2026-08-01 ATS briefing

Trump’s ethnonationalist immigration agenda

Source: Tempest

Trump’s second-term immigration agenda is being read by much of the left as more of the same: another round of border militarisation in service of capital’s need for a disposable, deportable workforce. Avery Wear’s argument is that this framework has expired. The shift is not in degree but in kind — from labour management to ethnonationalist consolidation. The distinction matters because it changes what the fight is actually against.

The historical record supports the old critique. From the post-Civil War open border that fed industrial expansion, to the 1924 quotas that codified a white supremacist hierarchy into law, to the post-NAFTA architecture of Operation Gatekeeper that deliberately produced a permanent undocumented underclass, immigration policy was a tool for disciplining the whole working class. The point was never to stop migration but to render it precarious. That analysis held for 150 years.

What has changed is the driver. Trump’s policy is not calibrated to employer demand for cheap labour — it is actively hostile to it. The three stated goals — preserving a white majority, reducing non-white immigrants to a permanent ethnic underclass, and building enforcement into an armed guardian of that order — do not serve profitability. They serve a political project of racial hierarchy that capital will have to adapt to, not one it designed. The Bonapartist framing is useful here: Trump has broken the Republican Party, the think tanks, the media, and the bureaucracy as instruments of ruling-class discipline. The result is an electoral autocracy that is ideologically pro-capitalist but operationally indifferent to the stable conditions capital needs.

The left’s reflex — exposing the Democrats’ hollowness on immigration — was correct when both parties operated within the same labour-management consensus. That consensus is now broken. The enemy is no longer a pseudo-debate between two management strategies. It is an openly authoritarian state project. The strategy of militant defence of immigrant communities remains necessary, but it can no longer be framed as exposing the fraud of reform. It is now a direct confrontation with the state’s core racial logic.

The EU’s Incredible Shrinking Banking Sector

Source: Project Syndicate

The reversal is stark enough that the numbers barely need commentary: in 2000, Europe’s five largest banks each out-valued the biggest American one; today, JPMorganChase alone is worth more than all five EU giants combined. But the interesting question is why this divergence has become a structural feature rather than a cyclical dip, and Davies’ framing — that European policymakers need to "address" it — smuggles in an assumption worth interrogating.

The conventional explanation runs through profitability. US banks enjoy a deeper capital market, a more consolidated sector, and a regulatory environment that has allowed them to concentrate risk and reward. European banks, by contrast, remain fragmented along national lines, burdened by home-country supervision and a Banking Union that was never completed. The Capital Markets Union, meant to shift financing away from banks toward markets, has stalled for a decade. So European banks are smaller, less profitable, and less able to fund the continent’s tech and green transitions.

But the framing of "shrinking" as a problem to be solved deserves scrutiny. The EU’s banking sector is not shrinking in absolute terms — it is shrinking relative to a US system that has concentrated enormous risk into a handful of institutions. The American model has produced higher shareholder returns, but it has also produced the 2008 crisis and a series of regional bank failures in 2023 that required ad hoc rescues. The EU’s fragmentation, often derided as a weakness, has arguably been a form of risk containment: no single European bank is too big to fail in the way that JPMorgan or Bank of America now are.

The real contradiction is political. Davies wants European banks to be bigger and more competitive, but the very integration required — a genuine fiscal backstop, deposit insurance, a single resolution authority — would require member states to surrender the national vetoes that keep the Banking Union incomplete. The EU cannot have American-scale banks without American-scale federalism, and it has shown no appetite for that. So the sector will keep shrinking relative to the US, and the policy prescriptions will keep multiplying, and the underlying impasse will remain untouched. For the left, the lesson is not that European banks need to catch up, but that the entire project of making European finance competitive with the US is a race to the bottom dressed up as modernisation.

