A Topography of the New Dollar Imperialism

The problem of imperialism has elicited some of the most inventive and far-reaching analysis on the left.footnote¹ For Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin, Bukharin and Luxemburg it was at root an economic phenomenon arising from the global organization of accumulation, involving coercion, exploitation and the subordination of weaker states. Lenin’s theorization, drawing on Hilferding and Hobson, treated it as a stage of capitalist development, defined by concentration, fusion of capital and state, and the organization of global rivalry via monopolistic combines.footnote² Crucially, this account insisted that imperialism must be grasped through its epoch’s dominant mechanisms of accumulation. Mid-century dependency theory, from Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin, identified the structural asymmetries that reproduced core dominance and peripheral subordination: technological monopolies, balance-of-payments constraints, multinational corporations as vehicles of private command, and the internalization of external interests within subordinate states.footnote³ In the 1970s, Nicos Poulantzas analysed the embedding of American priorities within allied state apparatuses.footnote⁴

More recent contributions have updated the concept. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin portrayed post-war us hegemony as the voluntary integration of other capitalist states into an ‘informal empire’ managed by the Treasury and Federal Reserve.footnote⁵ David Harvey theorized a ‘new imperialism’ centred on accumulation by dispossession and the articulation of territorial and capitalist logics of power.footnote⁶ Robert Cox developed a neo-Gramscian account of world hegemony grounded in transnational consent.footnote⁷ Giovanni Arrighi situated us primacy within a sequence of systemic cycles, anticipating a financialized ‘autumn’ and an eventual eastwards shift.footnote⁸ Other interventions refocused attention on production and surplus: John Smith analysed global labour arbitrage and super-exploitation within transnational value chains; Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik emphasized unequal exchange and commodity dependence as mechanisms of surplus transfer; Michael Hudson traced the role of debt and creditor power in sustaining international hierarchy.footnote⁹ This essay will instead analyse contemporary imperialism through the primacy of world money and balance-sheet power: the organization of global production and finance around dollar liquidity, the institutional command of central-bank balance sheets and the capacity of the United States to define the conditions under which liabilities count as money—an architecture in which military force remains the ultimate guarantor.

Contemporary capitalism rests on the pairing of internationalized productive capital and global financial capital, a configuration that differs sharply from the finance capital analysed by Hilferding and the classical theorists of imperialism. Hilferding argued that banks dominated productive capital because industrial investment required long-term credit, tying banks to fixed-capital formation and giving them decisive influence.footnote¹⁰ Today, neither pole commands the other; instead, they jointly structure the world division of labour while continually refashioning it. Global in scope and insatiable in its appetite for profit, this pairing moulds economic life, reshaping the contours of core and periphery. It presupposes a world market in which production and circulation span multiple jurisdictions, without a unified political authority; its reproduction requires a universally accepted means of settlement, liquidity and balance-sheet adjustment, a set of institutions that can operate across the world market, a legal infrastruct1ure and military backing. Together with world money these constitute the matrix of contemporary imperial power.

Productive and financial capital differ structurally.footnote¹¹ The former is tied to inflexible conditions of production, including trained labour, fixed capital, energy, logistics and the physical limits of time and technology. Finance organizes liquidity, maturity transformation and credit under an institutional and legal infrastructure that gives it far greater elasticity. A hedge fund can manage one billion or one trillion dollars from the same rooms in Mayfair; a semiconductor plant cannot double output without years of investment. The relation between the material requirements of financial services and the value extracted by financial intermediation is extraordinarily loose. This gives finance an autonomy that productive capital cannot match. Liquidity premia, collateral hierarchies, payment conditions and duration pricing arise from this autonomy. They do not reflect a ‘rentier deduction’ imposed from outside production, but the inherent consequence of finance’s position in the accumulation process. Finance is necessary to capitalist accumulation and expansion, while being capable of imposing terms that diverge from the requirements of productive profitability.

The two forms interlock in the world market: financial capital conditions the liquidity of productive circuits while productive capital provides the material basis for profit generation. This interlocking is structural rather than a merger or amalgam. The profitability of multinational production is inseparable from the global availability of finance, which itself depends on the liquidity regime governed by the dollar.footnote¹² The rigidities of global production chains are mediated through an elastic financial system, while the interaction of the two is articulated through world-money mechanisms anchored in the hegemonic state. Orbis data for the biggest manufacturing firms show cash holdings that far exceed short-term borrowing.footnote¹³ Leading corporations now hold large liquidity buffers, while bank credit has been reduced to a marginal, contingent tool. Most working capital and investment come from retained earnings and securities issuance, with bank loans kept as a backstop. Yet these firms remain tied to banks for the essentials of world money, including secure deposit facilities, cross-border payments, correspondent banking channels and access to the dollar settlement system.footnote¹⁴ Banks gain fees and cheap deposits; non-financial corporations gain monetary infrastructure they cannot recreate. The relationship is one of structural interdependence within a hierarchy of money, not bank domination.

Production for the world market is fragmented into tasks coordinated across borders through international chains dominated by multinational enterprises.footnote¹⁵ Commercial transactions within and between these chains account for most world trade.footnote¹⁶ A chain combines the circuits of one or more multinationals with those of affiliates and independent suppliers. The densest and most technologically complex links lie among core economies; core–periphery ties are extensive and growing but remain secondary. The geography of Foreign Direct Investment reflects this pattern: fdi inflows in 2023 amounted to about 1.3 trillion dollars, with developing economies taking a little under half but the bulk of greenfield projects going to developed countries.footnote¹⁷ Stock is more skewed: inward fdi stock reached roughly 49 trillion dollars in 2023, of which developed economies hold just over three fifths and the us alone accounts for a little over a quarter.

Coordination typically falls to a lead multinational that integrates affiliates, suppliers, partners and customers. Lead firms initiate new products, shape labour deployment, control technology transfer, manage logistics and concentrate profits. They also manipulate pricing conventions and credit terms to discipline suppliers, setting trade credit conditions and determining access to liquidity in financial markets. Through these mechanisms they bind formally independent suppliers to the chain. The coordinating enterprise is in a privileged position to extract returns: transfer pricing shifts declared profits to low-tax jurisdictions; charges for intellectual property and management services extract rents on intangible assets; internal debt and interest payments redirect cash flows within the corporate structure. Lead firms enforce dollar invoicing deep into their networks. Over the period 1999–2019, around three quarters of exports in the Asia-Pacific and almost all exports in the Americas were invoiced in dollars; the only major exception is Europe, where the euro dominates.footnote¹⁸