By L. Luria

Never have I seen Parliament more united. The prospect of social media access requiring one’s papers to be checked appears to have brought everyone ‘around the table’ where other thuggish assaults on the vestiges of bourgeois liberty have seemingly lacked the lustre. Myself being a beneficiary of a relatively free and open internet in my youth, and as someone who began calling myself a Communist at around 12 years old on account of such circumstances, the lack of care and attention this has drawn from other Communists has left me more irritated than usual at the state of our Real Movement’s self-appointed representatives.

To the Communists, whichever organisation you might find yourself in: How’s the paper round going? How’s youth recruitment? When was the last time a ‘cadre’ was ‘developed’ after an encounter on the street? I would hazard a guess that everyone in your ranks between the ages of 14 and 30 haven’t become Communists on account of your really effective newspaper stand, nor by picking up leaflets near a protest, nor by miraculously coming to consciousness from their imminent experience, only to be tipped over the edge by an after school encounter with one of your activists. The Communist movement, such as it is in contemporary Britain, is like any other ‘radical’ political tendency in that it’s the beneficiary of a relatively free and open internet full of teenagers. Subjective dislike of this fact will not change reality. The notion that experience alone fosters political consciousness has always been erroneous, the relation between thought and activity, the development of a language to express the half-formed assumptions which otherwise would fit within the preestablished axiomatic forms of the present order, have always been the means by which revolutionary political organisation develops and matures. That your group might have been lucky enough to put the final bit of work into the development of a few people means nothing when put against the whole process of political enculturation, that anything autonomous from establishment thought is, for the overwhelming majority, nurtured by a wholly online process of teenage identity formation. How do people develop the desire to read revolutionary literature instead of something else, to see themselves ‘becoming a revolutionary’ rather than slotting into something more normal? You might find it grubby and uncouth to admit that desire, specifically the desire for recognition, plays a determinate role in political subject formation, but I insist that you (if you’re younger than 30) take stock of your own ‘coming of age’ process and realistically assess what took place for you to become what you profess to be.

If that fails to convince, or if you somehow found your way into Marxism through some other route, I would remind you that in present circumstances only the rich possess both the capacity and the will to educate their children to a standard that the state has neither the means nor the inclination to match; private tutoring, cultivated households, the inherited assumption that one reads all survive a ban on social media for the children of the wealthy. It’s the poor, those for whom the comprehensive school exhausts the whole of sanctioned education, who will be invariably sealed off. Since the grammar school system was dismantled and the comprehensives have slid ever further into stultifying sub-mediocrity, the state has demonstrated over multiple decades that it has no desire to educate the children of the poor to anything approaching the sufficient cultivation of critical thinking, judgement, or reasoning faculties which revolutionary politics necessitates. Nothing I know, nothing I care deeply for, was gleaned through formal education. This goes for almost everyone I know, especially for every Communist I know; the historical reality of social media’s emergence is such that it has at once foreclosed the former sites of intellectual enculturation and assumed the position of being the determinate real site for relativity free discourse today, thereby granting it a critical role in the process of consciousness-raising and ‘cadre development’.

It baffles me that people belonging to my age bracket, the mid-twenty-somethings who I can say with certainty have spent at minimum fifteen years watching YouTube videos and engaging in some or another way with online discourse, can suggest that the effect of these platforms on their own maturation, political or otherwise, has been negligible, or that some other site of free and open discussion exists anywhere to the degree of widespread determination as social media. For my generation, an early adolescence dominated by the discourse of new atheism, feminism/anti-feminism, and so on, has invariably moulded our set, and as materialists we have to account for the role this discourse has played in our own consciousness, even if from the standpoint of wholesale rejection. While one might look back and say these discourses were all for nought, the discursive environment of the late-00s and early-10s undeniably formed a type of subject which is now beginning to act decisively in British politics. The diversity of thought which persists now among my generation is remarkable if put against most of our country’s history: Nobody has become “right wing” by reading The Telegraph, nor “left wing” by reading The Guardian – ‘Sargon of Akkad’ has had a more significant role in the burgeoning of political consciousness than any of the Paul Masons, Andrew Marrs, or Peter Obornes of this world.

The capacity for an individual to strike out against the rote orientations on offer from Question Time or Daily Politics is in itself good from the standpoint of fostering revolutionary capacity, granting at least the possibility of developing a sufficient language to speak against the present state of affairs, whether or not these expressions, or the thoughts behind these expressions, are themselves wholly compelling. If a person assumes an ‘anti-establishment’ political outlook only at age 16 or later, this person has already spent the years where their neuroplasticity was at its highest, consuming either news programming or whatever books might be lying around their parents’ house – what their politics might become after the age of 16, such individuals will invariably refer back in some way to that which crystallises in their formative years, to whatever figures of authority they happened upon at that time. We can’t account for the import of a given idea or set of ideas from the outset, what they will find themselves objectively expressing, what machinations they will perhaps run cover for, but we can certainly wager that broadening the range of discourse through which one can engage, permitting thought beyond the scope of BBC programming and the inherited views of family, ethnicity, religion, etc., is qualitatively more beneficial for the pursuit of potentially revolutionary politics. UKIP, and subsequently Reform, owe a tremendous debt to the online milieu which sprung up around the personality of Nigel Farage, a great many people who at the time of the Brexit campaign were under 16 years old and are now well into working and voting age. The same goes for Corbyn’s Labour Party, for whom a great many 14 and 15 year olds joined as a vehicle by which they could express the more radical political postures they had developed via social media discourse. Consider this beyond the schema of bourgeois politics, the immense potential that Marxists have had to give young people a means to cultivate themselves, to assert their own will politically in service of a more profound and meaningful historical mission.

When I first posted about this, somebody replied that “maybe just maybe they'll all be normally socialised and not get their brain melted with gore and pornography.” There is no ‘normal socialisation’ in our period, and any defence of ‘normalcy’ is, in these terms, a defence of the existing state. For the sake of the Marxists it should suffice to remind you that we understand breakdowns in the social order as constitutive of modernity itself rather than some recent affliction visited upon us by smartphones. The loss of ‘normalcy’ is a constant under present relations of production, so much so that to impose conditions formally equivalent to the world before social media is in itself a perversion of actual normalcy, taken to mean the normal conditions and processes of everyday life, the means of enculturation, the shared space and language of our present society. There is no stable socialisation to which the young might be returned, there is only the question of whether the commons of relatively unregulated discourse or regime broadcasting take precedence and mould the political imaginary and demarcate the horizon of thought for all subsequent younger generations.

One also hears reassurance that the ban will prove unenforceable, that young people will route around it as they route around everything. The ban would be enforceable readily enough were the measures to mandate biometric age verification at the device level, a proposal already floated despite previous opposition in Parliament and elsewhere to the Digital ID system (see now thick our defenders of bourgeois norms are proved to be when all you need to force down the last remnants of privacy is to invoke ‘The Children’). If all the above occurs, in tandem with the proscription of VPNs already threatened in Parliament (again, to near uniform approval), then all means of exit narrow to zero. Even if route-arounds are viable, by making it increasingly harder to engage in online discourse you limit the number of people (especially as time passes and restrictions intensify) who will wish to gain access. Worse still, by necessitating a criminal route of access, the process of assuming autonomous political subjectivity becomes itself equivalent to watching gore videos and weird pornography, branded by equivalence to criminal and underground activity. Communists aren’t criminals simply on account of having an autonomous political position.

Being a Communist means thinking according to a significantly longer time horizon than bourgeois politics permits – I would again ask those who deny the significance of this ban to examine their own political trajectory, how they formed the ideas they have, when and where they were first exposed to revolutionary ideas in a serious way: Why would you sit back and allow a generation to grow up in your wake who you’ll be unable to recognise yourself in, who’ll talk and think more like your parents than like you? By the time they get to 16, what will they make of social media? It will become, as it is for the older generation, an extension of the television, a repository for Gogglebox clips and sandwich reviews. On a broader level, doesn’t the unity of Parliament on this question give you any pause for concern? The entirety of the frontline Bourgeois establishment marches in lockstep, the only criticisms being that such measures ‘don’t go far enough’, drunk on their own agreement, giddy with the prospect of what new edicts they can impose to further control your behaviour, guide and shape the youth, impose their standard on the next generation at the critical historical juncture wherein established political authority has never been more unpopular. Further still, while one hand moves to seal the under-sixteens out of social media, the other is legislating, through the Representation of the People Bill, to lower the voting age to sixteen, bringing some 1.6 million sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds onto the register in time for the next general election; combined, we see the desire of our Parliamentarians to bring forth generations reared on nothing but licensed broadcasters and an atrophied school system incapable of cultivating judgement, permitted to vote at the precise instant they have been rendered pliable and unequipped, innocent of the means by which our moribund political consensus might be questioned (one wonders why this is all happening now, at a time when unprecedented decline in support for the State of Israel has been specifically noted as a downstream consequence of teenage social media use, and when two political parties seriously threaten the existing duopoly on both flanks).

Should the ban come in, what remains? Unless you intend on loitering at school gates distributing pamphlets and newspapers, risking arrest or having your picture pasted around parents’ WhatsApp channels, the prospect of any genuine thought arising among the under-sixteens becomes effectively null. They will be returned to the embrace of the television, the metered simulation of interior life, cut out of the commons through which consciousness, however crude, might arise autonomously within a discursive frame intelligible and adequate to contemporary life. Who, on turning sixteen and being admitted, will arrive equipped to know what’s being said, tell one position from another, to recognise a good argument from a bad argument, or even to recognise the basic structure of online argumentation itself which has become unavoidably determinate in shaping contemporary politics? A generation reared as their parents were will arrive incapable, yet somehow even worse than their parents, on account of the significant decline in education standards over the past fifty years: a future whereby generation after generation is afforded no occasion by which the faculty of judgement might cultivate and who can’t think or speak as we do.

In general, on the question of liberty, Communists often find themselves incredulously identifying with the state. I implore you all to take the words of Friedrich Engels seriously, from the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, that “we are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced that in no social order will freedom be assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.” To this end, Communists must be willing to accept all manner of morbid symptoms if it means a spark of possibility might be recovered from out of the dregs of contemporary life, and therefore we must defend the right for teenagers to have access to social media, without reservation or caveat.

This week:

SpaceX reaches world historic heights at NYSE.

UK Gov seeks to automate jobs and jobseekers alike.

Rhenus outlines the future of automated logistics.

Class leverage diminishes as determinate work shrinks.

We’ve been enjoying reading and engaging with Geese Magazine from across the pond this week. Though there are undoubtedly key disagreements we have with some of their output, it is encouraging to see their efforts to push the breadth of discussion beyond the dogmatic back-and-forth that has characterised so much debate in the past few decades. You can read our responses here: Ascholia/Schole & Proletarian Minority.

An experience our American readers may not share with us here in the UK is that of the somber ritual of going to the JobCentre Plus. It is a profoundly British affair to take a grey morning stroll to an international-style cube in your local ghost town to sit in a 30 year old, bright green office, surrounded by security guards to tell your ‘work coach’ how long you've spent scrolling on job listing websites. A deep sense of frustration and shame has you look across the desk at your dull-eyed patron and think ‘Well it's alright for you, ain't it?’

Well that misplaced envy may be having its spiteful last laugh, as the government plans to ‘complement’ their work coaches with a new AI coach that can remind the unemployed they aren't to have any leisure time, 24/7, everywhere they go. Good news for our rationeers, as they'll be well ahead of the training programmes required to use the software when it's their turn to make an account!

As our intrepid entrepreneurs go to bank their trillions in New York, we too should take pains to complement them and their hard work, despite our key disagreements on their output – that is, after all, what workers should do. So, a compliment fitting for the times:

That should hopefully get us a retweet by SpaceX.

— S.E.P.

SpaceX Valuation (& ‘Universal High Income’)

It's been a tumultuous week for markets as pressures from all angles weigh down on investor confidence. All eyes had been focused on the coming SpaceX IPO, which saw the ticker SPCX valued as the highest-priced stock option in financial history. SPCX has so far avoided major shorting as was feared by some investors, but the massive valuation of the company and preceding market choppiness is indicative of investors’ turning stomachs.

Whilst SPCX has seen an extraordinary surge in prices and markets have seen a rebound as of Friday, it should be noted that all is not as it seems. The sell-offs over the week also saw large purchases of yen and spikes in other currency markets, suggesting that not all investors are confident in the long-term viability of SpaceX’s current valuation. The Warren Buffet Indicator has repeatedly stressed the major overvaluation of SPCX, and many retail investors have expressed reluctance to act as potential liquidity in a major sell-off once the IPO sales close.

Attitudes towards AI investment have also shifted dramatically over the last week, with stock markets responding to increasing scepticism from business about immediate ROI for implemented programmes (see INDEX 8). Oracle stock has seen a tumble of nearly 16% on the NYSE, despite meeting its financial targets, after it announced plans to raise a further $40bn for data centre development.

Before the SpaceX IPO, Elon Musk had incorporated his xAI company into the firm in order to help bolster his deeply unprofitable Grok system. Of the myriad businesses incorporated into SpaceX, only its Starlink satellite programme is profitable, with the IPO supposedly introduced to raise capital for 100,000 new satellite launches in the coming year, as well as to help support their involvement in NASA’s Artemis project.

The grace period on Friday was greatly helped by the decision of the US government not to go ahead with strike action announced against Iran, with conspicuous timing for the decision being made at the time of the IPO and start of the 250th anniversary celebrations for the founding of the United States.

The picture from markets seemed stable at the end of the week, but deep insecurity in AI and consistent geologistical bottlenecks from the ongoing war in Iran, despite ceasefire, suggest we are far from escaping the ‘frothy’ volatility that has characterised the global economy in 2026. As inflation continues to rise in the US, with Trump remarking he ‘loves inflation’, this persistent volatility can only serve to continuously weaken the dollar and the long-term stability of Western credit.

(Note: In other news, during an interview with Peter Diamandis on 11 June, Musk predicted that through the development of the present AI/robotics-led transformation of the economy that the age of “universal high income” looms on the horizon: “We’ll basically just issue money to people… AI and robots are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they’ll run out of things to do for humans” and that "Money will stop being relevant at some point in the future." As the old adage goes, to be rich is glorious; that a more succinct elaboration of Communism comes from our trillionaire comrade and Rupert Lowe advocate is by the by. I’ll simply refer the reader to Cde. Jehu’s comments on the matter. – L. Luria)

‘Kill the Work Coach in your Pocket’

The first AI Adoption Summit was inaugurated at London Tech Week this week, bringing developers and investors from around the world to capitalise on the city’s growing tech sector. Prime Minister Keir Starmer made several key announcements at the summit regarding the government’s push for sovereignty in the sector. The programmes announced by the prime minister were primarily focused on attempting to balance the industrial impacts of AI rollout on the UK’s labour market, seeking to fight fire with fire regarding the new technologies.

£200mn were pledged at the summit for a TechFirst programme that introduce AI training at schools and introduce a new Level 3 AI Apprenticeship to increase worker competency, as well as access to several free introductory programmes for software run by firms like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. A new ‘AI and Future of Work' unit has also been put together to help oversee workforce security in the AI transition.

An Early Careers Job Alliance was also announced, which will bring tech employers together with the government and trade unions to attempt to reshape the nature of entry-level roles, which are seeing rapid automation in their traditional forms across the job market. Whilst tech leaders like Sam Altman have condemned ‘AI-washing’ by firms to excuse layoffs, the increasing impenetrability of the job market for untrained young people is having significant effects on generational career ladders. Around 13.5% of young people are unemployed NEETs, amounting to over a million people, many of whom will be reaching their 30s before major initiatives are scaled correctly. This week the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) downgraded its labour market estimates for the UK to predict an unemployment of 2.2mn people (5.5% of the population) by 2027.

For those without work at present, the government also announced the rollout of a ‘JobCentre in your pocket’, an AI assistant that would help jobseekers with CV drafts, job applications, and interview preparation. With AI tutors also announced to help disadvantaged students catch up with their privately-tutored counterparts, the government has effectively laid out a lifelong intimate engagement with younger generations and AI tools, from exam to interview, free school meals to dole.

Logistics Automation

Global logistics giant Rhenus has laid out its vision of the future of the industry, as AI seems shaped to transform supply chains in the near future. The firm described what it called a ‘Logistics Command Centre’ (LCC) model for future logistics operations, comparing the future approach less in terms of warehouse and distribution operations and more of ‘air traffic control’ provisions.

Looking to AI capacity for not just supply chain planning and management (see INDEX 7), but machine-integrated warehouse operation, Rhenus sees a near-term reality of autonomous warehouses and automated freight lines requiring little to no front line labour force. Instead, specialised operational experts with systems training are expected to oversee the autonomous supply chains from these LCCs, intervening only when anomalies are noticed in the system, and presumably reliant on outsourced labourers to amend systems when need be (a system that the recent Time Block proposals by the Portuguese Labour Ministry would be prime labour regulations for, see INDEX 8).

