É bastante evidente, começa Costas Lapavitsas, que o mundo está atualmente enredado em turbulências geopolíticas, talvez há mais de uma década. Neste artigo, Lapavitsas oferece uma análise dos mecanismos indissociáveis e interligados do domínio do dólar e do imperialismo, sustentados pelo militarismo crescente do segundo governo Trump. Como observa Lapavitsas: "O dólar e o F-35 — coerção monetária e poder militar — são duas facetas de uma mesma estrutura de dominação".
Costas Lapavitsas
 |
| Vol. 78, No. 03 (July-August 2026) |
Há mais de uma década acumulam-se evidências de que o mundo entrou em um período de profunda turbulência geopolítica. A guerra em grande escala tornou-se uma característica permanente da geopolítica, manifestada nos combates entre a Rússia e a Ucrânia desde fevereiro de 2022 — com o envolvimento direto e indireto dos Estados Unidos e de seus aliados — e na devastação do Oriente Médio e na destruição da sociedade e do povo palestinos por Israel. Paralelamente à violência aberta, houve uma coerção econômica generalizada exercida pelos Estados Unidos, incluindo sanções comerciais maciças contra a Rússia, o congelamento das reservas de seu banco central e o uso de mecanismos de pagamento interbancários para isolar a economia russa — e outras — dos sistemas monetário e financeiro globais.
O segundo mandato de Donald Trump trouxe uma escalada acentuada. Logo no primeiro ano, Trump lançou uma campanha abrangente de tarifas contra os principais parceiros comerciais dos EUA, declarou sua própria versão da Doutrina Monroe para o Hemisfério Ocidental, ameaçou anexar a Groenlândia, sequestrou militarmente o presidente da Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, após impor um bloqueio naval, e apertou o cerco contra Cuba. Acima de tudo, Trump, em conjunto com Israel, iniciou uma guerra de destruição não provocada contra o Irã, com profundas ramificações econômicas e políticas.
O padrão é agora evidente: o imperialismo dos EUA é atualmente a força geopolítica mais agressiva, abertamente coercitiva e que emprega instrumentos militares e econômicos com cada vez menos restrições. O que liga essa ressurgência ao estado atual da economia mundial? Como a turbulência geopolítica se conecta à reprodução capitalista em um momento em que a acumulação produtiva desacelerou drasticamente no núcleo histórico do capitalismo global, enquanto o capital financeiro continua a se expandir e a alimentar a especulação?
A evidente convulsão da ordem global recebe vários nomes entre os críticos do capitalismo. Um dos mais proeminentes é "policrise", termo que apresenta as emergências econômicas, financeiras, ecológicas e geopolíticas simultâneas de nosso tempo como um acúmulo contingente de choques.1 No entanto, o termo captura a coexistência, e não a causalidade. Ele não oferece uma hierarquia entre os mecanismos nem explica as relações estruturais entre produção, finanças e poder estatal que, conjuntamente, geram tensões geopolíticas crescentes. Ainda mais proeminente é a noção de "tecnofeudalismo", que argumenta que as plataformas digitais substituíram os mercados, os dados tornaram-se um novo fator de produção semelhante à terra e o lucro foi suplantado por rendas extraídas de territórios digitais cercados.2 No entanto, as plataformas são empresas capitalistas que vendem serviços digitais e outras mercadorias, cobram taxas, extraem receitas publicitárias e competem nos mercados. Elas podem exercer um controle infraestrutural considerável, mas isso não elimina a centralidade do lucro capitalista. Os dados que elas transacionam são reproduzíveis, e seu valor deriva do processamento e do uso, não da fixidez da oferta. O "tecnofeudalismo" confunde a persistência de uma acumulação fraca no núcleo da economia mundial — acompanhada por um controle intensificado por parte de grandes corporações — com uma transição de época para além do capitalismo.
A verdadeira questão para a economia política é explicar a escalada da agressão geopolítica e da instabilidade econômica de nossos tempos dentro dos parâmetros do capitalismo, e não pressupondo a sua superação. O que se faz necessário é uma análise do imperialismo ressurgente fundamentada nos mecanismos dominantes da acumulação capitalista contemporânea. Tal análise deve partir da organização concreta da produção e das finanças em escala mundial, bem como das formas específicas de exploração e coerção que daí emergem.
O argumento apresentado neste artigo segue o método marxista clássico e, portanto, toma como ponto de partida a estrutura determinada da economia mundial.3 O imperialismo contemporâneo possui dois fundamentos estruturais: primeiro, o binômio formado pelo capital produtivo globalizado e pelo capital financeiro internacionalizado; segundo, o dólar como moeda mundial, o que transforma essa combinação em um regime hierárquico de acumulação sustentado, em última instância, pelo poder militar dos Estados Unidos.
