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.
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.
Well, the cold machine of capital has no use for what it deems to be unproductive populations. Those groups are to be policed. With climate collapse you have strains of thought who tend towards the idea that ‘humans are the real plague’, which serves to mask the reality that when the cookie crumbles and billions die they won’t be billions who live in the Champs Elysee or Martha’s Vineyard. Ecofascists outright see death as the solution to industrialized climate change.
What happens instead when the ‘pie’ shrinks in a militarized police state? The same thing that’s happened for the past 40 years. People are blamed for their choices, told to learn to code, told to seek services that haven’t been provided since before Reagan became a vegetable. Except that with the loss of the USD what was once the slow boil of financialization becomes a steep cliff. People who had otherwise been well off suddenly find out that their house isn’t worth much and neither is their assets or their money. Taxes go up to meet investor expectations as bond yields rise. Interest rates must be kept high at all times, because the country no longer has an aura of unbroken credibility. In short, Argentinification where every solution possible to the economic woes of the country takes so long to take effect that by the time the next president is in power everything is worse.
The United States has all the capital in the world to steer that ship away from the rocks. It has chosen not to for 40 years because there’s simply too much money in exploiting reserve currency status. Now they are threatening that status by sanctioning countries that are too big to ignore. Soon they might even sanction China, but Brazil, India, Russia and so on are all sanctioned already. What happens when the only people recycling dollars and sending their profits to the US are moribund in Japan and the EU?
