aggregate level for the exploited part of labour’s value generation. The capitalist class has, in turn, generalised itself out of this relation: Marx observed in Capital Vol. III that the development of the joint-stock company renders the capitalist into a “mere manager of money”, abolishing capitalist production within the capitalist mode of production itself; the administered credit system is the further development of this process of capitalist-abolition, wherein the allocator of capital is no longer a proprietor with concessionary power, instead rendered a fiduciary in a nesting chain of credit-anticipation. The strike as directed at the employer encounters at most a local manager operating as representative of a vast abstract credit apparatus determined beyond the immediate workplace – the wage concession, if secured, doesn’t augment the worker's real participation in the social product, because the real determinants of that participation (rent, debt-servicing costs, the allocative logic of the credit system) aren’t subject to the immediate collective bargaining relation.

At the symbolic level we can witness that the national community itself breaks down, being formerly defined by relative levels of ethno-cultural homogeneity which are no longer civically guaranteed, wherein the substantive claims of nationality find themselves variable, disputable, irregular in composition. For instance, can it be said that within the same workplace with the same concretely determinate station in the process of value-generation such as a single train depot, that a Lancastrian third-gen South Asian, a Scouse-Irish, and an Essexian white-English share the same relation with the formal ground of sovereignty and citizenship in, say, the person of the King? Is the actual content of their subjectivity (in the proper sense) identical? More to the point, even amongst the white-English, can we say that there exists a general – or at the very least generally-correlative – notion of what it ‘means’ to be British? As way of demonstrating this symbolic breakdown in normative subjectivity, it is worth noting that Charles III is routinely and increasingly criticised from the right, that the King has submitted to woke, and so on. A certain agitational republicanism has arisen on the right as a means to get a handle on this fundamental breakdown in the assumed, inherited logic of subject-formation, and direct their political energy to novel horizons.

A similar phenomenon exists amongst Catholics: a regular Sunday church-going Catholic is likely to openly and unabashedly say something like ‘I don't like what the Pope is doing’ / ‘this Pope is an improvement on the last Pope,’ etc. This is a profound novelty when put against the centuries-old mode of deference characteristic of the Catholic faith since Counter-Reformation. In any case, with either the Pope or the King, the ‘image of the father’ has lost its determinate social gravity, the ex-sovereign rendered as merely one important person amongst others, as a senior stakeholder rather than a legitimate King. All this is to say that the ephemeral cultural bonds of citizenship have broken down, can no longer be said to hold a necessarily decisive significance in the lives of the working-class. Per Bevinism, the trade union actually serves as a more fundamental guarantor of citizenship in that it maintains, or did maintain, the relatively-stable position of the worker against the destabilising effects of economic downturn and the decomposition of materially binding collective social commitments. The trade union then serves to underwrite a way of life more so than being a vehicle for the pursuit of a specific, self-directed form of power. The labour movement in its mature form established a compact both between workers as the intelligible form of the working-class, as well as between the working-class and the nation-state through a specific settlement, underwriting the worker-citizen’s participation in a national community whose sovereign symbols retained a discrete formal intelligibility. Today, all three elements of this settlement have decomposed: The wage is no longer the site of meaningful bargaining over value, sovereign authority is no longer reliably intelligible as a meaningful social referent, and nationhood no longer produces relatively-uniform subjective relations to sovereignty across the population.

Ever since social-democracy in Britain evaporated following the dismantling of our sovereign industrial and energy infrastructure under Margaret Thatcher’s government, the inherited assumptions of trade union criticism as levelled by Lenin and others now holds less fundamental purchase. In the case of the RMT, who broke with the Labour Party more than twenty years ago, the vestiges of social-democratic reformism no longer claim any necessary determination over their outlook. Granted, inheritances persist, but these are merely formal, without any direct grounding relation, signifiers which have lingered past their point of concrete determination yet still persist on the mythic level as mechanisms for providing self-conception, situating oneself within a tradition, and so on. The actual commitment to the reinforcement of baseline standards of living are now, as made very apparent by the present Labour Government, no longer guaranteed by the ‘reformist’ party or state, whatever its projected intentions might be. Today’s reformists are, as much as the money-manager ‘capitalists’, materially incapable of providing relief or sustenance to organised labour through the strike. The quality of the trade union therefore must be reconsidered, especially given that, in the West, militant trade unions have persisted longer than both formal social-democracy and the Communist party-form as forces for the advancement of labour’s discrete interests. This is not at all to preclude the future development of a Party or some contemporary iteration thereof, only to say that with the conditions we have before us a critical reassessment of prior criticism is warranted. At the present juncture, we in the labour movement ought to limit ourselves to what we have at our disposal, and what we have is not a Party, either social-democratic or Communist, but a militant trade union whose members are intimately enmeshed in the determinate sites of valorisation from the domestic vantage.

Before proceeding, it’s necessary to lay out a few basic points on how labour engenders productive development. In classical political economy, including the tradition emanating from classical Marxism, capital is taken as the active term while labour is subordinate, rendered as a material upon which capital operates. In the 1960s Mario Tronti initiated a ‘Copernican inversion’ of this schema: “We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second.” Tronti initiates a line of enquiry which begins from the class struggle, with capitalist development as a reactive, secondary term. On this account, the historical record of capitalist restructuring cannot be seen as the autonomous unfolding of technical or financial rationality but as a chain of responses to the concrete and consistent pressure of the activity of the working-class through its political work: The strike is where we can locate the active site of revolutions in the forces and relations of production, occuring invariably – at greater or lesser degrees of immediate intelligibility – as capital’s answer to labour.

The working-class therefore assumes the responsibility of being a class-for-itself in the withdrawal of its participation in the valorisation circuit at points where that withdrawal is most consequential, and that what defines productivity in the more concrete sense is precisely the significance of a strike in relation to the economy overall. It is from this partiality, rather than from any presupposed universality borrowed from extraneous or secondary concepts, that the class constructs its sovereignty; “to discover anew what our side is and to base oneself on it so as to construct our own partial point of view, or rather to redefine the partiality of the point of view and reconstruct, from that, the consistency, the force, the organised force, the potentiality/power, of a side” (Tronti, Dello spirito libero, 2015).

This is then how we can re-read the older critiques of trade unionism on a novel basis, more commensurate with our own unique period. Lenin's argument in What Is To Be Done? that trade union consciousness left to itself produces malformed economistic consciousness, Gramsci's argument in the Prison Notebooks that the trade union reproduces economic-corporate forms within civil society, and the early Tronti’s own argument that the trade union functions as capital's internal mediation of labour-power, while holding a degree of persistent veracity in certain respects, all locate meaning within the institutional configuration that produced them, being the trade union embedded in the reformist social-democratic project. Given that today the trade union is no longer necessarily an institutional extension of reformism and the decisive site of valorisation has relocated from the domestic factory, has extended itself across the whole of the global supply chain, these critiques require reformulation.

In our period, the strike – being the sustained refusal of value-generating labour towards the ends of a concession – is still essentially coherent, still serves as the motive force of real economic development. However, the logic and scope of the strike requires readjustment in order to lift itself from the procedural doldrums of meagre wage increases, towards unearthing the theoretical-strategic ground which may grant a decisive capacity to act in respect of present forces and relations of production. For the logic of the strike to be readjusted, organised labour would need to shift its focus away from procedural demands regarding wages and conditions – concessions which, as already established by explicating the real nature of today’s wage-form, would invariably depreciate through the course of economic development along its present trajectory. In short, it doesn’t actually matter how high your wage is if the content of your pay packet is merely the recirculation of debt.

As the administered credit system absorbs the surplus product of rising productivity through fictitious asset inflation, wage increases as presently denominated inevitably depreciate against the background of that redistribution, leaving labour’s real purchasing power static/declining relative to aggregate social wealth. From this we can locate the demand for debt cancellation, for instance, as a claim on the whole of social wealth, therefore referring on the level of agitation to the real object of the strike, even if on the discrete formal level it isn’t annunciated as such. Government bonds, claims on future tax revenue – and therefore an aggregate claim on the future surplus value generated by the national productive apparatus – may be agitated towards as an instance within the credit system where domestic organised labour can most proactively intervene. The capacity for the Bank of England, or any central bank, to purchase sovereign debt means that the state can – according to the internal logic of the financial system – create the money required to service its own obligations, thus intelligibly collapsing the distinction between debt and money creation, and revealing the socialised character of the administered credit system.1

Organised labour levelling demands directly at central banks, recognised as the institutions which underwrite the entire process for the reproduction of the credit regime, then affords organised labour a means of pursuing its own sovereign demands. The Bank of England is, for agitational purposes, the ‘responsible party’ by which the present ephemerality of wages, the destabilised reproduction of baseline living standards, the grinding away of an already decomposed social-democratic settlement, and the breakdown of the worker-citizen formation in contemporary Britain materially arise.

From this, a strategic form begins to take shape: A persistent notion amongst militants in the labour movement is that of the necessity for general strike, an inheritance belonging to a long-since-foreclosed epoch of industrial syndicalism but still carried through as tradition in the varying tendencies of militant labour politics. The concept of the general strike ultimately presupposes, given the conditions of its genesis, a working-class concentrated in heavy industry and in a nation-state capable of being brought to a halt within the confines of its own borders – as discussed previously, a more adequate articulation of this would be the generalised supply chain strike, a coordinated refusal led by logistics workers and directed at the physical chokepoints of the circulation of commodities, with demands addressed directly to central banks wherein, for the distended chain of claims upon claims of future valorisation, the buck stops. Such a strike would necessarily be international, or at the very least continental in its scope, given that the supply chain is global, irreducible to its parts, and the political goal of such a strike is, in the first instance, the forced revelation of the international administered credit system in its dependence on physical production. In the event of container traffic passing through the Red Sea falling by ninety-percent-or-more, creditworthiness assessments across the whole set of firms dependent on that traffic are disturbed, thus forcing the administered credit system to reveal its fundamentally socialised political character as the geopolitical/economic guarantor of global supply-chain continuity for the reproduction of the administered credit regime. Houthi actions over the last three years have, without any such intention, conducted an empirical demonstration of this fact; a homologous exercise of leverage by organised logistics labour, on terms set by labour itself, would elevate this chokepoint leverage into a means of forging a new qualitative world-historical determination by and for organised labour itself.

The three geopolitical tendencies surveyed above all pose the activity of the working-class as derivative of struggles whose content is decided elsewhere: by the oppressed nation, by the counter-hegemony, or by the homeland and its ‘strategic partners’. A working-class geopolitics is something which the class constitutes itself, first of all in recognising through its own activity its reality as sovereign subject, then by imposing the claims of this sovereignty. Beginning, at the very least theoretically, from the standpoint of the working-class in its potential and capacity for engendering a generalised supply chain strike, the ephemeral and secondary social inheritances of the movement, whether patriotism, internationalism, anti-imperialism, multipolarism, third-worldism, or what-have-you, may be sufficiently interrogated so that their Marxist and working-class content can be isolated, re-articulated, removed from the dross of dead forms and invested with determinate import and application as part of the self-directed struggle for labour’s sovereignty.

From November 2023, Yemen’s Houthi forces targeted commercial shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and Red Sea. The US Defense Intelligence Agency reported a 90% decrease in container shipping through the Red Sea between December 2023 and February 2024; Container hiring costs for UK exporters rose by 300% by February 2024; Suez Canal transits fell from 2,068 in November 2023 to approximately 877 by October 2024; Rerouting via the Cape of Good Hope added 11,000 nautical miles, ten days of transit time, and approximately $1 million in fuel costs per voyage to affected routes.