A economia mundial baseia-se em cadeias de produção que geram continuamente fluxos de valor e mais-valia. Circuitos financeiros transformam esses fluxos em direitos e obrigações, enquanto uma ordem monetária estratificada — com a moeda mundial no topo — torna esses elementos líquidos e exigíveis entre diferentes jurisdições. No entanto, a ordem monetária não constitui um sistema global com regras coordenadas. Em vez disso, prevalece uma hierarquia monetária, encabeçada pela moeda do Estado hegemônico, que atua como moeda mundial. A potência hegemônica administra e impõe essa hierarquia por meio de mecanismos de pagamento, regras de garantias e sanções, recorrendo cada vez mais a infraestruturas digitais. A garantia última de toda essa estrutura reside nas forças aéreas e navais da potência hegemônica.
Os fundamentos da economia-mundo capitalista residem na produção, tendo as finanças como seu complemento necessário. Contudo, o eixo que disciplina a exploração e aplica a coerção geopolítica em escala global é a autoridade monetária da potência hegemônica, sustentada por um imenso poder militar. A Grande Crise de 2007–2009 acentuou tanto o caráter coercitivo da hegemonia do dólar quanto as contradições que agora impulsionam o militarismo ascendente. As raízes desse processo encontram-se na persistente desaceleração da acumulação produtiva no núcleo da economia mundial, o que transformou a ordem monetária baseada no dólar em um instrumento cada vez mais coercitivo nas mãos da potência hegemônica. Após 2007–2009, emergiu o imperialismo de balanço patrimonial, armado até os dentes.
O imperialismo na tradição marxista
As teorias marxistas clássicas do imperialismo estabeleceram o método de análise do poder imperial como uma configuração histórica concreta do capitalismo. Em 1916, V. I. Lênin forneceu a diretriz metodológica decisiva de que o imperialismo capitalista deve ser compreendido por meio dos mecanismos dominantes de acumulação de sua época.4 Seis anos antes, Rudolf Hilferding havia identificado esses mecanismos — a saber, a fusão do capital industrial e bancário em condições de monopólio, com os bancos no comando.5 Conjuntamente, essas forças econômicas geraram a exportação de capital a juros e a partilha territorial do mundo, conduzindo, assim, na visão de Lênin, à guerra.
Após a Segunda Guerra Mundial, a teoria da dependência deu continuidade a esse método com considerável vigor.6 Os principais veículos da hegemonia imperial eram as corporações multinacionais, que tiravam proveito da supremacia tecnológica no centro, aliada à deterioração dos termos de troca e às restrições no balanço de pagamentos na periferia. Essas percepções permanecem fundamentais; contudo, nem a abordagem marxista clássica nem a teoria da dependência analisaram o papel crucial da moeda mundial nas finanças e na produção globais como um mecanismo central do imperialismo.
Relacionada à teoria da dependência, mas distinta dela, a corrente da Monthly Review tem mantido o que é, talvez, o engajamento mais sério com a questão do imperialismo no marxismo de língua inglesa. Paul Baran teorizou a apropriação do excedente da periferia como o motor econômico da expansão imperial.7 Harry Magdoff trouxe contribuições significativas sobre a crescente autonomia das finanças em relação à produção à medida que o capitalismo amadurece, incluindo a dominância do dólar.8 O trabalho deles constitui o precedente analítico para o que este artigo denomina distinção entre "Financeirização Mark I" e "Financeirização Mark II". Trata-se de uma obra que permanece indispensável, mas que deixa uma questão em aberto: por meio de quais mecanismos opera a imposição imperial na economia mundial contemporânea, caracterizada pela produção globalizada e pelas finanças internacionalizadas?
Trabalhos mais recentes refinaram algumas das ferramentas analíticas, mas sem responder à questão. John Smith recentralizou a análise na superexploração de trabalhadores no Sul Global por meio de cadeias produtivas, garantindo assim a lucratividade das multinacionais.9 Utsa e Prabhat Patnaik apresentaram uma análise rigorosa da dependência do centro em relação às commodities da periferia, demonstrando como o imperialismo impõe a austeridade ao mesmo tempo em que transfere valor da periferia para o centro.10 Contudo, a pergunta persiste: por meio de quais mecanismos essa imposição opera entre diferentes jurisdições e soberanias monetárias, sem depender de administrações coloniais? A resposta, como se demonstra a seguir, reside na hierarquia do dólar e nos mecanismos de balanço patrimonial que ela comanda. Isso inclui linhas de crédito denominadas em dólares, ciclos de capital de giro afetados pela política monetária do Federal Reserve e a imposição estrutural aos Estados periféricos de manter taxas de juros elevadas e acumular ativos financeiros dos EUA. A arquitetura da moeda mundial torna esses mecanismos operacionais em escala global.