The LCC framework comes as 18 EU member states have signed a Joint Declaration of Intent regarding Automated Vehicle (AV) regulation and rollout for cross-border freight and cargo within the bloc. AV technology has taken off in recent years, with Volvo Autonomous Solutions expecting to begin automated freight trials in Q1 2027, with full commercial rollout aimed for 2028.

Although Rhenus insists that the LCC model is intended to ‘complement, not replace’ human labour (a catchphrase now for the myriad industries considering AI implementation), it is highly unlikely that skills transfers will be effective in turning career drivers and warehouse operatives into complex systems analysts. The numbers don't add up on a broad scale either: will the large-scale workforce of thousands of packers, operators, drivers, and administrators all find space in an LCC office? No. But the labour cost reduction afforded by LCCs combined with hyper-complex supply chain planning (see INDEX 7) is the only possible direction capital can take.

Strikes at Sellafield

2,000 specialist workers will go on strike this month at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria over a pay dispute. Pay rises have been seen across the sector, but Sellafield workers were not included in a like-for-like pay increase by their contractors. More trouble for the energy sector, where workers are farther away than most from the prospect of being automated.

The strike action is a typical example of the determinate working class using their peculiar leverage of withdrawing labour to exact fairly local demands (see our recent article Proletarian Minority on how this traditional class is growing smaller and smaller). In a recent report from the latest Unison conference, SPEW lamented this tendency:

“Unfortunately, on the whole, this year’s conference agenda fails to present delegates with serious options for building a national strategy to fight. While it’s true that the leadership is moving the union onto an ‘organising’ agenda – aiming to build strength through industrial campaigns as opposed to a union that just excels at individual representation, services and lobbying politicians – there is still a reliance on doing this branch by branch.”

Indeed, the trade union movement has retreated into the small pockets and quick struggles wherever it can, as overall sector leverage and balloting power has diminished over the years. As recent polling suggests that union memberships are increasingly leaning towards right-populist perspectives, we also face the peculiar condition of a mass trade union movement composed of workers who abhor the notion of striking altogether. But this would appear to be par for the course as the determinate leverage of their membership diminishes and their sense of empowerment is increasingly replaced by narratives of national, sectional, or ethnic pride.

Meanwhile, those few 8% with remaining leverage look set to focus their ambitions at making loadsamoney. Solidarity, comrades.

INDEX Verdict:

As capital continues its frantic dance of speculation and paranoia, forcing governments to put together patchwork solutions for their endemic failures, the world on the ground is changing. As the leverage of the masses vanishes into thin air beneath the brutal machinery of the modern age, we can but look on and insist that in peasants revolts there will be no solution. Where there will be a solution, however, we do not know.

By L. Luria

Ewan Ben, an ex-YPer from the Democratic Socialist camp, has written a fair amount since the implosion of Your Party across various Anglophone Marxist journals and on Substack, developing a theoretical framework to confront the various sectional lines that seem to dominate the Communist milieu in Britain and in the broader West. Persistent across his writing is a demand to resituate class analysis, comprehending the composition of the proletariat as it actually is, as the primary practical endeavour before which any kind of Communist politics can proceed. In his most recent article Ewan correctly identifies the persistence of a single fundamental error across three seemingly distinct strategic purports – voluntarism, programmatic idealism, strategic moralism – which are all, for him, corrected by ‘reversing the direction of determination’, meaning reacquainting Marxists with the original insight Marx develops by his critique of idealism, with bulk of the article addressing the analysis of working-class composition as a way to properly understand how a Party, as that class’ organ, should constitute itself.

Ewan begins by relitigating the break with Hegel, that “Practice, not contemplation, is the condition of adequate engagement with the world… Theory is not a representation of practice; it is itself a practice, and is understood only in the actual life-process of those who carry it.” From here he accuses the sects of idealism; “class becomes an object of theoretical derivation rather than a field of practice to be entered,” pursuing political forms “determined by prior theory rather than by the actual encounter with the class in motion.” What follows is a rather long account of the various ways Communist sects commit the sin of idealism; even though this makes up the bulk of the article, since I don’t belong to any of the named sects I have no interest in going over this part in detail or rebuffing him in any way. On the whole he’s right and I’d recommend people read what he’s written, especially if you find yourself belonging to these kinds of organisations. What interests me is Ewan’s central commitment to dismantling “the image of a class that no longer exists,” a hang up with the movement that he and I share.

One unfortunate casualty in the movement from the Theses on Partyism on his Substack to this article is that his account of the post-industrial transformation of the working-class has gone from recognising that “new concentrations have emerged in logistics, distribution, and the social reproduction sectors, whose strategic significance has been rendered visible by the disruptions of the past decade” to focusing in on “expanded service, care, and reproductive labor, fragmented… across platform and precarious work… [stratified] along racialised and gendered lines.” Please unclench; I’m not concerned with Ewan’s reference to race or gender. What does concern me though is that he's elevated the social reproductive element seemingly at the expense of the logistical-distributive element referenced in his earlier post. In any case, it would be useful to briefly run through how the working-class is actually constituted before we go any further. Today, services now account for around 85% of jobs and roughly 80% of output, with the two largest employing sectors being health and social work at about 13.5% of all jobs, and wholesale and retail at about 13%, with manufacturing down to roughly 9% of output and a similar share of employment, our domestic economy having shed the bulk of mid-century industrial labour that once stood at roughly a quarter of all labour performed. Health and social care is largely state-funded, drawing on redistributed pre-existing revenues rather than generating its own registrable surplus; in terms of retail, its share of value has already been realised elsewhere. Against all this stands the logistical-distributive section of the working-class which, per Logistics UK’s accounting, employs around 2.6 million people (roughly half that of health and social care), constituting 8% of the contemporary workforce.

In order to properly assess the determinacy of a given group of workers, rather than comparing output alone, it’s necessary to see what tangible effects are incurred by the withdrawal of labour in their particular sectors. In August 2022 roughly 1,900 Unite members shut the Felixstowe port, which handles about 48% of the UK's container trade, delaying an estimated $4.7 billion of trade across eight days. When care staff or teachers withdraw their labour, however much hardship follows, the circuit of accumulation inevitably grinds on, adverse effects registering at a far slower, less immediate rate. Rather than referring to fragmentation alone, it would be more proper to say that at the advanced stage by which the fragmentary process has played out, we would be better to describe the overall process as the reconstitution of the class as a whole rather than just the stratification of a self-same entity, given that certain forms of labour have, by any meaningful account, been qualitatively reduced to a level of near-total indeterminacy at the domestic level, whereas others have risen to overall determinacy at increasingly higher qualitative levels. Ewan notes in the article that “power is… accumulated through organization, concentrated through coordination, deployed at points of structural vulnerability” and that the “political question is always where the forces are, how they are constituted, what their lines of strength and vulnerability are.” This is correct, however any account which doesn’t name logistics workers as the specifically determinate social element capable of inflicting precisely these points of structural vulnerability eschews the material premise for the argument. Recent wildcat strikes at Hinkley Point C also indicate another determinate site for industrial action, with domestic energy infrastructure necessarily belonging to the cohort of socially indispensable labour today.

Ewan briefly gestures at Operaismo, specifically work undertaken by the writers at Classes Operaie to distinguish the technical and political composition of the working-class as it was in 1960s and 70s Italy; repeating this inquiry today, the immediate criticism of our contemporary sects would be that they spend too much time drawing out analysis of the political at the expense of the technical. Despite claims regarding what has been done to the class, that it’s presently determined by fragmentation, dispersed across a labour market restructured to prevent concentrations of collective power, that it is precarised, atomised, stripped of dense institutional life, and so on, an account of the class’ positive determinations, what it actually is, remains ambiguous, in this article in particular and across the rear of Ewan’s output. For the sake of clarification, Operaismo concerns itself crucially with the productive element, the fight that begins from the factory floor, to which foundational Operaista Mario Tronti offers the assertion that there is “nothing more limited and partial, nothing less universal” than workplace struggle, that from this direct confrontation – rather than the vantage of a presumed universal – the essential spark of Communist politics is located. With global supply chains having assumed determination at the aggregate level globally (intermediate inputs, the parts and half-wrought goods moving between stages of production rather than finished articles exchanged between self-contained economies, now account for over two-thirds of the goods traded worldwide) logistics is the actual point by which domestic labour qualitatively interfaces with the circuit of valorisation, therefore lays claim to the positional leverage Ewan speaks to; logistics workers are, despite only making up 8% of the workforce in Britain, the inheritors of economic determination through the effects wrought by the withdrawal of their labour; no other element can claim the same level of fundamental economic determinacy, therefore positioning logistical workers as the legitimate inheritors of the category which Marx establishes as the working-class. Here we arrive at perhaps the fundamental scandal for contemporary Marxism: the productive proletariat, the revolutionary subject, has transitioned from the category of the mass, from the absolute majority of the population of the developed world, to a miniscule social minority who, in Britain, constitute a mere 8% of the workforce taken as a whole.

If we follow this assertion further we can see that what Marxists continue to call the ‘working-class’ doesn’t necessarily refer to a ‘class’ in any determinate sense; what is called ‘the class’ more so refers to a kind of politically-constituted coalition of various different ‘labour-power sellers’ cohered by a formal relation to the wage rather than by a common relationship to production. The docker, the carer, the warehouse picker, and the call-centre worker are united at the level of juridical category, but where they relate in terms of the production and realisation of value, each diverges immeasurably. I doubt Ewan will agree with my radicalising his argument to this extent; I expect the charge against me is that I’ve proposed something which theoretically ‘divides the working-class’ – the problem with that rebuff is that this ‘division’ between determinate and indeterminate labour is a mere fact of the present technical composition. To insist upon the unity of this inherited form and to subordinate the leverage of the determinate minority to the coalitional logic of the indeterminate majority doesn’t follow from adequate application of method; if Marxists were to critically reappraise the given notion that this coalition constitutes ‘the class’ in a real sense, rather than as the form of a political inheritance, I would wager that the pursuit of solidarity could begin to proceed consciously. The distinction is not ours to invent, in any case. The same structure that concentrates the production of surplus in a shrinking minority also pools that surplus across the whole of the capitalist class, confirming the determinate minority as above the category of a sectional interest and as the actually existing working-class.

How a certain social force appears at the level of economic output or at the level of the wage actively eludes an account of their actual determinacy; an equivalent and parallel process occurs from the standpoint of capital itself, with these two processes reinforcing and compounding each other in kind; in Capital Vol. III Marx notes that while surplus value is produced by individual capitals in proportion to the living labour they employ, that surplus is appropriated across the capitalist class as a whole in proportion to total capital advanced. As a result, what an individual firm retains as profit bears no essential relation to the surplus value generated by the firm – a capitalist employing no variable capital at all (therefore exploiting no workers directly) still draws profit from unpaid surplus labour, each capital drawing from this same common pool of surplus, that surplus then being “divided among capitalists as dividends proportionate to the share of the social capital each holds,” that “in selling their commodities the capitalists of the various spheres of production recover the value of the capital consumed in their production,” and that ultimately “they do not secure the surplus-value, and consequently the profit, created in their own sphere by the production of these commodities” alone; “What they secure is only as much surplus-value, and hence profit, as falls, when uniformly distributed, to the share of every aliquot part of the total social capital from the total social surplus-value.”

Starting here, we can read into Marx’s schema in Poverty of Philosophy regarding the formation of the working-class proper, that the mass of workers “is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle… this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests.” The determinacy of the workplace and the elevation of immediate interest to class interest is itself a process of generalisation which is mirrored in capital, of the aggregation of surplus value into the “common pool” and the aggregation of individual workers into a working-class. What distinguishes these analogous processes is that the working-class represent the active principle while capital is necessarily passive, as succinctly elaborated by Tronti that “capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned.” In other words, despite the fact that surplus-value can only be properly registered at the aggregate level, its generation is still essentially tied to actual physical production, and that actual physical production develops according to the tempo of the labour movement itself. Historically, a share of the surplus from this common pool served as the basis for the distribution of profits to the capitalist class in aggregate, and as the source of the existing revenues by which the wage-packets of the indeterminate working majority are derived.

The active pulverisation of working-class power under Thatcher through the dismantling of our national industrial and energy base demonstrates – paradoxically – how the working-class sets the tempo for capital, and how the capitalist class seeks to escape the class relation, the “political history of capital” being “a sequence of attempts by capital to withdraw from the class relationship; at a higher level… the history of the successive attempts of the capitalist class to emancipate itself from the working class.” The capitalist class will invariably attempt to suspend the antagonism by any means necessary, even to their own fundamental detriment, cutting off its nose to spite its face and laying the foundation for the supersession of their own hegemony. Meanwhile, the levels of genuine productivity of the contemporary productive worker have risen to astronomic heights compared with that of the late 19th or early-to-mid 20th Century; outside productive work, the immense ballooning of superfluous labour time and the mass expansion of the public sector demonstrate what actually happens when capitalists attempt to escape the class relation by force. It does indeed seem paradoxical to say that the currently atrophied state of the working-class movement is a direct result of the class’ political success; perhaps it’s easier to demonstrate by looking at capital’s dismal failure to innovate domestically as a direct consequence to Thatcher's attempt at a ‘final solution’ to the class antagonism. Ultimately the only tangible result of this maneuver on capital’s part has been an explosion in economically indeterminate forms of labour and the concentration of more and more insurgent determinacy in fewer hands at key physical points of economic leverage. The old style of mass politics evidently belongs to a prior epoch, but what replaces it is still an open question. If we follow this line of inquiry to its conclusion, then we might say that Communism has atrophied politically less so by failure of agitation, propaganda, or even by wrong-footed analysis, but that the decline in potency of Communist politics in our period actually reflects a real process going on at the economic level, which has then been exacerbated by Communists failing to interrogate this objective reconstitution of the working-class as a minority. The actual ‘masses’ today technically ‘work’ in conditions of virtual unemployment, serving as a vector for the redistribution of pre-existing revenues, while an ever-slimmer productive minority actually works at the points by which the country, our immediate political terrain, interfaces with the global economy. I would wager Communism is still the politics of the working-class, but that it can’t any longer call itself the politics of the masses, and that our movement ought to proceed from this understanding, however difficult it might be to cast off the inheritances of the prior period.

The concern for Communists, now attempting to reconstitute themselves in various ways, is then in reckoning with the meteoric ballooning of labour time performed in contradiction to the immense diminution of any intelligible share of value produced (and therefore the potential for collective bargaining) across the population. Rather than maintaining a faltering subject by reifying a political coalition as a class, the task ought to be carrying on with what Communists have always done in embedding the movement within the productive part of the working-class and from there fighting for a political programme from a position of strength, to engender the conversion of the virtual unemployment of the toiling majority into genuine free time.

By L. Luria

When I was writing the OGAS article I had in mind the analogous type in contemporary Western society who fits the bill for being our ‘Gosplan bureaucrat’. Initially I wanted to write a brief section on how a certain element of anti-AI Marxists, usually people who do clerical or managerial work, seem to unwittingly repeat the same errors – although of course in a far less decisive way – as the reactionaries at Gosplan and the Soviet Communist Party in the late 60s. Little did I know, the preeminent Geese Magazine had, only a couple days ago, published an article from somebody of exactly this social position, making exactly these arguments! This will be somewhat more informal because I want to get it out today, so forgive me if it reads a little rushed (I would also recommend reading the article first before reading this response any further).

Right off the bat, the author calls it a “misconception” and “an egregious distortion of basic Marxist philosophy” to assert that Communism means the pursuit of the end of labour. In order to prove this the author links to Capital Vol. I, Part III, Ch. 7: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value. Reading back over this Chapter to see if I’ve been completely wrong and somehow missed something so crucial to Marx’s project, unfortunately (for the author) the closest thing to the human being achieving “self-realisation through labour” for Marx is in his overall treatment of the purposive, imaginative, teleological activity which forms the determinate quality of human beings as opposed to animals, that “what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” Marx states his intent at the start of the chapter to “consider the labour-process independently of the particular form it assumes under given social conditions,” however this abstraction (as explained by Engels in a footnote to this section) is erected specifically to demonstrate how human work is only granted its meaningful social form through specific productive relations, that capital turns ‘mere work’ into labour.

Marx calling work an “everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence” that is “independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase,” which is, I assume, what the author wanted us to take note of by linking to this chapter, doesn’t support their assertion that “Marx believed that under the proper circumstances, human beings find fulfillment and self-realization through labor—not outside of it,” the implication from their writing here being that only through labour can humanity have the capacity to ‘realise’ itself. The author continues: “When we are able to independently or collaboratively direct the process of our own work and reap the benefits it yields, labor gives us pride, identity, and purpose. It fosters a sense of community and belonging.” Again, you would be hard pressed to find in Marx anything directly regarding “pride, dignity, and purpose” as part of his project, nor as a property emergent to labour itself, nor that the emancipation of labour-as-such from capital is the point of Communist politics. While the existence of drudgery and toil certainly affords an ethical-moral route into Communism for many people, this doesn’t account for Marx’s actual critique of labour under conditions of capitalist exploitation, nor does it necessarily lead to a defence of work, especially when put up against Marx’s very clear statements regarding the reduction of the working day, the separation of the distinction between physical and intellectual work, the end of the division of labour, and the supersession of labour/capital altogether by the general intellect.

