The Money Fetish and Empire

“Liberation Day” and the Roots of Dollar Dominance

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

October 13, 2026

doi.org/10.63478/GQM8LP82

This essay is based on a forthcoming book chapter in a book edited by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) on Decolonisation: Histories, Theories and Economies.

In This Feature

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.

Economists and the Money Fetish

The dominant view of money in economics assumes that money emerged out of the growth of trade networks and market exchange. The textbook story is that money emerged to facilitate barter, which became increasingly necessary as trade networks expanded.

As such, money is considered to increase the economy’s efficiency but is neutral in the sense that changes in money supply do not impact prices or values.1See J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev, Against Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2026) for more on how economists (mainstream and heterodox) approach money. As money is largely treated as a technical aid to exchange, the historically specific social processes necessary to any form of economic exchange get lost.

Even after the financial crisis of 2008, when the ways in which money was conceived of in the discipline of economics was under scrutiny and critique, the foundation for the way money was approached remained unshaken. Developments since then have involved introducing market failures, frictions, imperfect information, and bounded rationality to allow for the emergence of endogenous money.

However, beyond allowing money to emerge endogenously within the conceptual framework, the mainstream economic (late neoclassical) approaches still do not allow us to understand money as a social relation or to interrogate how power undergirds different functions and manifestations of money. Neoclassical theory by definition focuses on appearances such as prices or exchange rates, rather than the social relations that underpin money.2Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine, From Poltical Economy to Economics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Modern Theory (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2008).

The straight line that economists draw from barter to capitalist money is eurocentric because it misunderstands the actual violence of capitalist development and how capitalist money emerges from it to support it.3Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore and James Membrez (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); Mahmoud Al Ishtikiraki, “The Measure of Everything: David McNally’s Materialist History of Money,” Left Voice, August 25, 2020. Such understandings of money universalize a fetishized and depoliticized view to assume that more efficient monetary institutions will facilitate (capitalist) development in a progressive manner across the globe.

Mainstream economic approaches still do not allow us to understand money as a social relation or to interrogate power.

This in turn feeds into neoliberal development policies and support for the contemporary global system. Where money is not facilitating development efficiently, economists point to deficiencies in market institutions or the institutions that underpin capitalist development more generally. To move beyond the money fetish, we must instead attempt to grasp the inner workings of capitalism of which money-forms are merely an expression.

What is Money in Capitalism?

While mainstream economists tend to accept money’s functions in capitalism as given facts, Marxist political economists see them as a result of capitalist development.4Suzanne De Brunhoff, Marx on Money (New York: Verso, 2015). As capitalism develops, the economic system is no longer simply about direct exchange of products between commodity owners.

Instead, a whole network of social connections evolve “entirely beyond the control of the actors.”5Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), 76. As money develops with the development of commodity production, it assumes a special function as a general equivalent to mediate exchange and thereby, beyond its facilitation of exchange, becomes the general representative of value.

Money then comes to constitute the social form of the social relations underlying the capitalist world market. The common material languages of money and commodities provide a universal basis within capitalism for linking everyone into the same social system.

As capitalism evolved and expanded, the credit system has also evolved into a more complex financial system to support commodity production and circulation.6Ramaa Vasudevan, “From the Gold Standard to the Floating Dollar Standard: An Appraisal in Light of Marx’s Theory of Money,” Review of Radical Political Economics 41, no. 4 (December 2009): 473–91, doi.org/10.1177/0486613409341369. With this evolving system, we see a concentration and organization of money capital in the banking and financial system, and a rise to dominance of finance capital.7Beverley Best, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital (New York: Verso, 2024).

Banks create money or credit as part of this process of capitalist accumulation. Money’s role as world money arises as the world market expands and the international division of labor extends. Money, due to its ability to be exchanged with any other commodity at any point in time, is also a form of social power. At the world market level, this means that world money can serve as a measure and source of interstate dominance.8Vasudevan, “From the Gold Standard.” This takes us to our discussion of money and empire.