Na economia mundial de hoje, plenamente capitalista tanto no centro quanto na periferia, o imperialismo apoia-se na força disciplinadora dos balanços transfronteiriços. Essa disciplina é exercida, em grande medida, por meio do funcionamento da moeda mundial. Especificamente, o dólar atua como unidade de conta em mercados-chave; a liquidez em dólares funciona como meio de pagamento alocado coercitivamente sob condições de poder assimétrico; e as reservas em dólares são acumuladas, acarretando custos que constituem uma forma de tributo à potência hegemônica.
Outros trabalhos também são fundamentais para esse argumento. A abordagem neogramsciana de Robert Cox identificou o consenso como um pilar da hegemonia, processo pelo qual o Estado líder universaliza seus interesses particulares e assegura a adesão sem recorrer à coerção contínua.11 Anteriormente, Nicos Poulantzas havia situado o momento hegemônico do poder estadunidense de meados do século na internalização dos interesses dos EUA nos aparelhos estatais de potências imperiais aliadas.12 Mais recentemente, Leo Panitch e Sam Gindin descreveram a hegemonia dos EUA no pós-guerra como a integração voluntária de outros Estados capitalistas a um império informal gerido pelo Tesouro dos EUA e pelo Federal Reserve.13
Decerto, a aquiescência à hegemonia dos EUA tem sido uma característica crucial das relações entre potências imperiais históricas nas últimas décadas. Embora essas análises conservem um valor explicativo considerável, não conseguem dar conta, de fato, da característica mais marcante do ressurgimento do imperialismo estadunidense desde 2007–2009: a erosão do consenso. A dominância do dólar opera agora como uma disciplina externa compulsória, e não como uma estrutura compartilhada; a dominação manifesta-se por meio de mecanismos coercitivos da infraestrutura de liquidação, em vez de normas internalizadas. O que antes parecia uma integração voluntária era, na verdade, uma conduta imposta pela ausência de alternativas à liquidez em dólares. No fundo, tratava-se sempre de uma imposição estrutural, e não de uma escolha — fato que se tornou evidente após a crise decisiva de 2007–2009.
Desde esse evento marcante, as hierarquias de swaps cambiais, as sanções e a exclusão de sistemas de pagamento demonstraram que o acesso ao dólar é um instrumento de influência imperial. Michael Hudson identificou corretamente a dívida e o poder do credor como mecanismos de hierarquia internacional; contudo, hoje está claro que a moeda mundial é o elemento central do poder hegemônico dos EUA, operando sempre sob a proteção do poder naval e aéreo estadunidense. Esta é a característica definidora do imperialismo contemporâneo.14
The Pairing of Productive with Financial Capital
The world economy today is organized around multinational enterprises that coordinate production chains spanning dozens of countries. Lead firms, headquartered primarily in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Europe and Japan, control design, intellectual property, logistics, pricing, tax liabilities, access to credit, and access to markets. Smaller chain participants, in both the core and the periphery of the world economy, usually perform labor-intensive, low-technology tasks, with compressed margins, long cash-conversion cycles, and heavy dependence on dollar-denominated credit. Already in 2013, around 30 percent of world trade flowed through these chains.15 The densest and most complex links are to be found among core economies; core-periphery ties, though extensive and growing, remain secondary.
There is a structural power asymmetry between lead firms and other chain participants. The lead firms are typically multinationals and their dominance is enforced through patent regimes, technology licensing, transfer pricing, credit access, and, crucially, control of dollar invoicing. Suffice it to note that, between 1999 and 2019, roughly three-quarters of exports in Asia-Pacific and virtually all exports in the Americas were invoiced in dollars.16
The prevalence of the dollar reflects the operational requirements of chains typically mandated by the lead enterprises. Contractual terms require dollar settlement, specify payment through correspondent banks in the dollar system, and tie supplier finance to credit facilities priced off dollar benchmarks. A supplier in Vietnam or Mexico ships components today and waits sixty to ninety days to get paid, while wages and inputs continue to demand cash outlays. The gap must be financed, and under dollar invoicing, this means financing in foreign currency, a routine condition of chain participation, not an economic choice.