In Part VII, Chapter 48 of Capital Vol. III Marx states that the objective ends of the conscious pursuit of political and economic development are towards realising “human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom”, for which the “shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.” If we were to read the passage from Critique of the Gotha Programme about labour becoming ‘life's prime want’ (which is usually brought up in arguments about this kind of thing to defend the ‘labourist’ position) and look at it in the context of human energy as an “end in itself” we can open a broader and more complete picture of what Marx understood to be the trajectory of the Communist society, to which he grants no moralistic ascription for how labour ought to be performed. The only prescription Marx offers at all is that the working day has to be shortened and that human energy has to become an end in itself; evidently these two points rise over and above other considerations for Marx, or at the very least grant a far better picture of what he considered his project to be rather than the secondary polemical taglines about “dignity.” In other places, such as in The German Ideology where Marx goes into what labour might look like in Communism, he talks about hunting, fishing, and cattle rearing.

The author goes on to write that labour “helps us to develop creatively, intellectually, and even spiritually. Labor—if I may partake of the masses' favorite opiate—is what gives us our souls.” If we take for granted that the author is making reference to the soul in a metaphysically serious way, then this ascription of the soul’s content as tied to labour is actually rather interesting, given that it completely reverses the standard understanding of the soul as Western societies have inherited it. Faculty psychology defines the soul as the principle that organises a living thing into the kind of thing it is, determined by faculties, the highest of which being (for Aristotle through to Aquinas and further on) nous, the intellect; it could be said that labour works to erect the necessary ‘framework conditions’ for the incubation and maintenance of the soul, but even from this very charitable interpretation of the author’s language it would still have to be in the moment of an absence of labour where the soul can be known in its fullness. As far back as Aristotle the means for contemplation, wherein the intellect is put to work, occur in the negation of labour: “Ascholoumetha gar hina scholazōmen” (we are un-leisured in order to be at leisure); ascholia, labour, is the negative, the privation of scholē, leisure. The whole apparatus of the soul therefore grounds leisure over labour, and labour even without the fetters of capitalist relations of production is always necessarily for the sake of something else, while the soul’s act is always necessarily for its own sake.

If you think I’m harping too much on this soul thing, I would ask you to think about what the author meant by making reference to the soul in the first place. What relationship does specifically ‘the soul’ – which they could just as easily call ‘mind’ in contemporary language – have to their analysis? Or perhaps it’s an excuse to get an ‘opiate of the people’ reference in there to add more Marxist gloss to an otherwise theoretically scant article. Either way, I’ve gotten this far with it now, so if we’re taking reference to the soul seriously then the corresponding ambition of the class-for-itself, the conscious working-class, would surely be for dismantling the frame of ascholia, un-leisure, which suppresses the soul, consolidates and reproduces the class beyond the bounds of its own spiritual, contemplative self-interest, permits them free time wherein the intellect can be put to work. Freedom in the Marxist sense can't be understood in terms of a subjective existential condition by which one “feels free”, but as an actual concrete negation of a tangible enframing of human behaviour (as a side note, and without making too much recourse to etymology games, it would be useful here to note that the Greek scholē becomes the Latin schola, the root of the English term ‘school’, ‘scholar, and so on; Western society at its origin holds to an identity between leisure, contemplation, the development and revelation of the intellect, and so on – all being the basic properties which Communism seeks to emancipate and universalise against the tendency of consolidating these properties into the hands of a social minority, and what Marx is perhaps implying when he refers to the general intellect in the Grundrisse).

Going back to the author’s central theme of ‘the dignity of labour’, such slogans and rhetorical postures invariably presuppose in some or another way the continuity of presently existing forms of labour as the ultimate horizon for personal and social meaning. The author eventually shows their hand towards the end of the article:

“It would be bad enough if generative AI corrupted only archetypally creative professions, but the soul of the humble bureaucratic functionary is no safer. This is an issue of deep concern for me; my professional experience is almost exclusively cashiering and standard nine-to-five office jobs involving journal entries, tax documents, filing systems, databases, and spreadsheets. The possibility of being replaced by AI hangs over my head like the sword of Damocles.

“My rational self-interest in maintaining job security aside, I like my work and do not want it taken away. The tasks I perform can be frustrating and exhausting, and a machine might indeed be able to perform them more efficiently than I can. But the honing of critical thinking, problem-solving, and organizational skills cannot be rushed.”

The author’s account of their own bureaucratic work constitutes an intellectual defence of the reproduction of a wholly indeterminate social element against that which might dissolve it and, therefore, move the wheel of history forward, upset the presently existing balance of social forces, and clarify where in the complex of contemporary political economy the productive and determinate social elements really exist. If, per Lenin, we hold that administrative ‘labour’ doesn’t imply any essential specialism, being “functions any literate worker could perform”, then automation, which is now viable through LLMs, is surely the most logical and socialistic option: under a socialist government, especially one which might intend on instituting a comprehensive economic planning regime, the speed by which clerical work can be done should obviously be accelerated and the costs incurred by clerical work should obviously be lowered as much as possible. The idea that socialism exists as a jobs program for managers is maybe the most perverse malformation of the Communist project I’ve ever encountered. Lenin’s argument in The State and Revolution was that capitalism had already sufficiently simplified administration to basic operations of registration, filing, and checking so elementary that the state could be run effectively by all in turn, that the separate caste of officials could be dissolved into the population; the author demands the opposite, to preserve a monopoly of expertise, by refusing to permit their specialism to be rendered transparent and common.

The reason that a broad anti-work tendency has gained significant traction amongst Marxists, clearly to the chagrin of the author, is not only because there’s very clear precedent across Marx’s writing, but also because, given contemporary circumstances, it isn’t a major intellectual leap to recognise that should society eradicate the vast excesses of superfluous labour hours which make up the lion’s share of labour time spent in western economies today, converting superfluous labour hours into free time, wealth would cease to be defined as command over the surplus labour of others and become instead disposable time for every individual and for society as a whole. As Jehu has consistently pointed out, in the long postwar boom the hours worked and the output extracted from those hours multiplied several times over without any commensurate gain reaching those who did the work, with the surplus then accumulating as idle capital that the state then had to absorb through deficit, armament, interest, and so on, forming the whole apparatus of unproductive labour, an apparatus which serves merely to redistribute that which already exists rather than actively ‘produce’ in any sense familiar to Marx or to the classical political economists. Evidently, this apparatus is one to which our author, the self-confessed bureaucrat, belongs.

The author doesn't defend their clerical work because of any social wealth produced – which, of course, they couldn’t, because there is none – but instead from their purported ability to provide regulatory checks on the power of capital: “A world without human bureaucrats is a world in which capital can operate totally unchecked by human oversight… Human beings who work within institutions instinctively try to improve them for the simple, self-interested reason that it will make their jobs easier.” If the author can get away with this kind of anecdotal fluff, then I’ll just briefly note that a friend of mine used to work in a charity doing homeless outreach, for which they would regularly have to interface with local government bureaucrats. From what I've been told, given the manner by which the emergency housing system works in Britain, genuinely homeless people – including mothers of small children – have been left destitute for periods of months going on years because of the negligence of local government bureaucrats, even though there were clear methods by which only a rather small amount of work could be done to help mitigate these people’s horrendous conditions. It absolutely doesn’t hold that clerical workers ‘instinctively’ improve the functioning of a given system just by the fact of their being there. For a grander example, see my last article on OGAS.

In any case, going back to the author: given their full-throated defence of already existing forms of labour, this further uncritical defence of the preexisting institutions of bureaucracy sufficiently completes the picture of the ‘Marxism’ we’re being offered here. When Communism does eventually reveal itself in the west, if the author would like, I’m sure a kind of ‘work simulator’ could be provided so they could spend all the free time afforded by the new system so as to busy themselves with rudimentary administrative tasks that, by their account, provide tremendous joy and satisfaction. The end of labour is very clearly what Marx was talking about, and what we ought to be pursuing if we take our politics seriously. Even if AI proves incapable, for whatever reason, of assisting in this development, this doesn’t negate the fact that the reduction of labour time spent is our ambition. Ultimately, for Communists, the question as to what humanity will become after the end of labour is irrelevant at our present strategic juncture. Regarding the author, arguments to prolong labour beyond its point of any necessary social determination is only defensible if this ‘labour’ refers to wholly subjective and personally gratifying activities, but to conceptually defend the category of post-revolutionary labour as needing to hold some essential identity with labour as it is today, or as it has been in the epoch of capitalism-proper, ultimately reads as a fear of the unknown, fear of the full revolutionary import of Communism and the ways in which reality will be reconstituted. It is a dreadful attitude, and should be put to rest amongst Marxists forever.

This week:

Global profits show growth in the first half of the 2020s; corporations ditch AI in favour of labour intensification.

Portuguese workers go on general strike as government attempts workers’ rights putsch.

British workers down tools at Hinkley Point C site; RMT strikes resume across London.

New ‘Socialist Federation’ breaks away from Your Party; typical splitting or novel experiment?

I highly recommend our latest editorial, Death on the Gosplan. In this week’s INDEX we go over many items relevant to the ideas discussed there, regarding what we look towards in our future from what was lost in our cybernetic past. For us today, ‘the sobering, profane, tragic actuality of worldly socialism’ is as blatant as ever could be, as workers yet again down tools within a terminal capitalist malaise that seems set to pop the AI bubble and bring all its hopes and dreams crashing down onto the shoulders of labour – a moment which rewards closer theoretical interrogation of the times and its precedents.

— S.E.P.

‘It costs how much?!’

Data from the first half of the 2020s has shown a surprising global corporate profit growth of around 7.7%, a major improvement on the 3.9% average seen in the 2010s, with the US and Japan the major winners from this upswing, while European capital continues to struggle through increasingly recessionary environments, especially in the UK and Germany. In his analysis of the new data this week, economist Michael Roberts explained this uptick as the result of two key developments in capital: the speculative furore around AI, particularly in the United States, and the historic low total labour costs have reached as a percentage of global GDP, indicative of a tremendous increase in overall labour intensity. In short: excitement over new machines and a heavier burden on workers has been the story of global corporate profit rises.

One would expect a row of cheery faces all down Wall Street at this news, a celebratory mood over an American economy that had seemingly become great again. One finds instead rather glum and panicky looks, of economists from the heights of Bloomberg all the way down to data engineers, as several firms have taken a more sceptical approach to the bloated AI tools they can’t seem to make profitable.

In INDEX 5 we discussed the emergent phenomenon of ‘tokenmaxxing’, a quasi-informal strategy employed by AI firms and their users in order to maximise the total training potential as well as usage metrics necessary to demonstrate productivity gains on AI implementation. We also noted corporate scepticism at the time, with around 70% of all corporate managers saying they found the ROI ‘underwhelming’. Well, it appears that AI may be reaching crunch time, as firms across the US such as Uber, Walmart, and even Microsoft have taken to ‘tokenminning’, placing token caps on employees and engineers in order to prevent overuse, as Uber, for one, has blown through its entire 2026 AI budget in a matter of 4 months. Indeed, one unfortunate company managed to spend $500mn in a single month on Claude AI tokens, as AI bills and costs have started to climb. Hyperscalers are getting increasingly anxious for provable ROI as firms like Anthropic and OpenAI seek to go public, but the cheap token trials corporate capital has been given have not proven overall potential profitability, and it would appear that they are now trying to smother the disappointing baby.

The continuing trouble is getting AI to work autonomously. For as much as engineers have found the tools useful to get text onto the screen, only around 20% of the code produced is actually usable, feeding into the check-back productivity cost we mentioned in INDEX 5. On the rollout issues facing AI hyperscalers, commentator Mo Bitar spoke to the ‘sobering up’ that firms are having as to the actual corporate applications of AI:

“I’m being literal, [AI] is a slot machine. You pull the lever. Sometimes it gives you a little dopamine tingle: ‘Oh look! It wrote code that works!’ And you’re hooked. But 80% of the time you are just listening to confident nonsense… [AI] is real and useful, but very narrow. Great for coding and other verifiable tasks, but only if you hover over it.... For everything else, it’s just a very expensive way to be confidently wrong.”

The story at Walmart goes deeper, as not only have they taken to imposing new token limits on their own internal AI system, Code Puppy, in order to cut costs, but have begun facing increasing backlash over the ways in which they have attempted to implement the software. Employees at Walmart have reported the implementation of AI in task-setting, which has resulted in the development of extremely unrealistic labour targets leading to burnout, injuries, and higher turnover (remarkable considering the current labour market). This week the investor group United for Respect attempted to extract a report from the company on the effect of AI-driven labour intensification on employee wellbeing in a request that was ultimately rejected by shareholders without explanation.

New machines and heavier burdens – the latter a tried and tested recipe for profit, the former proving perhaps not as effective, but maybe good slave drivers, which capital will need if the AI bubble bursts and all that remains is a tired, stubborn workforce. Give them a cold can of Asahi™ and let them watch a few games from the World Cup on the telly – why not throw in a half-time show while you’re at it? They’ll get over it soon enough.

General Strike in Portugal

Portuguese workers went on general strike across the country on Wednesday in protest against the government’s ‘Trabalho XXI’ package, which seeks to cut back on workforce dismissal regulations and remove caps on outsourcing, which Portugal’s trade union conference CGTP described as an ‘unprecedented assault on workers’ rights.’

Approximately 190 international flights were cancelled across Portugal, with much of the country’s public transport network paralysed, rail and ferry services facing widespread halts, state schools shut, and a near total walkout of all nightshift staff in state-run hospitals. Portugal’s centre-right coalition government has remained stalwart in its commitment to the package, striking a deal with the far-right Chega party in order to move it through parliament. Labour Minister Maria Rosario de Palma Ramalho downplayed the impact of the strike, claiming that 77% of public-sector workers scabbed, however the CGTP disputes these figures. Though the general strike ended on Thursday morning, the CGTP have made clear that they are not going to relent, with targeted strikes on critical infrastructure in logistics, healthcare, and transportation likely to hit the country as the bill arrives for debate in parliament in the coming weeks.

The government claims that the bill is intended to improve Portugal’s ‘competitiveness’ on global markets, with a cash-strapped Treasury facing up to the coming price spike and persistent labour shortages in construction, IT, and healthcare (particularly for its rapidly aging population), and seeking new capital influx – despite a relatively healthy labour market, positive growth figures, and a major domestic investment drive on the back of the Recovery and Resilience Plan the government introduced following severe winter storms at the start of this year. Here in the UK we might even look with envy at the state of the Portuguese economy, at least on paper. Portugal has achieved a remarkable fiscal turnaround since the lockdowns, seeing a downward trajectory in debt-to-GDP ratios of 91% at the start of 2026 from 137% in 2021. So why the need for a more ‘competitive’ Portugal, especially if it risks further strikes of this nature paralysing the Portuguese economy?

A great amount of the government’s ambition for this package is being driven by AI. The language the government employs to justify the package frequently refers to ‘looking ahead’, and ‘align[ing] labour legislation with new forms of work and business organisation, especially in a context of digitalisation and technological change.’ One of the key elements of the package is the removal of a 2023 ban on outsourcing after collective redundancies – a common tactic used by firms seeking to replace in-house workforces with slimmer, automated workflows. ‘Time bank’ arrangements are also included in the package, allowing firms to extend working hours during peak times, providing flexibility for capital to concentrate high-intensity labour where its new tools need it, whilst cutting wages when its newly-automated systems are up and running.

At least from a capitalist perspective, the Portuguese government is thinking quite far ahead – how to maintain a fragile upswing in the economy as profitability crashes await us in the coming quarters? Lay the groundwork for increased exploitation and break the power of the unions to stop it. We will have to wait and see who will win this battle for Portugal’s future.

Wildcat Strikes & Intensifying Labour in Britain

Mechanical and electrical engineering workers at the Hinkley Point C nuclear development in Somerset have been banned from entering the site until Monday after they staged ‘unofficial industrial action’ in protest of increasing labour intensity on the project. The workers staged a ‘canteen sit-in’, downing tools in protest against safety and fatigue violations by their contractor MEH Alliance, who had demanded workers clock in and out in dangerous site locations such as in crane-lift zones, in order to cut overall registered working hours.

Progress at the EDF nuclear plant has faced delays and spiralling costs. UK nuclear development has been notoriously weak in the preceding decades, with the last nuclear facility go online in the UK joining the grid in 1995, for a project started in 1988. The decline in management expertise, parts manufacturing, and specialised labour since the completion of the 1995 plant in Suffolk, on top of supply chain-driven price hikes, have led Hinkley Point C to double its estimated costs from £18bn to £36bn and its initial deadline of 2023 extended to 2030. EDF are putting immense pressure on MEH to rapidly increase worker productivity, to which the workers have responded at various times with wildcat strikes and protests over the course of the project, such as the incident seen this week. All this has cast EDF’s positive news on installing the second reactor pressure vessel, ‘Big Carl’, under fairly damp weather.