For three years, an insurgent non-state actor operating from one of the world’s most embittered, impoverished, economically backwards countries has decisively leveraged positional control of a maritime chokepoint, provoking disruptions to world commodity flows worth multiple trillions of dollars. Such disruption in and around the Persian Gulf demonstrates that oil as a stable foundational collateral asset may now cease to be registered according to formerly predictable financial cycles; as we have previously argued, credit, rather than profit, serves as the dominant allocative signal in the contemporary mode of production, with creditworthiness assessments ultimately dependent on relatively stable supply chain continuity. That an insurgent force has demonstrated capacity to engender sustained destabilisation of the administered credit system, in a roundabout way the essential reality of the labour performed by logistics workers, to whom we would assert hold the mandate of being the actual productive working-class in the epoch of administered credit, is ever more clearly demonstrated. However, this demonstration remains concealed, that the three-year long campaign of direct world economic sabotage has not been performed by logistics workers themselves.

This isn’t to say there’s much in the way of intuitive solidarity between a logistics worker in Britain and a Houthi militant in the Red Sea; as productive workers (in the classical Marxist sense as sellers of labour-power for a wage) and at the same time beneficiaries of the social wealth afforded by the stable functioning of the global supply chain, the British logistics worker finds themselves in a position which necessarily precludes any immediate identification with the Houthis. The phenomenon of workers holding on to more than just a baseline ‘proletarian’ existence has been a consistent feature of capitalist development for well over a century;1 In only very few and fleeting instances in the history of industrial modernity has there been anything in the way of a ‘pure’ working-class with absolutely nothing else to sell but their labour-power. The real accomplishments of the labour movement historically have led to the incubation amongst the working-class of their ‘other existence’ as citizens, reliant on the stable and continuous functioning of the global supply chain as a guarantee of the reproduction of a general baseline quality of life and purchasing power. The Houthis are ultimately too distinct in terms of social vantage and moral commitment, being themselves disinterested in the kinds of appeals to international solidarity of the type the logistics worker might be accustomed to from the inheritance of the socialist tradition. Even to identify in the Houthis something which holds a pertinence to class struggle, rather than abstract Islamic terrorism or piracy, arises only by dint of a very particular analytic vector.

With regard to labour leadership, public or private sympathy for the Houthis and the broader Axis of Resistance comes less so from an inherent social affinity, nor necessarily by an appreciation for their capacity for world-historic economic disruption, but more so owing to an inherited commitment to the inherited forms of anti-imperialism and solidarity with the oppressed – emergent trends necessitating a distance from the actual activity of these agents. Despite arising from the historical development of Marxist and labour politics, these supplementary conceptual frameworks have, over the last half-a-century-or-so, decoupled, taken on autonomous existences wherein adherents can decide by themselves whether or not to pay a historical debt to their labour movement authors. Even when an organised labourer with a good class-struggle Marxist pedigree engages with or forwards arguments pertaining to these inherited forms, a distinction necessarily persists between the local activities of the working-class and the global activities of the militant-oppressed. Attempts to forge identity between these are, again, products of a particular orientation, requiring the adoption of various assumptions which don’t necessarily register from the actual experience of the political and economic activity of logistics labour.

In kind, geopolitical thinking in the labour movement tends to distinguish between the activities of the proximate working-class and the worldwide great power conflicts, wherein domestic class struggle appears merely to interface with, being subject to / an instance in the larger machinations of competing claimant-hegemonies. In Britain, North America, and western Europe you can more-or-less group the geopolitical thoughts typical to the labour movement into three broad and occasionally overlapping tendencies, each with varying degrees of authority or ideological sway in the movement: the first we can call a derivation of Trotskyism, the second a derivation of Marxism-Leninism, and the third, for our purposes as Marxists in Britain, we'll call a derivation of Bevinism.

The Trotskyist derivation is, broadly speaking, a filtration of Trotsky’s commitment to a unified international revolutionary process through the vector of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems framework, a methodological posture which informed a significant part of American, and later British, new-left thinking on geopolitics. The American Trotskyite Sam Marcy and his Workers World Party were decisive in this synthesis, a point to which the ACP’s Haz Al-Din – a stalwart of the second tendency – offers a practical summarisation:

“Sam Marcy did something that was rather interesting: he applied Trotskyism to World Systems Theory. It was all about the Global South, it was all about the Third World, it was all about the lowest, most oppressed nations in the entire world as the vehicle for the victory of international socialism… But later that evolves, it becomes interpreted as [something akin to Mao’s] Third Worldism… where Trotskyists are skeptical of nationalism, but if it's just the most oppressed nations that are patriotic and nationalistic, that's okay. We can forgive them for it, because they will help facilitate the actual destruction of all patriotism in general, because theirs is only based on the extent of their inequality with oppressor nations. So if you remove that oppression, we get the Trotskyite global revolution, basically.”

Trotsky's Transitional Programme (1938) and the Comintern’s Second Congress debates on national liberation (1920) lay the ground for this conception of an international revolutionary process in which oppressed nations have a specific, contingent position and a decisive role in the dissolution of the imperialist world-system. Marcy and his inheritors then extended this into a framework determined by an abstract system of increments, wherein the political content of a given struggle is determined by its position within a scale of quanta of oppression/exploitation rather than any relation to capacity for economic-military sovereignty or counter-hegemonic interdependence. The British inheritors of this synthesis – SWP, RCG, RCP, SPEW, and so on – reproduce this schematic in their postures towards Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Palestine, and formerly Libya, Iraq, and Syria. The defining characteristic of the tendency is an affinity with oppressed nations that is indifferent to, or actively suspicious of, the counter-hegemonic capacity for non-Western states to project power, to act as an inter-sovereign economic-military bloc.

In contrast, the second tendency formulates its antagonism to the Euro-Atlantic global order by explicit recourse to that capacity which engenders suspicion from the Trotskyites, for constructing alternative strongholds of power, contesting the present hegemon on the level of geopolitical-economy itself. Haz continues:

“… Marxism-Leninism as applied to World Systems Theory …[would be the] project for cultivating and developing alternative strongholds of an alternative global system, rather than principally just focusing on the disadvantaged status of Third World countries or Global South countries. A strong emphasis is placed on an alternative global system, an alternative developmental paradigm… Russia is a big, strong country. Russia is not a Global South country. And yet Russia is at the [forefront] of anti-imperialism on the political level globally. So that's… the Marxist-Leninist perspective, in contrast to the Trotskyite perspective. It's not to say Marxist-Leninists have anything against Global South countries, especially ones that are fighting for their emancipation and liberation.”

In Britain this tendency is represented with reasonable density in the productive sections of the labour movement through ML groups like the CPB, and is observable also in the orientations of non-party and minor-party MLs in positions of trade union authority. The tendency shares with the Trotskyist derivation a formal commitment to anti-imperialism, but the substantive content of that commitment is radically opposed. Where the Trotskyite derivation identifies anti-imperialism with the oppressed nation regardless of its relation to any counter-hegemonic capacity, the ML derivation identifies it with the counter-hegemonic bloc itself regardless of its nominal oppressed-nation status. The tension between these tendencies is starkly visible in the Ukraine question: Ukraine is at the same time an ‘oppressed nation’ and also an ‘agent of western imperialism’, bringing to light the fundamental opposition that hides beneath the superficial equivalence of organised labour’s two principle ‘anti-imperialist’ geopolitical orientations.

The third tendency we call Bevinist after Ernest Bevin, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (T&G) from 1922 to 1940, Minister of Labour in Churchill’s wartime coalition, and Foreign Secretary under Attlee from 1945 to 1951. In securing British acceptance of the Marshall Plan, the formation of NATO, and the domestic containment of Communist influence in the T&G was grounded in an analysis of working-class interest as coextensive with the stability of the post-war settlement. This is the template that the Bevinist derivation has reproduced, in attenuated form, through every subsequent phase of British labour politics. It correlates structurally with the AFL-CIO tradition through figures like George Meany, and in France a partial equivalent is found in the traditions of the CFTC / CFDT.

What we’re calling the Bevinist derivation is rather straightforward, being the formal expression of an intuitive patriotic sense and bond of solidarity which extends beyond the class to the broader structures of society and to the existing global entanglements which serve to reproduce at scale the present dynamic of class relations, with the function of organised labour being to incrementally raise the employee position within this arrangement. By extending its commitment to stabilising the class relation into an affirmation of preestablished geopolitical associations, adherents to this tendency endorse in some or another manner the solidarity between organised labour and the institutions of the British state. They tend not to extend past the horizon of a conservative conception of the working-class in their relationship to capital and the state, rather opting for a classically reformist orientation in politics, to the constraining of capital, and to the maintenance/restoration of the working-class, usually expressed today as a desire for the Government to pursue a more pronounced industrial strategy underwritten by rearmament. Of the three tendencies, Bevinism speaks most profoundly to the given reality of the worker-as-citizen, beneficiary of the stable functioning of the global supply chain, rather than to the ashamed repression or conceptual dismissal to which the ‘citizen’ aspect of the worker’s character is subjected to.2

The Bevinist and the Marxist-Leninist tendencies, being reflections in domestic labour politics of an actual contestation between two conflicting power-blocs, makes them ciphers for actually opposing systems of economic development. The Marxist-Leninist analysis of the Sino-Russian bloc is substantively coherent in ways that the Trotskyist quanta-of-oppression schema isn’t, and the Bevinist attention to the material content of the worker-citizen compact is coherent and self-justifying in ways that neither anti-imperialist tendency are capable of giving sense to or absorbing the category as a positive feature of their systems. However, a basic synthesis of some form of ‘Bevinism-Leninism’ which retains the worker-citizen while at the same time pursues the breakdown of all guarantees of the reproduction of this form, would be paradoxical. The solution to the shortcomings of all the named tendencies requires a more profound operation than mere arbitrary syncretism.

Despite an inheritance in class struggle politics and the conceptual developments thereof, all the named tendencies reproduce commitments partially extraneous to the subjectivity of labour as such, both in its specific local determination – conflicted as it is between worker/citizen – and in its universal, general reality. They refer instead to certain steps along the road of class struggle’s maturation through the 20th Century, steps whose resultant conceptual products have to a large extent become estranged from their originary relation to the working-class in as much as the products of labour of varying forms under capitalist relations of production produce objects which stand apart from and against the worker. Recognising this conceptual estrangement then necessitates levelling scrutiny on the premises of each towards the working-out of something we can properly call a working-class geopolitics, a self-directed orientation which doesn’t rely on secondary political derivations, claims, and assumptions, instead re-grounding what is useful from the tradition in-total by a concrete interrogation of the present qualitative historical determination. Such a comprehension of geopolitics would have to speak to the double determination of the worker-citizen, but in a manner which doesn't necessarily collapse one into the other, engage in meek repression, or ignore the actual material advancements achieved by the development of the economy and of the labour movement’s inseparable part therein.

Is it right to say that the working-class ought to act on behalf of the world’s oppressed, the counter-hegemony, or the nation? Do any of these have an essential bearing on the working-class in its aspirational and self-consciously particular form as a class-for-itself? The question therefore becomes: could a working-class geopolitics in some way speak less to how organised labour interfaces with the world conflict before it and above it, which side to take, etc., but instead how labour might conceive of itself as itself, as a sovereign power, a force which knows and exercises its own partial interest, claims its own ‘territory’, asserts its own discrete will, etc.?

Note: due to Substack's email length limits, this post is in two halves. The second half will be posted shortly after this one, and should be available to read now.

Monday 20 – Friday 24 April, 2026

• Honor’s ‘Lightning’ humanoid robot wins the Beijing E-Town half-marathon, clocking 50 minutes and 26 seconds. This shatters the human world record of 57:20 by 6 minutes and 54 seconds. ASPI confirms China now leads the US in high-impact research for 66 out of 74 strategic technologies. The US retains a narrowing lead in only 8 fields, primarily foundational LLMs and biotechnology.

• Helion Energy maintains its 2028 deadline for Microsoft’s first commercial fusion plant. However, observers cite a ‘Supply Chain Paradox’: Helion’s aneutronic reactor requires Helium-3, yet NASA’s VIPER rover (the primary vehicle for lunar ice and mineral prospecting, vital for acquiring the rare element at scale) is cancelled due to federal budget caps, forcing reliance on speculative gambles with Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin spacecraft designs.

• RMT drivers execute two 24-hour tranches of strike action (April 21–24), shutting down the Piccadilly, Circle, and Waterloo & City lines. The union rejects the ‘voluntary’ 4-day week, citing a refusal to accept 36-hour shift compression without a real reduction in the working week.