The structure of production chains is thus inseparable from internationalized finance. Financial capital conditions liquidity and credit access within the circuit of globalized production, while productive capital provides the material basis from which financial claims ultimately draw their value. Neither form of capital dominates the other in the classical manner that Hilferding analyzed for the early twentieth century.17 At that time, universal banks, bound to productive enterprises through long-term loans for fixed capital formation, dictated terms to industrial monopolies. Today the relationship is one of interdependence within a monetary framework whose pivot is the dollar.
The balance sheets of international manufacturing corporations reflect this hierarchy. Out of a sample of the largest five hundred manufacturing firms, 32 percent are U.S. enterprises. These issue more than half of all long-term debt and hold nearly 39 percent of total cash, while relying little on short-term credit. Chinese enterprises represent over 20 percent of the same sample, but issue only 6.5 percent of long-term debt and carry a disproportionately high share of short-term borrowing. India and Brazil show similar patterns.18
These differences are the corporate reflection of the monetary hierarchy that conditions the pairing of productive and financial capital across the world economy. U.S. manufacturers operate with a currency that is simultaneously domestic and world money and are thus able to sustain longer-term maturities, larger cash buffers, and lower rollover risk. Equally large firms but associated with other states must operate differently. The difference arises from the dominance of the dollar as world money inscribed in both productive and financial balance sheets.
Dollar Dominance and the Imperial Apparatus
World money makes it possible to have cross-border settlement and value preservation among private capitals and sovereign states. Only the dollar delivers the functions of world money, serving as primary unit of account, means of payment, and reserve asset for the world economy. The euro, yen, sterling, Swiss franc, and renminbi occupy secondary positions, while peripheral currencies are structurally subordinate, accepted internationally at a discount and far less readily usable as collateral in financial transactions.
Around 60 percent of official global reserves are held in dollars, with the euro never exceeding 25 percent throughout its existence and the renminbi accounting for less than 3 percent. Half of crossborder payments using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication mechanism between international banks are settled in dollars, and the proportion rises to three-fifths if intra-euro-area flows are excluded. Around 55 percent of international and foreign currency bank assets and 60 percent of liabilities are dollar-denominated.19
The dollar’s dominance rests on the institutional and coercive capacity of the U.S. state, not on its productive or commercial pre-eminence. The Federal Reserve broadly determines which liabilities count as globally liquid assets, which securities serve as collateral, and which balance sheets will be stabilized in a crisis. The New York Federal Reserve’s standing repurchase operations (repo) accept only U.S. Treasury bills, federal agency debt, and agency mortgage-backed securities as collateral, while excluding foreign sovereign bonds. These are not neutral technical rules but the operational expression of monetary hierarchy.
What makes this hierarchy truly operational, however, is the way in which its components interlock through a broader apparatus that governs production, trade, investment, and technology across borders. Neither productive nor financial capital can be reproduced internationally without binding rules and collateral infrastructures backed by coercive authority.
Trade institutions, such as the World Trade Organization and its Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement, establish rules for production chains and safeguard lead firm profits. Regulatory bodies, including the International Organization of Securities Commissions and the Financial Action Task Force, set internationally effective standards for payment systems and collateral eligibility. The guidelines of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on transfer pricing and royalty flows transfer value to low-tax jurisdictions aligned with the core, thereby systematically eroding the fiscal capacity of governments in the periphery.
World money also requires the presence of a legal architecture capable of enforcing claims across borders. As Katharina Pistor has shown, contemporary capitalism relies on the legal “coding” of capital through contract law, property rights, and enforceability across jurisdictions.20 Crossborder financial and commercial contracts overwhelmingly specify New York or London as the governing jurisdiction, creating a transnational legal space in which these national legal orders function as de facto global law. The acceptability of dollar-denominated claims across the world requires certainty that they can be enforced, restructured, or seized within legal systems aligned with the hegemonic state.
Sanctions are an integral part of these mechanisms, the explicit activation of hegemonic power that is already latent in the global structure. The issuer of world money possesses the power to exclude participants from essential monetary processes. The freezing of approximately $300 billion of Russian central bank assets in 2022 serves as a stark demonstration of this capacity. Settlement infrastructure, legal jurisdiction, collateral rules, and compliance requirements reinforce the global hierarchy, with sanctions available as explicit enforcement mechanisms when the hegemon’s latent power must be made visible.