This comes as TfL drivers in the RMT have resumed strike action this week over the labour contraction efforts being undertaken by the company to attempt to increase productivity on the railways, first discussed in INDEX 2. Workers across the UK and indeed Europe are facing tighter and tighter squeezing by capital in order to maintain margins, from sector to sector, yet logistics, healthcare, and energy workers are proving their capacity to respond with renewed labour withdrawal energy. So what of the political wing of the labour movement?

Your Other Party?

The first ‘major’ split from Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s failed left-wing experiment Your Party (YP) has arrived, under the name ‘Socialist Federation’ (SF). This Federation started life as the Members’ Charter, a loose group of socialists united in protest against YP’s refusal to allow dual-membership for the organisation, formally breaking away over disputes over data handling and an opaque centralised leadership (this in itself is rather ironic, given that the YP dual membership dispute was largely centred around the rights of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) members in the YP, the SWP itself infamous for the highly opaque, top-down, and controversy-baiting activities of its own leadership).

Reports are varied on the number of members who have actually left to form the new group, but it seems to be in the range of 100-200, potentially less, and it is even more unclear what total density this grouping represents in YP after the mass exodus following their founding conference and the Green Party’s emergence as the undisputed face of the electoral populist left.

A read of the original Members’ Charter’s conference resolutions put out prior to the SF’s announcement point towards a three-way debate for the organisation’s form: one group of ‘federalists’ opting for a loose, autonomous federation of local groups (Pope, Meldau, etc.); one group of ‘networkists’ who push for asynchronous, digital autonomous groups (Green, Urquhart, etc.); and a third group of more traditional ‘vanguardists’ or ‘partyists’ seeking to build a disciplined cadre organisation (Shanley, Tilley, etc.). Evidently from the name of the group, the federalists won the initial debate, likely on the promise of it being a short-term, ‘transitional’ model, though the direction is unspecified.

What to make of all this? A small, factionalist grouping breaking apart from a small, factionalist grouping of the Labour Party, neither of which appear to give much mind to the overwhelming popular distaste for splitting, ideology, and vanguardism in an electoral culture guided by fear of the far-right and reactive mass return to Labour in the event of a successful Andy Burnham campaign. Is it to be condemned as a useless exercise?

Potentially. Much of the localist left space has been crowded out by Greens Organise, who successfully capitalised on that momentum to win several urban councils at the local elections last month. The very public disaster that was the YP conference left many with a profoundly negative impression of mainstream socialist politics in general, not just for the characters of Sultana and Corbyn. The objective result of all this so far has been to bolster support for the Greens as the only viable left-populist alternative. It is unlikely a new ‘federation’ will be able to capture much more beyond the small audience it has already cultivated, at least in the short-term.

On the other hand, the debate taking place within the group is, in some respects, encouraging. Evidently the membership is young and willing to break away from the more rote ideological infighting that has marred left wing politics for so long. To focus on the ‘party problem’ and use an experimental model to test out new ideas is by no means a fool’s errand, though unlikely to garner political attention any time soon. It is arguable that despite the Green’s success locally and Burnham’s potential recovery of the Labour vote, there still remains a vacuum to be filled in British politics for explicit socialism of a serious type, especially one that can look constructively toward network models (as advocated in INDEX 5) and the emergent cybernetic proletarianism indicated above, whilst remaining cautious of ‘movementism’ and the need to erect a ‘political subject’ of the old type.

The SF may look (and sound) like a parody of leftist politics from the 1970s, but that cloud-cover may prove the vantage needed for a new form of political expression for the UK’s avowedly socialist left, at a time when socio-economic changes are rapidly re-politicising and radicalising greater and greater numbers of workers, one way or the other.

INDEX Verdict

It is growing more and more evident that capitalism is simply unable to nurture the emergent technological properties of organisation implied by artificial intelligence, with the only meaningful use they can find for the tools being new whips for increasing labour intensity. As always, the working class must take history by the horns and force through the future whether capital likes it or not. Drawing on the networkist models developing in Europe for workers’ struggles, we coin a phrase: networkerism, for a functional network of workers nationwide, continent-wide, worldwide, learning from the logics of the technology we interface with each day, to force the world into the future by whatever means necessary, in the pursuit of leisure over labour. Let us build the network they are incapable of.

(More on this in future)

By L. Luria

Communists should remain cognisant of the tragedy which persists in our movement. Even our victories are tragic. Lenin’s break with Marxist orthodoxy was tragic; Stalin’s Socialism in One Country, the victory over Trotsky of course, but more so the victory over Bukharin, was brutally tragic; Mao’s break with the Soviet system of planning, the Cultural Revolution, and the geopolitical split were all mired in tragedy; the end of the Cultural Revolution, the transition from Mao to Deng, and then from Deng through Jiang and Hu to Xi, has all been tragic also. I mean that our whole history is tied up in the recognition of necessity, a comprehension that the pursuit of socialism necessitates betrayal and sacrifice, the repudiation of everything which has previously given sense to the project, the ceaseless affirmation of the spirit against the letter, of ruthless criticism at higher and higher degrees of intensity – always more absurd, always more real.

I don't intend this to be read as a romantic eulogy for the prior age of revolutionary optimism; the intent here is simply to elaborate a disposition, beginning with a claim regarding V.M. Glushkov’s project to overhaul the embittered Soviet economic planning regime through the National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing (OGAS). Glushkov’s ambition was to deliver Soviet society to a form of economic organisation wherein money held no necessary determining role in the allocation of goods, overcome through cybernetic planning (in a partial prefiguration of our contemporary data economy1) so as to consciously satisfy the maximal ambition for a society with neither classes nor money. The failure of OGAS represents a permanently lost horizon of communism, that the victorious world-historical ascent of the internet, carrying with it the inherited social logic of its origin in ARPANET, has irreversibly branded the present information age so that the whole of humanity is now inextricably bound in some or another way to the cultural norms and prescriptions of America.

OGAS was an attempt to resolve a persistent anxiety in Soviet communism, the preponderance of bureaucracy and the bureaucratic strata developing within socialist society. The OGAS project aimed in part to solve concerns raised in Josef Stalin's 1928 proclamation that the Soviet Communist Party had yet to root out bureaucratic influence, both in its own ranks and in the ranks of the political, economical, and cultural institutions of the State.

“Bureaucracy is one of the worst enemies of our progress. It exists in all our organisations – Party, YCL, trade-union, and economic. When people talk of bureaucrats, they usually point to the old non-Party officials, who as a rule are depicted in our cartoons as men wearing spectacles. (Laughter.) That is not quite true, comrades. If it were only a question of the old bureaucrats, the fight against bureaucracy would be very easy. The trouble is that it is not a matter of the old bureaucrats. It is a matter of the new bureaucrats, bureaucrats who sympathise with the Soviet Government, and finally, communist bureaucrats. The communist bureaucrat is the most dangerous type of bureaucrat. Why? Because he masks his bureaucracy with the title of Party member. And, unfortunately, we have quite a number of such communist bureaucrats.”
(Speech Delivered at the Eighth Congress of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, May 16, 1928)

Despite Stalin’s purported commitment to de-bureaucratisation, concerns that the Soviet bureaucracy was assuming a pernicious role became ever more widespread as his leadership of the Soviet state progressed. The now-preponderant term ‘New Class’, popularised in the West by the adherents of Laschian post-leftism, was given its primary canonical formulation by the dissenting Yugoslav Marxist Milovan Djilas to describe the particular form of the bureaucrat facilitated and nurtured under the Stalin government. The phrase and the thesis are older than Djilas, however; Jan Wacław Machajski at the turn of the last century gave this a more systematic form, arguing that the socialist intelligentsia, the ‘intellectual workers’, constituted a rising new class whose victory through nationalised industry would amount to an eschewing of the emancipation of the proletariat, substituting this ambition for its own accession to power. Leon Trotsky’s attacks on the Stalin government held an equivalence to this line of new class critique albeit differing on a few key areas, condemning the bureaucracy as a ‘caste’ rather than a class, that this strata was not personally enriching themselves by way of surplus value extraction, and so on. Alexander Bogdanov represents another significant Communist engagement with this problem of class and socialist bureaucracy, concerning himself with the distribution of skills and responsibilities within the socialist economic arrangement, positing that the command-execution relation and the monopoly of expertise are themselves proto-class relations; In any case, much of the bitter attitude which defined anti-Soviet Marxism as it developed into the 1930s and 1940s specifically cohered around the unfortunate persistence of bureaucrats, discourse around the class character of this undesirable yet highly embedded social element, and the corresponding perception that Stalin was in some or another way their ‘Bonaparte’, champion of the bureaucrat against than the proletarian.

The concern regarding creeping bureaucratic capture was already present in Marx-Engels’ period, as best expressed in the condemnation of the Marxist purport by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin: “Either one destroys the State or one must accept the vilest and most fearful lie of our century: the red bureaucracy”. Engels’ attention to the particular point of what form a Socialist government would take is defined (after Saint-Simon) as the supersession of “the government of persons” by “the administration of things,” refusing to elaborate so far as to erroneously prefigure the image of socialism, yet evidently attempting to sketch out something which would annul the fear of a ‘red bureaucracy’ from Bakunin and his ilk. The persistence of this anxiety towards bureaucracy is perhaps then as integral to socialism as revolutionary optimism is; with the movement realising itself in power in 1917, Engels’ formula had been radicalised by Lenin in The State and Revolution, describing political/economic administration as reducible to functions any literate worker could perform; mere “accounting and control”. However, writing shortly after in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (1918) Lenin pulls the other way and endorses Taylorist scientific management and one-man management, indicating that the actuality of the post-revolutionary state required a level of specialisation, a privileging of certain specialist responsibilities not previously accounted for.

In an address to the Supreme Soviet on 7 May 1957, Khrushchev announced his sovnarkhoz reforms, abolishing the majority of industrial ministries, replacing their authority with numerous regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy) in roughly a hundred economic administrative areas. These reforms were designed in part to decentralise decision-making from all-Union branch ministries to the republics and regions, and to further consolidate Khrushchev’s hegemony, promulgating a perception of systemic change within the bounds of the state, further developing the image of his leadership as a motor for economic renewal and political decentralisation. At the 22nd Party Congress in 1961 Khrushchev announced the Third Programme, stating that Communism would be achieved by the year 1980, a claim which was purportedly guaranteed by scientific calculation and assessment undertaken by senior Soviet economists. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat had given way to the State of the Whole People, announcing the final success of the Khrushchev era in their dismantling of all vestiges of class antagonism. One year after Khrushchev announced the end of class struggle, in early June 1962, a strike at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Works commenced following a nationwide rise in meat and butter prices, coinciding with pay cuts at the plant. Thousands of workers marched on the Party headquarters, met by gunfire from Soviet Army soldiers. Twenty four were killed, with around eighty-seven wounded. Later, seven individuals were executed and over one hundred imprisoned for participation in the strike. The price increases which precipitated the strike were never repeated, the planners instead opting for swelling food subsidies. The same year as the strike, Glushkov’s OGAS was proposed to Soviet authorities, to a mixed reception.

As Glushkov worked on his system amidst criticism and suspicion from the Party elite, the problem of rampant Communist bureaucracy was being dealt with in China by other means: Red Guard cadres directly attacked bureaucrats and figures of seniority in the Party, promoted directly by the Party and the state itself, articulated most succinctly by Mao in his big-character poster Bombard the Headquarters in 1966. That same year, the United States Department of Defence began developing ARPANET, four years after Glushkov first submitted the OGAS project to Soviet officials. In 1969 the first ARPANET computers were connected, and by 1970 had developed into an integrated and expanding network; that year, OGAS was refused funding. The following year, the 24th Party Congress formalised the Soviet Union's commitment to small scale, local, disconnected information exchange systems, shelving OGAS forever.

Had OGAS been implemented, a radical reformation of Soviet bureaucracy would have had to follow. Rather than a reformulation in liberalising terms (as pursued through the Kosygin-Liberman reforms of 1965), OGAS would have given rise to a more profound realisation of the ‘totalitarian’ concept which the less efficient planning regime could only give partial expression to. OGAS would have set the Soviet planning regime onto a path towards ‘completion’, realising the lofty ambition of the depersonalised administration of things. The first phase of this would have necessitated the mass redundancy of the planners, a progressive diminution of the numbers of bureaucrats necessary for the reproduction of Soviet society. In the failure of OGAS and the parallel triumph of ARPANET, the return of capitalism in Russia was made inevitable. By the dismissal of the necessity of a sovereign information exchange system, therefore the Soviet Union’s incapacity to compete in the information age; the cultural forms emerging in America and the broader west during the rise of the nascent information economy became, as Alexei Yurchak words it, ‘sacral objects’ for the Soviet people, holding a resonance and speaking to a profundity which lay elsewhere than their immediate local experience. The period of the 1970s through to the early 1990s was defined by an ever-rising perception within the Soviet Union that their society was in some or another way fraudulent, a tendency which rose concurrently with the development of a form of world economy increasingly determined by electronic information exchange to which the Soviet Union was physically incapable of sufficient participation or mastery.

To pry open the archaic debate about the class character of bureaucrats, we can say that in their reluctance to implement OGAS, the Soviet bureaucracy post-1970 can very much be categorised as having its own independent class character. This is not to say they’re a ruling class in the narrow sense, as a covert bourgeoisie which could hoard capital and direct it towards self-interested partial ends – things which the socialist state still precluded and criminalised – but instead that the bureaucrats after 1970 acted as a determinate partiality, a strata with its own interests and aspirations at odds with those of the population as a whole. Against Djilas and Bogdanov, it does not suffice to say that monopoly control over the social surplus and the means of its allocation are themselves sufficient to determine what a class is, if allocation is still broadly operating according to the pursuit of a common good and socialist construction rather than private interest. However, by sacrificing socialist construction for the sake of maintaining their social position and perverse vestigial identification with a prior period of the productive revolutionary process, in this decisive moment in 1970, the Soviet bureaucracy was transformed from a stratified element of the wider proletariat into something else. Objectively, as a class-in-itself, the bureaucracy had existed for decades as a potentiality, which is what Stalin, Djilas, and the martyrs of Novocherkassk each reveal in different ways. What occurs in 1970 is its becoming a class-for-itself: in refusing the instrument that would have begun to dissolve it, the bureaucracy acts, consciously and decisively, in defence of its own reproduction and against the construction of socialism. This refusal is the moment the new class knows its interest as its own and chooses it; that act of recognition, and not the bare fact of privilege, completes the passage from strata to class. Twenty-one years after OGAS was shelved, the same bureaucracy that dismissed Glushkov’s proposal went on to formally write the Soviet Union out of existence.

To sufficiently comprehend the monumentality of this foreclosure, what OGAS might have meant, it suffices to merely consider what the internet is, what it’s facilitated. In 1916 Lenin identified how the various forms taken by the different instances of imperialism in the late 19th Century, owing to their British genesis, engendered something we could call an economic ‘Anglofication’ of the European powers, a concession to the origin necessary to enter into open financial competition with Britain. Contemporary states have undergone something equivalent, something of a social and economic ‘Americanisation’ by their entry into the global information economy; What is ‘American’ about the internet is located in the firms, the financial superstructure, the lingua franca, and the proprietary logic of accumulation carried through and affirmed as a necessary precondition of online engagement. Had a wholly different social form oriented against the pursuit of mere accumulation have organised this same material substrate, then the formal and informal preoccupations the internet has engendered globally, the seemingly irreversible ‘Americanisation’ of reality, might have been eschewed in favour of the universalisation of the Soviet idea – a Soviet world-episteme encoding the present age of information economy.2

ARPANET was born from the Pentagon in the 1960s, passed to and moulded by American academia, and then, after the state withdrew in the mid-1990s, relied entirely upon the support of private capital, charged with the revolutionary optimism of a borderless market commons expanding across the globe. The internet resolved in time to become the advertising and data-rent form which the functioning of the whole world relies upon, whereas OGAS was conceived from the first as an instrument of the planning state and was killed by that state’s own administrative strata.

Returning to China, as early as 1956 Mao had broken with the Soviet economic planning template, detailing in On the Ten Major Relationships the endemic faults pertaining to over-centralisation and the privileging of heavy industry over light industry & agriculture, calling for power to be devolved to provinces and localities. The vertically integrated branch-ministry apparatus to which OGAS would have hypothetically brought to completion were consciously fragmented under Mao, reaching a terminal intensity under the Cultural Revolution, turning the masses directly against the bureaucracy and the planning apparatus, cultivating across China a dense patchwork of relatively self-sufficient local units loosely bound to the centre as the sovereign architecture of their socialism. In bypassing the highly complex, tightly interlocking machine which the Soviet economy had developed into, the generations of Communist Party leaders succeeding Mao could “grow out of the plan” at the margins through pursuing township and village enterprises and special economic zones without risking the collapse of the entire apparatus as a result. China connected to the internet in 1994 through state-built and state-planned backbones, all cloistered in the confines of the Golden Shield.