• Palantir releases a 22-point summary of The Technological Republic, a programme for a ‘radically technocratic’ state. It marks the first time a major defence contractor has openly proposed replacing traditional democratic oversight with algorithmic targeting and data-fusion governance.

  ---

Chinese Lightning

Chinese smartphone producer Honor won first prize in the half marathon in Beijing on Sunday, with their record-beating athlete, Lightning. In a demonstration of Chinese technological capacity, several tech firms contributed to the second human-humanoid half marathon in Beijing to showcase and compete in robotics advancement. Last year’s race did not yield a single robot that could cross the finish line. This year, few didn’t, with Lightning, Honor’s winning machine, beating the human world record set this March by almost 7 minutes. Further to Honor’s win, humanoid robots have for the first time outperformed quadrupeds (robot dogs) at Unitree Robotics, one of China’s largest robotics firms.

The defeat of man by machine on level footing serves as an ideal symbolic representation of the leaps made in the last few years from robotics to AI to quantum computing, and in particular another leap for China, already outpacing the United States by a significant margin. Humanoid robotic output is completely dominated by China, responsible for 94% of production and 80% of global shipments.

China’s renewable energy output more than triples that of the US, with 3,399 TWh of production yoy, dominating in domestic output on top of a well-established saturation in the global renewables supply chain. According to the ASPI Critical Technology Tracker, an index covering national leadership in a range of technologies, China now leads in 66/74 of all total technologies in development, including quantum computing, defence, space, and energy, with the US retaining only a marginal lead in fields like biotech and LLMs.

Chinese technological advancement is not restricted to commercial and developmental output, also having a seismic and planned effect on the domestic labour market. While many in the West anxiously await the seemingly inevitable AI-induced unemployment shock, the CCP’s AI+ initiative, a vital component of the 14th and 15th Five-Year Plans, has seen nationwide efforts to encourage universal competency with New Quality Productive Forces (the economic planners’ category for a wide range of developments across AI, Quantum Computing, robotics, and renewables). Collaborative robotics (or, ‘Cobotics’) and other features of Chinese technological rollout in industries ranging from manufacturing to pharmaceuticals demonstrates a keen social awareness and active effort to see these technologies successfully integrated into the existing labour market, rather than the unregulated tendency of major Western firms to find ways for these technologies to simply replace human labour and shore up ‘profit’. The state and party’s overall leadership and guidance in the pace of technological output is leading to a model for labour automation that will soon be formidable.

It should be said that technological prowess has not entirely evaporated in the West, and indeed as discussed in last week’s INDEX, Europe and North America continue to lead in overall investment, speculation, and hope for the productivity to be unleashed by the full deployment of AI and AGI. Although China does possess, unbeknownst to many, a thriving space programme with its own space station (soon to be the only inhabited station in orbit after the ISS de-orbits in 2030), NASA’s recent trip around the Moon advises against being unappreciative of the continued dominance, at least in terms of capacity, of Western technology. But there is a decidedly different tone between the isolated men and women drifting in space as part of a programme looking to take bids for lunar commercial opportunities with the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin, and the eager and amused faces of Chinese worker-athletes watching on as their robots race past to exceed their capacity to run, and overcome their need to toil.

Fusion by 2028?

If Silicon Valley is to be believed, the AI furor engulfing American debt markets may be providing larger dividends faster than we expected. OpenAI, a company described as the largest loss-maker in history – set to lose $14bn this year alone and expecting $115bn in losses before they ever turn a profit – have sought to cover losses (and in part help independently power their data centres) by setting up nuclear energy R&D firm Helion, who made the claim this Sunday to be able to provide fusion power to Microsoft by 2028. This would be the world’s first direct energy transfer from fusion production for commercial use – however, as reported in the Financial Times, observers are highly sceptical of the likelihood of this timeline.

Helion specialises in a specific type of heat-induction generation rather than typical water-boiling generation that most nuclear power facilities use. It also uses Helium-3 rather than Tritium to achieve fusion. Helium-3 is aneutronic, which makes heat-induction far more efficient than steam power – up to 95 per cent efficiency – and means the level of damage caused by charged neutrons to the reactor itself is minimised, allowing it to run for longer with fewer repairs. The downside to Helium-3 is that it is incredibly rare, with most known quantities existing exclusively on the Moon, making the prospect of Helion generating at scale highly unlikely in the near-term. Helion has never demonstrated its capacity to generate efficient fusion energy. One of the main obstacles to fusion generation is efficiency, as typical fusion requires far greater energy to achieve than it releases. Whilst it has been proven possible by the US National Ignition Facility, Helion have yet to prove their own capability, let alone with the novel heat-induction method they propose. Helion has claimed that their lack of demonstrations is due to patent protection concerns, but observers in the Financial Times on Monday noted that the benefits of a successful demonstration would far outweigh the potential copycat risk.

The technology does not appear to be anywhere near completion, let alone being able to provide grid energy by 2028 as Helion has promised, a worrying prospect for the company which will face financial sanctions if they fail to live up to the commercial promises made to Microsoft. Less worrying when one considers that Microsoft is intimately tied up with OpenAI as its largest investor, and the capacity for Microsoft to commit to decarbonisation through Helion’s promises is an elegant regulatory solution. Microsoft wins whether or not Helion provides, and Helion will be propped up by Microsoft and OpenAI regardless. And here is the nature of Western R&D showing its mirror image to the logic of fictitious capital: It doesn’t matter whether objective material results are delivered, so long as the promise is to some extent feasible. Industrialists and scientists can kick the can of development a decade or two down the road, whilst still reaping the ‘rewards’ of meeting a fictitious deadline.

This attitude is coming to bite back at Western power; Artemis III, the successor mission to this year’s captivating manned orbit around the Moon, slated for next year, will involve two commercial experiments with both SpaceX and Blue Origin, to see which company, if any, will be able to deliver the spacecraft necessary to begin the US ambition of setting up a Moon base within the decade. This comes as the US government has pulled funding from NASA in order to increase the military budget, all while rapid inflation (in large part excited by US military action in the Middle East) has forced the agency to cancel its in-house lander programme and delay their overall timeline. NASA have also expressed doubts that either SpaceX or Blue Origin will be able to produce the technology needed within the established timeframe. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has been given special contractual funding by the government to manufacture a ‘competitive market’ in the hope that this will speed up production, but which again comes with no material guarantee and works more as an outsourcing trick than a legitimate solution.

Time is not on NASA’s side, with the CNSA, China’s space agency, hoping to land ‘taikonauts’ on the Moon by 2030 using tried and tested hardware. A delay to the Artemis programme by even a couple years, highly likely in aerospace development, moreso if neither SpaceX or Blue Origin deliver, could see the US lose the initiative in space completely. A Moon base is a vital component of Helion’s need to harvest Helium-3, and thus maintain US momentum in the fusion industry; the old methods of speculation and competition may be costing America the lunar supply chain of the coming decades.

Palantir is a Paper Tiger

Last Saturday, Palantir produced a 22-point summary of their 2025 ‘manifesto’ The Technological Republic by CEO Alex Karp and his firm’s legal counsel Nicholas W. Zamiska. While right-wing tech influence has been building in the US for some time, and the barriers between politics, silicon valley, and high finance have already blurred, this marks the first time a private firm embedded in Western state infrastructure has now openly declared a political programme with allusions to a semi-coherent political philosophical orientation.

The content of Alex Karp’s manifesto presents Palantir as if it were a ‘company of a new type’, a revolutionary force in American society iterating upon various theoretical and political threads left dangling over the last few centuries. The symbolic projection of power and obvious ambition of the document, however, betrays a more squalid reality for the firm; ultimately, the content of the 22-points signals less so a foundational vision for a new American Century, but the pretense of Palantir assuming an equivalent function to the CCP in the United States and its peripheral holdings.

The firm no doubt looks to Chinese Communists with a degree of envy regarding the full spectrum dominance that China’s socialist governance affords. However, Palantir fundamentally lacks the material base to satisfy this desire; Karp calls for a ‘Software-Defined State’ and universal national service which parades as sovereignty, but conceals a desperation of a fictitious dollar hegemon attempting to maintain a sense of historical control.

Of its 22-point summary, a few things leap out as noteworthy. Proposals 1, 4, 5, and 7 argue that Silicon Valley owes a ‘moral debt’ to the US government, a romantic fealty reminiscent of the arguments for industrial fascism in the 1930s; Proposals 21 and 22 explicitly reject notions of pluralism in assertion of a totalising Western supremacy, indeed the supremacy of the technological and military dominance afforded by a credit economy. Proposal 6, perhaps the most radical, calls for a Universal National Service, which would see the entire citizenry militarised and the burden of risk (the currency of a debt economy) spread across the populace.

Against fear-mongering about Palantir’s ‘fascistesque’ output, it’s worth noting that these allusions are themselves part of the firm’s brand ID and marketing strategy. To whatever extent Thiel, Karp, Mosley, etc. actually believe in NRx or fascist politics is hardly relevant; Palantir’s use of controversial allusions serves two primary purposes, the first being the cultivation of an appearance of a collective civilisational mission, something which the Chinese have and the Americans desperately want, and the second being to engender a perverse thrill in both their adherents and detractors. Palantir fascinates because it looks like it might be the ‘American Fascism’ liberal society has been attempting to ward off for almost twenty years now. The style, the approach, everything in Palantir is intended to seduce, and to that end all of their peacockish attitude, NRx blogger prose, and the allusions to class collaboration serve to conceal the fact that Palantir is a paper tiger, incapable by the basic fact that for America to even accomplish one tenth of China’s dirigistic capacity would necessitate such a profound overhaul of their system – one which, if attempted, would likely result in a civilisation-ending civil war, something which would undermine global supply chain stability and therefore not satisfy the balance sheets of Palantir or the Federal Government.

Without indulging too much on Cold War metaphors, this appears to mimic an old Soviet posture: a large-scale power relying on technological and military expenditure at the cost of domestic policy, utilising a culture of extreme surveillance and militarisation of the citizenry to maintain an ideological stranglehold over the state machinery. As workers strike and ‘friction’ builds in reaction to the incapacity of former logics to yield significant returns, the key stakeholders – in this instance manifest in outsourced military surveillance companies – are exposing the extent to which they are willing to maintain social disequilibrium, all in the name of ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’. The irony is that the Technological Republic is a proposal being made by a company entirely reliant on government contracts.

RMT vs. Labour Intensification

TfL tube drivers took to the picket line this week in response to proposals for a 4-day working week intended as a response to drivers’ demands for shorter working weeks earlier in the year. The RMT, who organised the action, argue that the proposal does not provide for a real reduction in the working day, but only intensifies the hours worked whilst reducing the weekly take-home. Indeed, weekly hours are not being reduced, only the number of days worked, posing a high fatigue risk for drivers opting into the 4-day trial. Furthermore, whilst TfL are proposing the 4-day week as an optional measure, the RMT have rightly identified a lack of guarantee that this will remain the case, raising suspicions that, if successful, their ‘4-day week’ will become standard labour practice from then on.

Strike action on the Underground is always immensely unpopular with Londoners, and is usually an easy target for the press to excite anti-union sentiment. Across social media calls have been made from the public for the full automation of London’s Underground network, not in any drive for greater efficiency or speed, but merely to take the network out of the union’s hands. However, this does not solve the problems raised by the RMT. The safety risks of 'Driver Only Operation' (DOO) are visible on the Thameslink and London Underground networks, and a further reduction in driving staff, coupled with a reduction in Transport Police presence, will render the tube one of the most dangerous places in the city.

The bottom line, however, is that automation cannot solve the issues endemic to the operations of these these networks under the present ownership and management structure. Despite nationalisation, the regulation of these companies will remain relatively unchanged, and operate on the exact same 'for-profit’ mechanism that is presently being pushed to its limit. The corporate push for labour intensification by way of staff reductions and shift compression is a symptom of rapidly declining profitability and the need to exert pressure on the labour component in order to maintain the capital component. Automation may temporarily relieve some of the pressure for these quangos, but the inexorable decline in profits – shown in last week’s Index to be constantly present – will continue to hit hard at the transport industry, with the result being a less safe and less efficient network, reliant on outsourcing and overwhelmed by delays (a familiar story, it would seem).

