2026-06-23 ATS briefing¶

Investors shun UK bonds after Starmer quits¶

Sovereign debt stress in a core imperialist state signals the exhaustion of the post-2008 credit expansion and the fragility of bourgeois political forms under crisis conditions.

What the Iran War Taught the World About Food Security¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz laid bare a structural contradiction that no amount of diplomatic memoranda can resolve: global agriculture has been organised to maximise efficiency at the expense of resilience, and the bill has come due. Maximo Torero, writing for Project Syndicate, notes that 20–30% of globally traded fertilisers and roughly half of all sulphur exports passed through a single chokepoint. When that chokepoint closed, there was no buffer, no alternative source, no coordinated reserve mechanism. The system worked perfectly for capital until it didn’t.

What is striking is Torero’s admission that the risks were well understood. This was not a failure of knowledge but of political will — or rather, of the subordination of political will to the logic of cost-minimisation under competitive pressure. No individual capitalist firm could justify holding strategic reserves of fertiliser when cheaper just-in-time supply was available. The result is a fragility that is not accidental but systemic.

The crisis also reveals the tight coupling between energy and food systems. Diesel for irrigation pumps, fuel for transport networks — volatility in one market transmits instantly into the other. Torero’s call for rural electrification and renewables is sensible but evades the question: who pays, and under what conditions? For countries already squeezed by debt service and balance-of-payments constraints, the answer is not obvious.

The most useful insight is buried near the end: falling fertiliser prices are not always good news. Demand destruction — farmers cutting back due to uncertainty — signals future yield losses. This is a classic feature of crisis in agricultural markets: the adjustment happens not through planned reorganisation but through the silent attrition of productive capacity. The next shock will find a system even more degraded than the one that entered this one.

Cancer patients in India seek their own chemotherapy in face of platinum supply shock¶

Source: The Telegraph

Shipping disruptions and price spikes in a critical industrial metal reveal how supply chain stress under inter-imperialist rivalry directly impacts human life, a concrete manifestation of crisis.

The Hormuz risk question has changed and compliance frameworks haven’t caught up¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The Strait of Hormuz is not closed. Yet the question of whether it is "open" has become almost meaningless. The 2026 crisis has produced something more insidious than a blockade: a passage environment where transit is technically possible but commercially, legally and operationally toxic.

The numbers are stark. After the US-led Operation Epic Fury in late February, daily crossings collapsed from 147 to single digits. By mid-April, a US naval cordon had hardened the disruption into something structural. Some 500 vessels remain trapped in the Gulf. But the real shift is qualitative. Vessels still moving through are disproportionately old, unclassified and outside mainstream insurance. GNSS spoofing has degraded AIS data at scale — over 3,000 vessels affected in a single day. Only 6.4% of crossings used the IMO-designated route. The evidentiary burden has shifted: sanctions risk now crystallises at the point of coordination with Iranian authorities, not just payment.

What this reveals is a contradiction between the form of global shipping and its actual functioning. The industry's compliance frameworks were built for a world where physical access was the primary variable and data could be trusted. That world no longer exists in the Gulf. The gap is not technological — the data exists — but institutional. Risk assessment remains reactive, incident-based, binary. The organisations adapting are those treating vessel behaviour as the primary signal: waiting times, lane deviations, AIS anomalies, clustering patterns.

For Marxist analysis, this is a concrete instance of how capitalist circulation confronts its own material limits. The Strait is not a battlefield in the conventional sense, but the intersection of inter-imperialist rivalry (US-Iran) with the logistical infrastructure of global trade. The result is not closure but fragmentation: a tiered system of passage where risk is distributed unevenly, and the cost of verification is pushed onto each link in the chain. That is a structural drag on the turnover of capital — and one that no compliance update can resolve.

Far-right millionaire wins Colombia’s razor-tight presidential election¶

Source: The Guardian

Colombia’s presidential runoff has delivered a razor-thin victory to Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right lawyer and political novice who rode a wave of violence and disillusionment with Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” project. The margin — just 250,000 votes out of over 25 million cast — reveals a country split almost exactly in half, with the leftist Iván Cepeda refusing to concede and alleging irregularities.

De la Espriella’s victory is not merely a swing back to the right. It is a symptom of a deeper failure. Petro’s government spent four years attempting to negotiate the dismantling of criminal groups through temporary ceasefires and dialogue. The result was meagre: one group of 99 fighters disarmed, while an estimated 27,000 armed individuals continued operating. Violence rose. The “total peace” strategy did not fail because it was too idealistic; it failed because the state lacked the coercive capacity or political will to offer armed groups a credible alternative to accumulation through extortion and drug trafficking. Into that vacuum stepped a man promising maximum-security prisons and airstrikes on coca plantations — a return to the military confrontation that defined Colombia for decades before 2016.

What makes this election noteworthy is the class character of the victor. De la Espriella is a millionaire lawyer who built his career representing paramilitary leaders — the private armies of drug traffickers and landowners. He presents himself as an outsider, but his material interests are fused with the most reactionary fractions of Colombia’s ruling class. His alliance with Trump, Milei, and the broader Latin American far-right signals a coordinated regional project: deepen subordination to US strategic interests, crush organised crime through militarisation, and dismantle any left-wing institutional foothold.