At the 2015 Wuzhen conferences, Xi Jinping outlined the manner by which China would engage within this terrain, committing to Chinese ‘cyber-sovereignty’ against the American vision of a globally integrated open commons. China holds a system of mass information exchange identical to, and operating within, the same system as the Western internet, the only difference being that the Chinese internet is retained under political command rather than surrendered to private capital. At the 19th Party Congress in 2017 wherein Xi proclaimed the dawn of the ‘New Era’ of Chinese socialism, the Party committed to the integration of the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence with physical economy as an explicit national objective; In March 2020 the Central Committee and the State Council classified data as the fifth factor of production, alongside land, labour, capital, and technology, and therefore as a resource to be consciously allocated by the state toward explicitly productive and social ends. The opposition between understanding data as private property to be enclosed and rented versus understanding data as a resource equivalent to water, energy, and other natural monopolies demonstrates that a clear step beyond ‘Americanisation’ has been taken. China has engendered a significantly more adequate reorientation of the state towards the actuality of data understood as social factor with immense potential for consciously-oriented social transformation.

This is by no means what Glushkov could have possibly imagined or wanted from OGAS. In the ever-moving process of the realisation of Communism, while OGAS failed and foreclosed upon any prospect for a pure, non-accumulative, non-bourgeois world information exchange system, the object of OGAS has been, in a certain respect, fulfilled beyond any expectation – fulfilled in part through the logic of accumulation itself, through the sobering, profane, tragic actuality of worldly socialism.

It’s become something of a tired point, but it’s undeniable that British heatwaves are relentless. Something clawing about them that just won’t leave you alone, especially here in London where we’re all packed together like a tin of sardines. Or a pack of jackals, perhaps, which have taken to huddling up in European cities in recent years, spikes in population chalked up to climate change. The jackal is the face of Anubis, god of the dead, now stalking westward to unusual climes in Germany, Poland, and Brussels. Anubis was famously the patron of mummification, wrapping corpses in thick bandages for their journey to the afterlife – an unthinkable torture in this heat. So I stand with the Pope this week who called for an end to the ‘idolatry of profit’ in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas; smash the icons and be rid of this intolerable state of affairs. Take off these criss-cross choke-bands of irrational supply chain management, discard the liturgy of bureaucrats, stop tithing us for our time, and give the houses of the gods back to the people. I’ll pray on it. Or maybe I’ll talk to Claude about it. Feels like I’ve got a lot to relate to a San Francisco data centre right now.

— S.E.P.

(Note: the Other Editor wishes to state publicly and for the record that he’s very much enjoying the heat, even if it has meant delays in at least two articles he wanted to put out last week. It is a weak excuse, of course, but it is what it is. If the Aten permits it, regular one-to-two articles per-week shall return in due course.)

Cybernetic Planning Is Here

A new paper published by the npj Science of Food journal has demonstrated new levels of AI end-to-end algorithmic matching. The researchers used AI tools to develop a complex food distribution system which can seamlessly match predicted nutritional requirements, from datasets as small as individual glucose levels, to localised supply chain distribution and management. The outcome is a theoretical equilibrium between supply and demand which, when scaled alongside advanced quantum computing models, has the potential to reshape the entire food distribution system worldwide.

The research points to the very real present capabilities of AI supply chain management to orchestrate automated planning. The model’s sensitivity to biological minutiae is so extreme as to largely discount the application of these complex systems to any but a small upper-middle class Western consumer base, at least with immediately attainable tech solutions. But the idea that such minute datasets are required to appease the nutritional preferences of a small elite suggests that larger datasets focused on broader social demand are now feasible for global planning.

The research effectively points to the capacity for AI to replace price signals for both supply and demand, were the political direction asserted for its application. The political restrictions of the present moment are also made ludicrously evident.

In a recent article economist Branko Milanovic discussed the long-term potential outcomes for automation on this scale in both Marxian and Neoclassical frames, with both models pointing to the same outcome: capital becomes entirely unsustainable without an active labour force, either due to the declining rate of profit or the destruction of a productive consumer base, respectively. The outcome is not necessarily the socialisation of wealth, however. With remnant political institutions and practically unshakeable monopolisation by capital investors, a perhaps more likely outcome following the status quo is the collapse into a total rentier society and UBI guarantee for the sake of minimal consumption, with a small service workforce maintained as a new middle class. What potentially emerges is a new class struggle between a remnant, union-protected proletariat in the middle, a small elite of techno-bureaucrats and financiers (read planners, i.e. bureaucrats), and a large bottom layer post-proletariat kept sufficiently docile by social media and UBI - nutrition-based supply chain planning serving only the interests of a small elite, ‘socialism for the rich.’

If unemployment trends persist, Big Tech maintains its stranglehold over the means of organisation, and the working class remains divided and subdued by limited trade union consciousness, it does appear the more likely scenario than perhaps Aaron Bastani & co’s optimistic Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

Regardless, the technology for dynamic socialist planning is no longer a theoretical concept demanding research at scale. The research stage is reaching completion, the question remains as to who will develop it, and who will own it.

EU Tries to Break Free

Hyperscaler bond issuance has now reached record-breaking levels, with 15% of global bonds issued by the Big Five tech firms in 2026 (Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Oracle, and Microsoft). In effect, Big Tech is now not only in control of the infrastructure of the emerging market, but the policy decisions of the state.

In an attempt to curb overall Big Tech dominance in domestic markets, the European Commission is set to introduce its Tech Sovereignty Package on 3 June. The package will follow the UK’s own SovereignAI programme to inject large amounts of state capital into the tech market in an effort to attract local startups and prevent talent from being rerouted to the US. It also seeks to encourage a shift in state buying patterns, with 70% of current tech expenditure by the public sector going straight to the Big Five.

Serious doubts about the viability of these sovereignty schemes persist, however. Although the public sector does possess a significant amount of purchasing power, it also lacks meaningful cloud infrastructure. It is all well and good for software to be ‘Made in Europe’, but it is still entirely dependent on US data centres owned by Oracle for them to be run. Ease of integration is also a major problem of onboarding, as tech systems designed for in-house integration pose major logistical hurdles for introducing third-party, ‘sovereign’ programmes. Indeed, EU bodies which are beginning to implement new tech solutions have opted consistently for single developer systems where possible.

The pace of governance is also of concern. Task fulfilment is at machine pace when it comes to AI engineering, far exceeding what is possible for human programmers - but compliance, governance, and policy regulations reduce actual throughput back to human pace, as AI systems cannot fulfil these outcomes autonomously. European tech firms like Mistral have openly protested the EU’s tight market regulations as disincentivising both supply and demand for home-grown AI.

There are potential solutions to these problems. One of the major issues with sovereign AI scaling schemes is that whilst they promote financial investment in domestic AI companies, they stop short of actually attempting to break infrastructural dependencies which keep the Big Five dominant in the domestic market. Were governments to demand their purchases be open-source, local firms would be able to continue development in cloud infrastructure and software modelling without having to resort to private scale systems from Big Tech. Peer-Production Licenses for platform co-operative developers and improved financial incentives for these types of firms to scale would also help to not only keep software free-flowing within the public sector, but also purposefully exclude Big Tech from being able to poach and redevelop novel sovereign software.

With regard to governance issues, proposals have been made about ‘Policy as Code’, essentially coding governance into AI systems autonomously so as to eliminate the need for a human bureaucracy. This would undoubtedly ramp up the pace of production without requiring reckless deregulation, but would also upset a large body of techno-bureaucrats who hold significant influence over the European Commission. And here lies the core issue. Even with these solutions available, the political influence of policy bureaucrats and Big Tech bondholders actively disincentivises and in some cases paralyses state actors from genuine ‘sovereign’ development, forever entrapping state spending power in Silicon Valley monopoly giants. One of the EU’s first major ‘sovereign’ partners, considered a model for the upcoming package, was in fact a joint venture with Alphabet, and with 70% of all EU-wide tech already owned and operated by the Big Five, the logistics of overhaul, let alone cost or political will, may very well render these sovereignty packages nothing more than further fuel to foreign monopolies.

Real Wages In Meltdown

Real wages are in freefall in developed countries as supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Iran continue on into their fourth month. We have covered several of the key materials shortages being caused by the war in prior INDEXES, including plastics and aluminiums, however the sizeable impact on wages is exacerbating an impending price storm expected to hit towards the end of this summer.

Average earnings in the UK grew by a measly 0.1% over the last three months, and are expected to shrink outright in the face of the price spike. This trend is also being observed in the US and EU, with Spain the only nominal outlier of the year so far. This of course will tighten consumer spending habits, especially in the run-up to Christmas (with last year proving disastrous for high streets already), and incentivise union agitation for higher wages, likely leading to greater instances of strike action and putting further pressure on the labour market.

This comes as the UK government recently produced the diagnostic element of its report on youth unemployment, which has risen to 16% of all young people in 2026 (see INDEX 6). The second part of the report is expected for Autumn this year, when plans to overcome the socio-cultural issues associated with long-term youth unemployment may be rudely interrupted by a price-spiral market unwilling to take on new employees.

Wages are declining, prices are rising, jobs are growing scarce, and the next generation have no workplace experience. The UK labour market is in a terribly poor situation, an economy shrinking on the back of a post-proletariat whose primary economic function has shrunk to servicing public debt through consumptive taxes.

Manchesterism in Action?

The first official consultation for the planned Mayoral Development Corporation (MDC) in Middleton was opened to Middletonians this week as the corporation looks to get its feet off the ground in what may be a pathfinding experiment in civil infrastructure. MDCs typically consist of public-private partnerships, with the occasional resident representative, aimed toward developing local areas through land acquisition, development subsidies, and streamlined planning processes.

Middleton MDC represents a significant change, however, with the direct involvement of local and national co-operative bodies, Middleton Co-operating and Co-operatives UK, respectively. For the first time, community worker-owned partners hold a stake in the corporation, experimenting with grafting the horizontal, resource-pooling logic of the Italian contratto di rete discussed in INDEX 5 onto a statutory, top-down British administrative vehicle (though the state still fundamentally controls the MDC - still a while to go yet).

The MDC promises to deliver social housing and local trade facilitation in an exercise of devolved economic development. It turns the head on what has been a series of drawn out experiments in top-down local initiatives with mixed results, from David Cameron’s Big Society to Boris Johnson’s Levelling Up and now Keir Starmer’s Pride in Place. MDC Middleton has instead generated much of its initial momentum from the community-organised Middleton Co-operating, an organisation which aims to support credit union and mutualist facilitation within the Middleton area. Alongside Rose Marley, the chief executive of Co-operatives UK, the national coordinating body for British co-operatives, local stakeholders will co-chair the MDC. The measure of the corporation’s success will be the measure for future localist development in the country, as well as co-operative leadership in such plans, for national policy - especially with keen supporter Andy Burnham hoping to make his way into No 10 if he wins the Makerfield by-election coming up next month.

Co-operation offers attractive solutions to many social policy concerns and local development issues, even at scale, as has recently been shown in Africa. The African Co-operative Housing Conference, held this year, pointed to the immense success the growth of co-operative housing developments have had for the African housing crisis, with key examples in Kenya, Uganda, and the conference host Nigeria showing rapid development and affordability not pegged to corrupt and sluggish government bureaucracies and uninterested and non-compliant private developers. Success has been so far-reaching as to initiate discussions to implement a continent-wide Blockchain network for land registries in order to massively streamline future co-operative land acquisition and development.

Such technology may in fact offer a potential solution to long-standing concerns around land value capture. The policy idea has recently returned to discourse on the back of Andy Burnham’s preference for the idea as a solution to housing issues in the UK, but has often been shut down due to the large bureaucratic requirements to calculate land values. A decentralised blockchain registry may ease this process, making implementation faster and less controversial. This would also help to ease the process of co-operative land acquisition in the UK, making projects like MDC Middleton more capable to scale.

INDEX Verdict

The technological leaps and bounds being made by AI are real, but they may prove fruitless in our present economic situation, regardless of their performance. Techno-bureaucratic monopolies can do little to slow the decline in profits resulting from their own innovations, and state actors are powerless to shift their debt dependencies alone. But alternative solutions are emergent, from blockchain-backed housing in Abuja to credit unions in Middleton. When the question is no longer if we can rationalise the economy, but who will draw up the plan, we should look encouragingly towards models which give labour a seat at the table, to make its reasonable demand for leisure, and an end to the idolatry of profit.

“There’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend.”

So goes the Flanders and Swann track, lamenting the decline of Britain’s railways as the Beeching Cuts irreversibly changed our infrastructural landscape. Indeed, the Low-Speed Rail 2 project seems a thing of perpetuity, announced when I was a child, knocking down my council block as a teenager, now as an adult cutting a sizeable chunk out of my wages through my tax bill. I’ll be 40 by the time it takes its first passengers. HS2 seems to be this immovable burden that tells the story of mine and many other young Londoners’ lives, and immovable is the last thing you want a train to be. Unless, of course, you’re the RMT, who have reluctantly postponed the May strikes this week to carry on negotiations with TfL over proposals to change drivers’ working hours (reported on in INDEX 2). I’m fortunate to be in a union that can muster a sense of professionalism and organisational ability that the state and capital evidently lack. In all honesty, I’m fortunate to have a job at all. Unemployment is a sticky thing, and it’s really going to hurt this summer when the price spikes arrive to check tickets. My bag is packed and I’ve stocked up on Murray mints, coffee, and Cornish pasties. Feeling my pockets, searching through my luggage, double-checking that I’m ready for that not-so-slow train rattlin’ early ‘round the bend.

— S.E.P.

The Criminal Enterprise of HS2

The Department for Transport this week announced yet more bad news for the ill-fated High-Speed Rail 2 project, which first broke ground in 2011. After several delays, scope reductions, and spiralling costs under the Conservative administration, Labour’s Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has now announced that the project will cost double the original estimates for the national network (now reduced to a single line between London and Birmingham), and extended its deadline yet again, now all the way to 2040. On top of this, the actual speed of the ‘high-speed rail’ project has been reduced, with cheaper locomotives procured that cut 40km/h off the initially expected travel speed.

The story of HS2 has been one of continuous failure, and a key demonstration of the incapacity of the modern British state. What in Europe costs a fraction of the price and time has in the UK become one of the most expensive infrastructure projects of the 21st century. As Alexander rightly pointed out: “If we were a country the size of China, I could understand, but we are not.” However, this is more than a question of geography, it is a question of the size of the state as well.

The biggest hurdles for HS2 have been contract spending. Almost 100% of the long-term downside risk for the project was placed on HS2 Ltd (quango), rather than the contractors actually responsible for delivery. This gave private contractors free reign to chase short-term construction schedules which allowed for juggling multiple contracts at once, with engineering problems or unaccounted difficulties paid for by HS2 Ltd, not the contractors themselves. Mark Wild, who took over the project as part of the government’s latest reset, outlined how this led to civil contractors pouring concrete and tunneling before local planning consents were secured and engineering blueprints completed, leading to design changes mid-way through construction to satisfy local regulations that forced construction to stop, and £26bn spent on contractors sitting idle or being forced to alter half-built structures.

It is also a point that, when George Osborne launched the project in 2011, the scale of expectation was incredibly ambitious. With the backdrop of the oncoming 2012 Olympics off the back of Beijing 2008, and growing geopolitical dialogue between the UK and China, HS2 was intended to outperform every standard European high-speed line with faster units, extreme track specifications for maximal speed, and a range of custom components that had to be designed. Had the project been limited to a European model, it likely would be completed by now. This is what the present government is now deciding to do.

The failures around HS2 reek of corruption at every level, with contractors awarded billions due to apparent negligence in state planning, and a contract system specifically designed to allow contractors financial immunity. In INDEX 5 we discussed the contratto di rete, an Italian contract form that has proven successful in delivering broad, multi-stakeholder infrastructure projects through transparency, mutualised risk, and clear communication. None of this was present in the contract model agreed for HS2 Ltd., which, despite the reduction of the project’s overall scale and ambition, remains the model after Alexander’s ‘reset’.

The failure of HS2 brings the facade of London’s financial splendour to bear with the physical reality often discussed in the INDEX. The country is a corrupt, poor, and incompetent place where an asset-deprived state exists merely to funnel public funds into private hands. We have spoken on this with regard Ed Miliband’s energy policy in INDEX 1, that state policy has been set up to nationalise risk as much as possible to permit for the continuation of ever-more fickle profit margins. Where the state does nationalise, the form of ‘nationalisation’ takes on the same character (see outsourcing on the newly-nationalised railways, PFIs in the NHS, and so on). This has been state policy since the 1990s, and there is no escape route. International markets and central banks operate explicitly on this framework, meaning that any attempt to change course on a state-level will cause runs on the pound and skyrocketing gilt yields. It is becoming increasingly apparent, given the paltry options available to the British electorate, that the only viable means of exiting this arrangement will have to come from outside normal channels.

The Non-Return of Supermarket Price Caps

The Treasury has made remarkable headlines this week in a botched attempt to introduce price caps for supermarkets, as nerves grow for the incoming price spike ready to hit essential consumer goods. Retailers immediately rejected the proposals, with the M&S boss calling the idea “madness”, before the Treasury quickly retreated with its tail between its legs.

This 1970s throwback comes at an odd time, as headlines also highlighted fairly positive growth figures for the UK this week, beating expectations and even seeing a drop in inflation. A smiley Keir Starmer, desperate to appear more human as the Mayor of Manchester trapses along in his slow jog to Westminster, noted that he was “very pleased” that migration was down, ‘the economy’ was up, and waiting lists had been cut. A seemingly good week for the government – so why was Rachel Reeves caught trying to shoplift from Tesco?

Anxieties are growing about the price spike discussed in INDEX 5. Since then, the timeframe has been compressed due to poor ONS figures on Wednesday, ironically a product of the deflation the Prime Minister was celebrating in Downing Street. What was a Q4 expectation is now being adjusted to Q3, with the Treasury rightly terrified that an unprepared consumer market will turn around and blame them when chicken breasts start going for £10 a pop. Retailers rejected the proposals on grounds of profitability, expectedly, and lambasted the perceived assault on market orthodoxy.

Price caps are fickle things. They may keep consumers ‘happy’ for the period they are implemented, but prices will eventually rise elsewhere to compensate. The Treasury allegedly offered to lift certain regulations in exchange for voluntary price capping, indicative of a skittish and unconfident approach. They truly have no clue what to do.

Full Unemployment In Our Lifetime?

In other good news, unemployment has risen to 5% this week as businesses struggle to meet the increasing cost of material logistics, energy, and increased taxation. The labour market has been particularly poor in recent months as profit margins are squeezed and labour intensity reaches regulatory limits. An astonishing 16.2% of all young people are now unemployed, the majority out of education. As ever, yet another consequence of the falling rate of profit in this country is being subsidised by the state, welfare checks issued to keep consumer markets happy whilst they fire all their staff.

No wonder the Treasury is panicking as the Q3 deadline looms, because no one in the private sector is willing to shoulder the blow to increase wages to any reasonable level, putting the government in the tight spot of having to try and pay for it themselves. Social democracy is on the ropes, with every month seeing the British state dig deeper and deeper into its fiscal hole, before being told the plans have changed and they’re compelled to undergo yet another ‘reset’. It may very well be that the country is ungovernable, its citizens unemployable, its foodstuffs unaffordable, and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel (as an aside, even in instances where employment does rise, the pervasive condition of ‘virtual unemployment’ through the preponderance of non-value-generating labour, the ballooning of socially unnecessary labour time, means that even short or medium term stems to the decline in employment can’t sufficiently halt the free-fall tendency of the decline in value-generating work overall. Here, the prospect for radically distinct approaches to ‘employment’ and ‘productivity’ may commence, however such conservations amongst people who might be able to address such problems remain unlikely).

Bank of England Announces Debt Gadget

The Bank of England this week finally announced the rollout of a new bond issue format: the crypto-bond they are calling DIGIT (Digital Gilt Instrument), which will be the first of its kind in global monetary instruments. They are perhaps getting ready to streamline their sovereign debt issuance capacity to ‘sell, sell, sell’ in preparation for the oncoming shock.

That the BoE is capable of putting together an admittedly impressive technological feat for the sake of debt issuance is a picture in itself. Where in the UK laying tracks and building tunnels spirals into disastrous incompetence, the technology of owing people money is ahead of any other country in the world. One only wonders what we could achieve if instead of using this technology for credit signals, we instead used it for material signals in the macro-economy, say, to help coordinate stakeholder timelines for infrastructure delivery; ‘Give us your gismo you pillock, you’ve been trying to dial the number for Samaritans on the calculator app for hours now. That’s it, you hand it over and jump down there. Should be here soon.’

INDEX Verdict

We need to demand a full investigation into where state funds have gone over the course of HS2. We need to ensure that corrupt politicians and contractors are held to account, and we need to make the argument for a complete overhaul of UK contract law to bring in a system that is transparent, inclusive, and flexible. We would like to see the organisation of a people’s campaign for these demands. In the railway industry, when a worker is involved in a disciplinary incident, they are forced to fill out a ‘Please Explain’ form. We demand this of HS2 Ltd. and its contractors:
Please Explain.

By L. Luria

1. Consumer credit closes the gap between stagnant real wages and the consumption level required to realise social wealth. Were the wage to function as it did under classical conditions, this gap would close itself; the wage would be sufficient to purchase what production needs to sell, or the failure to do so would manifest as crisis and correction in the productive apparatus. In our period the gap has been closed administratively, by extending consumer credit to fund the difference, with the result that the consumption flow has become severed from the immediate productivity of the labour from which the wage is drawn.

2. If wages had continued to grow at their pre-2008 trajectory, real average weekly earnings would be £11,000 per year higher than they are at present, a 37% gap unparalleled in the modern industrial period. The OBR projects only 0.5% real wage growth per year in the medium term, with housing costs rising faster than general inflation since 2022-23. Against this stagnation, the Bank of England’s Money and Credit release reports net consumer credit borrowing of £1.6 billion in July 2025, of which £0.8 billion was on credit cards; The Bank's own Credit Conditions Survey notes that unsecured lending spreads widened across 2025, indicating that the price of consumer credit is rising even as the Bank Rate is cut; the spread, rather than the rate, has therefore assumed the role of determining variable for the marginal household borrower.

3. One objection to the way this stratum has been described is that it appears to treat the consumer credit crisis as independent of any deterioration in the productive apparatus, presuming that credit dynamics are in themselves autonomous from production. If the productive apparatus is understood in its classical form, as the set of firms and labour processes producing the use-values consumed in social reproduction, this conclusion would hold, however that is precisely the form which administered credit has reconstituted. The productive apparatus today is not merely the producer of consumed goods; it is the producer of credit-receiving firms whose creditworthiness depends on continuous consumption flows. The consumer credit circuit is not external to production; under administered credit it is internal to it. A 'crisis of consumer credit saturation' is therefore not autonomous but is the form through which the underlying productive contradiction (between increased technical capacity and the credit superstructure which prevents the reduction of socially necessary labour time) realises itself at the household level.

4. Regarding property, housing as property is held by the worker in two principal forms; as tenant in the rental sector, where rent is extracted by landed property as ground rent, and as owner-occupier in the mortgaged sector, where the worker holds title against a debt and the asset’s value is the capitalisation of an administratively imputed future income stream.

5. The rental case broadly retains its classical character; the landlord extracts surplus from the wages of the worker-tenant through rent, with the surplus then partly absorbed by the mortgage-holding bank where the dwelling is leveraged. The owner-occupier case is qualitatively distinct, however, from the classical Marxist schema: Here the worker holds an asset whose value is not the product of any tangible or identifiable share of surplus value produced by the dwelling itself (a house, on its own, produces nothing). The value is rather the capitalisation of imputed rent, the present value of a stream of housing services that the dwelling would yield were it rented out, discounted at the prevailing rate of interest, that rate of interest being administered at its apex at the central bank level, therefore rendering asset value ‘political’ in the proper sense rather than confirming to an autonomous or self-referential market mechanism.

6. The Bank of England’s own analysis has estimated that real house prices in 2014 would have been 25 per cent lower without quantitative easing; corporate and gilt purchases of £895 billion at peak underwrote this asset price effect through to the end of QE’s expansionary phase. Net property wealth now constitutes 40 per cent of household wealth in Great Britain (ONS Wealth and Assets Survey, April 2020 to March 2022, with the caveat that this dataset has had its accreditation suspended), private pension wealth 35 per cent, net financial wealth 14 per cent, physical wealth 10 per cent. The mortgaged worker is therefore, by a very large margin, more enmeshed in their housing asset than in any other property they own. The central bank, by setting the discount rate at which this asset’s imputed rent is capitalised, holds direct administrative power over what is, statistically, the worker’s principal form of wealth (more precisely, their share of an objectively generalised social wealth, given the determinacy of the central bank as organ of the state in the determination of asset value).

7. A given worker’s stake in the existing social order extends past the immediate wage relation, the sale of labourpower for a wage, through the (administered) asset relation. The mortgaged worker has been integrated into the credit system as a holder of capitalised value, this integration forming the foundation of the post-war settlement in Britain, elaborated romantically as ‘covenant’ or ‘compact’.

8. The function of student debt, despite its name, isn’t principally a means to recover the cost of higher education. That the student finance system only recovers only 25 per cent of its lending is, the system can’t be considered lending-proper, serving more-so as to channel state spending to prop-up a spiralling nominally for-profit higher education system. Another part of the real character of student finance is its role as an enclosure of general intellect, the socially produced reservoir of cognitive capacity which, under conditions of genuine subsumption, becomes an independent productive force. Student debt converts the development of the general intellect from a social investment (with social returns) into a personal income-contingent liability against future wages. This is the material foundation beneath the now-popular analytic claim of the student loan being a ‘graduate tax’.

9. By allocating the post-graduation labour of a credentialed strata into the sectors required to service the credit superstructure renders an objectively social investment in cognitive capacity into a form that registers, in administrative terms, as a private return on credit. The tightening of repayment thresholds (the 2025 Autumn Budget froze the Plan 2 threshold for three years) makes evident that the student finance regime is developing toward a more codified and apparent system of allocation.

10. The crisis form of student debt is less financial than it is structural/political. The share of UK First Class degrees rose from 16% in 2010 to 35% in 2022. Analyses published in 2025 suggest the marginal graduate premium (the additional earnings of the last graduate added to the strata) disappeared roughly two decades ago, when undergraduate participation rose past 30 per cent. Of the 2024 student intake of around 495,000, approximately 160,000 may not earn any premium at all; the graduate is being credentialed for a wage scale that does not, in aggregate, support the credentialing investment. The credential is being inflated to the point where its signal value approaches zero, demonstrating that the underlying cognitive capacity is therefore systematically misallocated.

11. The fourth type of debt, Sovereign Debt, is the apex, that the first three terminate in the fourth; consumer, mortgage, and student debt crises are all, in extremis, absorbed onto the sovereign balance sheet. In 2008, the peak cash cost of the UK interventions was £137 billion, with a net cost subsequently estimated by the OBR at £33 billion; UK government debt rose from 38 per cent of GDP in 2007 to 83 per cent by 2012, driven by the bailouts, lost tax revenue, and increased welfare expenditure. Subsequently, the response to COVID-19 produced a further outgrowth of sovereign debt. UK general government gross debt now stands at around 101 per cent of GDP, with debt interest payments at £126 billion in 2025-26, the third largest item of government expenditure after health and welfare.

12. Britain exhibits neither rising organic composition of capital nor accumulation of new productive capacity. Sovereign credit here is allocated to massaging the existing distribution of asset claims (QE and QT in turn) and supporting consumption (frozen tax thresholds, etc). Britain’s growth has been the worst of any major economy since 2008, and the OBR has been forced to revise productivity growth downwards repeatedly across reports.

13. While it ought to be noted that bond markets discipline sovereign credit, the PRA and FCA discipline private credit through capital and conduct rules, and the Treasury sets the fiscal envelope, the central bank still stands as the absolute threshold for tending to crisis for when fiscal, regulatory, and market discipline have all failed. The apex is not apparent during periods of relative stability because, in such instances, the lower-order instruments are sufficient to resolve crises. The material sovereignty of the Bank of England is affirmed at the expense of illusory forms of sovereignty in Parliament; clarification of these terms provides the base material for political agitation for a novel form of social organisation and a conscious, self-directed mode of production.

14. From all of the above we can sketch the outline for a minimal programme sufficient for the present period. Such a programme would, as has become increasingly popular in the spontaneous reactive demands of vast and disparate sections of the population, begin with debt cancellation plus the productive reorientation of sovereign credit. One without the other would ultimately serve to reproduce the dynamic that gave rise to the present arrangement.

15. Pursuit of consumer debt cancellation would, in theory, restore future variable capital to its prior position as the worker’s claim on social consumption, but would not fundamentally alter the productivity gap that necessitated the original credit extension in the first place; Mortgage debt cancellation in isolation destroys the capitalised asset value held by the owner-occupier worker, therefore risking mass political reaction, an attack on the vestigial remnants underlying the worker-citizen in its already atrophied condition; Student debt cancellation, the politically ‘lightest’ of the three, wouldn’t inherently disturb the object of the debt since the underlying asset is the graduate’s own cognitive capacity, engendering the possibility of a more immediate social return, yet a pursuit for cancellation would still necessitate thorough economic justification in the present ideological condition of the British public.

16. To mitigate adverse effects of the pursuit of debt cancellation in general, the decisive agitational wager would therefore be the demand for a redirection of sovereign credit toward expanded reproduction in concrete terms through physical capital formation, energy infrastructure, domestic manufacturing capacity, transport and freight infrastructure, and the productive deployment of cognitive capacity through reformed higher education institutions. In our period, this serves as the minimal condition under which the credit superstructure can be made to serve productive development rather than the reproduction of existing asset relations, all towards the ends of writing-out the system of administered credit altogether.

17. A reorientation of sovereign credit toward expanded reproduction makes possible the redistribution of social wealth toward the worker without forcing the destruction of the capitalised assets that ground the worker’s citizen-existence. The reconstitution of the former is the precondition for the retrieval of the latter, and the further integration of the latter underwrites the continuation of the former at higher and higher degrees of material prosperity.

How much plastic do you think you’ve bought in your life? Not a question that bears thinking about; it's a little sublimating. I know whenever I walk through a Poundland and see the sheer amount of poor-quality plastic tat for sale, I wonder just how much plastic we have used since the material was synthesised back in 1907. I also wonder just how much plastic we actually need; evidently, a lot. Computers, clothing, medical equipment, electrical infrastructure, vehicles, medicines – to put it simply, plastic is as ubiquitous as water. Handling it daily in an industrial workplace, its utility is undeniable – nonconductive, smooth, flexible, waterproof, mouldable, and (historically) cheap.

This week’s INDEX uncovers an emerging crisis in plastic prices. As supply chains fracture, we look at how the legacy of ZIRP-era (Zero Interest Rate Policy) ‘asset-light’ business models and an insubstantial British logistical infrastructure have left the UK bracing for impact. In contrast, we look to how state-led network sovereignty in Indonesia and Italy appear set to weather the storm. Further to this, we look beneath the $5 trillion global capex spike to ask whether the tech sector's present obsessions are delivering actual productivity, or merely erecting a mask to conceal a market trading on borrowed time.

(To settle your curiosity, one person uses about 150kg of plastic every year. If you measured that in plastic bottle caps, it would stretch the length of over 18 football pitches. So, yes, a lot.)

— S.E.P.

Capex Reaches ‘Historic’ Highs

It’s become a popular point amongst analysts to say we’re presently undergoing the largest capital expenditure (capex) cycle in history, reaching $5trn in 2026. Energy shifts make up the largest share, with $3-4trn involved in tearing down power grids in favour of renewables and nuclear power. This includes the Taipingling nuclear units in China, windfarms in the UK, and gas turbines in the US. The Treasury has made windfall of this capex spike, with positive growth in Q1 reported on Thursday.

AI hyperscalers make up the remaining $1trn, largely concentrated in data centres. Despite inflation, there is a genuine volume increase in orders: Gas turbine manufacturer GE Vernova is reportedly sold out until 2030; Caterpillar has reported major profits in its construction, mining, and power generation businesses; chipmakers like Nvidia continue to see soaring profits and price-setting power in the development of complex computer chips needed for hyperscaler data centres.

The question regarding overall AI productivity gains is now being more thoroughly interrogated, however. With capex reaching these historic highs and US inflation rising back to 3.8% this week, investors are looking for proof of RoI. This ‘proof’ has been found by the Financial Times to be being delivered by performance over at Amazon: ‘Tokenmaxxing’ is a leaderboard scheme at hyperscaler firms where employees are rewarded on how much they use AI tools on the day to day. Similar practices have also been found at Microsoft and Meta, with terms like ‘Claudemaxxing’ associated with other firms. There are two logics to tokenmaxxing: the first is to improve AI UI and working practices, as well as to train AI in programming tools. The second, and arguably more important for these hyperscalers, is overall proof of usage. If investors can be shown that productivity gains are being made alongside a high use of workplace AI, the data can be construed as correlative. But with an incentivised usage scheme like tokenmaxxing, this masks a potentially less optimistic reality. Indeed, tokenmaxxing incentives are high, with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth reporting that top engineers at the firm were able to double their salary with a purported 5-10x increase in productivity.