Palantir and Western governments will have you believe that we are in the midst of a new race – a space race, a weapons race, a technological race, what-have-you. They will have you believe that China is ‘fast catching up’ and we need not be afraid to use dirty tricks to keep our lead. The reality is that there are two completely different races taking place, much as the half marathon that took place in Beijing this week: a human one, and a robotic one. The West is losing both. As China takes the lead in the vast majority of technological publications and novel developments, Western governments look toward an aggressive, AI/defence/finance panacea. As China paves the way for legislative precedent in the integration of new technologies with the existing and future working class, Western governments punish the labour force to maintain fictional margins. The Chinese era is a present reality, and the question remains to when, not if, a Western Belovezha Accords will find their way onto the desk of the Oval Office.

Note: This interview was conducted on the 20th January, 2025.

L&L: Your book, Aeons Without History, first seemed to be coming out in late 2023, and then much like yourself appeared to vanish without a trace; also, like yourself, it seems to have taken a protracted detour to the East. What can you speak to, without breaking any confidentiality and what not, regarding the book and the development its taken since initial announcement, especially now that China has become such a locus for enthusiastic theoretical investigation?

V. Garton: The original plan for Aeons Without History developed at the end of 2021, at a time when an endless series of restrictions and retrenchments made it seem like the world might be plunging into a state of indefinite stagnation. This explains the projected title of the book: it was motivated by the need to account for a time in which it seemed like no time was really passing - in Hegel’s words a ‘repetition of the same majestic ruin’. Of course this feeling was enhanced by being stuck in Europe and specifically in Britain, where, shall we say, the sentiment hangs thicker than in most of the rest of the world.

The course of empirical events disrupted this original project along several vectors. First came my definitive break with academia. After a period of quiescence during the high pandemic, at the start of 2022 I joined a Singaporean-backed startup based on the concept of predictive social media, eventually - by the middle of the year - assuming oversight of its technical operations as CTO. This is about as different an environment from academia as you can possibly imagine - a place where competing demands for technical agility, rigorous leadership, and complete independence all of a sudden had been thrust into the centre of my life. This, as you might expect, derailed any plans I might have had to work on the book or any other public writing. Though the startup inevitably folded after about 18 months, I was able to parlay the crash course I’d received in engineering into my current posting as a senior software developer in the energy industry - no doubt a far more respectable vocation, in any case a more stable one.

So I resumed work on the book only at the turn of 2024 after a substantial gap, by which time the original project seemed far less relevant.

By that time I had accumulated (beginning during Covid) objectively a fairly enormous online social network in China. I was spending, and now continue to spend, much of my time during the day in conversations with dozens of friends and contacts all across the Chinese social spectrum, with foreign academics, a migrant worker in the suburbs of Shanghai, gaokao candidates in villages in Yunnan and Shanxi; on one occasion an afternoon in heated discussion with a top-level officer of one of the largest Chinese companies. My current job has also finally afforded me the leisure to spend a large part of my time in mainland China in person, travelling, observing, and talking - which I have of course exploited to the fullest extent.

On the other hand, and at the same time, both in social media and now in the energy sector I have had a front-row seat spectating the enormous successes of a clearly innovative and immensely dynamic Chinese industrial economy at a very high level.

Running through all of these encounters was the shattering disconnect between what was in front of my eyes and ears and the grim, repetitive drumbeat of tedious commentary by officially approved China commenters - those law professors, financiers, anthropologists and political actors whose profound ignorance of the West had already been clear to me in my prior life as a student of history of political thought and political economy but whose parochialism and intellectual pathologies could only now resolve into their monstrous full dimensions.

Recognising my obvious inability to ‘explain China’, or to pretend to make worthwhile commentary within the domain of Chinese philosophy itself, the drive to explain the obvious indigestibility of China to the Western mind in the context of the dominant importance of China in the 21st century has moved firmly to the centre of whatever intellectual project I can be said to have.

The second key change to the book project came at a philosophical level - in a happy coincidence with my evolving feelings on China - with my parallel reading of Kojève, who I now firmly believe is the most important intellectual of the last one hundred years and an unknown prophet of our current conjuncture, alongside Xunzi - the heterodox poet-scholar whose work at the junction of classical Confucianism and what is called ‘Legalism’ can be said to have birthed the Chinese empire. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that most of my free time over the last few years has been taken up in an eccentric combination of reading classical Chinese poetry and philosophy and intense study of Kojève’s enormous unfinished history of philosophy along with the Greek, Roman, and modern German thinkers it discusses. Now, where, for Hegel-Kojève, the millennial story of Western philosophy is the abolition of essence that culminates in a revolutionary terror against the concentration of all transcendence in the Kantian thing-in-itself, it struck me all of a sudden while reading Xunzi that the ruin of transcendence is where Chinese philosophy begins.

More serious Sinologists have already noted something like this at a macrohistorical level, that ‘Confucianism’ begins with a rebellion against the failure of the mandate of Heaven, understood as literally an astronomical phenomenon observed at the turning of the Zhou, to manifest in timely fashion on behalf of the prophet-king Confucius. Xunzi draws this out with exacting, dreadful rigour: the constellations may be fallen, he says in the Fu chapter of the Xunzi, time may be out of joint, but it is the responsibility of the Confucian scholar to call the entire cosmos to order. More than this, he draws elsewhere a radical distinction between the ‘Elegant Confucian’ (Ru), one who merely conforms to an inherited system of ritual, and the ‘Great Confucian’ who unites their absolutely self-sufficient will with Heaven not through mere conformity but by transforming reality itself. All of this, for Kojève, is already the very end of philosophy! So if China is the start of history, as Hegel argues, then why would history ever have left? Why is it not the end? This is certainly not a question that Hegel managed to answer, at least if his endless, spiralling attempts at histories of China are any indication.

I should leave any further explanation of all this to the book, but that is broadly where it is now: fundamentally, it is still a book about history and its unfolding or lack of it. But now the encounter with China that once formed only an incidental theme has utterly saturated it - an overwhelming, totally consuming encounter with China - and I am forced to account, reflexively, for that very fact.

L: If China is ‘misunderstood’ by the West, is the West ‘understood’ by China? There’s articles every now and then about an uptick in classics education and European philosophy and that kind of thing over there, but more to the point, in Kojève the end of history is something observed, catalogued, and indexed by this figure of the wise man. He’s the proof of the end of history. Does the figure exist in the Communist Party, in the President?

G: Kojève writes that in the universal and homogeneous state at the end of history only two people are completely and actually satisfied: the Head of State (‘Napoleon’), who acts, and the Sage who comprehends those actions (‘Hegel’ - thus ‘Revelation = Napoleon + Hegel’). But precisely because of the homogeneity of the state, where the Head of State is in fact a cipher of the state as a whole and their concrete person is interchangeable with any other citizen, every member participates in their actions, which are ‘étatique’, actions of the state as such. This is a useful framework for understanding the self-conceptualised role of the Chinese President/General Secretary. The universal state, refracting the limitless ‘vanity’ of ‘Napoleon’ and imposed as a field of force that suppresses and sublates the annihilating background threat of Terror left behind by the collapse of transcendence - in the end that state consumes and overcomes the Head of State’s human reality.

Xi Jinping, more than any other Communist Chinese leader, is a constructed image on precisely these lines: rather than a personality in his own right, he is a signifier that simply concentrates in one place the identity, the simulative capacity, and the embodied knowledge of the Communist Party as permanent conspiracy and as ‘institutional emperor’ - facing the South from the darkness, imposing its measure upon the world and transforming it. We can recall how Xi’s speeches make it seem as though he has fluent command of every science and has read every work of world literature ever written, which speaks precisely to your point - in any case Jiang Shigong argues on similar lines when he says that the Communist Party is the immortal body of the Chinese Head of State in the sense of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’. That total embodied knowledge is the ‘Sagely’ or Hegelian component of the universal state, though clearly I think the contemporary Chinese state is at the moment rather more Napoleonic than Hegelian. Anyway, it is certainly that process of observation and indexing that is the very core of the Communist Party’s activity, which is concretely embodied in its Head of State.

More generally, as Boris Groys remarks, every serious Communist leader must also at least present themselves as a philosopher, and Communist governance is precisely the realisation of the Platonic regime of the Sage. So it is unsurprising that, using the conceptual inventory of Marxism, the Chinese government has funnelled enormous energy into constructing and promoting a synthesis of Chinese and Western philosophy. This is why essentially all interesting philosophical work in China is explicitly aligned in one form or another with the Party, and equally why Chinese liberals who attempt (in fact unsuccessfully) to escape the discursive field of that system tend to end up with a rather weak, indeed self-mutilated grasp of the intellectual history and political economy of the West by comparison.

On the broader question of China’s understanding of the West - and humouring for a moment the concepts of ‘China understanding the West’ and ‘the West understanding China’ which are at one level obviously nonsensical - I think the median Chinese certainly has more knowledge of the West than the other way round, and I’ve been baffled by various attempts that I’ve seen to deny this. It is simply true that the average countryside student in Shanxi has a more sophisticated analysis of the West than the average tenured China expert in Brooklyn does of China. This is, at the very least, an obvious consequence of American cultural dominance - the existence of which it’s frankly puerile to deny, whether in support or defiance of it. But it is also, at a deeper level, a consequence of the deep, intellectually overwhelming trauma of the encounter with the West in China which does not yet have any general inverse counterpart in the West itself.

L: It’s almost a truism nowadays in certain parts of X (and online more generally), shared by both the successors of the old American Libertarian Right and ascendent elements amongst the Marxists / Post-Marxists, that the West is as much economically coordinated, determined, and planned as China is. I find it useful to refer to the old Marxist paradigm of consciousness, that ‘Communism’ in China is merely the conscious articulation of the West’s ‘Capitalism’. Taking into account your comprehension of China, can Western states reorient themselves, become economically and politically ‘conscious’ in this regard? What I’m asking is, how do Western political agents respond to China on a more practical, political level? What would it mean to ‘learn from China’ for those presently smothered by this rather oppressive, sentimental malaise seemingly everywhere in Europe, Britain, North America, etc?

G: Let me start with a tangential point - I have always found the phrase ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, which of course has the status of a meme in the West, to be a rather unfortunate translation of the original term 中国特色社会主义. This is because 特色 is far less marked, linguistically, than its rendering ‘with … characteristics’. We would probably not translate 陕西特色美食 as ‘cuisine with Shaanxi characteristics’ unless we were being droll. Something like ‘China’s particular socialism’ or even just ‘China’s socialism’ is more accurate to the implications of the original, that is, we are not talking about a mutation of the head of the noun phrase but rather a specification.

I mention this because the idea that the posthistorical Chinese system is ‘Chinese’ at the level of inherent essence is not correct. It is true that the Communist Party no longer seeks to evangelise its domestic practices in the way it once did under Mao - but it still strives to bend the arc of human development towards its own teleology in a more material fashion through its continued support of globalisation and its industrial policy. Similarly I don’t believe, in contrast perhaps to some Heideggerian analysis we’ve seen recently, that Chinese philosophy is valuable because it is Chinese or because it is different, but rather precisely because its object is the same, and its methods and deductions which are necessarily limited to the argumentative vector field in which human discourse unfolds are also ultimately the same in perhaps different sequence, which indeed makes all the difference. In other words the real difference of Chinese philosophy, viewed from the West, is the course of its development from and to the very grounds of its similarity. Kojève, of course, says that the function and reality of the universal and homogeneous state is the sublation of all particular differences, all Besonderheiten like nation and class and family. Therefore if we want to see what is, dimly, posthistorical in China we need to turn away from any supposed specifically and irreducibly Chinese content.