The most revealing moments are crises. During the historic crisis of 2007–2009, but also in the pandemic shock of 2020, the Federal Reserve extended dollar liquidity to a select circle of fourteen central banks through its principal power instrument, the dollar swap lines. Five of these central banks have permanent (standing) facilities and nine have temporary lines. All fourteen could stabilize their financial systems in days, but the central banks of other countries, including large ones in the periphery, such as India, Indonesia, and South Africa, faced greater turbulence, with currency depreciation, loss of reserves, and pro-cyclical austerity. These fourteen countries account for approximately 55 percent of U.S. imports and 60 percent of U.S. exports. Even more revealingly, they are home to the overwhelming bulk of U.S. military personnel posted overseas.21 The dollar hierarchy and the network of U.S. military power across the world are the same structure viewed from different angles.
Military power is a constitutive element of the dollar order. The air and naval forces of the United States seek to secure the critical sea lanes—Hormuz, Malacca, Bab el-Mandeb, Suez, and Panama, among others—through which roughly 90 percent of world trade moves. They underpin the enforceability of intellectual property regimes, semiconductor supply chokepoints, satellite constellations, and cloud infrastructures on which global capitalist accumulation depends. The dollar and the F-35—monetary coercion and military power—are two moments of a single structure of domination.
Financialization Mark I and Mark II
The form of this imperialist domination shifted qualitatively after 2007–2009. For three decades before that crisis, the financialization of capitalism had proceeded primarily through commercial banks, extending credit to households, trading in financial markets, and extracting enormous profits from net interest margins and fees. This was Financialization Mark I, with commercial banks as the central agents of financial accumulation, boosting trading in financial markets and turning the homes of workers in core economies into a prime terrain of financial expropriation.
The Great Crisis of 2007–2009 broke this regime. Commercial bank profits as a proportion of total profits in the United States peaked at close to 40 percent and did not regain those extraordinary heights in the ensuing years.22 Household debt contracted relative to both GDP and disposable income and remained subdued for over a decade. Financialization Mark I had exhausted itself. What emerged in its place was Financialization Mark II, a regime centered on shadow banks, that is, non-bank financial intermediaries, particularly asset managers holding portfolios of public and private securities, such as investment and hedge funds, but also pension funds, insurance companies, and similar institutions.
There is no structural antagonism between commercial and shadow banks, since the former are major lenders to the latter and are often directly involved in setting these up. Both rely on obtaining liquidity through wholesale funding that is directly underwritten by public balance sheets. As private debt creation faltered after 2007–2009, public debt exploded in several core countries. U.S. public debt rose from roughly 60 percent of GDP to more than 100 percent by 2025.23 At the same time, the Federal Reserve created vast amounts of public money by undertaking waves of quantitative easing, absorbing public and private securities on a truly historic scale, and driving interest rates close to zero.
The central bank of the hegemon, alongside the central banks of other core countries, became effectively dealers of last resort in the markets that supply liquidity to both commercial and shadow banks. The Federal Reserve actively directed the flows of global credit by determining which securities qualify as collateral in the markets for liquidity. The stability of global financial markets came to depend on the balance sheet of one U.S. institution that issues public debt (the Treasury) and another (the Federal Reserve) that absorbs much of this debt to provide public money on demand.
Vitally important in this respect is that the profit mechanism of commercial banks is different from that of shadow banks. Commercial banks are gatherers and active lenders of loanable capital, whose profits derive primarily from the spread between their own borrowing and lending rates. Shadow banks are portfolio managers that gather and allocate loanable capital through transactions in marketable securities, including both equities and bonds. Their profits derive from interest and dividends on securities but also, and crucially, from capital gains. In Marxist terms, their profits depend on the spread between the average rate of profit and the average rate of interest, which Hilferding identified as the basis of “founder’s profit.”24
This difference helps explain why, under Financialization Mark II, stock-market inflation became a primary channel of financial accumulation. The Big Three asset managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—increased their combined stakes in S&P 500 companies from around 6 percent in 2008 to over 20 percent by 2025.25 It also helps explain why preventing sharp falls in the stock market became a central concern of U.S. economic policy.
The global reach of this form of asset ownership became extraordinary during the same period. New research tracking 426 major asset managers’ stakes in all billion-dollar listed companies worldwide between 2013 and 2025 found that the equity controlled by these institutions rose from $13 trillion to $40–45 trillion, depending on valuation method.26 By mid-2025, roughly 40 percent of the equity of all billion-dollar companies in the world was controlled by asset managers. The Big Four—that is, the Big Three plus Fidelity Investments—increased their share from 9 percent in 2013 to 15 percent in 2025. In every broad region outside North America, U.S. asset managers are the single largest group of foreign investors. They represent a form of imperial power exercised through balance sheets rather than territory. This power derives from the pairing of asset managers with the corporations that organize global production chains and rests on the dollar mechanisms that integrate production with global finance.
