Thought this was an interesting analysis, though I think it needs to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt (I think it’s power is what is qualitatively describes rather than precise numbers, and I think the author might even agree with me).
I’m always on the lookout to see it quantified how much the average American benefits from imperialism. My guy says if the US was unable to exert hegemony, the US would experience at least what Russia experienced in the 90s. These numbers align with that; and this is only talking about dollar hegemony and not, for example, the US using military pressure, sanctions, or other methods for extracting cheaper resources and goods from the global south.
That said, I’m not sure you can just run a regression and get your answer. I don’t see how you can isolate the US losing dollar hegemony without it then creating an uncountable number of secondary effects. All this stuff is deeply interconnected. But that said, I think this does a good job of highlighted at least in a qualitative sense just how much Americans benefit from dollar hegemony, and how losing that would be huge problem for the US economy.
Here’s the thing, the labor aristocracy is global. The labor aristocrat can always just move to an anglo country and make many times what they’d make in the Global South or Europe. That’s what brain drain is all about. Which is why I never even mentioned them. What I compared are the conditions of service industry and farm workers, and how global financial policy alters their status.
When you add the labor aristocracy to the equation you have what can be considered an inflection point. The indentured servant in a large american city has to compete with the labor aristocrats for amenities - housing, services, and so on. The indentured servant in, say, Rio de Janeiro has to pay rent to live in a favela just so they have the opportunity to clean the a middle class house.
People struggle everywhere, especially people at the bottom of the rung. But there’s a real appreciable decline in US living standards due to deindustrialization and financialization. The only ones safe from that decline are capitalists, high value workers, capitalist family members, and the real estate gentry. Those all benefit from american fiscal policy and the USD. What we are saying is that’s only the tip of the iceberg if USD hegemony disappears and the US government actually starts having to pay its bills. It’s like in France. Revolutionary conditions arrived when hunger knocked on the doors of rural aristocrats, the lower clergy and even the tax paying bourgeois.
I agree the labor aristocracy is global, and you’re right, you never mentioned the labor aristocracy, it was the question of whether US workers would stand to lose from unipolarity collapsing. It’s definitely going to disrupt a lot of industries to lose access to specific cheap resources, undercosted aluminum, things like that, and those costs are going to be send down the ladder immediately, but it’s not like the global system has been rigged to the benefit of US workers, but rather financial institutions in the global north. My reasoning is that the US labor aristocracy is going to contract even further as a result of the loss of these intl monopolies, being opened up to competition in semiconductor design, pharmaceuticals,even finances lol I think someone was posting about their town freaking about a Chinese company sponsoring their basketball team.
No, the global economy was not rigged to the benefit of US workers. It was rigged to the benefit of the US economy. Let’s go with a concrete example. When the argentinean currency collapses it’s not the homeless grocer who stops eating. It’s almost everyone. If the USD collapsed, then anyone whose networth is mostly based on owning a house suddenly sees that disappear. Even if US elites - for the past 40 years - have chosen to financialize and nickle and dime the workers to their last credit card, you still have a situation where inflation and economic stimulus can lead to workers gaining some bargaining power. When you print trillions of your currency and you don’t have the USD hegemony, workers have less than no bargaining power. They are more than desperate to make rent. They become the targets of ecofascists.
They become the targets of ecofascists.
Go on, this is getting fun and speculative.