The idea that Chinese communism is the conscious rearticulation of Western capitalism is excellent I think. This is the goal of the Communist Party as regime: to replace the endlessly successful conspiracy of capital with its own, conscious, therefore philosophical conspiracy, which involves a process of ruthless dialectical identification and contradiction. If Western capital manifests a kind of socialism in more or less mute forms, in its self-constellation in the form of a Metacartel, its subordination to the credit pipework of the central bank, and so forth, in China this process is highly conscious, explicit, and accelerated - that is in effect the central conceit of China’s socialism.

It is hard to say what or how to learn from this exactly. I’ve had many Chinese friends tell me that Britain or the West in general needs its own Communist Party and its own revolution, but any success there is doubtless some way off despite their excitement at seeing videos of Trot demonstrators in Cambridge and the like. Moreover, it is in a sense not important, in the sense that whatever it is Westerners are doing is far less relevant than what happens to the subalterns of the international order - as Palestine has demonstrated - and in comparison to the enormous task of finally undoing the residue of essential reality that forces those contradictions to remain open. From a narrowly political perspective, my hunch is that simply copying the forms and conclusions of Chinese policy is unlikely to do anything good in the West. This ends up in the parody industrial policy that has emerged in the United States, which is obsessed with the mere act of spending enormous sums of money on things like semiconductor chips to placate the fixations of particular sectors of American public life: huge amounts of marketing, less in the way of concrete outcomes. Indeed America’s contribution to the epochal task of managing climate change, and in turn bootstrapping planetary human development as a whole, seems to have essentially collapsed - even as the Chinese energy sector attains escape velocity.

Rather than trying and failing to one-up China at its own ‘game’, which in any case reflects qualities of China’s particular status that will eventually fall away if it is successful - or, worse yet, simply standing athwart history and demanding that China stop - it is probably more productive to think through the role of Western countries in the future world order that is left behind by the Chinese industrial vortex. In fact, at a level of policy, there are some vague intimations in this direction in places like Spain, though they are very fragile. For our part as individuals I think we are best served by rejecting and even humiliating the paranoid-neurotic response to China that became common after 2019, and by learning to adopt the ironic attitude towards the substantiality of reality that Chinese people already have in abundance - by allowing ourselves a certain faculty of daydreaming which can more easily develop into the more serious task of generative simulation. As with ‘China’s socialism’, none of this is ‘essentially’ Chinese, although its presence in China has a civilisational magnitude. And it is then, and only then, that we can apply ourselves to the task of transforming what we have been given.

L: You referred to “certain sectors” of the American public regarding a desire for industrial renewal, however illusory the results. Since BlackRock’s departure from the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, Zuckerberg on Rogan, etc., a lot of the ‘commentators’ have been left quite confused, leftists and rightists both. A man like Alex Jones finds himself caught in bizarre knots defending Trump’s authenticity amidst the ‘de-wokeification’ and integration of Big Tech into MAGA. The apparently masculine turn amongst tech CEOs and asset managers could be as simple as the ideological gloss for a lite-Bonapartism (an attempt, at least), here for a brief stint to develop the necessary energy infrastructure required for further AI development, so all the fluff from the past decade or so gets wiped off for a while. But what do you make of this supposed ‘break’ in the American elite’s ideology and self-image?

G: I also find the rapid decomposition of American liberalism since the election fascinating - meaning the term in the narrow party-political sense. Certainly there is a sense in which Trump’s election victory, much larger than anticipated, has cemented Trumpism as a fixture in the American political landscape and forced the entire country to reorient itself around it. At the same time, the entire period since the epochal Trump–Biden debate has been one long debacle for the Democratic Party, which has sunk now to the worst approval ratings it has ever recorded. I suspect very much that the origins of this immense failure are more than simply bad tactics, though certainly many Democrat actors have proven to be extraordinarily inept tacticians. Perhaps its origins actually lie in the same roots that gave us the rotten fruit of the unlimited slaughter of Gaza and the grim, neurotic crusade against China - all those signature policies and ‘accomplishments’ of the Biden administration - namely the impulse to dress up a brutal, self-justifying claim to hegemony in a threadbare cloak of unlimited universalism.

The peculiarly noxious contradiction between the language of universalism and the enforcement of the claim to masterly status - ‘Yimbys for Harris’ sign-wavers with rainbow flags smirkingly justifying the slaughter of Palestinians all the way to the White House - has no doubt been too much to bear for many young Americans. On the other hand, from what we have seen, Trump’s geopolitics may be brutal, but he does not project this brutality into a cosmic religion as do Sullivan, Biden, and their cohort. In this sense, ironically, he appears friendlier to genuine universalism, less pagan in his outlook, because he sees the United States in more realistic terms as one imperium competing among others, as ‘the best country’ in contingent terms rather than an essential master-state.

That is all something of a digression, but it sets the stage for that process of decomposition you’ve highlighted. The New Year’s sun has dawned over the wreck of the Biden administration; torn by crashing intellectual contradictions and obvious political failures, the mainstream of American liberalism has lost any reason to persist - has in fact completely discredited the corrupt claim to masterliness on which it had come to depend. It makes good sense for anyone not already entirely captured by this clearly malfunctioning intellectual apparatus to hasten away from it. Now, the most natural way to do this is simply to enact a total inversion of norms, rather like the one imputed to Moses by Egyptian and Roman historians, and perhaps thereby to restore the masterliness without the hypocrisy. But that would be impossible without also inverting the social and economic order, that is, without an actual revolution.

The current transformation of American elite ideology may be read as something like an attempt to limit the catharsis, a partial, transformist attempt to forestall a transvaluation of all values by picking the lowest-hanging fruit - by dropping the ‘woke’ signifiers that had become entangled in this intellectually corrupt form of liberalism, most obviously, but also by making a show of devoting themselves to the transformation of reality by grand gestures of industrial policy, sometimes by an unabashed return to brainless, eschatological tech boosterism. I suspect the compact between Trump and the tech sector in particular will have difficulty weathering the despotic force of Trump’s untimely and unpredictable personality over the next years. Perhaps these elites will be forced to transform much further, and in quite different directions, in order to survive - not least also because they will need to cope with ever-escalating psychological China shock…

L: Going back to where we started, you briefly commented on Britain as the most severely afflicted by this stagnation condition the West as a whole suffers. Maybe the lack of a modern revolution, or rather the overwhelming ‘success’ of 1688, has left it crippled, immobile. This is especially ironic, given the complete embarrassment history has dealt to a certain kind of stadialist orthodox Marxism, that Britain had been destined to bear the standard of the future, and usher in the world to come which China, by all sincere accounts, is in fact pursuing. If this is all the prelude to our ‘century of humiliation’, then in a way might we expect an equivalent event to the Chinese on the other side?

G: I suppose this is a variant of the ‘Nairn–Anderson thesis’, that Britain is stagnant because it failed to fully overthrow feudalism. I find David Edgerton’s work on modern British political economy, which in some ways is directed against that thesis, fairly convincing. Edgerton has a very interesting argument: in effect, he says that the modern UK should be understood as another postcolonial (or at least postimperial) state that emerged from the rubble of the British Empire. The initial postcolonial order, which was the high tide of the welfare state, was in place for a few decades until Thatcher, and even more importantly New Labour, which brought in a kind of parodic revival of the imperial political economy. London was flung open to foreign investors and became an open market rather more like what it was in 1920 than in 1970, with the exception that now it was dominated by foreign capital making ventures in Britain rather than British capital making ventures overseas. What this means is that rather than just a vista of stagnation stretching on from 1688, we have something more time-tangled, a constant back and forth as these different tendencies - corresponding to different factions of capital and the British managerial elite - make themselves felt in their various directions. There is an unhealed wound that separates national Britain from the British Empire and holds them in contradiction.

Jiang Shigong - in my opinion the most serious political theoretician of contemporary China - somewhere describes the British Empire as the most perfect political order in human history. This isn’t because he’s been reading too much Douglas Murray: what he means is that the tumult of the 17th century crystallised into the most pure, stable, and constitutionally balanced vehicle of liberal capitalism that has ever existed. This formation was able to dominate the global market, and of course to subjugate, open, and destroy the millennial Chinese empire with nonchalant ease. For Jiang, even the French Revolution itself began as a frustrated reaction to the defeat France suffered in its trade war with the British Empire in the 18th century (a similar thesis, incidentally, has been developed at length by Michael Sonenscher). In that sense, the entire course of the permanent crisis of modern political thought begins not with the Revolution in France, but in London - and American independence, of course, was another consequence of the struggle between those two states.

For Jiang, the shared community of mankind which is the stated objective of China’s international policy constitutes a large-scale, global political order similar to the British Empire. In a sense, it would in fact recuperate the British Empire at a subsequent socialist stage of development: where the British Empire was the preeminent manifestation of liberal capitalism, whose shadow still hangs over the world, the shared community of mankind, or coming world-empire, that is, the universal and homogeneous state, would wholly manifest and balance the posthistorical configuration of political economy. Perhaps the shared community of mankind would then allow Britain to attain that ‘other side’: a redemption of empire in which the roles of master and slave have at last been overcome, an end to the contradiction between Britain’s national and imperial imaginaries.

For now, it is a cliché that Britain struggles to overcome the shadow of the British empire. If Jiang is to be believed, it shares that condition with China. Certainly within the UK now there are many ‘feudal’ holdovers, as anyone who’s investigated the pattern of landholding in London can tell you. But at the same time, all countries everywhere must deal with the dreams and nightmares of their own traditions. To some extent that is no bad thing, since that is the fuel of the engines of simulation that transform dreams into reality and back again - the material of the artificially intelligent universal state. Like I’ve said, we could certainly learn from China how to transform and play with our history.

Monday 13 – Friday 17 April, 2026

• Global profit rates are in terminal decline, a reality confirmed by new data from Sydney University. Post-pandemic recovery has flatlined into a downward trend in surplus value,

• Current hyperscaling is a capital trap. Up to 80 per cent of AI CapEx is tied to depreciative hardware maintenance (C/V) with negligible productivity yields.

• Miliband commits to Small Modular Reactors (SMR) which facilitate a fragmented, high-maintenance energy regime designed to appease credit markets.

• IEA declares Hormuz closure the ‘greatest disruption in history’, as Iran agrees to reopen the strait [then closes it again].

• Recent 93% Ofgem strike mandate signals the seizure of the state's regulatory centre, precisely as it attempts to license a new nuclear future.

• The landslide victory for Péter Magyar (138 seats) signals a debt-for-compliance swap intended to unlock €20bn in frozen EU credit at the cost of Hungarian sovereignty.

  ---

The New Physiocrats

Can Miliband’s Electrostate Work?

New data from Sydney University confirms that the post-2008 credit regime - conceived as an administrative guardrail - is hitting a thermodynamic wall. We are witnessing the exhaustion of profitability; the state is no longer cooling market pressures but attempting to floor-plan a reality where profit has ceased to be the primary engine of growth (see ‘On Credit’, LL 07/04/26). This is not to say that profit has disappeared entirely, but global economies are adjusting to an uncertain future accordingly.

A recent New Statesman profile from Will Lloyd confirms that Ed Miliband is in regular contact with economist Adam Tooze, and that Miliband’s intellectual allies describe America under Trump as “aligning itself with the petrostates,” as well as calling Nigel Farage a “Fifth Column” for America’s petroleum interests. The framing of an economic world conflict between petrostates and electrostates is directly taken from Tooze, used by Miliband’s circle as the conceptual vocabulary for understanding our present geopolitical moment. Ultimately the electrostate is – besides its environmentalist exterior – a means to reground domestic energy product in a more qualitatively sovereign and resilient material foundation, moving beyond the post-Bretton Woods petrodollar regime towards a more multilateral geopolitical-economic order.

Meanwhile, the efficacy of these developments in Britain seem to be slow going, with the ancillary logic of the petrodollar regime covertly shaping the nature of our ‘electrostate’ in construction. In the UK, Net Zero targets have developed a further iteration of rentierism. Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 is not primarily a decarbonisation strategy, nor primarily an energy security strategy, though it presents itself as both. Rather than climate sovereignty, the project serves more so to escape terminal industrial declines through the state-directed constitution of a new generation of underlying assets adequate to underpin the next cycle of credit expansion. Inverting 1990s state-led growth theories, the government has moved from being a catalyst for private expansion to being a nationaliser of the cost of the present.