Social Relations as Global: Money and Empire

As Marx recalled, rather than emerging in a rational manner as an extension from barter and then mercantilism, capital came into being “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”9Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 535. This basic insight is also helpful for understanding the role of imperial force in the money form, as the world market has always been a space of rivalries, hierarchies and imperial domination.10David McNally, “The Blood of the Commonwealth: War, the State, and the Making of World Money,” Historical Materialism 22, no. 2 (2014): 3–32, doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-12341359.

Marxist value theory allows us to move beyond simple dualistic understandings of the market and the state, which often underpin reductive understandings of imperialism as being motivated by the state’s search for territory or resources, a strategy which is then contrasted with that pursued by the market. Instead, insisting on money as a creature of the world market rather than only the market or the state allows us to understand that the extension of modern value relations embodied in fully capitalist money cannot be cornered off from certain spheres of the global economy.11Adam Hanieh, “World Money and Oil: Theoretical and Historical Considerations,” Science and Society 87, no. 1 (2023): 50–75, doi.org/10.1521/siso.2023.87.1.50.

Indeed, although states are important for understanding the dynamics of the world market, they are also subject to the law of value. As such, states in world markets cannot determine the value of their money on their own accounts.

This allows us to understand that the extension of modern value relations embodied in fully capitalist money cannot be cornered off from certain spheres of the global economy.

Although it is perhaps easy to think about money along national lines because of the use of national currencies, this kind of territorial cornering off of our analysis would lead us away from understanding the social relations underpinning money at a global scale. But Marx saw world money as an embodiment of power internationally and this has specific implications for how money manifests in different parts of the world.12De Brunhoff, Marx on Money; Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), doi.org/10.7312/patn17978.

Moreover, institutionalists who consider world money as a tool of state power limit their understanding to the level of appearances, which has the effect of concealing money’s relationship to value. While money as a social form is indeed mediated through interstate rivalry and cooperation, world money cannot simply be understood as an outcome of decisions and negotiations by political actors at a global scale.13Matt Hampton, “Hegemony, Class Struggle and the Radical Historiography of Global Monetary Standards,” Capital and Class 30, no. 2 (2006): 131–64, doi.org/10.1177/030981680608900106.

To appreciate the underlying dynamics of accumulation at a world scale, the scale that led to the emergence of the form of world money to begin with, a Marxist analysis is necessary.14Hanieh, “World Money and Oil.”

To participate and compete in international markets, countries must produce and sell before they accumulate the internationally accepted means of payment—world money. Countries in the Global South are hence forced to accumulate foreign currencies, which constitutes a net wealth transfer from the periphery to the reserve currency issuer.15Carla Coburger, “World Money and the Making of Currency Hierarchies: Evidence from Nigeria,” Review of International Political Economy 33, no. 1 (2025): 98–130, doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2025.2542204. As such, world money is qualitatively different from national currencies and inherently unstable because its domination is challenged diplomatically, economically, and militarily.

Effectively, the uneven development of production, also reflected in the financial system, means that countries in the capitalist center can export fragility to the Global South, with the periphery acting as a kind of buffer.16Vasudevan, “From the Gold Standard.” In our contemporary era this has also helped to preserve and extend the dollar standard.

Meanwhile, countries in the Global South pay the high costs of borrowing imposed on them by the major financial centers as well as the costs related to broader mechanisms of value appropriation.17François Chesnais, Finance Capital Today: Corporations and Banks in the Lasting Global Slump (Leiden: Brill, 2016), doi.org/10.1163/9789004255487. The next question then becomes: how can such an understanding of money and empire help us make sense of world money today?

World Money and the Question of a New World Order

Bringing blood and dirt into our understanding of value and money allows us to see how war was a significant force which shaped the emergence of capitalist money in England during the 1690s.18McNally, “The Blood of the Commonwealth.” The fiscal–military character of the English state and its eventual domination of much of the rest of the world rested on the social power constituted through world money.