This is state-based financialization, in which the liquidity required by multinationals is anchored in the dollar. Its global reach materializes through the movement of capital flows, asset prices, credit, and debt across economies, pivoting on the policies of the Federal Reserve. U.S. monetary policy decisions thus exert a disciplining influence across the rest of the world.
Subordinate Financialization
The international dimension of Financialization Mark II appears sharply in the Global South. Subordinate financialization is the peripheral counterpart of core financialization, a constitutive element of the hierarchical structure of the world economy.27 Capital flows that originate in core financial systems and are driven by portfolio choices tied to the monetary policies of the hegemon’s central bank integrate peripheral economies as dependent nodes of the global order. Domestic accumulation in the periphery becomes tethered to the monetary stance of the Federal Reserve, while policy space is restricted by the need to attract and retain volatile loanable capital. This is a distinct mode of accumulation, operating through mechanisms that continuously transfer value and resources from periphery to core.
This reality is reflected in the balance sheets of peripheral firms within global production chains. Dollar invoicing permeates trade credit, guarantees, and hedges, creating systematic currency mismatches as the obligations of firms are denominated in dollars, but their revenues accrue in local currency.28 Technological dependence adds a further layer, generating regular dollar-denominated obligations for licenses, imported components, and technical services. These are mechanisms through which the lead firms can extract value over time while also enforcing dependence on dollar circuits.
Firm-level pressures aggregate into constraints at the macroeconomic level. Integration into production chains gives rise to currency mismatches, regular dollar outflows, and external financing requirements that could, in the aggregate, exceed the foreign currency available through trade performance. Borrowing abroad in dollars becomes imperative and, if global liquidity tightens, refinancing costs jump, the exchange rate comes under pressure, and firms cut investment and employment to protect their balance sheets. The peripheral government is then forced to step in by raising interest rates, providing reserves, and possibly adopting fiscal austerity. The subordinate economy is obliged to adopt the adjustment costs required to keep the production chain and the system of financial settlement running.
Peripheral countries are sharply distinguished from the core by the constraint structure they face. Their central banks cannot expand balance sheets freely, conduct large-scale asset purchases, or backstop shadow banks, since policy space is tightly constrained by the exchange rate and the constant threat of capital flight. To attract and retain volatile loanable capital, peripheral countries typically adopt inflation targeting and maintain high interest rates.29 This is not due to domestic conditions, but because such policies signal commitment to maintaining the flows of international loanable capital. The costs for the domestic economy are substantial. In October 2025, the average policy rate set by their central banks in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa stood four percentage points above that of the Federal Reserve.30 This differential operates as a levy imposed on peripheral countries to participate in the global system.
The result is a trap with class content. High interest rates attract volatile inflows that push up exchange rates, encouraging imports and foreign currency borrowing by large domestic firms, while undermining the competitiveness of domestic manufacturing. Reserve accumulation becomes paramount, as does sterilization of the incoming flows, that is, the issuing of domestic debt to mop up excess liquidity in domestic currency generated by the flows, thereby expanding the public securities market and restricting fiscal space.31 Domestic producers are squeezed and development is hampered.
The class consequences are equally severe as the exchange rate becomes a social weapon as much as an economic variable. Overvaluation boosts financial returns and encourages large domestic enterprises to borrow abroad cheaply in dollars and to reinvest in high-yielding domestic assets while also benefiting from currency appreciation. Meanwhile, the middle strata are habituated to consumption patterns that deepen reliance on foreign capital. A social bloc is created whose reproduction depends on continued integration into global circuits, even when these strangle domestic investment.
Together these mechanisms form a system of value and resource transfers across the world economy. Interest rate premia function as liquidity tributes paid by peripheral countries and received by the hegemon and other core countries; reserve accumulation immobilizes domestic resources in low-yielding foreign assets rather than domestic investment; currency mismatches enable carry trade extraction; and sudden reversals of capital flows impose adjustment costs. The co-movement of capital flows, asset prices, credit, and debt across peripheral economies transmits U.S. economic policy decisions worldwide and acts as a global disciplining mechanism, mediated by mobile loanable capital.
Peripheral balance sheets are incorporated into the dollar system as buffers and investment outlets. Without this subordinated layer, the pairing of productive and financial capital at the core of the world economy could not function at the present scale, and imperial command over the world market would lack essential levers.