Whether or not even 10x productivity gains can outpace the rate of capex – and the concomitant debt accrual – remains unclear, however. Whilst corporate capex on AI facilities has doubled since last year, this still only accounts for around 1.7% of revenue, a drop in the ocean compared to the towering sums being spent by hyperscalers. Only 7% of firms in the US have actually adopted AI programmes, and a May 2026 report found that 73% of all executives who have rolled out AI programmes found returns to be ‘underwhelming’. Further to this, it is reported that for the roughly 1 hour of productivity gained by AI rollouts, roughly 40% of that is then eaten back in having to double-check output, rendering software implementation redundant. One report found that AI implementation actually reduced productivity by around 19% due to double-checking; meanwhile, hyperscalers are engaged in aggressive land-grabs, energy investment, and infrastructure hoarding, which, while beneficial in the short-term for companies like British Land, EON, and Caterpillar, may never yield the productivity expected.

For the time being, this capex high is largely being flushed with cash, incentivised under the infrastructure and manufacturing tax-shield frameworks of the US ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ and the UK’s SovereignAI fund. However, debt influx is inevitable as capex scales, and if hyperscalers are inflating overall productivity gains with tokenmaxxing, a market already trading at 23x forward earnings may find Q4 more than just underwhelming.

EON Takes Over European Energy Supply

German energy giant EON recently acquired a full stake in British energy company OVO. The acquisition comes as energy prices look to skyrocket in the face of the war in Iran, and smaller providers are seeking capital shields against a tough oncoming winter.

OVO was founded in 2009 as part of an effort to boost competition in an already very centralised energy market. It pitched itself as transparent, customer-first, and an early adopter of new renewable energy. By 2020, OVO had become one of the ‘Big Six’ energy firms controlling the majority of UK energy supply. When the energy shock from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine hit, however, it did not have the balance sheet to bear the blow, and by 2025 had become a liability.

One of the biggest issues for OVO was its ‘asset-light’ model, a trend that emerged in 2010s as providers sought to develop less ‘heavy’ businesses by contracting infrastructure in from outsourced firms and simply acquiring the energy, reducing initial capex and providing high profit margins. As the energy crisis hit, OVO did not have the assets to cushion the blow, and were forced to trade at extortionate prices for the same quantities as the other Big Five.

Despite concerns around the reduction in market competition, OVO’s liability status is simply not something the British market can shoulder at the moment, making it highly likely regulators will waive through the acquisition. This is part of EON’s own model pivot towards becoming a continental distribution playmaker which is too big to fail, and something households continent-wide are dependent on for energy supply. The acquisition doesn’t involve the expansion of EON’s asset base, but it does expand its market share to around 25% of the total UK market, or 10mn households (giving it practical duopoly status with Octopus Energy’s 26% market share), allowing it to have a greater control over power usage in the UK to help provide greater predictability and data points for grid management. This comes with the high digital readiness of OVO households, transferring the capacity of the UK’s most advanced digital energy interface to a German energy company’s market and infrastructure intelligence. This process is taking place across Europe. In effect, EON is seeking to be the gatekeeper for all Europe-wide energy policy in the decades to come.

Plastic Resin Supply Crisis & Limits to Sovereignty

Plastic prices have seen major hikes as resin supply chains continue to be disrupted by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. This is principally due to the core resin naphtha being unable to leave the region, causing major issues across the global supply chain. Plastics manufacturers in Europe are now stockpiling resin supplies; GEP Global Supply Chain Volatility jumped from 0.57 to 1.64 on Wednesday, with roughly 7mn tonnes of naphtha being held in the Middle East. Major chemical giants such as BASF and Ineos have begun declaring force majeure, shutting down operations due to shortages. Prices are expected to spiral into the consumer market by Q4.

Much like the growing aluminium crisis reported on in INDEX 4, Europe is the biggest loser in these supply chain issues. Indonesia serves as a vital counterexample to European paralysis in this case: Indonesia is a major importer of Middle Eastern naphtha, and the supply shock has severely threatened domestic plastic manufacturing there. In response to the emerging crisis, the Indonesian Trade Ministry sought alternative shipments from India and Africa, before settling on a rapid deal with the US to fill supply gaps, largely circumventing long-term instability for manufacturers. One of the key assets available to the government is the Pertamina procurement mechanism, which, as a state-owned energy giant, is capable of absorbing high shipping costs and ensuring market and local distribution through the state-owned CIVD – a centralised digital network through which all Indonesian vendors interface, allowing the state to track national inventory and mandate real-time raw material allocation. Danantara, a $900bn asset-rich national wealth fund which consolidates dividends from SOEs like Pertamina, is furthermore able to provide a capital floor for temporary price hikes and actively redirect funds to US markets on the command of the Trade Ministry, overcoming messy and expensive negotiations with private capital firms and creditors.

Europe, meanwhile, has struggled with sourcing alternatives. Regulations and aging manufacturing infrastructure across the private-sector in Europe mean that naphtha must be of a certain grade for manufacturing, a standard which US variants do not meet. For the UK, a lack of an active national wealth fund and dependence on private price-setters render the Trade Ministry effectively powerless, as manufacturers seek stockpiling over joint capex measures for long-term logistical safeguards and planning. The geologistics for Europe are further complicated, as discussed in INDEX 4, by the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, rendering potential alternative supply routes and naphtha providers out of bounds by sanctions. The UK and Europe will instead be forced to brace for impact as Q4 sees shortages and price spirals in commodities ranging from food to textiles to medicines and tools.

Italy’s Network Sovereignty: The ROLER Rail Project

In an interview for The Loadstar on Monday, Ben Fletcher, CEO of UK Logistics, made the case that UK policy does not account for the significant scale and development requirements needed for national logistics industry, as capital and policy focus remains squarely on energy and AI hyperscaling. Fletcher criticised government policy for being too focused on hyperscaling and manufacturing, whilst it dismisses logistics as “a niche… that needs to be regulated.”

A comparison suffices to demonstrate the paucity of logistical investment in this country: The Italians are making headway this week on a tremendously large-scale logistical development project called ‘ROLER’. Its primary objective is to double rail freight transport volumes through the strategic collaboration of several key stakeholders: SOEs like rail infrastructure manager RFI; private corporations like the Rail Traction Company (RTC); worker co-operatives handling goods at the Port of Ravenna and Bologna Interporto such as Gulliver, Solidarieta 90, and CNS; and the trade union triple alliance between the CGIL, CISL, and UIL. This is under a contract model known as a contratto di rete, or ‘network contract’. This unique Italian contract allows several smaller firms to overcome insufficient capital bases by agreeing to co-operate without resorting to quango formation or mergers. Partners are jointly responsible for the project whilst sharing labour and resources for the sake of project completion. This maintains a transparent financial ecosystem, allows smaller co-operative groups into industrial development programmes (vital in a region like Emilia-Romagna where co-operatives make up the bulk of the labour force), and provides a single framework for labour negotiations to take place within, rather than having to negotiate representation for several tiny sub-contractors.

ROLER intends to meet several key ambitions of government, private enterprise and workers, including meeting key EU net zero targets, having massive improvements for domestic and continental logistics with regard to Italian manufacturing, and reducing overall pollution levels. ROLER is especially significant for what it aims to achieve for the Emilia-Romagna region’s co-operative economy, where roughly one-third of all GDP is co-operative generated, and two-thirds of the citizens are member-owners of those capital gains, dispersed across various manufacturing, logistics, and legal networks that permit for regional specialisation and financial co-operation. Emilia-Romagna is well established as the industrial hub of the country.

The approach in the UK to logistics is accurately portrayed by Fletcher. Take the Freeport system, for example: These are SEZs plotted around the UK for the sake of attracting local investment, and at the Solent Port, some attempt has even been made in developing a ‘Collaborative Model’ not too dissimilar from a contratto di rete, though not as radical (amounting to a single steering group composed of local councils, ports, and universities). Nonetheless these are islands unto themselves, and there exists no legal instrument nor centralised SOE to coordinate infrastructural developments towards long-term national aims. Despite the talk from the government on long-termism, without substantial instruments to develop logistical capacity in the economy, this is largely restrained to consumer-facing outcomes and isolated examples, such as with Great British Railways and the to-be-nationalised British Steel (which amounts to a single facility). The biggest logistics news of the week came from Marks & Spencers, who announced the development of a logistics hub in Lichfield – yet another island of potential growth constrained from broader national uplift by lack of state investment – to say nothing of the role of worker groups like trade unions and co-operatives in these developments, which is practically nonexistent.

(Note – I do not prescribe the Indonesian or Italian models as bulletproof solutions or political endpoints, but examples of preferable, attainable solutions to emergent crises. Of course the heavy lifting of policy and costing in a structurally insecure UK is not ventured here, but I believe the examples given are of note for that process.)

INDEX Verdict

If asset-light capital is unsustainable, then an asset-light state is insecure. As workers, we cannot succumb to quietism, nor can we content ourselves with the defensive, short-term politics of the past. We must elevate our collective demands to the level of macroeconomic architecture. When regional leaders or political factions push toward network sovereignty – whether through centralised procurement interfaces or legally binding, collaborative contract models that unite state capacity with organised labour – workers must recognise, support, and actively drive these frameworks forward. Use your Trade Union leverage, your ballots, and your political structures to demand an end to fragmented private-sector islands. Networked sovereignty is the blueprint we must back to brace for the impact of Q4.

I work a manual night job. Pulling heavy machinery around large warehouses and engineering sheds out into the cold as the Moon watches over me. It’s referred to in popular culture as the ‘graveyard shift’. But I can’t help but feel the opposite is true. Keeping machinery operational in the only hours that work can be done is a form of nurture for the real economy. My colleagues decked in boots and high-vis jackets laugh and shout and complain through the early hours of the morning, keeping vital infrastructure alive, ready for the trials of the next day. Each night I see a bed of life, which is more than can be said for the acceptable hours of modern labour, that vaunted 9 to 5. There you find all the stench and anxiety of a sickness spreading ‘industry’ to ‘industry’, picked up off rats in the financial sewage system. Wages stagnant; jobs in freefall; high streets in ruin; banks all nauseated… I think the ‘graveyard shift’ is much more accurate for the 9 to 5 than the night shift. All of my labour is still alive. But I do worry about the ghosts of the day that haunt the supermarket shelves, the rent prices, the energy bills. I worry that the dying dictate the conditions of the living.

This week’s INDEX unravels the death by proxy currently ravaging global markets, and soon to ravage our wage packets. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz seems to have no end in sight, as aluminium, mineral, and plastic shortages have started to see the crisis expand beyond just oil prices. Here in the UK, 30-year Gilt yields spiked to levels not seen since 1998 as bondholders brace for the inflationary consequences of the UK’s unpreparedness for financial shock. Reverberations are already being seen in the increasing strain on labour markets and commodity prices, from the titans of UK finance right down to the local newsagent. And local elections prove that the country has lost its political centre, as politicians on the right and left seek to capitalise on almost two decades of market paralysis, state failure, and national decline.

— S.E.P.

Aluminium Shortages & Geopolitical Realignment

The conflict in Iran and closure of the Strait of Hormuz is having disastrous effects on global aluminium supply. With the vital shipping chokepoint still closed, stockpiles in Europe and North America are drying up, as aluminium makes up a vital component of circuit boards and heat sinks necessary for data centre development. On top of aluminium shipping routes, the Middle East itself is a major aluminium producer, responsible for about 9% of global production; however, the inability to import raw materials on top of bomb damage to critical capacity infrastructure has reduced output in some cases to as little as 30% capacity. Assuming the war were to end today, it would still take over a year for the industry to return to full capacity, a disturbing fact for AI stakeholders and developers, putting yet more stress on a financial bubble appearing to reach its absolute limit.

Aluminium shortages will affect more than just speculative finance, being a vital component in almost every area of the modern consumer market. Housebuilding aluminium markets have now hit a four-year high, piling greater costs on the already gargantuan price of housing development the UK government is desperately trying to offset. Consumer analysts predict a 10-15% increase in the retail price of canned drinks by this summer alone, not counting the reduced size of canned goods overall as producers attempt to cut packaging costs. A 20-25% increase in the cost of medicinal packaging is also anticipated, with preemptive jumps in the price of aspirin products skyrocketing from a pre-war price of 38p to £7.00 in some regions. This will hit the already embittered NHS hard, as well as increase the dependency of patients on medical welfare to afford basic prescriptions. It will hit workers hardest, as job markets dry up, wages drop, and prices for basic essentials like toothpaste and tinned food eat up greater and greater percentages of already pre-spent wage packets.

Meanwhile, China is largely insulated from these supply chain issues due to a high level of domestic production, but the trade barriers set up between the West and China, especially in the midst of Donald Trump’s trade war with the country, have rendered aluminium imports from China no better than the clogged Middle East in terms of logistics. Other East Asian countries, however, like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, are being deeply hurt by these materials shortages, as well as the global inflationary spiral incurred by oil price spikes, perhaps providing an explanation as to why these traditional Western allies have begun looking to Russia for a solution.

Russia has a monopoly over the Northern Sea Route (NSR), the shortest possible sea route between Asia and Europe, situated across the circumference of the Arctic. The Russian government has recently deployed a tremendous amount of state investment to make the route more feasible for large-scale transport. At present, the route is largely frozen over for 7 months of the year, but the effects of climate change and the development of Russia’s nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet, Arktika – the most powerful icebreaking ships in the world – have garnered the attention of investors from China, South Korea, and Japan, who all seem to be considering a potential workaround for a long-term blockage in the Strait of Hormuz. The question for us in the West is whether geologistical necessity is enough to force geopolitical realignment, with the EU recently committing to a new €90bn loan to Ukraine to support its war effort, putting further strain on any near-term rapprochement between Russia and the bloc.

UK Govt Borrowing Costs Hit 28-Year High

UK 30-year Gilt yields hit a 28-year high on Tuesday, as markets braced for supply chain shortages and growing political instability after the May 7th local elections. Gilt yields dictate the cost of borrowing for the British state, reflecting bondholder confidence in the government's ability to service national debts. The spike this week demonstrates how short-lived the Labour Party’s honeymoon period has been after implementing its ‘securonomics’ strategy last year.

Gilt yields are more than just an interest rate for government borrowing, in real terms they are hard limits on state investment capacity, and therefore on overall state sovereignty. The tragedy is that in spite of Rachel Reeves’ expert pandering to the bond markets in her fiscal policy, the material consequences of US militarism have stopped her dead – as she allegedly made clear to her American counterparts this week. This is not so much a failure of economic policy, nor a consequence of poor political oversight, as much as Labour’s political opponents would stress it is. The local elections have acted merely as an acute pressure point on economic prospects already deep under water, and all that pressure has to go somewhere eventually.

What this does mean is that taxpayer money will now have even shorter reach (ironically necessitating higher borrowing) as a 5.77% bulk heads straight out of the Treasury coffers and into creditors’ pockets.

The Inescapable Collapse in Profitability

In INDEX 1 we discussed some of the undeniable data produced by Sydney University on long-term global declines in profitability. Some of that data revealed that in 2026 we have reached levels of profitability akin to those being accrued during the COVID-19 lockdowns. This is beginning to have a visible effect on all levels of the British economy.

The Big Four finance giants – EY, KPMG, Deloitte, and PwC – have long been exalted for their role in maintaining the edifice of British economic prowess, the main operators in the cash-flow engine of the City of London. In a post-industrial Britain, these have been the ground upon which the country’s economic fortunes have rested. However, the internal mechanisms of these ‘titans of prosperity’ are starting to rust. Equity partnership is the key ambition for most who work for these companies, a status akin to shareholder power, where one works and owns a share of the firm. It is seen as being at (or at the very least near) the top of the ladder, and something that is effectively irreversible once allocated. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, financial service demand skyrocketed, leading to a tremendously optimistic employment intake at these firms with a great many admissions to equity partnership.

Now, as the brief sugar-rush of the post-pandemic recovery subsides, these firms are having to cut equity partnership admissions. This has caused issues for the talent pool, as younger financiers grow increasingly wary of a crowded upper floor and lack of progression potential. To compensate, firms like EY have begun to introduce non-equity partnership and management positions to simulate career progression while not offering the substantial economic power most in the industry strive for. For all the talk of ‘re-proletarianisation’ from the left, it appears that capitalism is doing the job itself just fine.

This is on top of hundreds of jobs being cut in financial middle management, around 600 at KPMG alone. It is hoped these cuts in labour costs will shore up profits, and the potential has been facilitated by the first major rollouts of AI systems for administrative tasks. These young prospective graduates brought in en masse after COVID are now expecting to be back out on the streets, graduation caps in hand.

They will find a high street of rapidly diminishing opportunity. The atmospheric pressure of financial capital is thick here. Pubs are suffering terribly, with one closed every hour. The price of a pint in London is now said to have reached £10 in some parts of the city. To survive, many are having to strip themselves of historical baggage to cater to a smaller, paying consumer base of those who happen to survive in the flighty airs of income-earning. TG Jones has closed. Remember TG Jones? No, it's unlikely you do. TG Jones is the legally safe imaginary name given to the high street units formerly known as WHSmith, who sold their more than 150 branches to speculative giant Modella Capital as they shift focus to railway stations and airports. Modella have announced that they will be closing all the remaining TG Jones stores this year as sales fail to meet expectations. And of course the high street familiar TSB, one of the longest operating British high street banks, has now been absorbed into Santander, its brand to be ditched by the wayside as the remarkable growth of Spanish capital starts to take its revenge on an exploitative British tourism industry.

