Counter Hegemony

Lessons from the Pinochet coup in Chile? On September 11,1973, Chile was rocked by a military coup. Led by General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean military toppled the socialist government of President Salvador Allende and established a dictatorship. Pinochet ruled Chile for 17 years. During that period, the military junta committed numerous crimes, violated human rights, banned political parties, s...

BRICS is a a geopolitical and economic alliance between Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Formed in 2010, the group encompasses more than a quarter of the world's land surface, over 40 percent of the global population, around 30 percent of global GDP, about 20 percent of international trade and 50 percent of the world's foreign exchange reserves. In August 2023, the BRICS announced t...

Why are rents going up in Europe? In recent years, most European countries have been grappling with a sharp increase in living expenses. According to Eurostat, rents have soared by 18 percent and house prices by 48 percent since 2010. As a consequence, more and more households are having trouble paying bills. The crisis has been further exacerbated by rising inflation and high energy costs. On clo...

Over the past years, Ecuador has become a major battlefield in the transnational drug war. On August 9, presidential hopeful Fernando Villavicencio was shot dead at a campaign rally in Quito. Villavicencio was a member of the National Assembly and spoke out against organized crime and corruption. His murder marked the culmination of Ecuador’s worsening security crisis and of an unprecedented cycle...

On July 26, a military coup took place in the African country Niger. President Mohamed Bazoum was overthrown by a small group within the military. He was the first democratically elected president since Niger gained independence from France in 1960. The UN and the African Union condemned the coup. The United States and European leaders also expressed major concerns and demanded Bozoum’s immediate...

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 featu...

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 re...

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 th...

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 on...

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. U...

Colombia has been rocked by a bloody armed conflict for more than six decades. The overwhelming majority of the more than nine million victims are poor peasants. So Colombia’s rural areas have always been the principal battlegrounds of the ongoing war. Historically, the political conflict dynamics in the countryside have been closely related to the development and the expansion of capitalism. To f...

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 s...

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...

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 existin...

On May 28th, Turkish voters will head back to the polls for a runoff election between incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Erdogan is in a good position to win in the second round. He is supported by a party alliance of ultranationalist, fascist and Islamist parties. Kılıçdaroğlu, chair of the Republican People's Party or CHP, heads a secular-nationalist...

Austria’s Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) is currently determining its new leader. Over the past years, the SPÖ has failed to make political headway in the context of inflation, declining real wages, rising rents and impoverishment as the largest opposition party. Following the debacle in the 2023 Carinthian election, the SPÖ decided to hold a membership referendum on who should lead the party into...

In November 2021, Elke Kahr was sworn in as mayor of Graz, Austria’s second largest city. Kahr is not only the first Communist mayor of an Austrian city but of any major city across Europe. There are four factors that explain the surge of Communism and Elke Kahr’s success in Graz. First, the KPÖ’s focus on social issues and the common good. Over the past decades, the Styrian Communists have effect...

In late April, regional elections were held in the Austrian state of Salzburg. The big surprise was the historic success of the Communist Party. There are several factors that explain these developments. First, the party addressed the right issues. Its campaign was focused on municipal social policies, primarily on the issue of affordable housing. Second, the top candidate Kay-Michael Dankl convin...

The video is the second part of a series about the crisis of social democracy. It analyzes the subordination of social democratic parties to neoliberal hegemony and the adoption of so-called “Third Way” policies during the 1990s. In addition, it examines organizational and cultural changes within social democratic parties that have increasingly alienated the party leadership from members and voter...

Contemporary capitalism is in many ways shaped by social democracy. Just think of the notions of socially just wages, a regulated market, the right of workers to organize, wealth distribution, social welfare, the ethos of solidarity or the understanding of companies as organizations with social responsibilities. These modifications of capitalism can be traced back to the historical struggles of so...

Die meisten Erklärungsversuche blenden die Frage aus, welche Rolle marktbeherrschende Monopole oder Oligopole in der aktuellen Inflationsdynamik spielen, also wie höhere Gewinnmargen für Großkonzernen zur Inflation beitragen. Vor allem die Benzinpreise an Raffinerien und Tankstellen haben sich seit der Eskalation des Ukraine-Kriegs systematisch vom Rohölpreis entkoppelt. Ähnlich verhält es sich au...

Im Februar 2023 stiegen die Verbraucherpreise in Österreich im Jahresvergleich um 10,9 Prozent. Im Monat davor hatte die Inflation sogar den höchsten Wert seit 70 Jahren erreicht. Die vorherrschenden Erklärungsversuche sehen die Ursachen für die Teuerung vor allem in überhöhten Staatsausgaben, einer zu lockeren Geldmengenpolitik und hohen Lohnabschlüssen. Die Erklärungsversuche greifen jedoch bei...

In November 2016, the Colombian government and FARC-EP guerrillas signed a historic peace agreement that aimed to put an end to decades of civil war. More than six years later, violence continues todominate large parts of the country. Under Colombia's first leftist president, Gustavo Petro, however,the chances have increased to bring the armed conflict to a close. To achieve "total peace," the Pet...