2026-07-06 ATS briefing

Patrimonial Bonapartism

Source: Tempest

Patrimonial Bonapartism

Anthony Teso argues that Trump's regime is best understood as "patrimonial Bonapartism" rather than fascism or populist authoritarianism. The distinction matters for strategic thinking about working-class alternatives.

The fascism label has been tempting: visible contempt for legal procedure, leadership cults, paramilitary symbolism, mass deportation machinery. But fascism in the Marxist tradition describes something specific—a mass petty-bourgeois movement fused with capital to crush a working class facing revolutionary crisis. Those conditions don't obtain in the United States today. The working class isn't organised for revolution; the petty bourgeoisie lacks extra-parliamentary formations; capital isn't suffering the profitability crisis that drove German and Italian industry toward fascism.

Bonapartism, by contrast, names a recurring form of capitalist rule where the executive achieves real autonomy from the dominant class while serving its general interest. Marx developed the concept for Louis Bonaparte's France: a bourgeoisie too divided to rule directly, a working class strong enough to threaten but not to take power, and an executive stepping into the vacuum. The state disciplines the bourgeoisie, taxes them, bypasses parliament—but protects property and crushes workers.

Teso combines this with Weber's patrimonialism: rule through personal loyalty rather than bureaucratic procedure. The result is a regime where the executive concentrates power, parliamentary mediation decays, and administration becomes personalised—but without the mass movement and revolutionary threat that define fascism.

The implication is strategic. If this is Bonapartism rather than fascism, it's an emergency form of rule, inherently transitional. The question becomes what it transitions toward—and what organised alternative the working class can build in the meantime.

OPEC+ countries say they will expand monthly oil production

Source: Al Jazeera

OPEC+ has announced a fifth consecutive monthly production increase, adding 188,000 barrels per day from August. The move is framed as a response to recovering markets, but the real story is the slow unwinding of a crisis that exposed the fragility of global energy supply chains.

The US-Israel war on Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, which carried roughly a fifth of global oil. OPEC+ production collapsed from 42.77 million barrels per day in February to 33.13 million in May — not because of deliberate cuts, but because storage filled up and tankers couldn’t move. The production quotas became a paper fiction.

Now, with a ceasefire memorandum signed in June, the strait is reopening. Iran has pushed nearly 50 million barrels onto the market. Saudi shipping has more than doubled. Meanwhile, Chinese demand is softening, and US and Russian exports are rising. The result is a looming oversupply. Brent crude has already fallen back to pre-war levels around $72.

This is not a story of OPEC+ exercising market power. It is a story of how quickly a geopolitical shock can break the circuits of global oil circulation — and how, once the blockage clears, the system lurches from scarcity to glut. The underlying dynamic is overaccumulation held in check by artificial constraints, now being released all at once.

For listeners: the war on Iran was never just about Iran. It was about controlling the arteries of energy trade. The fact that prices have returned to pre-war levels so quickly suggests the war failed to achieve that objective — but the volatility itself is the permanent condition.

Tanker Market: Russian Fuel System in Limbo

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The war in Ukraine is now reshaping Russian oil flows in a way that reveals a contradiction beneath the headline export numbers. Crude exports rose 7.8% year-on-year in June, but this is not a sign of strength. It is a symptom of damage. Ukrainian drone strikes have taken roughly 20% of Russia’s refining capacity offline, hitting eight of its ten largest refineries. Unable to process crude domestically, Moscow is pushing more of it straight into seaborne exports — particularly from Baltic and Black Sea ports.

The result is a divergence within the tanker market. Crude carriers, especially Aframax and Suezmax vessels, see more employment as unrefined barrels are shipped out. Product tankers face the opposite: less diesel, gasoline and jet fuel leaving Russian ports means fewer clean cargoes. Over two-thirds of Russia’s administrative regions now face fuel restrictions, and Moscow has had to ask Kazakhstan for gasoline supplies. The downstream system is under real strain.