The Structural Paradox and Its Politics
The preceding analysis of contemporary balance-sheet imperialism converges on a single structural paradox, namely, the U.S. share of global manufacturing (value added) has fallen from roughly half in 1945 to just over 16–17 percent today, while the dollar’s share of allocated official reserves has slipped only slightly below 60 percent.32 U.S. monetary and financial dominance is accompanied by the demise of its productive primacy. Meanwhile, U.S. multinational enterprises remain pre-eminent and rely on the global functioning of the dollar.
Dollar dominance derives from the absence of credible alternative collateral, the legal coding of global finance, the customary practices of key markets, and the coercive power of the hegemon to exclude challengers from settlement infrastructure. The hegemon retains multinationals, world money, and military force, but its domestic productive foundations have eroded, with the important exception of information technology.
The political form of this structural paradox is the rise of Trump. The social degradation he has exploited—stagnant real wages, deindustrialization, and collapsing communities—is the domestic face of the same accumulation strategy that produced dollar dominance and production chain pre-eminence for the United States. Over several decades, U.S. corporations have led the export of productive capital, the construction of global production chains, and the outsourcing of intensive processes to cheaper jurisdictions. On the one hand, the globalization of productive capital was a tremendous success for U.S. capital, but on the other, it acted as the mechanism hollowing out the U.S. industrial base and creating the social wreckage that became Trump’s political raw material.
Trump’s response is to defend both U.S. multinational dominance and the restoration of U.S. national industrial capacity. At the same time, he is fully committed to maintaining U.S. financial predominance and the supremacy of the dollar. These goals are in fundamental tension with each other. U.S. productive strength cannot be restored through tariffs, domestic austerity, and the further expansion of internationalized U.S. financial capital. The paradox will persist.
There is no challenger that can presently resolve the hegemonic conundrum. China, the leading candidate, commands nearly 30 percent of world manufacturing, but the renminbi accounts for less than 3 percent of global reserves and payments. A productive superpower whose largest internationally active firms do not routinely fund themselves at long maturities denominated in their own currency is in no position to sustain a rival world money regime. This barrier is not one of strategy or will. For a currency to function as world money, it is necessary to have deep and liquid markets in safe public liabilities, legal protection for foreign holders of claims, and capital account openness. But these would expose the domestic financial system to external pressures. They are precisely the conditions that the Chinese economy was designed to avoid, and for good reason, since they would have hampered industrial development and encouraged subordinate financialization.
Among the historic imperialist countries, Germany’s acceptance of U.S.-led sanctions on Russian energy at severe cost to its own industrial base confirmed that even advanced producers will subordinate their economic interests to the dollar order when pressure is applied. The United States remains strong enough to enforce compliance, but it no longer redistributes gains sufficiently to generate voluntary consent. It has stopped acting as a hegemon and conducts itself as the biggest and most aggressive contestant with the capacity to enforce coercive submission among allies and enemies.
The global monetary architecture cannot be peacefully remade, the hegemon cannot recover its former productive foundations, and the main challenger cannot reshape the hegemonic order while relying on a world money that it does not issue. The contestation that is currently under way, involving reserve seizures, payments exclusion, technology embargoes, intensified arms expenditure, and proxy wars, is not a temporary disturbance, but the expression of an unfolding deeper imperial conflict without an obvious end.
The conclusion is not to drift toward fatalism, but to seek clarity about the political terrain. Anti-imperialist struggle must start with the recognition that contemporary imperialism is a global system of monetary domination that pivots on globalized productive capital and internationalized financial capital and is backed by huge U.S. military power. It has now entered a phase of coercive enforcement rather than consensual hegemonic leadership. But even the military power of the United States is no longer adequate to make some of its less powerful enemies cower, as the war in Iran has already shown. When it comes to China or Russia, the predominant power must tread with extreme caution in the military field.
Antiwar politics and opposition to capitalism in both core and periphery are two aspects of the same structure. The dollar hierarchy that enforces balance-sheet discipline on peripheral economies while extracting value and resources ultimately rests on the F-35. The domestic degradation of the United States and other core countries is also an outcome of the contemporary form of imperialism. There are no durable gains for the working class of the hegemon from the dollar order that sustains its coercive power. On the contrary, the more the United States pursues imperial pre-eminence, the more it will undermine its domestic economy. The same system that extracts value and resources from the periphery also hollows out the core, creating the conditions for genuinely international anticapitalist politics.