Critics to Miliband’s right often compare CP30 to Chinese policy towards their own electrostate transition. China’s advanced integration of state planning, manufacturing scale, and technological development – irreducible to renewable infrastructure alone – make them the world’s archetypal electrostate, and therefore the only realistic available model for a figure like Miliband to emulate. China’s photovoltaic production capacity is now 4.5 times the entire rest of the world combined, despite immense Western efforts to compete between 2022 and 2024; what China demonstrates is that the degree to which a country is (or can be) an electrostate comes down to what level of economic and governmental rationality the state can deploy, as well as capacity to absorb the shocks of global energy supply crises without destabilising the institutions of the state.

The form of sovereign economy Miliband is attempting to construct represents a retreat to the natural monopoly of energy now that the frontier of industrial profit has closed. Treasury political economy appears to have regressed to a pre-industrial synthesis to address a post-industrial reality, the fundamental problem of profitability being too large an object to seriously address. In the 1700s the Physiocrats observed that the wealthy derived their produit net, or surplus, from control of the natural bounties of agriculture. In our period, the manner by which the treasury views energy demonstrates an equivalence with the formal properties of cyclical regularity and predictability that agriculture formerly held for the political economy of the 18th Century – albeit refracted through the logic of high finance.

Contracts for Difference (CfD) agreement guarantees a renewable energy generator a fixed strike price for electricity over twenty years regardless of market fluctuations, meaning a future income stream is capitalised at a discount rate to produce a present asset value which can serve as collateral for the state. The state, through the CfD, massages a baseline of predictability which serves as the material basis for the sustenance of the credit system – the bottom line is that even if Miliband wants to pursue the electrostate model to emulate China’s sovereign resilience, he would be unable to do so without also ending the present system of administered credit. The Chinese government is able to pursue the electrostate model to a profound level of efficacy due primarily to their infrastructure-led developmental model, wherein neither profit nor debt factor as decisive constraints to further development, whereas in Britain profit remains a reified signal determining creditworthiness. Unless that system is overturned, no amount of effort on Ed Miliband’s part will build lasting sovereignty in Britain.

The recent contract between Great British Energy - Nuclear (GBE-N) and Rolls-Royce SMR to deliver three Small Modular Reactor (SMR) units at Wylfa – backed by a £599mn National Wealth Fund facility – is a clear demonstration of treasury orthodoxy at work. By opting for modular units over large-scale, centralised gigawatt plants, the state avoids the transformative investment required for genuine long-term security. Instead, it introduces a fragmented energy regime of shorter-lived, depreciative hardware assets. These units require constant maintenance and are distributed only to firms with significant disposable credit, reinforcing the artificially 'competitive' energy markets that the green turn was meant to overcome.

A key argument made for SMRs center on energy queues. Industrial investment efforts are currently held back by carbon regulations and grid connection queues of up to 10 years; SMRs supposedly provide a rapid, government-sponsored bypass to wait-times for National Grid connection. The reality is, however, that SMR regulations are far denser than carbon regulations, requiring geological and radiological groundwork that puts industrialists in the position of nuclear operators. Despite government subsidies and the £2.6bn allocated in the 2025 Spending Review, SMRs remain more expensive than traditional grid solutions with higher long-term overheads. This strategy may appear impressive to speculators, but the fact is the UK government is downsizing national energy capacity to appease bondholders, pricing in permanent energy scarcity to maintain short-cycle assets and bond liquidity.

INDUSTRY

Sovereign AI and Virtual Unemployment

American capital is gambling its remaining surplus on an AI ‘miracle’, with investment hitting a record-breaking $2.25trn worldwide as of 2026. Yet up to 80 per cent of expenditure is still being burnt on maintaining hardware that offers zero productivity in physical supply chains. This fuels a post-industrial unemployment trap, where displaced labour is absorbed into socially unnecessary work to justify consumption, further draining the net social surplus.

The UK is applying the same physiocratic logic to its own burgeoning AI market. Science Secretary Liz Kendall’s ‘Sovereign AI’ – a £500mn state-backed venture facility announced on Thursday - intends to utilise the state’s monopoly on computing power to anchor developers to the national growth agenda. But ‘AI sovereignty’ is a lagging indicator. As the IMF slashes UK growth expectations further than any G7 peer this week, Britain is merely jumping onto a pilgrim’s bandwagon just as the global surplus that funded it begins to evaporate.

LOGISTICS

“The Largest Energy Supply Disruption in History”

Friday saw the end to what the International Energy Agency (IEA) officially declared the largest oil supply disruption in history, exceeding the 1970s crisis; Saturday saw it potentially begin again.

From the start of the closure to Friday 17 April, this has amounted to a 10.1mn barrel per day decline in global supply, with wholesale gas prices jumping 75% since 28 February. Brent crude this month sat at $112 before Tehran and Washington came to their brief agreement to keep the waterway open prompted by of the 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon.

The UK is projected to have lost about 440mn barrels in supply for April alone, with European stockpiles notoriously unprepared for a crisis of this magnitude, and putting extreme pressure on EU commitments to continued sanctions on Russian energy imports. Reeves’ securonomics agenda is being pushed to its limit by an increasingly unstable global economy.

LABOUR

Red Tape on the Picket Line

On Monday, PCS members at Ofgem renewed their strike mandate with a 93 per cent 'Yes' vote. This follows from strike action taken in mid-2025 over pay security against inflation, which saw workers undertake targeted paralysis action to severely frustrate the regulator's agendas.

Last year's strikes were targeted to hit offices during the quarterly gas price cap announcement, causing significant delays to publication for key documents related to energy policy and leading to a data fog in the market. They also successfully increased union density at Ofgem by 150 members in a single month, leading to this week's mandate increase of 7.77 percentage points, a number high enough to give the union the power for a 10-day notice ‘lightning strike.’

This comes at a particularly vulnerable time for Miliband’s DESNZ as lengthy paperwork awaits the implementation of new SMR contracts and market frameworks for the UKAEA fusion roadmap, both announced this week, on top of increasingly volatile oil prices that require hair-trigger government responses to protect industry and consumers.

Emboldened by the Employment Rights Act 2025, which allowed the extension of strike mandates to 12 months and removed minimum service requirements, the nature of the government’s social-democratic-degrowth efforts remain evidently paradoxical and unresolved.

GEOPOLITICS

The Fall of Actually-Existing Postliberalism

Sunday's Hungarian election results brought back a landslide victory for Peter Magyar, winning a two-thirds supermajority at 77.8 per cent turnout. As JD Vance's desperate attempt to campaign for the outgoing Prime Minister during his visit to the country demonstrated, this victory points to something of a formal closure of the illiberal moment in Europe.

Orban's Fidesz has long played the thorn in Europe's side, vetoing several large-scale funding initiatives for Ukraine in its war with Russia, and playing both Russia and the EU off one another, a strategic posture which a large section of the western right – including in the Trump administration – regarded as a pragmatic, ‘postliberal’ formula for geopolitical engagement. This strategy has not been paying any dividends in recent years, however, with average wages in Hungary the third-lowest in the EU and prices suffering the highest levels of inflation post-COVID in Eastern Europe, in large part a result of endemic post-communist reliance on foreign investment.

Magyar's victory signals the start of a new geopolitical fiscal regime for Hungary, with hopes that relaxing windfall taxes on banks and removing vetoes on EU funding for Ukraine will unlock the roughly €20bn in support grants and loans that have been frozen in Brussels (amounting to roughly 10 per cent of the national GDP).

Magyar has made a great many contradictory manifesto pledges, however, with promises of lowering taxes, investing $1.5bn in state infrastructure, and cutting the deficit, all while maintaining a ‘pragmatic’ relationship with both Russia and the EU. This begs the question as to whether Magyar – indebted to a Fidesz pedigree himself – represents a break in continuity at all, or just a shift in emphasis of the Fideszian post-Communist political baseline of the Hungarian political class. To what extent Hungarian sovereignty can survive the tumults of contemporary Europe is yet to be seen, but Western capital will certainly be expecting a much simpler route into the country’s national assets than before.

Despite the fall of one ‘sovereigntist’ leader, the spectre of sovereignty remains; as global profit rates continue to fall, the anxious desire for greater national control against volatility is shaking continental markets. The British government is banking on a neo-physiocratic regime, wherein the state no longer manages growth but merely rations declining profits to protect the solvency of credit markets. From Miliband’s SMR contracts to Kendall’s ‘Sovereign AI’, ‘sovereignty’ is being fought for under a single strategy: the nationalisation of risk plus the renting out utility.

Where the AI ‘miracle’ offers a $2trn depreciative sink for excess capital, the material reality remains dictated by the physical. The example set in the Strait of Hormuz and the strike mandate mustered at Ofgem both represent a sovereignty decided by the exception, by the power to withdraw from and, if needed, stop the global machinery. While Hungary appears to trade autonomy for EU credit, and the UK tries to leverage that credit for itself, the class struggle for true sovereignty carries on.

When this week’s edition of the Weekly Worker landed on my doorstep, I had for the first time in some months a sense of profound feeling for the collective body of humanity: in front of me was a full-page image of earth-set, this once-in-a-hundred-generations event witnessed by the Artemis II crew on April 6th, 2026, during their sling-shot mission around the moon. This photograph, a profound representation of the advancement of the species, the refinement of human mastery over nature, was accompanied by three words, white text set upon black void: ‘Back to reality’.

At long last, I thought, some serious engagement from a ‘proper’ Marxist journal, a vindication on the continuity of human accomplishment and progress, ‘reality’ meaning the unleashing of collective human potential, the whole of the world raising itself from the doldrums of post-Apollo mediocrity and blasting open the contradiction between the possible and the real in a limit-test of contemporary relations of production, revealing the living proof of a human future to come in a state of profoundly repressed, yet ultimately unstoppable, construction. Imagine, then, my disappointment when I turn to the article and read:

“Artemis II and the new space race do not represent a great leap in human progress, argues Paul Demarty. Instead, what we have is a criminal refusal to take responsibility for the dire conditions here on Earth” (my emphasis).

The article begins with a brief hand-wave about Artemis being a “welcome distraction” from the Iran War, which reads as if Demarty is insinuating that a space mission years in the making was actually, maybe, in part, some kind of a ploy to get people to stop caring about the US bombing Iran for maybe two days. Demarty’s apparently substantive criticisms begin with direct comparison between Artemis and Apollo meant to reveal Artemis’ profound shortcomings while also Critically Criticising the exalted status Apollo has in the popular imaginary.

Demarty states that the primary objective of Artemis is “to recapture the optimism of the Apollo programme and its successes,” going on to suggest Trump’s ego as an inciting factor, that “Trump is a man who likes to put a shiny item on his CV.” Nevermind that this statement coming less than two paragraphs after a claim that the program was only “just about tolerated by the cost-cutting Trump 2.0 regime.”

Artemis is, according to Demarty, “from a strictly scientific point of view… worthless”, a claim he attempts to back up by reference to previous research into the effects of zero-gravity on the human body, that further research is “redundant,” and so on; however its difficult to see how his very specific criteria for ‘worth’ passes inspection: the article has no reference to or engagement with the possibilities for gathering deep-space radiation exposure data, lunar surface resource assessments, speculative development of long-duration life support systems, or any of the other fruitful research benefits Artemis very obviously facilitates. Addressing Apollo, Demarty claims it was, first and foremost, a “grand-nation building project, using the cutting edge of rocketry, computer engineering and aeronautics to go, as the Star trek slogan would later have it, where no man has gone before,” followed by a pompous derision of the whole enterprise as being “very American.”

Demarty is, ostensibly, a Marxist in good standing, one that the CPGB-PCC believes adequately forwards what a good Marxist line on space exploration ought to be, so much so that it takes pride of place as the cover article on this week’s edition of their paper. That this supposedly Marxist position appears more like a relitigation of Gil Scott Heron’s Whitey On The Moon, meekly asking why public money was spent on space rather than ‘welfare’ or ‘housing’, is disappointing, especially when coming from from the otherwise rather consistent and considered Weekly Worker. When faced with projects which bind together the scientific, productive, technical, logistical, political, and geopolitical threads undergirding the totality of our present social/economic order, rather than this type of miserly welfarist ‘interrogation’, should not the question be “does this investment generate qualitative transformations in the productive forces of the entire human race?” In the case of Apollo, that “very American” “costly display”, absolutely and unreservedly did.

The Apollo 11 guidance computer (AGC) serves as the clearest demonstration of this basic point, a piece of technology Demarty affords no more than one sentence to: “The Apollo 11 guidance computer, a justly legendary technical accomplishment, would be hard-pushed to power a modern television remote, never mind a smartphone.” He is of course correct, but what he fails to mention is that had it not been for the AGC, we would not have contemporary television remotes, or smartphones, or laptops, or half of the amenities and technologies which make up the fundamental infrastructure of our present existence (this rather obvious detail might potentially be important for a Marxist if they’re serious about the economic history they’re engaging in, especially given the terms of Demarty’s argument, that an attempted repetition of the Apollo event on a higher scale “[does] not represent a great leap in human progress.”)

Less than two years into the design process for the AGC the engineers developing it realised that transistors, which had served as the basic technical infrastructure for approximately all circuitry up to that point, were materially insufficient to provide the necessary computing power to accommodate the strict parameters of the lunar mission. In order to overcome this, the relatively novel integrated circuit (chip) was used instead; the AGC thus became the model for all subsequent computers, and iterations thereon, which came after it. By 1963 Apollo was consuming 60% of total US integrated circuit production, accelerating demand, renegotiating domestic supply chains, and leading to a rise in global attention on semiconductor development, therefore to the foundation of the semiconductor industry which now undergirds humanity’s collective existence. Had it not been for the Apollo program, necessitating as it did a radical active intervention by the American state, the rapid technical improvement of integrated circuit technology (attested to directly by Apollo engineers) would have slowed down development of the technology by roughly ten years. In short, the accelerated development and standardisation of production, alongside validating the commercial viability of a hitherto relatively niche technology, all for the ends of a ‘wasteful’ leap into the void, built the actual foundations of our present reality. Demarty goes on to talk about Elon Musk later in the article: that the power and wealth of Silicon Valley is a direct, traceable result of Apollo’s pressure on the semiconductor industry in the 1960s, seems not to factor into his analysis of Elon Musk, or any of the other politically decisive billionaires whose wealth sprung from the post-Apollo tech industry.

Given the constant capital developed during the program and that Apollo's investment rose the rate of surplus value outside the existing reproduction circuit, it is beyond self-evident that “costly displays” such as Apollo are themselves a tremendous motive force for the development of the productive forces and, in their capacity to marshall the supposedly capitalist state to serve interests beyond immediate capital returns, such programs engender the partial suspension of the artifice of capitalism itself, revealing actual material possibility from beneath the inverted frame of social necessity. Through the cultivation of a qualitatively new productive sector in semiconductor manufacturing and, subsequently, the entire information-technology complex, Apollo’s contribution to a rise in the productive power of the social totality (relative to its reproductive costs across subsequent decades) demonstrates in crystal clarity the characteristic emergence of general intellect, the determination of generalised, objectified knowledge over the basic circuit of accumulation.

That the M - C - M’ circuit persists in some form or another does not negate the fact that, for Apollo, its law was overridden, subordinated to an abstract social logic unassailable by a legalistic comprehension of political economy. Operating at the absolute limit of technical-scientific possibility, the Apollo program generated such a profound forward development in the whole productive forces, engendering a diffusion of that technical knowledge throughout the entire American industrial base and, given the program's fundamental reliance on / development of global supply chains of the period, this diffusion undertook a global character, raising and developing the productive, scientific, and technical capacity of the human race in general.

Granted, Artemis is (in its present phase) not the Apollo mission, and thus occupies a far less fundamental position in our present popular imaginary. But to state Artemis is just a “faltering attempt” to recreate Apollo immediately falls apart when you look at the intended scope of Artemis, the permanent moon bases and manned trips to Mars so derided by Demarty in his article. Artemis will, if it is allowed to proceed, necessarily facilitate a fundamental acceleration of development, a rise in the productive power of the social totality which will – if allowed to progress towards its intended ambition – usher in so profound a revolution in the forces of production, confirming without question the possibility for precisely the kind of revolution in the relations of production Demarty pins his hopes on towards the end of the article.

Men like Demarty would rather see us move deckchairs, redistribute already existing money for poor people, rather than build an economic foundation upon which everyone’s living standards will be raised. Kicking the can down the road, he argues that “Perhaps, when every belly is reliably fed on our own planet and nuclear arsenals are no more than an anxious memory, we can put a few brave souls in a tin can and launch them towards the moon or Mars. It would be, for world communism, just what it is for capitalist society today - a flex, a ‘because we can’ move. Sometimes that is reason enough.” While I’m at risk of repeating myself here, that he considers one of the most profound potential transformations in the productive basis of the human race as pertaining only to symbolic value, and nothing more, is such a profoundly disappointing thing to read from a Marxist.

Demarty sums up: “Under present conditions, however, one can only deplore the waste and hubris. Artemis II is a flight from Earth, but also a flight from the capitalist world’s bad conscience.” Two minor corrections, and we’ll leave it there for now: 1) Without ‘waste and hubris’ there can be no end to ‘present conditions’; 2) The ‘flight from Earth’ is, more precisely, the flight from capitalism. Developing cislunar infrastructure, gathering deep-space radiation data necessary for subsequent crewed missions beyond Earth orbit, developing reusable heavy-lift architecture; all the supply chain reorganisations necessary to facilitate the project, all the diplomatic negotiations which would allow necessary materials trade, the energy output required, and so on and so forth… whether all of this genuinely contributes a meaningful general intellect investment is a serious debate which ought to be had, but as it stands Demarty and the Weekly Worker didn't even consider that it might be. In any case, I would go so far as to say that without Artemis and without even more money and resource pumped into space programs – disgusting amounts of money, money at the expense of welfare bills, money that could feed a city for ten or more years – that the horizon of arrival at a higher form of civilisation becomes increasingly distant. In that case it’s infinitely more barbaric to raise someone’s dole allowance by 15%, build a few shoebox council flats, all the while consigning the human race to another century of mediocrity, hunger, and death.

(Note: This is a supplementary note to our previous article)

According to the Labour Theory of Value, profit obscures surplus value by spreading the apparent source of value across the total capital advanced rather than identifying it exclusively in variable capital, this mystification itself being a fundamental condition emergent to capitalist relations of production. The displacement of profit by credit, in the classical Marxist framework, would represent a change in form or an iterative development of an already unreliable surface signal, with the credit system extending and intensifying a mystification already constitutive of capital's self-presentation. However, rather than taking the simple one-sided interpretation of administered credit as mere iteration, the displacement of profit by credit as the dominant allocative signal represents both a form of the same fundamental indeterminacy latent to capital's relationship to its own productive basis, and at the same time a qualitative transformation at the level of the social totality, revealed acutely in the transformation of the content of the wage-form discussed in the article.

(Before proceeding, it’s useful to cover some familiar ground. Please bear with as we get that out of the way)

In Marx's formulation from Capital Vol. III, the rate of profit is

p' = S/(C+V)

where S is the mass of surplus value, C is constant capital, and V is variable capital. The rate of surplus value is defined as

S' = S/V

being the ratio of the mass of surplus value S to variable capital V, from which S = S'V follows as a direct rearrangement, so that p' can also be expressed as

p' = S'/(C/V + 1)

As capitalist development proceeds, the organic composition of capital C/V rises. More machinery and raw materials are deployed relative to living labour, because this is how individual capitalists gain competitive advantages. But since only living labour generates surplus value, a rising C/V means that surplus value grows more slowly than total capital advanced C+V, and given that surplus value can only be accounted for at the aggregate level, if the rate of exploitation remains constant the rate of profit must fall, and fall in general, at the level of the social totality.

The problem lies in the fact that the same technological advance that raises C/V also raises productivity, which means it necessarily also affects S'. When a capitalist introduces labour-saving machinery, the productivity of the remaining workers rises, potentially allowing them (in formal terms) to ‘produce more surplus value’ per unit of time. The question then becomes: does rising productivity raise S' fast enough to compensate for rising C/V, or does C/V always ‘win out’?

A rising C/V that represents investment in productive constant capital, machinery and science that expands the productive powers of labour, will necessarily manifest differently at the systemic level from a rising C/V that represents investment in socially wasteful expenditure, speculation, and capitalist consumption. For Marx, the categorical identity of a particular object is not intrinsic to the object and is instead determined by the social totality. If the value-category of any particular object within the productive process is only determinable from the standpoint of totality then, for instance, firm-level accounting cannot establish whether its product represents genuine surplus or mere simple reproduction. At the level of the firm, the capitalist only receives redistributed shares of aggregate surplus value.

In the classical schema, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall operates against countervailing tendencies, meaning that the outcome at any historical moment is dependent upon the balance of these various tendential forces. However, this schema as presented leaves political economy without a determinate measure of productive advance, something Marx identifies but doesn’t work to resolve into a single formula, being beyond the scope of Capital as a project. The question of what the measure would be is therefore left an open question, although one which Marx does provide the outline for throughout his work.

The framework of a solution is postulated in the Grundrisse machines fragment that, by the unfolding of material development itself, production “calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent” that the “development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production,” with objectified knowledge itself taking a decisive significance over and above labour time spent. The measure of productive advance at higher qualitative levels of development is then the relationship between the degree of scientific-technological capacity in relation to the expansion of social reproductive wealth across successive epochs, wherein “the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself” (we can map this development within the history of the capitalist mode of production in quantitative terms according to whether a given increment of C generates a proportionate or more-than-proportionate expansion of S' sufficient for expanded reproduction, over time and at the level of the social aggregate, achieving higher and higher states of the objectification of knowledge and the technical extension of the intellect towards an eventual qualitative productive shift which renders the value-categories C and S' obsolete. This formulation provides the framework for a transitional economic program, something which utilises categories of the value-form in recognition of their transient, inessential character at higher qualitative phases of development).

On one level, the credit system can be seen to merely manage, absorb, and redistribute the social product generated by rising productivity in a way that prevents the ballooning of socially unnecessary labour from becoming actual unemployment, at the cost of directing an increasing proportion of social labour toward activities that do not contribute to the net social surplus available for expanded reproduction. At the same time, in directly sustaining non-value-generating enterprises, the credit system prevents a resolution through the conversion of socially unnecessary labour time into leisure time. The credit system is therefore both the management of a tendency generated elsewhere and also a determinate mechanism that gives that tendency a definite and reproducible form.

Whether contemporary intellectual labour which does not presently or tangibly contribute to expanded reproduction may nonetheless, in increasing the cognitive capacity of labour over time, contribute to the further cultivation of expanded reproduction in future epochs. This is, of course, not a question that can be settled from the standpoint of any single productive period. The general intellect accumulates across generations, the contribution of a given epoch's intellectual labour to the productive powers of subsequent epochs is not measurable in the period of its inception or empirical development. This is structurally analogous to the temporal extension of the credit relation, in which anticipated future valorisation underwrites present investment; further than this superficial equivalence, it is itself the more fundamental form, of which credit is an institutional approximation operating within the inverted logic of capital. Where credit anticipates valorisation within the existing circuit, the general intellect develops the cognitive and scientific conditions for qualitatively new forms that exceed existing circuits altogether. The temporal horizon of genuine productive advance is thus the arc of social-scientific development, across which the general intellect constitutes itself, the foundational constitutive logic for the vector of socialisation; the revelation of a conscious, associative mode of production from its unconscious, pseudo-competitive capitalist form.