For example, resources extracted in India formed the backbone of financial accumulation in the United Kingdom, which further drove imperial expansion.19Ramaa Vasudevan, “The Gold Exchancge Standard in Colonial India: Foreshadowing the Monetary Hierarchy of the International State-Credit Standard,” Review of International Political Economy 31, no. 5 (2024): 1496–1519, doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2024.2330430. This laid the foundations for capital market development in London, which in turn supported the British Empire.20Tony Norfield, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance (New York: Verso, 2017). Like the United States today, Britain exercised an exorbitant privilege—what economists call the ability of the hegemon to earn more on its overseas assets despite much greater foreign liabilities—in its role as the issuer of the international reserve currency.

Indeed, Gastón Nievas and Thomas Piketty show that European countries held a privilege between 1800 and 1914 comparable to the exorbitant privilege held by the United States from 1970 to 2025.21Gastón Nievas and Thomas Piketty, “Unequal Exchange and North–South Relations: Evidence from Global Trade Flows and the World Balance of Payments, 1800–2025,” (working paper, World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics, Paris, 2025), https://tinyurl.com/64h7svh8. The example of England shows how there is a deep connection between concrete forms of world money and the relative positioning of particular states within the world market—a relationship that remains deeply relevant today.

The internationalization of capital that took place following the Second World War was shaped by the United States promoting a new trade architecture and US corporations seeking to locate factories and other productive activities outside their home markets. With this, the USD represented a form of world money adequate to capital’s expanded reproduction through the postwar moment, which allowed for an expansion of global credit levels and cross border investments.

While this was in theory represented in the gold standard based on the Bretton Woods Agreement establishing the USD as the only currency officially convertible into gold, in reality gold “was largely a symbolic ornament,” and it was the USD that served the day-to-day role as world money.22Maria Ivanova, “The Dollar as World Money,” Science and Society 77, no. 1 (2013): 44–71, doi.org/10.1521/siso.2013.77.1. As such, countries were compelled to hold dollars to cover their foreign transactions. Although the Bretton Woods system initially relied on central bank money (bank notes and reserves) and commercial bank money (deposits), offshore dollar creation emerged in the 1950s with the rise of the Eurodollar market centered in London.23Steffen Murau and Tobias Pforr, Finance and Society 6, no.1 (2023): 56–66, doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.v6i1.4409/.

Then, given the falling profit rates and rising costs of raw materials in the 1960s, it became increasingly difficult for the United States to maintain convertibility between the dollar and gold. Therefore, the system moved to one of floating exchange rates that was consolidated by the middle of the 1970s. That is the system we are currently in.

With the link to gold officially cut, the amount of USDs in circulation could increase largely unrestrained. Offshore dollar creation by non-US banks also rose sharply. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, broader political and economic shifts supported the further internationalization and financialization of capital, including the collapse of the USSR, the integration of China into the world market, the liberalization of markets in the Global South, and the development of new technologies that could speed up the movement of commodities around the world.

With these new developments, a major restructuring of global value chains was set in motion, especially marked by offshoring of labor-intensive production from the United States and Western Europe to low-wage areas in the Global South, including China.24Ivanova, “The Dollar as World Money.” The dollar continued to represent the social form of the world market throughout this period, a period that was marked by an unprecedented expansion of financial markets and the emergence of new financial instruments such as derivatives, further supporting the intensification and expansion of capital’s reach.

This pattern of internationalization and financialization led rival centers to emerge as well, reflected by the large US current account deficits generated by that country’s role as the world’s lender and consumer of last resort. Surpluses flowed to US markets and USD-denominated financial instruments.

At this time, US government debt became one of the primary forms of world money, with countries increasingly holding US Treasuries as international reserves.25Vasudevan, “From the Gold Standard.”  As with the Bank of England in the 1600s, these hoards of US public debt were implicitly guaranteed by US future value production.26Hanieh, “World Money and Oil.” This arrangement allows the US to draw surpluses from the rest of the world.

This meant that large dollar holders were incorporated into the hierarchical structures of the world market.

The global compulsion to hold US government debt meant that large dollar and small dollar holders alike were incorporated into the hierarchical structures of the world market. The USD’s role in the international financial system also reinforced the dominance of US financial institutions and markets which are the largest and most liquid in the world, and have thus become the leading source for companies and governments seeking to borrow funds.

As US financial instruments and Treasury Bills are also considered safe investment vehicles for trade surplus countries’ central banks, the role of world money is now played and supported by different modalities of the US dollar.27Chesnais, Finance Capital Today. Dollar hegemony means the United States has been able to run the world’s only current account deficit without experiencing a loss of investor confidence in its currency.28Mona Ali, “Global Imbalances and Assymetric Returns to US Foreign Asssets: Fitting the Missing Pieces into the US Balancre of Payments Puzzle,” International Review of Applied Economics 30, no. 2 (2016): 167–87, doi.org/10.1080/02692171.2015.1085002.

Overall, as both a store of value and the requisite means of circulation in the world market, the dollar provides a significant source of geopolitical power to the United States, including the ability to enforce exclusions from the US banking system via sanctions.29Hanieh, “World Money and Oil.” The USD has taken the form that it has as a necessary expression of the internationalization of the circuits of capital and cannot be reduced to simply a reflection of or a tool for the state’s hegemony.30Hanieh, “World Money and Oil.”

Although US policymakers have often promoted the USD abroad, the ways that offshore dollar markets and USD-denominated financial instruments evolved in the postwar period were more often through actors trying to circumvent the control of policy-markets through unregulated activities.31Steffen Murau, Joe Rini, and Armin Haas, “The Evolution of the US Offshore Dollar System: Past, Present, and Four Possible Futures,” Journal of Institutional Economics 16, no. 6 (2020): 767–83, doi.org/10.1017/S1744137420000168. Technocrats trying to contain these developments through ad hoc measures such as swap lines in turn became part of the global monetary architecture and then formalized.32Steffen Murau, “Trump’s Dollar,” Phenomenal World, February 6, 2026. Although this global dollar-dominated system has not been consciously designed by the US state, it relies on the US Fed to hold it together in moments of crisis.

Liberation Day: A Crossroad for the Dollar?

Now, to the current moment. Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs of 2025 led to financial turbulence, as prices of equities, bonds, and US treasuries plunged. The USD also tumbled with the rise in market volatility, which entailed a reversal of the historical pattern of the USD being inversely correlated with major asset classes.

This led to widespread speculation about the dollar’s waning status as a safe asset in times of turbulence.33Markus K. Brunnermeier and Sebastian Merkel, “Preserving the Global Safe Asset Status of US Treasuries and the US Dollar Is in Everyone’s Interest,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, April 18, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/2eszn9aj. Two key arguments have often been launched to explain why this signals the end of the USD empire since the beginning of the second Trump administration.

The first is that Trump’s erratic policies are eroding users trust in the dollar. This argument is in line with institutionalist understandings of money, which often constitute an extension of neoclassical monetary theory. In such accounts, the actions of the second Trump administration pose a serious threat to the dominance of the USDbecause erratic US policies “erode global trust in the United States and force states and private actors alike to reconsider their reliance on the dollar.”34Tobias Pforr, Fabian Pape, and Johannes Petry, “Dollar Diminished: The Unmasking of US Dollar Hegemony Under Trump,” International Organization 79, no. 51 (2025): S117–33, doi.org/10.1017/S0020818325101033.

The second (related) argument is that alternative currencies, especially the Chinese renminbi, are emerging as more efficient alternatives in the wake of the chaos caused by Trump and also to protect themselves from US power to sanction.35For example: Yong Wook Lee and Kyuteg Lim, “Status Quo Crisis Again?: RMB Challenges and Dollar Hegemony,” New Political Economy 29, no. 5 (2024): 709–32, doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2024.2332348; Monique Taylor, “Challenging Dollar Dominance? The Geopolitical Dimensions of Renminbi Internationalisation,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 54, no.3 (2025): 430–47, doi.org/10.1177/18681026251342258; “America’s Aggressive Use of Sanctions Endangers the Dollar’s Reign,” Economist, January 18, 2020. Particular focus has been on China’s strategy to internationalize the renminbi.36Taylor, “Challenging Dollar Dominance?”