A common complaint from pubs to high street vendors is the weight of government-imposed business tax, and indeed business taxes now are strong limitations on the potential for many companies to survive in the long-term. But the overall picture is ultimately still one of declining profits and business capacity seen across all rungs of the British capital ladder. High business taxation is one of the last remits of a state desperate to keep itself afloat as the British economy sinks deeper and deeper, and the investment supposed to be flooding in without these taxes is hardly likely to rescue it from the vortex of declining profits the world over.

2026 Elections: Decentralisation/Recentralisation

Local and devolved elections held across the UK on Thursday have revealed the deep-seated restlessness of the British electorate, as the traditional duopoly is tossed out. The results convey a desperate need for an improvement in conditions. The very concept of continuity, in whatever form it takes, has been consistently and rapaciously protested against since 2016, after the effects of the 2008 financial crisis proved more enduring than expectation.

The country is searching for a new centre. In the devolved parliaments, that centre seems to be heavily insular. For the first time since devolution, all the devolved parliaments in the UK are now majorly composed of national-separatist parties, after Plaid Cymru did away with 70+ years of continuous Labour governance. Although the SNP failed to secure the majority needed to warrant calls for a second referendum in Scotland, evidently the future of the union is at greater stake now than at any time in its history. Meanwhile the Labour-Conservative duopoly has been resolutely discarded with the surge in support for Reform UK and the Greens.

What should we make of this? Most analysts will have seen this coming; I would pinpoint it with the failure of the Boris Johnson moment in Conservative politics, which saw a hugely popular prime minister ousted by a political elite followed by a disastrous interregnum and then a cautious operation under Sunak which the Labour Party has had no choice but to follow. As we have made clear here and elsewhere, government is a poison chalice for any party. The British state has been so thoroughly dismantled and outsourced to the point of near-total incapacity, with even the slightest change in direction triggering rapid economic reverberations which threaten to tear apart the edifice of the state entirely. The political settlement has, since the 1980s, been hanging in a web of fragile mythic confidence in the City of London’s financial service sector. The scam has been played for so long that even the slightest attempt to reconcile with the immense material challenges facing the country are responded to with the panic of an existential crisis that bondholders and financiers are not ready to deal with. This continued skittishness will afflict any pretender to change. Even Reform’s neoliberal prestige has been recognised as a spook to investors, now uncertain the old formulas for growth can work in an unstable supply-side environment. To invert the adage, the problem with ‘neoliberalism’ is that you eventually run out of assets to strip. A repetition of Thatcherism today can’t yield the returns once available when a thirty-odd year base of state-owned, state-built enterprises and infrastructure were there for the stripping.

INDEX Verdict

Consider stockpiling non-perishables and medicines. Beware of simple party-political fixes. Join your relevant trade union. Avoid aspirations towards middle management or admin. Embrace labour and leisure.

The property question has once again taken a determinate position in the discourse of contemporary British politics, with London (unsurprisingly) at its epicenter. Last month saw two significant property protests in London: the National Housing Demonstration and Save Lewisham Shopping Centre’s largest rally so far. Ridley Road Market continues to resist evictions by developer Larochette Real Estate with locals and traders occupying the site and refusing to leave. Across London a new wave of grassroots organisations defending social housing and local community and retail spaces against luxury developments is growing, with coalitions such as the 35% Campaign, Refurbish Don’t Demolish, Protect our Places, and SHAPE assuming significant influence in the expression of local political activities throughout the city, alongside targeted local organisations pushing against (re)development schemes across London to ‘Fight the Tower’, ‘Save Deptford High Street,’ ‘Save Brick Lane’, and so on.

Amidst the rising political forces outside of and antagonistic to the Labour Party, struggles for rent controls and public-led planning are returning to the fore. What these movements recognise, and what politicians both local and national continue to obscure, is that London’s model of ‘development’ is neither economically necessary, nor particularly productive in real terms. A growing political constituency now suspects the plans and projections for London’s future to be motivated by cynicism, the prioritisation of value extraction over social need. We have the £4bn Canada Water development, whose developer British Land said in 2020 that 35% of the housing would be affordable – a number stripped to just 3% without support, then 9% after a bailout from the Mayor of London. Of the 1744 homes being offered in Landsec’s proposals for Lewisham Shopping Centre, just 16 percent are considered ‘affordable’ (that household income does not surpass £75,000), and only ninety-eight homes will be available for social rent – and this may yet change again. A mood persists that whatever the initial claims of a developer might be, the tangible result of their developments will invariably attempt to whittle down their affordable housing quotas to zero. A dozen towers of over 20 storeys have been proposed for Old Kent Road with just 12% affordable housing provision and no commitment on the number of new council homes, displacing locals to make way for more extractive, debt-based student housing. Meanwhile, 164,040 UK children were homeless with their families in temporary accommodation in 2024, up 21,650 (15%) since 2023 (Shelter). 1 in 47 people in London are homeless. The social decay engendered by the present development agenda has therefore made the question of property a determinate concern and a significant site for political agitation.

Looking back to the redevelopment of Canary Wharf and the wider Docklands in the 1980s and 90s reveals the precedent for today’s schemes. Local authority power was usurped as large-scale private development was presented as unquestionably beneficial with significant state support. What followed was the suppression and eventual displacement of a local working-class for a transient, alien population of financial, clerical,and managerial workers, with little interest on the part of developers or national government for gradual integration or compromise with the local population. Central in the Docklands development was the Canadian developer Olympia & York, who acquired a vast expanse of derelict dockland in the early 80s amidst the rapid closure of docks and industrial sites. From this initial purchase, an immense office-led development project was proposed, becoming what we know today as Canary Wharf.

The goal was to build a new business district from scratch to rival the City of London, made possible by the formation of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) a quanto established by the Thatcher government in 1981 through the Local Government Planning and Land Act 1980. Subject to parliamentary approval, Nigel Broackes was appointed Chairman and Bob Mellish, former Labour MP for Bermondsey, his Deputy. A Board of Trustees, chosen by the Secretary of State, was drawn directly from the private sector. Critically, development authority for Dockland areas would switch from the Boroughs to the new LDDC. By September 1985, 8.5 million sq.ft. of office space had been approved by the LDDC. With concerns that new jobs were incompatible with the existing mode of life and labour of the residents, the Association of Island Communities was established.

The Docklands redevelopment ought to be understood as an experiment in state-directed financialisation, underwriting the construction of a new physical centre for finance capital in rapid time with the expectation of immense future economic growth; the deliverable reality of this was, against expectation, a speculative upswing in land values and investment activity with little in the way of tangible physical benefit to the surrounding area, the foreclosure of all possibility to reopen the docks – historically London’s principle physical economic centre – for the pursuit of abstract speculative returns at an ephemeral future point. Through this process the conception of economic value became detached from physical production, based instead on asset prices and expectations for future returns, with ‘growth’ becoming inexorably tethered to arbitrary speculative asset inflation. The unshakable faith in deregulated finance capital which developed in this period was justified by a shock rise in profitability, strengthening the resolve of the City of London to the point of demanding (from the state) increased capacity for adjacent financial institutions. Expansion into the Isle of Dogs, whose docks had largely been closed in the 1970s and early 1980s, became the most obvious symbolic site for building the model form of a post-industrial London. Ultimately, however, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall reasserted itself, and the fruits of this development now stand as monuments to a fanatical ideological commitment, the fruits of which are readily apparent in the acceleration of social decay, poverty, and nihilism across the de-industrised quarters of the city.

To justify the Docklands developments, towers fit for the ‘electronic age’ and rising land prices were recognised as measures of success, even where employment opportunities were minimal and economic depression persisted. The role of the state in these developments is ubiquitous: Compulsory purchases were a persistent tactic of the LDDC. There are simultaneous efforts to infiltrate, dilute, and maneuver groups to comply. In the case of the Docklands Forum, groups were led to accept funding and eventually capitulate, with community demands relegated to footnotes in the development schemes. In some cases activists were co-opted to act as community liaisons or other intermediaries on behalf of the LDDC directly.

Where these ‘compromise’ measures prove ineffective, developers boldly subvert the democratic institutional process altogether. The GLC and the alternative ‘The People’s Plan for the Royal Docks’ proved problematic for the Docklands developments. As a result, the GLC was abolished outright by Thatcher in 1986. After Southwark Council rejected Berkeley Homes’ proposals for Peckham in July 2025, with the planning committee refusing on the grounds of heritage, affordability, and retail space, Berkeley bypassed the council and appealed directly to the Planning Inspector in a ‘democracy-busting’ move to force the development through. On the local level, councillors like Ted Johns of the East End, or today’s Lewisham Greens, can align and campaign with local groups, but there will always be a higher body aligned with the state’s neoliberal ideology who will wave developments through.

Asset management has become thoroughly embedded in both urban development and housebuilding processes in London. BlackRock owns 10% of shares in the aforementioned Canada Water developer British Land, as well as holding 11% of voting rights in Lewisham Shopping Centre developer Landsec – whose new target borough has “10,986 households on housing waiting lists and 2,800 households living in temporary accommodation” (Faris Luke for Tribune). As of 2021 BlackRock had committed £1.1bn to the UK residential property sector. According to Private Equity Insights: “The UK’s institutional players, such as Aviva, Legal & General, and Lloyds, have been joined by global giants like Blackstone, the world’s largest real estate investor. Since late 2023, Blackstone has acquired 4,500 homes from Vistry in deals totaling £1.4bn. It now oversees 17,000 residential properties in the UK… The surge is driven by rising rental demand and a worsening housing affordability crisis. Investors are shifting their focus toward single-family homes instead of multi-family developments. These properties attract stable, long-term tenants and are simpler to build under the UK’s restrictive planning regulations.”

If the state and the developer are in cahoots over shared economic aims, what form can opposition take? What should opponents aim for, and now should they pursue them?

Some Marxists will consider these developments as broadly positive, given their role in the development of the productive forces and so on, disputing the claims and aspirations of grassroots organisations on account of a perceived moralism; others may see such developments as mere reflections of a further iteration of imperialism, the latest phase in the decline and outsourcing of production to the third world, and therefore feel immobilised, incapable of confronting them by the sheer scale of the forces involved and their own sense of economic irrelevance.

Gentrification is therefore not recognised as something to be ‘resisted’ given that such resistance halts historical transformation, or can't be straightforwardly resolved in a determinate outcome. To oppose Docklands-type development on the grounds that ‘it causes displacement and change, which is sad’ or ‘it is financed by BlackRock, who are nasty’ is to an extent motivated by a conservative or NIMBYist disposition. However, per Marx, ‘progress’ can’t be reduced to the quantitative terms of ‘building more’ or ‘building faster’ – the point of development in a Marxist sense is, on one level, transforming conditions of life in ways that lead to expanded human capacity, reductions in labour time, and tangible qualitative increases in leisure time for the working-class population.

These political pursuits are rendered impossible when workers are displaced, forced to take 60+ minute commutes to work because housing has been made unaffordable, when we still work overtime to afford rent and essentials, when our remaining wages are spent on fleeting self-soothing consumption, when our capacity to focus, converse, and learn is subverted, when healthy food, property, and leisure activities become sparse and inaccessible. Preventing development on terms set by capital is precisely where the power of the working-class lies, averting the futile amnesia of lumpenisation and forging a path of development on terms set by the working-class itself.

A YIMBY impulse persists which accuses anti-gentrification left-wing movements of conservatism. See Leo Gibbons’ comment of 23 April: “The urban Left is overwhelmingly dominated by socially conservative preservation campaigns… Trying to prevent social housing estate regeneration projects, or town centre redevelopments, or even simple things like high street pedestrianisation (like in Deptford).” For all their ridiculing of the Left, those pro-market urbanists or self-identified ‘anglofuturists’ lack a class analysis, hold to a one-sided view of economic progress, and therefore fail to understand why such movements emerge. Gibbons mistakes these movements for vague cultural heritage schemes with aesthetic or moral resentments, presuming the psychology of a Scrutonesque conservative aggrieved about graffiti on the Tube. Rather, grassroots anti-gentrification movements are principally concerned with the survival, integrity, dignity, and future of the struggling tenant, underpaid worker, or burnt out parent, who all bear the brunt of much-lamented decline through ever-worsening living and working conditions. If such movements are ‘regressive’, so is the push to maintain societal standards or clean streets – which is exactly what groups like Looking For Growth pursue while condemning trade unions in a bid to ‘end decline’.

Small businesses, while not ‘inherently progressive’, can play a stabilising role in communities. Their displacement coincides with rising rents and the consolidation of commercial space by larger firms or chains; their refusal to leave can present issues for landlords desperate to raise rents and developers marketing ‘trendy’ areas. The small business owner or pub manager faced with a pedestrianisation or redevelopment scheme is often the only economic impediment to the terminal decline of high streets by extractive monopolies with no concern for social wellbeing – which invariably leads to alienation and its visible consequences of addiction, homelessness, and mental ill health.

The question is, then, how community action groups can win these battles for our class. Let us begin with a look at the changing class character of the Docklands. The dock labour system had been a geographically concentrated, stable workforce with a strong union culture, though by 1967 Millwall docks closed, and by 1972 the union had fallen to just 6,000 members; by 1980 West India Docks had fully closed and sites became derelict. Collective labour was replaced by a fragmented subcontracting system of construction firms. A news item of July 1986 reported that “Preliminary site works began this week on the £2bn Canary Wharf banking centre in London Docklands. Building work is being carried out by a joint venture comprising Costain, Laing, Mowlem, Taylor Woodrow and Sir Robert McAlpine. Works being carried out include general site clearance, diversion of services, stabilisation of quay walls, site investigations and test borings and the erection of site offices.” Every single one of these firms was later revealed to be a subscriber to an illegal blacklisting service by the Consulting Association, dating back to the 1980s. The blacklist monitored unionised workers so that companies could refuse to hire or sack them, often for raising on-site H&S concerns. By the time Canary Wharf was built, the collective labour power that might have played a part in accommodating the development to the local working-class interest was already shattered.

Though the AIC, JDAG and the Docklands Forum had ties with local trade union branches, and many ex-docker families would have taken up other labouring jobs, there is no documented history of communications between these groups and the thousands of labourers hired to construct the new development. There is no documented history of locally-rooted unionisation efforts of these labourers, or their education on what the development meant for local workers. This is not to discredit or minimise the efforts of the Docklands groups. The GLC-supported People’s Plan for the Royal Docks was the product of collaboration between trade unions and tenants’ associations, which combined concerns about underemployment, social housing, and privatisation into a singular set of demands. Its failure was not due to its proponents’ weaknesses; the abolition of the GLC allowed these concerns to be immediately shelved and plans to be rushed through. However, the reorganisation of work into casualised and subcontracted forms left labourers dispersed and functionally scabbing on themselves.

Where workers are fragmented across subcontractors, agencies, and isolated in ‘self-employment’, sectoral amalgamation through industrial unionism creates unified organising power. New Unionism further demonstrates possibilities for unionising the casual or ‘unskilled’ worker and surpass the perceived limits imposed by irregular working hours, immigration and outsourcing. The separation between the people building developments and those displaced by them is intentional. It leads to today’s cultural gulf (and often bitter resentment) between the Reform-voting small-business subcontracted builder and the Green- or Labour- voting unionised worker – both of whom belong in some way to the working-class. Reconnecting labour and community struggles means treating construction sites as part of the same organising terrain as housing campaigns and tenants’ associations. ‘Community unions’ like ACORN and the LRU have demonstrated varying degrees of success in preventing evictions and lobbying negligent landlords. They have acted in solidarity with groups like Save Lewisham Shopping Centre, attending housing protests and the like. However, until community unions and anti-gentrification campaigns are willing to extend their organising beyond defensive struggles into the sphere of production itself, towers will continue to be constructed by a workforce cut off from the communities their employers displace. Where tenants, residents, and workers recognise their shared position within the same process of development, what was once a planning dispute becomes a question of whether the project can proceed at all according to its present terms.

At the same time, anti-gentrification campaigns need to consolidate their demands into a citywide or even national forum, representing localised campaigns at a central level. SHAPE and the Protect our Places coalition are already laying groundwork for wider collaboration by affiliating smaller campaigns. Coalitions can be remarkably effective in providing locals with guidance navigating legal services and strategies to ‘buy out’ developers, such as Asset of Community Value applications, cooperative models and community ownership grants. However, there remain barriers to collaboration as larger street demonstrations dwarf localised, targeted rallies and threaten to overwhelm specific demands with sloganeering and empty rhetoric. Collaboration between campaigns needs to disseminate effective strategies to leading activists so that less time is wasted on Kafkaesque petitions thrown out by councils for formatting reasons, or demonstrations outside empty offices. Our new efforts must learn from both the successes and failures of the past. Otherwise we risk losing our homes to development that thrives on fragmentation, reshaping a city not for those who live and work in it, but for those who take from it and give nothing back.

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.

By L. Luria

(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.

By L. Luria

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.