Notas
1. O termo “policrise” é geralmente associado a Edgar Morin e Anne Brigitte Kern, Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium (Cresskill, Nova Jersey: Hampton Press, 1999), que é a tradução para o inglês da obra original em francês, de 1993. O termo foi amplamente popularizado por Adam Tooze; veja-se, por exemplo, Shutdown (Nova York: Viking, 2021). Veja-se também Eric Helleiner, “Economic Globalization’s Polycrisis”, International Studies Quarterly 68, nº 2 (junho de 2024), para uma tentativa de definir um sentido coerente para “policrise”.
2. Um esforço metódico para tornar o termo compatível com a economia política foi realizado por Cédric Durand em How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy (Londres: Verso, 2024). Posteriormente, Yanis Varoufakis popularizou-o amplamente em Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Londres: Bodley Head, 2023). Veja o artigo de Evgeny Morozov, “Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason” (New Left Review 133/4, janeiro–abril de 2022: 89–127), para uma refutação inicial tanto do termo quanto de seu suposto conteúdo.
3. The argument here draws on Costas Lapavitsas, “A Topography of the New Dollar Imperialism,” New Left Review, no. 157 (January–February 2026): 107–35, and Costas Lapavitsas, “The Dollar and the F-35: Balance-Sheet Imperialism,” Working Paper no. 272, Department of Economics, SOAS University of London, January 2026.
4. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (London: Penguin Classics, 2010 [1916]).
5. Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981 [1910]).
6. For a concise account of the links between classical Marxist theory of imperialism and dependency theory, see John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024): 1–32.
7. Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957).
8. Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969) and Harry Magdoff, Imperialism Without Colonies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003).
9. John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
10. Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021)
11. Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
12. Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: Verso, 1975 [1974]).
13. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso, 2012).
14. Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2003 [2nd ed.]).
15. UN Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2013—Global Value Chains: Investment and Trade for Development (Geneva: United Nations, 2013), unctad.org.
16. Carol Bertaut, Bastian von Beschwitz, and Stephanie Curcuru, “FEDS Notes: The International Role of the U.S. Dollar—2025 Edition,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, July 18, 2025.
17. Hilferding, Finance Capital.
18. Author’s calculation based on Orbis data; see Table 1 in Lapavitsas, “The Dollar and the F-35: Balance-Sheet Imperialism.”
19. Bertaut, von Beschwitz, and Curcu, The International Role of the U.S. Dollar. See also Patrick McGuire, Goetz von Peter, and Sony Zhu, “International Finance through the Lens of BIS Statistics: The Global Reach of Currencies,” BIS Quarterly Review (June 2024).
20. Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
21. Lapavitsas, “The Dollar and the F-35: Balance-Sheet Imperialism,” Table 2.
22. Lapavitsas, “A Topography of the New Dollar Imperialism.”
23. Lapavitsas, “A Topography of the New Dollar Imperialism.”
24. Hilferding, Finance Capital.
25. Lapavitsas, “The Dollar and the F-35: Balance-Sheet Imperialism.”
26. Krystian Bua, Giovanni Dosi, Costas Lapavitsas, and Maria Enrica Virgillito, “Corporate Financialization in the Age of Asset Managers: Emerging Traits of Financial Imperialism,” Working Paper no. 273, Department of Economics, SOAS University of London, March 2026.
27. Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner, and Jeff Powell, “Subordinate Financialization in Emerging Capitalist Economies,” Greenwich Papers in Political Economy no. 23044, Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre, University of Greenwich, 2019.
28. Bryan Hardy, Felipe E. Saffie, and Ina Simonovska, “Firm-to-Firm Financial Linkages and Dollar Risk Transmission,” NBER Working Paper no. 31078, National Bureau of Economic Research, Washington, DC, 2023.
29. Annina Kaltenbrunner and Juan Pablo Painceira, “Subordinated Financial Integration and Financialisation in Emerging Capitalist Economies: The Brazilian Experience,” New Political Economy 23, no. 3 (2018): 290–313.
30. Lapavitsas, “The Dollar and the F-35: Balance-Sheet Imperialism.”
31. Gilad Isaacs and Annina Kaltenbrunner, “Financialization and Liberalization: South Africa’s New Forms of External Vulnerability,” Competition and Change 22, no. 4 (2018): 437–63.
32. Lapavitsas, “The Dollar and the F-35: Balance-Sheet Imperialism”; Bruno Venditti, “Ranked: Global Share of Manufacturing Value, by Country,” Visual Capitalist, May 2, 2025, visualcapitalist.com; UN Industrial Development Organization, The International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics, 2023.
Costas Lapavitsas é professor de economia na School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), da Universidade de Londres. Ele é autor de Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (Verso, 2013) e The State of Capitalism: Economy, Society and Hegemony (Verso, 2023).
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário