This article is a part of a roundtable on imperialism in the journal Spectre.
The introduction:
SINCE THE BEGINNING of US President Donald Trump’s second term in 2025, the political nature of money has been evident to anyone following economic and financial news. Any loss in value of the US Dollar (USD) tends to be met by scaremongering among Western pundits about the decline of the dollar as world money, and therefore also the decline of US hegemony.The scaremongering is, then, in turn met with a counterbarrage of opinion pieces outlining all the ways in which the dollar is still dominant as a means of payment and store of value. What is strikingly absent in these discussions is an understanding of the dominance of the USD as closely connected not simply to the US dollar’s use and the institutions that support it, but also to global value relations.
Via the Marxist critique of political economy, this essay seeks to expose the limitations of dominant framings which see the potentially imminent fall of the dollar. This is especially important for grasping today’s moment of flux and the extent to which dedollarization, increased trading in Yuan, and sell-offs of the dollar constitute a paradigm shift for the contemporary monetary order.
Rather than focusing on either the role of trust in the dollar on the one hand or China’s strategy to internationalize the renminbi on the other, this essay links the development of a global international division of labor, and the power relations it is characterized by, with the dominance of world money. This leads to a very different way of understanding the current moment than that of mainstream commentators.
To do this, the essay starts by laying out how economists and other social scientists approach money through a kind of money fetish, then it moves to discussing what a Marxist understanding of money in capitalism entails. It then discusses what this means for understanding world money historically, and finally, the situation today is laid out, contrasting it with the most dominant characterizations by academics and journalists.
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