Reflections on administered capital & the global supply chain

1. The Illusion of Working Class Diminution

For contemporary Marxists in the west, the decades-long process of de-skilling, compartmentalisation, complexification, and financialisation of the labour process has, by most accounts, produced profound diminutive effects upon labour power. Such a seismic transformation as has been experienced over the last fifty-or-so years has cultivated two major threads of assumption when analysing the working class in this state: that the worker has become an unviable political category, or that they remain viable only beyond the horizon of local relations of production; in the first instance something we can broadly lump in with the partisans of critical theory and allied disciplines, in the second the catch-all conception of ‘Third Worldism’.

In either case, the class relation appears suspended. In such dire circumstances for the labour movement, the capitalist class would have provably won out. Marxism must now be definitively repudiated as a relevant form of analysis or activity, subordinated to one among many theoretical postures, a formal abstract relation in a horizontal critical-analytical schema.

There remain some oppositional Marxists who hold to ‘traditional’ presumptions, engaging in a so-called ‘class reductionism’ which privileges the contemporary persistence of an impoverished wage-earning strata (over and above other abstract forms) as evidence of the validity of the ‘classical’ conception of Marxism. This classical Marxism, however, covertly concedes to their enemy, analysing the proletariat only in terms of a superficial relationship, that being their wage labour plus their impoverishment. Needless to say, wage labour + impoverishment alone does not suffice as the essential reality of the proletariat, at least by the criteria established by Marx. These characteristics hold no essential bearing on the quality of the work performed by the wage-earner, nor the quality of the wage, as in the actual content of pay packet, for example. A significant transformation in this content is vital to understanding what our modern working class actually is, divorced from both the relativism of the academics and the reductionism of the traditionalists. In the contemporary world, the wage is not merely conditioned by the relations of production, but the credit relation; the wage flows immediately into debt servicing, rent, and financialised consumption in a way that is qualitatively different to the earlier ‘classical’ form, wherein the wage accounted for the exploited share of a worker’s productive value. Even if the contemporary sum of the wage is proportional, or even identical, to that of the ‘classical’ wage (with regard to purchasing power, etc.), that holds no bearing on the qualitative distinction at the essential level between today’s and yesterday’s wage-form. The wage comes pre-spent by a financial machinery to which the worker is not only subservient, but intractably enmeshed.

In order to reinvest Marxism with some vitality for our present situation, the actual site of production must be located against the presumption that it has simply disappeared or been relocated abroad. Understanding where to locate the working class today requires the location of where productivity is.

2. Credit

For Marx, discrete formal objects and empirical relations only afford a partial view of the actual nature of production, necessitating a process of abstraction, that the common-sensical (positivist) schema of the abstract being a property of the concrete is a faulty, inverse orientation: ‘the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete.’ (Capital Vol. I, Value-Form Appendix). If the point of abstraction in Marxism is, broadly speaking, to arrive at the general features which give rise to capital, labour, etc., and also accepting that there has been some fundamental alteration in the underlying reality of the wage-form, then we are compelled to call into question the inherited, formal conceptions of capitalism’s essential-reality as purported by classical Marxism. From this initial suspicion, to then locate and understand what abstract form gives rise to relations of production in our period.

As we have discussed with regard to the modern wage form, the continued assumption of profit as the key driver of production has become fundamentally suspect. Rather, credit, which is the measure of anticipated return on investment, circulating through central banks and ‘universal owner’ firms (Metacartel) have taken a determinate position in the driving force of production. We see, for instance, how BlackRock and Vanguard, determinate owners in the system of production, have shifted from metrics of actual quarterly profit to ‘Sustainability’ and ‘ESG’ scores in order to determine creditworthiness, rather than profitability. As Marx abstracted from the apparent diversity of commodity exchange to arrive at abstract labour, the same procedure applied to contemporary capital arrives at the structural primacy of administered credit, with profit reduced to one input or signal among many in the assessment of creditworthiness.

3. The Temporal Restructuring of Capital

The essential movement of capital as outlined by Marx is M – C – M’ (where M = Money; C = Commodity; M’ = More Money), wherein the increment (surplus value) determines the circuit. Profit, being the phenomenal form of surplus value, formally signals that the circuit has been completed, that living labour has been set to work, value produced, and the surplus extracted in the process of commodity exchange.

From this assessment, outlined in Capital, classical Marxism presupposes that for the last century or more nothing has essentially deviated in this schema, that profit remains the tangible driver of capital, with credit functioning as a formally subordinate but materially necessary lubricant for accumulation at scale. In spite of this assumption, no attention is paid to the possibility that the temporal structure of the M – C – M’ circuit may be fundamentally extended, and that by such a radical extension would necessarily undergo a qualitatively reconstitution.

Credit in its classical type functions simply to anticipate surplus value, to allow production to proceed before the actual process of valorisation (the transition from C to M’) is complete. In prior periods this anticipation was relatively short, typically seasonal and tied to the physical process of production, with the bill of exchange generally referring to actual commodity shipments. (Capital Vol. III, Chapter 25).

What is decisive in our period is that this process of anticipation has become so radically extended that the connection between any given credit instrument and surplus value production has become, from the standpoint of the capitalist, functionally indeterminate. Derivatives, collateralised debt obligations, credit default swaps, etc., today function as distributions of compounding, nesting chains of claims on claims of future surplus value or the volatility of those claims (risk) rather than proximate claims on actual surplus value. Credit ratings, yield spreads, and the cost of borrowing have assumed an allocative signal function. Capital flows not determinately to where profit is being made but to where ‘creditworthiness’ is identified; in other words, a given firm can remain unprofitable for years, and yet attract enormous capital inflows if its credit conditions are deemed favourable.

Conditions of favourability are themselves not by necessity determined by profitability or tangible prospects of future valorisation but instead to broader social determinations beyond classical assumptions of creditworthiness. For instance, as in the National Security and Investment Act 2021, a given firm’s importance to national security objectives in regards to supply chain maintenance holds immense determination over basic creditworthiness in profitability-terms: commitments to national security, alongside aforementioned ‘Sustainability’ targets and so forth, demonstrate that the reproduction of society itself takes precedence over and above the apparent foundations of said society in regards to its self-conception as being properly ‘capitalist’.

As the joint-stock company was for Marx ‘the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself’, the socially-determined credit system is the abolition of the market allocation of capital within the market form. Credit, circulating through nominally market institutions wherein its allocation has been determined by explicitly social criteria, administered by state institutions on the basis of societal reproduction rather than profitability, is itself ‘a self-dissolving contradiction’, still incubating as a ‘mere phase of transition’ wherein a mode of production qualitatively distinct from capitalism takes form. See the bailout culture that has emerged since 2008, such that we are rife with firms that are too big to fail dictated not by the whims of the market, but by the requirements of the state.

In much the same way that the British state is still a monarchy while feudalism no longer serves as its undergirding economic ground, ‘capitalism’ – as understood both by its advocates and by classical Marxists – is no longer a useful or realistic descriptor for the contemporary mode of production. For classical Marxism, it’s considered a scandal to entertain the proposition that profit has been dethroned in the logic of capital, subordinate to the lesser position of an abstract signal for the sake of credit issuance. Despite its scandal, a realistic inquiry cannot help but deliver the critic to such a conclusion.

4. The Redistribution of Labour Power

Marxists (all variants) agree that abstract, undifferentiated labour must necessarily still exist, but that the various concrete forms of abstract labour, their determinate import, have changed. In accepting Marx’s treatment of abstract labour while keeping in focus the numerous compounding revolutions in the forces and relations of production since the writing of Capital, the fundamental contradiction between our tremendously increased technological potential for productivity and our actual output per worker arises as a (perhaps the) fundamental tension at the heart of the contemporary order.

The mechanism of this stagnation is the credit system itself. By sustaining non-value-generating firms and sectors, administered credit has given rise to a vast labour force whose wage is underwritten by the financial apparatus rather than by any tangible productive output. Human energy, value-generating labour, has concentrated near-totally into the shrinking but irreducible core of supply chain logistics, a concentration coterminal to the ballooning of socially unnecessary labour time. While our technological capacity should allow for a radical reduction in the working day, the credit superstructure requires constant consumption-driving output. It prioritises the survival of the debt-loop over the physical investments – such as, for instance, reducing energy costs – that might serve to increase overall productivity in real terms.

By this, the class struggle in Britain cannot be said to have actually diminished in actuality, that it qualitatively rages as it always has done since the inception of industrial modernity, since the first tools were downed. The success of class struggle in any period can’t be reduced to the quantity of workers or the quantity of strikes; socialists can only locate the ground of political development, the criteria and veracity of their work, through interrogating the quality of labour and therefore the quality of a strike, from there tracing by way of concrete-abstraction the real movement for the realisation of socialism. Notions of anti-imperialism, internationalism, and anti-fascism – all iterative developments upon the core insights of Marx, suspended as they are in formal traditionalism – take on a concrete and decisive character today if drawn from the direct operative experience of organised labour embedded in organising, operating, and maintaining the global supply chain.

5. The Generalised Supply Chain Strike

Whereas one might expect otherwise, given the generally atrophied level of Communist and Marxist organisation in Britain, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) likely has the highest density of Marxists within the commanding heights of their organisation, and a relatively high (and growing) density of Marxist rank-and-file. Italian logistics workers also claim relatively high militancy and Marxist density through the CGIL, as do their French and Spanish counterparts (see the development of logistic union blockades in Italy, the French CGT-Transports and SUD-PTT vanguard of the interprofessional strikes of 2019 & 2023, and the Spanish Platform trucker strikes of 2022, of course on top of the 2022 and 2023 RMT strikes in the UK). The form of labour and the formal ‘industrial unionist’ aspirations of these unions (the RMT in particular) afford a degree of militancy which is otherwise intangible or inopportune for organised labour in other key industries. Communist consciousness is still determined in a profound way by a direct, tactile relationship to value generation.

At present, Marxism typically serves the function within these unions as a formal cultural traditionalism, permitting workers in the here-and-now to interface with and identify in past struggles, with the wider socialist/communist project, and so on. There is then the potential for a rectification of this tradition into operative method, realising the concrete identity between Marxism and organised labour over the ephemeral, abstract, and mythic association which presently renders organised supply chain labour at the same time culturally enriched while also formally tied to the vestiges of something qualitatively overturned, and therefore useless to them. If we accept that the (productive) working class is now situated almost exclusively within logistics, then the notion of the general strike, one of the premier formal inheritances of the labour movement, becomes a questionable proposition. As the Iranians have demonstrated this last month-or-so in the Strait of Hormuz, the constraining of global supply choke points has assumed a determinate position in the logic of global economic affairs. Reflection on recent events then leads to a possibility beyond the narrow scope of the general strike, supplanted by a generalised supply chain strike.

Necessarily such a strike would entail global coordination and would be led by organised labour in the logistics sector; other unions or other workers might demonstrate solidarity in some form or another, and may be capable of intensifying pressure, but will not be the initial determinants in this struggle. Demands can then be levelled not just towards the various firms, private or public, which claim control of various aspects of the supply chain, but also to the central banks which underwrite the global supply chain in its interrelation with the administered credit system.

A generalised supply chain strike affords a realistic, concrete, and determinate method by which autonomous working class power can be achieved; the globalisation of labour struggle, and therefore the globalisation of the concessions made from capital to labour. At the level of the credit system, a logistics strike that threatens supply chain continuity threatens the creditworthiness assessments of every firm dependent on it, which in the contemporary arrangement threatens the systemic stability that the present order exists to maintain. The strike therefore forces the credit system to reveal its dependence on physical production, making visible the contradiction between the credit superstructure and its productive basis that administered capital permanently works to conceal.

Here then arises the greatest potential leverage that the labour movement has for the exposure of the contradictions of the present system, and toward the formal instantiation of a socialised mode of production in which the relations between people and things are not mystified and occluded by nostalgia and dogma – the cult of profit – but revealed in their fullness for the rational re-organisation of capital to the benefit of mankind. In turn, the labour movement must rid itself of the idols and fetishes of prior analytical frames, take hold of this leverage, and administer the pressure needed to engender the next phase of the socialist transition.