2026-06-24 ATS briefing¶

US stocks plunge in global tech rout¶

Direct evidence of the AI speculative bubble bursting — confirms the RCI position that AI investment is circular fictitious capital, with the crash expressing overaccumulation and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Hormuz oil shock tilts shipping towards alternative fuels¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

Here is a summary and analysis of the article for the hosts of Against the Stream.

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has sent shipping fuel prices soaring, and the industry’s response reveals a classic capitalist adaptation: crisis as a driver of technological shift, but only where it intersects with profitability. The article, from Hellenic Shipping News, models how a sustained oil shock makes alternative fuels like LNG and methanol commercially viable now, not because of climate concern, but because their relative price gap to oil has narrowed sharply.

This is a concrete example of how geopolitical instability—in this case, inter-imperialist rivalry playing out in the Middle East—can accelerate a transition that regulatory pressure alone has failed to deliver. The IMO’s global carbon price has been delayed. The market, however, is being forced to act by supply disruption.

The key contradiction is laid bare in the numbers. Switching to “grey” methanol or ammonia—the only forms currently available at scale—actually worsens the carbon footprint compared to heavy fuel oil. The climate benefit only materialises with “blue” (gas plus carbon capture) or “green” (renewable energy) variants. But green hydrogen is stuck in a pilot phase. So the industry’s “hedge” is to lock in dual-fuel capacity now, betting on a future where the clean stuff is cheap enough. This is not decarbonisation; it is capital preparing to commodify decarbonisation once the price is right.

For the shipping industry, the immediate lesson is resilience, not revolution. The ability to switch fuels is becoming a strategic asset, a hedge against supply-chain volatility. For Marxists, this confirms that the capitalist class will only pursue ecological fixes when they align with the imperative to manage price risk and secure supply. The planet’s fate remains subordinated to the cost of a barrel of oil passing through a contested strait.

New ICS Maritime Barometer Report reveals geopolitical instability as defining force shaping global shipping¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The International Chamber of Shipping’s latest Barometer report confirms what any port worker or freight broker already knows: the global shipping industry is now defined by permanent geopolitical turbulence. The report’s language is telling — “risk multiplier”, “fragmented and less predictable environment”, “uncertainty is no longer an interruption… it is the backdrop”. This is not a temporary disruption but the new normal for capital circulation.

What is most revealing is the industry’s response. Shipping leaders are not demanding an end to the instability — they are asking for “regulatory clarity” and “financial support” to navigate it. In other words, they want the state to absorb the costs and risks generated by inter-imperialist rivalry while they continue to profit. The preference for LNG and biofuels over more transformative alternatives is equally instructive: capital will only decarbonise if it can do so through existing supply chains and without threatening short-term returns.

The contradiction at the heart of this report is that shipping — the circulatory system of global capitalism — is being forced to adapt to a world where the old certainties of trade routes, insurance markets, and fuel supplies have dissolved. The industry’s “resilience” is not a sign of strength but of capital’s capacity to normalise crisis. For the working class, this means supply chains that are increasingly vulnerable to disruption, with costs passed on as higher prices and intensified labour exploitation. The question is not whether shipping can adapt, but who pays for the adaptation.

Food shocks¶

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

Food Shocks¶

Benjamin Selwyn's piece traces a pattern that is not cyclical but structural: each fertiliser crisis reproduces the same dependency, only more intensely. The Strait of Hormuz closure is merely the latest disruption exposing a system where agriculture has been built on synthetic inputs derived from fossil fuels, locking producers into a treadmill of rising costs and vulnerability.

The historical arc is instructive. Nineteenth-century guano and nitrates established imperial extraction circuits. Synthetic nitrogen production during WWII revealed the fundamental tension: fertiliser is simultaneously agricultural input and military feedstock. The US resolved this not by reducing dependence but by importing Chilean nitrate to maintain both food production and explosives manufacturing. The 1970s oil shock triggered the same response pattern—states doubled down on fertiliser use rather than questioning the system itself.

What emerges is a contradiction at the heart of modern agriculture: the very inputs that enable high yields also embed farmers in a global supply chain vulnerable to geopolitical disruption. The response to crisis consistently deepens this dependence. African states in the 1970s built state-led distribution systems to subsidise fertiliser access; structural adjustment dismantled them, but the underlying logic remained. Today's "green revolution" initiatives continue the same trajectory, despite evidence that agroecological methods produce better local food security outcomes.

The current crisis is sharper because it compounds multiple pressures simultaneously: fertiliser shortages, fuel costs, debt burdens, and the accelerating diversion of land toward biofuels. The latter is particularly revealing—governments respond to high oil prices by redirecting food crops into fuel, deepening the squeeze on food production. Each state scrambles to secure its own supply through export controls and subsidies, externalising costs onto poorer nations.

The system reproduces itself through crisis management. No major power treats fertiliser dependency as a structural problem to be overcome. They treat it as a supply chain to be secured. That is the real lesson: the global food system cannot absorb shocks without passing their costs downward.

FOMC Summary of Economic Projections, June 2026¶

Source: FRED Blog

The June 2026 FOMC Summary of Economic Projections reveals a central bank caught between stubborn inflation and a slowing economy. Core PCE inflation for Q4 2026 has been revised sharply upward from 2.7% to 3.3%, while real GDP growth has been trimmed from 2.4% to 2.2%. The unemployment rate is projected to hold steady around 4.3%, suggesting the Fed expects a mild slowdown rather than a recession.

