INDEX 8 — Networkerism
1–5 June, 2026
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)