Venezuela Steps In as the Hormuz Crisis Re-routes VLCC Trade Out of the Gulf

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The Strait of Hormuz crisis has done what sanctions against Venezuela could not: it has made Venezuelan crude a viable, even necessary, part of the global VLCC trade. Volumes jumped from 1.4 million tonnes in Q2 2025 to 6.5 million tonnes a year later, with Trafigura alone moving 2.6 million tonnes in the second quarter. The market has found a workaround, not a solution. Total VLCC liftings have collapsed by 22% year-on-year, and the 40% contraction in Gulf exports is not being offset by the scramble to Angola, West Africa and the Caribbean. The system is absorbing the shock by rerouting, but it is absorbing it at lower total volume and higher freight risk.

The freight data shows where the pressure actually sits. The Baltic Dirty Tanker Index at 2,607 remains well below its March–April crisis peak of 3,737, yet the week's gains are overwhelmingly Atlantic: West Africa–China up 27%, US Gulf–China up 25%, while Middle East benchmarks firmed barely 4%. This is a market pricing a rerouting, not a shortage. The 137 VLCC ballasters sitting in the Arabian Gulf, up 10% week-on-week, are the tell — tonnage is repositioning toward loading zones where liftings have fallen, waiting on a transit framework that remains unresolved. Iran's refusal of the Gulf-backed funding proposal, modelled on the Malacca Strait, suggests the standoff has a commercial dimension as much as a military one.

The durability question is political. If Gulf exports recover, Venezuela's new customers will likely evaporate as quickly as they appeared. But the episode demonstrates how readily capital reorganises around disrupted chokepoints, and how quickly the US's own Gulf crude exports — down from 38.5 million tonnes to roughly 3 million — become collateral damage in a crisis Washington helped provoke.

At least 57 people die as tens of thousands cross to Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Morocco

Source: The Guardian

Fifty-seven dead, fifty thousand through the wire in a day, and the Spanish prime minister’s first instinct is to blame “human trafficking mafias” for an “avalanche” that conveniently absolves both Madrid and Rabat of any agency. The scale is unprecedented — five times the 2021 surge — but the choreography is familiar. Morocco opens the tap, Spain cries foul, and the EU convenes crisis meetings while Italy theatrically suspends Schengen. The real story is how neatly the border functions as a pressure valve for two states that have already settled the underlying question.

Sánchez’s attribution is telling precisely because it is so threadbare. The trigger he cites is a supreme court ruling that ended summary returns at sea — a legal constraint on state violence, not a smuggling operation. That a court decision could “spread like wildfire” through migrant networks suggests the border regime’s normal functioning depends on the threat of immediate, lawless pushback. When that threat is removed, the border simply ceases to hold. The buoys Sánchez now plans to string across the breakwater are an admission: the line between Spain and Morocco is not a territorial fact but a legal performance, and the court has punctured it.

What goes unspoken is that Rabat’s cooperation is the real border. The 2021 crisis ended when Madrid abandoned neutrality on Western Sahara and backed Morocco’s claim — a colonial inheritance repackaged as diplomatic pragmatism. Algeria’s thaw with Sánchez this month is the other side of that bargain. Ceuta is not a leak in Fortress Europe; it is a tap that Morocco controls and Spain pays to keep closed, with Western Sahara as the currency. The deaths are not a malfunction of this arrangement but its periodic recalibration.

Italy’s intervention is pure spectacle — Meloni’s government has no interest in Spanish border control, only in weaponising the crisis for domestic consumption. But the deeper point stands: the Schengen zone’s internal solidarity evaporates the moment the external border fails. The EU’s integrated crisis response is a ritual, not a solution, because there is no European solution to a border that exists only as a negotiated fiction between two states with a colonial ledger to settle.

Can capitalism save Cuba's revolution?

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

The care home in Vedado is a useful place to start, because it condenses the whole arrangement into a single image: a former paediatrician and an IT specialist running a private business that the revolution once prohibited, catering to elderly Cubans the state can no longer look after. The mipymes are not a concession to capitalism so much as an admission that the state sector has collapsed as a provider of basic services. What is being privatised here is not surplus value but the state's own failure.