The response is instructive: the median federal funds rate projection has been raised to 3.8% for end-2026, with rates staying above 3% through 2028. This is not a pivot. It is a grudging admission that inflation is proving more entrenched than hoped, and that the cost of suppressing it will be higher interest rates sustained for longer.

What this reflects is the underlying contradiction of the current cycle. Capital has been unable to restore the rate of profit through productive investment alone. Instead, the economy has been propped up by massive fiscal transfers and a labour market that, by historical standards, remains tight. The Fed is now trying to cool things down without triggering a crash — a balancing act that becomes harder the longer inflation persists.

The projections show no confidence in a soft landing. They show a central bank raising rates into a slowing economy because it has no other credible tool to discipline capital. The real question is whether the working class will absorb the costs through rising unemployment and stagnant wages, or whether the growing strike wave and labour militancy of recent years will force a different outcome. The Fed's numbers assume the former. The class struggle will decide.

New Prime Minister, Same Problem¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

Here is the summary and analysis of the article.

The article argues that Keir Starmer’s political demise is not a story of tactical blunders but of a bill finally coming due. For a decade, Britain deferred the economic consequences of Brexit. Starmer’s strategy was to neutralise the issue, ruling out a customs union or single market return, and hoping modest growth would paper over the cracks. It worked until the external environment changed.

Trump’s tariff war and the breakdown of the rules-based trading order have stripped away the last buffers. The EU, for all its faults, has scale. Britain does not. The costs of leaving—nontariff barriers, lost foreign investment, the decline of the City as Europe’s financial hub—are no longer diffuse. They are crystallising in the bond market, where rising yields signal that lenders now see British sovereign debt as riskier. This is the material form of a political contradiction: a medium-sized economy that chose isolation just as the global order demanded consolidation.

The article’s real insight is that this is not a crisis of bad policy but of impossible politics. A closer partnership with the EU is the rational economic fix, but the political will to pursue it is absent. The working class, meanwhile, bears the weight through stagnant wages and eroded public services, while the political class cycles through leaders who can only manage the decline, not reverse it. For revolutionary politics, the lesson is clear: the national question is not a distraction from class struggle but one of its sharpest expressions. When a bourgeoisie cannot resolve its own relation to the global market, it fractures its own state.

UK prioritised ties with UAE over averting mass atrocities in Sudan, MPs to be told¶

Source: The Guardian

The British government sat on intelligence linking Ethiopia to genocidal militias in Sudan for over a year, prioritising its relationship with the UAE over preventing mass atrocities. This is the substance of testimony Nathaniel Raymond, a Yale human rights investigator, will give to a parliamentary select committee.

The detail is damning. In May 2024, FCDO officials told Raymond that “significant private pressure” from the UAE prevented the UK from publicly disclosing evidence of Emirati and Ethiopian support for the Rapid Support Forces. The UK, as penholder on Sudan at the UN Security Council, was uniquely positioned to act. It chose not to. When El Fasher fell and Raymond briefed MPs that 60,000 civilians had been killed, a senior FCDO official contacted him to ask if the figure was too high — not to verify the number, but because it was a “political problem”.

This is not a case of bureaucratic inertia or intelligence failure. It is a conscious trade-off. The UK judged that preserving economic and diplomatic ties with the UAE — a key trade partner and investment source — outweighed the lives of tens of thousands of Sudanese civilians. The contradiction is stark: a state that claims a moral commitment to atrocity prevention actively suppressed evidence of genocide to avoid upsetting a regional ally.

The implications for revolutionary politics are indirect but real. This episode reveals the hierarchy of priorities that governs liberal interventionism. When the choice is between stopping a genocide and maintaining access to Gulf capital, capital wins every time. The UK’s “best hope” for Sudan was never a hope at all — it was a calculation.

Trump’s March of Folly in Iran¶

Source: Project Syndicate

Timothy Snyder’s analysis of Trump’s Iran policy is sharp on the surface but stops short of the structural logic driving the outcome. He frames the “memorandum of understanding” as a straightforward American capitulation — Iran forced the US to surrender by changing its politics through war. That much is true. But Snyder attributes the defeat to a political system that elevates “entertainers and profiteers,” as though the problem is simply the wrong people in charge.

This misses the deeper dynamic. The US did not lose in Iran because Trump is a buffoon. It lost because the American state, for all its military dominance, cannot translate destructive power into political victory when the adversary is willing to absorb punishment and outlast the domestic will to continue. Iran understood that the US empire fights wars it cannot sustain politically. The “deal” is not a Trump failure — it is the logical endpoint of a strategy that assumed bombing could substitute for strategy.

What Snyder calls humiliation is better understood as a contradiction made visible. American capital needs stable energy markets and regional order; the military apparatus cannot deliver either without committing ground forces the electorate will not tolerate. The result is a negotiated retreat dressed as diplomacy.

For the left, the lesson is not that Trump is incompetent but that the imperial state’s tools are blunted. That creates openings — but only if we recognise the weakness is systemic, not personal.