This is not a story of a resilient Russian energy sector adapting to sanctions. It is a story of war damage forcing a shift in the composition of exports — more crude, less refined product — with knock-on effects for shipping demand that are specific and uneven. The risk premium around Russian-linked trades is also rising: attacks on port and storage infrastructure make loading schedules unreliable, and some owners are becoming reluctant to call at western Russian ports.

For crude carriers, the disruption is supportive in the short term. But the underlying driver is a constrained refining system, not a healthy oil balance. That distinction matters.

How Safe Are Today’s Blockbuster Tech Stocks?

Source: Project Syndicate

Barry Eichengreen’s piece is a cautious exercise in historical analogy, comparing today’s tech mega-IPOs to the 1987 listing of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. At its peak, NTT was worth more than all of West Germany’s stock market. Within five years, it had lost 80% of its value. The parallel is sobering, but Eichengreen’s framing is too polite.

The real issue is not whether today’s AI and space stocks are overvalued — they clearly are — but what that overvaluation reveals about the system’s current predicament. Capital is awash in liquidity, chasing a shrinking number of outlets for productive investment. The tech giants are not simply promising future profits; they are absorbing vast sums of fictitious capital because there is nowhere else for it to go. The underlying economy cannot generate sufficient returns on real investment, so money piles into narratives about general-purpose technologies that will supposedly transform everything — eventually.

This is a symptom of overaccumulation, not a speculative sideshow. The scale of the bubble matters because these firms are now so large that their collapse would not be contained. When NTT crashed, it was one company in one country. Today’s tech behemoths are global, entwined with pension funds, sovereign wealth, and household savings across the advanced capitalist world. A correction would not be a repeat of 1987 — it would be a systemic event.

The hosts might note that the search for historical analogies is itself revealing. The bourgeoisie senses instability but cannot name its cause. So it reaches for railway booms and electrification, missing that the problem is not technology but the social relations in which it is embedded.

Xeneta Weekly Ocean Container Shipping Market Update: Rates on the Rise

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The ocean container shipping market is surging, and the numbers are stark. Spot rates from the Far East to the US West Coast have climbed 253% since late February. Carriers are throwing record capacity at the Transpacific — the four-week rolling average has matched the previous high set during the US tariff pause last July — yet rates keep rising. Xeneta’s analyst calls it a “global peak season” arriving early, driven by shippers rushing to move goods before further disruption in the Middle East.

This is not a simple supply-demand story. The capacity being added is real: MSC reinstated a service, Yang Ming and ONE are running extra-loaders. But it is not enough to reverse the trend. That suggests the bottleneck is not just ships but the entire logistics chain — port labour, trucking, warehousing — stretched to its limit by a concentrated wave of demand. Shippers are not responding to consumer signals; they are stockpiling against geopolitical uncertainty, effectively front-loading future demand into the present.

What looks like a healthy market is actually a symptom of chronic instability. Capital is piling into shipping capacity because the returns are there, but those returns depend on a crisis that could shift at any moment. The underlying contradiction: the industry is booming precisely because the conditions for stable, predictable trade have collapsed. For the hosts, the question is whether this frantic movement of goods reflects real accumulation or a speculative rush that will leave overcapacity and stranded assets when the next disruption — or de-escalation — hits.

‘The situation is terrible’: aid workers on life in Sudanese city pummelled by drone strikes

Source: The Guardian

The Slow Strangulation of El Obeid

The Guardian's report on El Obeid describes a city being systematically dismantled from the air. Drone strikes have hit power stations, fuel depots, hospitals, and even crowds gathering for internet access. The UN human rights chief calls it a "red alert". Aid workers describe a population that has "become accustomed to pain, loss and fear".

What is striking is the methodical nature of the destruction. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab found damage "consistent with intentional bombardment of civilian infrastructure necessary for the sustainment of life". This is not indiscriminate. It is a strategy of siege by air — targeting the material conditions that allow a city of half a million people, including 100,000 refugees, to function.

