Is the US actually an empire? And if so, why does hardly anyone talk about it? In 2012, Leo Panitch and Sam Ginidin published an award-winning book. They argue that the US is indeed an empire and that the American state was the primary force behind the expansion of capitalism around the world after WWII . The authors hold that the US established a new form of imperial rule with unprecedented features: First, the American Empire is an informal empire. The US refuses to acknowledge itself as such to its own citizens and to the rest of the world. Second, the American Empire is a non-territorial empire. It does not depend on territorial conquest and direct territorial rule. Its subject states are not colonies but instead known as allies.

The thesis of American decline has been around for several decades. In recent years, the Ukraine war and the growing conflict between the U.S. and China have given the debate a new lease of life. Declinistic scholars have argued that the U.S. is militarily overextended, financially overspent and ideologically bankrupt. They view China’s rise as a new global hegemon as inevitable. Anti-declinist researchers have rejected these arguments as a myth. They doubt that the American Century will be over anytime soon. What is often lacking in the debate, is a critical understanding of the structural underpinnings of U.S. global domination. The power of the U.S. rests primarily on two pillars: its unchallenged military capabiliites and the dominant role of the U.S. dollar in global trade and financial transactions.

The growing conflict between the United States and China will define the coming decades. The new bloc confrontation has increased the danger of a world war and is currently fuelling an international arms race. China’s rise as a global hegemon would bring 500 years of Western domination to an end. American decline goes hand in hand with the “de-westernization” of the world. It is highly doubtful that this will occur peacefully. So far all U.S. strategies to stop China’s rise have failed. The first strategy, pursued under George W. Bush, was to control global energy reserves in the Middle East. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was in part directed against China and its high dependence on imported fossil fuels at the time. The second U.S. strategy, launched under Barack Obama in 2011 as part of America’s “pivot to Asia”, was to block China’s sea routes in the South China Sea via the Strait of Malacca, in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.The U.S. economic war against China, propelled by the Trump and Biden administrations, was a reaction to the failure of the sea domination strategy. If the economic strategy to stop China does not produce the desired outcome, the military option will increasingly move to the fore.

The episode analyzes the current escalation of a military buildup in the Asia Pacific. The US has been strengthening its military positions in the region for more than a decade. The aim is to stop China’s rise as a global competitor. In recent years, the US has deepened its military cooperation with its allies in the Asia Pacific (Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Taiwan and Australia).

Many international observers believe that the growing conflict between the US and China will be the major conflict of the 21st century. In the 2022 National Security Strategy, the Biden administration affirmed that it would “advance America’s vital interests” and “position the United States to outmaneuver” its main geopolitical rivals. By the latter, the US is referring to China and Russia. The ongoing war in Ukraine is part of the struggle over a new world order. It takes place in the context of a systemic crisis of capitalism, which is related to the decline of US hegemony and the rise of China. The Ukraine war is essential for the US to defend and consolidate its geopolitical, economic, technological and military dominance and to prevent China from becoming a global competitor.

Over the past two years, the war in Ukraine has dominated mainstream media. What is rarely discussed, however, is the question of how the war has facilitated the expansion of U.S. and global capital. As long as the war in Ukraine drags on, big oil and gas companies and the US weapons industry will reap the profits.Ukrainian resources have been in the crosshairs of global capital for many years. Ukraine is one of the world's largest producers of barley, wheat and sunflower oil. There are extensive plans to privatize the country’s vast agricultural resources and hand them over to foreign multinationals.Capital around the globe is also positioning itself for the reconstruction of Ukraine once the war is over. Some estimates put the cost of rebuilding the country as high as $750 billion. This would make Ukraine the world’s largest construction site.

On June 12, Silvio Berlusconi, the flamboyant billionaire, media tycoon and politician died at a Milan hospital. Like no other, Berlusconi had dominated Italian politics over past three decades. What is less know, however, is the fact that Berlusconi was a member of the anti-communist clandestine organization Propaganda Due or P2. Founded during the Second World War, the P2 has functioned like a state within a state over the past decades. It has infiltrated civilian and military decision-making and undermined Italian’s democratic institutions from within. The organization is widely believed to be the mastermind behind a series of neo-fascist terrorist attacks and assassinations that shook Italy between 1969 and 1980.The plan was to establish an authoritarian regime disguised behind a democratic façade. The control of the media and the establishment of its own media network independent of the state formed part of that plan. The P2 helped finance the acquisition of Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s other's most influenced newspapers. It also supported Berlusconi’s rise to the position of media mogul and prime minister. Berlusconi, in turn, made P2’s plan a reality. Over the past decades, he and his media empire have certainly played a central role in paving the way for the rise of post-fascism in Italy.

In November 2022, the US corporation OpenAI released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence language model. The chatbot has been trained on a massive amount of data to generate human-like responses to text-based questions. ChatGPT will have a profound impact on labor relations, employment, geopolitics and the very sense we perceive reality itself. Under capitalism, ChatGPT is not primarily a tool for liberation, in the sense that it liberates us from tedious work and allows us to pursue more pleasant activities. It is first and foremost a tool for appropriation, privatization and profit-making. What we are currently witnessing is the appropriation of all collective intellectual and artistic knowledge that exists in digital form and its transformation into copyrighted profitable commodities.In a capitalist market economy, where the majority are wage-dependent workers, replacing human activities with AI-based tools will lead to a mass cognitive deskilling and make large numbers of workers increasingly superfluous. AI-driven automation will also lead to an enormous intensification of work, along with a loss of autonomy and privacy. Another concern is the potential for ChatGPT and other AI technologies to produce ever greater inequalities by widening the wealth gap between the owners of capital and the working class.And there is also the issue of the so-called “averaging effect”. ChatGPT generates answers based on averaged and typical word patterns. It shows us parts of the world in a biased, standardized and flattened form. The automation of cognitive processes through ChatGPT comes with the side effect of amplifying dominant views and mainstream ideas. Never before has a technology been so directly intertwined with the existing power structures.

On June 3, Austria’s Social Democratic Party or SPÖ will determine its new leader at a party congress. In a runoff election, Hans Peter Doskozil, governor of the state of Burgenland, will face left-wing contender Andreas Babler, who many observers compare with Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders. What would Doskozil’s or Babler’s victory mean for the SPÖ? What impact would the vote have on the existing power relations in the country? And what would be the implications for Austria’s revitalized Communist Party or KPÖ? As former Defense Minister and incumbent governor, Doskozil is an integral part of the SPÖ’s establishment. He and his camp are well connected within the bureaucratic apparatus of the party and the state. Babler, on the other hand, ran a grassroots campaign. He has criticized the SPÖ’s establishment and called for a democratization of the party. If Babler wins, he would probably have to face more resistance from the party's entrenched power networks.The outcome of the runoff vote will also have an impact on the political power relations, in particular with regards to the right-wing Freedom Party or FPÖ, currently leading in the polls. In that confrontation Doskozil and Babler pursue different strategies. Following the model of the Danish Social Democrats, Doskozil combines state interventionist, social policies with a more restrictive stance on migration. Babler, on the other hand, believes that the advance of right-wing populism cannot be stopped by shifting to the right. He views flight and migration as social issues.What would a Doskozil or Babler victory mean for the KPÖ? If Doskozil wins, the public discourse would further shift to the right and make the field left of the SPÖ larger. If Babler wins, the competition between SPÖ and KPÖ would intensify. A re-positioning of the SPÖ as a genuine workers’ party would reduce the KPÖ’s political maneuvering space and weaken the party, but probably only in the short-run.