Categories
Imperialism International Financial Subordination Marx Publications

The Money Fetish and Empire: “Liberation Day” and the Roots of Dollar Dominance (new article)

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.

Read the full article here. If you have trouble accessing, check my ResearchGate.

Categories
Blog Decolonizing Economics Dependency theory Economic Development Publications

Inverted Eurocentrism: The Consumption of Decolonization in the Global North (new blog post)

At a moment when the United States has recently kidnapped the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, assassinated the Iranian supreme leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, is plotting regime change in Cuba, and is continuing to support genocide and colonial oppression in Palestine, the question of how to understand empire, capitalism, and possibilities for resistance is as pressing as ever. In a new article, I argue that any radical decolonization agenda must be aligned with critique of and resistance to contemporary oppression. I also posit that the most dominant form of decolonial theory – the one that is now pervasive across global North universities as well as many institutions across the global South – does not lend itself to such radical critique and resistance.

Today, “Eurocentrism” tends to be equated with the study of Europe or studies by Europeans, and the process of intellectual decolonization tends to be equated with elevating indigenous or global South voices and perspectives as well as the inclusion of case studies from the global South. When liberal institutions use the term ‘decolonization’, a very particular, arguably essentialising and epistemic-oriented, worldview is often underlying the approach taken. When academics use it, a particular understanding of a decolonial framework is very often assumed, if not explicit. In fact, the decolonial framework has become so prominent and dominant that it is difficult to present arguments about decolonization and Eurocentrism without being automatically associated with this specific decolonial tradition. The consumption of decolonial theory in the global North and beyond thus serves to water down the radical core of decolonization and anti-imperialist projects.

It was in the early 2000s that a large and diverse group of Latin American scholars formally organized themselves into the Modernity-Coloniality-Decoloniality (MCD) group. By the 2010s that tradition had started to become a misinterpreted artifact of consumption in Northern academia. This is not the first time global North audiences misinterpret, flatten and distort traditions that have primarily emerged in the global South. Just as the original debate about dependency theory became distorted to fit a global North audience’s worldview, rendering dependency theory ‘a strawman easy to destroy’, the debates about decolonisation and decoloniality have been shoehorned into the frameworks and politics of global North academia. As André Gunder Frank became the representative of dependency theory in the global North – papering over rich discussions and nuance within Latin America and beyond – the decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo has, arguably, to a large degree become the spokesperson for decolonisation efforts, representing a similar kind of distortion and simplification. And as with dependency theory, decolonial theory was also twisted to serve a political function for global North academia, which became increasingly concerned with discrimination, identity, epistemology, and critiques of grand structural narratives in the 2010s.

Read more on the EADI blog.

Categories
Decolonizing Economics Economic Development Imperialism Marx Methodology Publications

Inverted Eurocentrism: The Consumption of Decolonization in the Global North and a Radical Decolonization Agenda (new article)

I have a new article out in Development and Change‘s new Forum on decoloniality. The abstract:

In the Global North and elite spaces in the Global South, the concepts of Eurocentrism and decolonization have come to be associated primarily with identity and location rather than with capitalism and political economy. This article argues that the reason for this can be traced to what Samir Amin calls ‘inverted Eurocentrism’, which entails a romanticization of specific identities or social formations in the Global South that tends to accompany Eurocentric ideology. This has become the dominant discourse on decolonization, leading to the displacement of broader, more radical decolonization efforts. Moreover, this discourse reflects a partial engagement with the original Modernity-Coloniality-Decoloniality (MCD) debates in Latin America that it claims as its origin. The article argues that a radical decolonization agenda entails the critique of political economy and it evaluates the extent to which the original MCD tradition reflects such an agenda. It shows that, despite allowing for a more critical understanding of knowledge, decolonization and capitalism than today’s dominant decolonial strand, the original MCD tradition is nonetheless limited by its departure from the critique of political economy. Finally, the implications of the dominant understanding of decolonization for universities and beyond are considered and the article concludes that this understanding of decolonization hinders a structural critique of capitalism and imperialism.