The RSF appears to be replicating the playbook used at El Fasher, where an 18-month siege ended in massacre and what the UN called the "hallmarks of genocide" against non-Arab communities. The difference in El Obeid, according to analysts, is the absence of the same ethnic dynamics. That may not offer much comfort. Siege warfare does not require ethnic animus to produce mass death — only the willingness to cut off what people need to live.

The war itself is sustained by external powers. A recent referral to the ICC names officials in the UAE, Iran, Turkey and Egypt for supplying arms, financing and mercenaries to both sides. This is not a civil war in any simple sense. It is a proxy conflict playing out over Sudanese territory and resources, with the civilian population absorbing the costs.

For revolutionary politics, the lesson is grimly familiar. When rival factions of the same class — military and paramilitary — compete for control of the state and its resources, the working class and peasantry are reduced to targets or refugees. The international community issues statements and holds debates. The drones keep flying.

Rodríguez defends Venezuela’s emergency earthquake response as number of bodies expected to soar

Source: The Guardian

The Guardian reports that Venezuela’s death toll from the 24 June twin earthquakes has passed 3,300, with over 16,700 injured and 58,000 buildings destroyed. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez insists there will be no social unrest, only “deep social solidarity,” even as families describe being turned away from overflowing hospitals, unable to afford funeral costs, and scrambling for cemetery plots to avoid mass graves.

The article’s real weight is in the details of decomposition. Forensic technician Joel Mirabal estimates 60-70% of bodies are identifiable by relatives, but the rest go to cooling containers donated by private companies. He expects to spend three months collecting bodies. “The collapse is massive,” he says. “Mass graves will have to be created.”

This is not a story about a regime failing its people, though that framing is available. It is a story about what happens when a state’s capacity to manage death itself has been hollowed out. Venezuela’s economy has been strangled by sanctions and mismanagement for years. The state cannot afford body bags, let alone the logistics of urban search and rescue. The private sector steps in with cooling containers, but only to store the dead, not to save the living.

The contradiction is stark: Rodríguez promises social solidarity, but solidarity is what fills the gap when the state cannot function. The families burying their own, the forensic technicians working seven-day shifts, the funeral homes charging $450 — this is the social reproduction of catastrophe under a broken economy. The question is not whether unrest will break out, but how long the makeshift networks of survival can hold before the mass graves become political facts.

Florida Republican says deporting Haitians with TPS would be ‘huge mistake’

Source: The Guardian

A revealing split has opened within the US ruling class over the fate of 350,000 Haitian migrants with Temporary Protected Status. Republican congressman Carlos Giménez, representing a Miami district with a significant Haitian constituency, has publicly called the Trump administration’s push to end TPS a “huge mistake.” He is joined by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and New York Congressman Mike Lawler — Republicans all, but ones whose local economies depend on the labour these migrants provide.

The contradiction is stark. The Supreme Court has ruled that the administration can legally cut off protections. But the material reality on the ground resists the logic of the court order. DeWine points out that Haitians in Ohio work in manufacturing, food production, and care homes. Lawler notes that a third of Haitian TPS holders work in healthcare. To deport them, these politicians argue, would create immediate crises in hospitals and nursing homes, and pull the rug from under local industries that have integrated this workforce.

This is not a humanitarian intervention from the conscience of the Republican party. It is a class fraction — rooted in regional capital that depends on migrant labour — defending its own interests against the abstract, punitive nationalism of the Trump White House. The bill to extend Haitian TPS until 2029 passed the House with bipartisan support from South Florida lawmakers, but now sits stalled in the Senate.

The underlying reality is that US capital has absorbed these workers into the fabric of the economy. The state’s legal apparatus can declare them removable, but the economic machinery cannot afford to lose them. This is the kind of contradiction that exposes the gap between political posturing and the actual needs of accumulation — and it is far from resolved.