The left’s response — alleging fraud without evidence, calling for recounts that have never flipped a Colombian presidential result — risks demobilising its own base. If Cepeda cannot prove systematic irregularities, the movement will have absorbed a defeat without learning from it. The real question is whether the organised working class and peasant movements can build independent power outside the electoral cycle, because neither Petro’s negotiations nor De la Espriella’s iron fist will address the root of Colombia’s violence: a social order that generates vast profits from cocaine and land dispossession.

FOMC Summary of Economic Projections, June 2026¶

Source: FRED Blog

The June 2026 Summary of Economic Projections from the FOMC reveals a central bank wrestling with a stubborn contradiction. On one hand, the median participant sees the unemployment rate holding steady around 4.3% before a slight dip to 4.2% in 2028 — a labour market they consider essentially stable and at its "longer-run" level. On the other hand, core inflation projections have been revised sharply upward: from 2.7% to 3.3% for Q4 2026, and from 2.2% to 2.5% for Q4 2027. Inflation is proving more persistent than expected, even as the economy is not overheating by traditional measures.

The response is a clear upward revision to the projected federal funds rate, now at 3.8% for end-2026, with rates staying above 3% through 2028. This is not a soft landing. It is the Fed signalling it will keep credit conditions tight for an extended period to squeeze inflation out of the system, accepting that growth will be modest — GDP projections were trimmed to 2.2% for 2026.

What this reveals is the limits of monetary policy in the current conjuncture. Inflation is not being driven by an overheated labour market or excess demand in any straightforward sense. It is rooted in supply-side fragilities, energy price volatility, and the structural dislocations of inter-imperialist rivalry — none of which interest rate hikes can resolve. The Fed is raising rates into a slowing economy, a classic recipe for precipitating the very recession it claims to be avoiding. The projections show a central bank that has run out of good options, managing a crisis it cannot name.

Will AI Yield Abundance Without Purpose?¶

Source: Project Syndicate

Carl Benedikt Frey’s piece in Project Syndicate raises a question that is both timely and, in its framing, revealingly limited. He asks whether AI-driven automation will produce abundance without purpose, drawing on Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano to illustrate a future where machines do the work and humans are left with nothing meaningful to do.

Frey is right to challenge the boosterish assumption that people will simply invent new sources of meaning once wage labour is no longer necessary. Work, as he notes, structures time, confers status, and provides social belonging. To imagine that hobbies or “passion projects” will fill the void is naive. But the analysis stops short of the real issue.

The problem is not that people might lack purpose in a world of abundance. The problem is that capitalism cannot deliver abundance without first extracting value from labour. Under this system, automation does not free humanity — it displaces workers into unemployment, precarity, or lower-waged service jobs. The “abundance” Frey gestures toward is not a social reality but a technocratic fantasy, because the means of production remain privately owned. The purpose work provides is not some anthropological constant; it is a specific feature of a society where one must sell one’s labour to survive.

Frey’s framing — purpose versus abundance — obscures the real contradiction: between the potential of technology to reduce necessary labour time and the imperative of capital to keep people working, consuming, and indebted. The question is not whether we will find meaning after work, but whether we will be allowed to stop working at all.

Ukrainians in solidarity with Palestine¶

Source: Tempest

Here is a summary and analysis of the article.

Two Ukrainian leftists joined the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, an act of solidarity that cuts against the grain of both Ukrainian state propaganda and the "campist" Left internationally. Andriy Movchan, one of the participants, describes the flotilla’s dual aim: to physically challenge Israel’s blockade and to break a "wall of stereotypes."

The first stereotype is domestic. Movchan details how Ukraine’s media landscape on the Middle East is effectively "occupied by Zionist voices," a legacy of the Soviet collapse, the absence of an independent Left, and the large Russian-speaking population in Israel. This creates a paradox: the Ukrainian state, under Zelensky, officially supports a two-state solution and votes for pro-Palestinian UN resolutions, while civil society is saturated with hawkish Israeli propaganda. Zelensky’s own ignorant "big Israel" comments only deepened the confusion.

The second stereotype is international and more politically charged. Russian propaganda paints all Ukrainians as "ardent Zionists" who deserve no sympathy. Movchan’s participation refutes this, insisting that opposition to Russian imperialism and solidarity with Palestine are not contradictory but complementary. The slogan "From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime!" is the core of their "principled anti-campism."

This is a sharp intervention into a real contradiction. The material basis for Ukrainian-Palestinian solidarity is clear: both peoples suffer colonial war and occupation. Yet the political superstructure in Ukraine—shaped by a specific history of Soviet collapse, emigration, and media capture—has largely blocked that solidarity from taking root. Movchan’s effort is a conscious attempt to build a class-conscious internationalism that refuses to subordinate one anti-imperialist struggle to another. For the revolutionary Left, it demonstrates that breaking the campist logic is not an abstract principle but a practical necessity for building a unified front against the inter-imperialist system that grinds down both Ukrainians and Palestinians.