Read the full article here – it’s open access.

Categories
Critique of Mainstream Economics Economics Nobel In the media Klassekampen

FT letter: The economist’s blind spot

I recently wrote a Letter in the Financial Times (snippet above) on the limits to Daron Acemoglu’s argument about liberalism, technology and the working class. You can read the full Letter here and Acemoglu’s original piece here.

I also recently wrote a related (but longer) op-ed on the mainstream understanding of technological development in the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen. Read it here.

Categories
Critique of Mainstream Economics Decolonizing Economics Economics Nobel Imperialism Methodology

New commentary: The Nobel Fetish

In response to the announcement of the Economics Nobel being awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, I wrote a commentary for Economic and Political. Here is the commentary and you can download the PDF here.

Read a Norwegian version here.

Categories
Decolonizing Economics Dependency theory

De regreso a Dakar: Descolonizando la economía política internacional a través de la teoría de la dependencia (new translation)

Really glad to have my Back to Dakar paper (originally published in Review of International Political Economy) with Felipe Antunes de Oliveira now published in Spanish in Cuadernos De Teoría Social. You can read it here. It’s part of a special issue on dependency theory edited by Martín Arboleda, Francisca Benítez & Alonso López.

Categories
International Financial Subordination Methodology

New commentary on anthropology, economics and finance

I just published my commentary on Caroline E. Schuster’s excellent new article Politics of pools in Current Anthropology. See the commentary here.

This exchange was a part of a project organized by Gustav Peebles, Richard McGahey, Teresa Ghilarducci and Danilyn Rutherford and it culminated in two special issues, one in Current Anthropology (see here) and one in Review of Political Economy (see here), where each anthropology article comes with a commentary by an economist and vice versa. The overarching theme for all the contributions is Scarcity and Abundance in an Unequal World. In my contribution to ROPE, I partnered with an actual anthropologist to write The Hierarchies of Global Finance: An Anti-Disciplinary Research Agenda.

Categories
Blog Critique of Mainstream Economics Imperialism

The Trouble with Nievas and Piketty’s Unequal Exchange (new blog post)

I wrote an essay for the INET blog on the problems with how colonialism & imperialism in understood in the Economics discipline (exemplified by Nievas and Piketty’s recent paper). Have a read and see what you think.

Categories
Development Finance International Financial Subordination

New chapter/afterword: The Relevance of Global Capitalism for Studying Statecraft and Financial Subordination

I wrote the afterword to this interesting new book edited by Johannes Petry and Andreas Nölke: State, Capitalism, and Finance in Emerging Markets: Between Subordination and Statecraft.

Have a read of the afterword here. I also wrote a little thread summarizing some of my points you can see on X/twitter or Bluesky.

Categories
Decolonizing Economics Heterodox Economics Publications

Decolonizing Economics – An Introduction (new book!)

We have finally published our book! It’s been a long-time coming and we’re excited to finally share it with the world. You can order it here. If you’re keen to write a review, let me know and I can ask Polity to send you a reviewer’s copy.

Here’s the blurb:

Decolonization has long been debated across the social sciences, but the economics discipline has so far avoided such critical engagement. This book provides a much-needed intervention.

Dutt, Alves, Kesar, and Kvangraven uncover the deeply Eurocentric foundations that shape how economists study the world today. These have rendered the discipline ill-equipped to tackle critical questions, such as structural racism, uneven development, the climate crisis, labour relations, and how structural power shapes economic outcomes. Decolonizing economics entails challenging the norms of neutrality and objectivity that economists claim to speak from, while fostering alternative ways of understanding the economy that take seriously structural power relations and contemporary processes of economic development. Readers will come to understand the political stakes of decolonization and the wide range of scholarship that already exists that can help us grasp economics from non-Eurocentric perspectives. Through such scholarship, we can gain an enriched understanding of capitalism and its relationship to exploitation, colonialism, and racialization.

And here are reviews of the book:

Reorienting the Economic Debate, by Robert Bigg, July 2025