The timing matters. The liberalisation was announced in the wake of the largest anti-government protests since 1959, and the regime's response was to crack down on demonstrators while simultaneously opening the economy. That is not a contradiction in the sense of an inconsistency; it is a coherent strategy of political closure combined with economic opening. The state is trying to preserve its monopoly on power while surrendering its monopoly on production. Whether that is sustainable is another question. A private sector employing a quarter of the workforce will eventually generate its own political demands, and the regime has given no indication it intends to meet them.

The external pressure is doing real work here. Trump's second-term threats to "take" the island, the executive order declaring Cuba an "unusual and extraordinary threat", the tariffs on any country supplying hydrocarbons — these are not rhetorical flourishes but the tightening of a blockade that has now lasted over six decades. The US is not trying to strangle the Cuban economy because it fears socialism; it is trying to strangle it because the Cuban state, however weakened, still refuses to subordinate itself to Washington's hemispheric order. The irony is that the embargo is the single most effective argument for the regime's survival: it gives Havana a permanent explanation for scarcity that no amount of market reform can dispel.

The empty luxury hotels and begging children are the two poles of the new Cuba. The question the article poses in its title — can capitalism save the revolution — is probably the wrong one. The more pressing question is whether the revolution can survive being saved.

Silicon, Not Software, Will Decide the AI Race

Source: Project Syndicate

The framing of the AI race as a contest of silicon rather than software is, on its face, a claim about engineering bottlenecks. But read closely, it is an admission about the structure of accumulation. The authors date the boom to ChatGPT’s launch, yet the real pivot they describe is earlier: once scaling laws were established in 2020, the scientific question was settled and the economic one took over. From that point, the binding constraint was never intelligence — it was the capacity to manufacture and deploy it at a scale that returns a profit.

What the piece gestures toward, without quite saying, is that the AI sector has crossed from a phase of innovation rents to one of capital intensity. The marginal cost of a better model is no longer a cleverer algorithm but a data centre, a fab, a grid connection. This is the classic moment when a young industry matures into a monopoly problem: the fixed costs are so enormous that only firms with access to cheap capital and captive markets can play. The talk of "physical infrastructure" and "markets large enough" is euphemism for the fact that the race is now a test of who can absorb overaccumulation — who can sink billions into depreciating assets before the next wave of chips makes them obsolete.

There is a genuine contradiction buried here. The authors present scale as the path to victory, but scale is also the path to fragility. Every doubling of compute capacity is a bet that demand will keep pace; if the deployment side stalls — if the promised productivity gains don't materialise in the real economy — the whole edifice rests on fictitious valuations. The AI race is not just a technological competition but a test of whether the financial system can keep inflating the bubble long enough for the physical build-out to catch up. For those watching from outside the industry, the question is not who wins, but what happens when the overhang of unproductive capital meets its reckoning.

What France's far right has learned from Israel's apartheid system

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

The comparison to Mussolini flatters the French far right. It implies a rupture, a dramatic seizure of power, that the actual trajectory of the Rassemblement National does not support. The more instructive model, as Bréville and Rimbert argue, is Israel: not a fascist state in the classical sense, but a democracy that has perfected the art of administering a permanently disenfranchised population. The danger is not the jackboot but the administrative form, the slow accretion of legal categories that sort people into tiers of belonging.

This framing has the virtue of explaining the RN's electoral strategy. The party has spent two decades detoxifying itself not by abandoning its programme but by translating it into the language of republican universalism. Citizenship stripping, security laws, the policing of public space — these are not the paraphernalia of a coup but the instruments of a legal order that can be built incrementally, with the cooperation of the very institutions it claims to despise. The Israeli model offers something Mussolini cannot: a functioning, internationally accepted template for permanent inequality within a democratic framework.

The left's fixation on fascism is not merely a misdiagnosis. It is a strategic error. Anti-fascist mobilisation presupposes a moment of rupture that never arrives, while the real work of segregation proceeds through legislation, court rulings and administrative circulars. The question is not whether France is sliding towards 1934 but whether it is building a juridical architecture that makes political equality a formal fiction. The answer, on the evidence of the past decade, is that it already has.