The problem with these arguments, which dominate mainstream media and academic spaces, is that they attribute too much power to the agency of individuals and states, thus representing both methodological individualism and nationalism. But, given the framework for understanding money and empire outlined above, we cannot understand the dominance of the USD as simply a product of consistent US state action to support the dollar abroad or as compliance and choice among non-US actors and states (the assumption of the first line of argument).

Rather, the dominance of the USD is based on the dominance of US capital, which in turn reflects global value relations. As such, unless the dominance of US capital is being challenged, state or individual (erratic or rational) behavior will not topple the USD as world money. Before briefly considering whether US capital is indeed being challenged, let us look at the extent to which there has actually been a move away from the USD in the way many media outlets are reporting.

Unless the dominance of US capital is being challenged, state or individual (erratic or rational) behavior will not topple the USD as world money.

Although investment in USD Treasuries has fallen, investors have increased their share in US equities, leading some commentators to argue that it is US equities that are now becoming the new safe asset.37John Plender, “The Haven Asset Status of US Treasuries is Eroding,” Financial Times, February 20, 2026. As such, there has not been a move away from dollar-denominated instruments.

Furthermore, in foreign exchange markets dollars are used in nearly 90 percent of trades and over half (56 percent) of foreign currency reserves held by the world’s central banks consist of US Treasuries and other dollar assets.38Paul Blustein, “Don’t Bet on Dollar Dethronement,” Financial Times, January 29, 2026. According to data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the amount of outstanding foreign exchange swaps—used by international banks, securities firms, multinational corporations, insurance companies and pension funds—currently stands above $100 trillion, and of this about 90 percent involve the USD.39Blustein, “Don’t Bet on Dollar Dethronement.”

The USD’s low financing cost is not just a function of US interest rates, but it also reflects scale and use.40

Diana Choyleva, “Why China’s Renminbi Push Matters Even if it Never Rivals the Dollar,” Financial Times, March 12, 2026.When trade settles in dollars, firms earn dollars, hold dollars as working capital, and recycle balances through banks and markets. About 60 percent of foreign currency debt is issued in dollars, making it the preeminent medium of crossborder borrowing, and the USD still makes up 80 percent of the trade finance market.41Carol Bertaut, Bastian von Beschwitz, and Stephanie Curcuru, “The International Role of the US Dollar – 2025,” Board of Governers of the Federal Reserve System, July 18, 2025, doi.org/10.17016/2380-7172.3856; Choyleva, “Why China’s Renminbi Push Matters.”

Notably, most dollar obligations extend beyond the traditional boundaries of the nation state, given that offshore dollar creation has become so prevalent that we can think of the dollar as a privatized and to some extent denationalized currency. The network of dollar creation, trading and lending outside the United States in the form of an offshore dollar system plays an important role in sustaining American power. As long as the dollar remains the most used currency in international trade and finance, the sanctions threat from the United States will continue to remain potent too.42Murrau, “Trump’s Dollar.”

A lot of attention has been given to the fact that Chinese investors are investing less in US Treasuries, which means that the correlation between China’s current account surplus, its reserve growth, and its holdings of US bonds has broken down.43Brad Setser, “China Is Not Dumping US Treasuries,” Financial Times, February 23, 2026 However, although it is not evident by looking only at the balance sheet of the People’s Bank of China, China’s state (broadly defined) has not stopped accumulating dollars under the second Trump administration.

Rather, the accumulation of dollars has shifted from China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange agency to state banks. In fact, China’s big state-owned financial institutions have added an unprecedented $100 billion to foreign assets in December 2025 and another $70 billion in January 2026.44Setser, “China Is Not Dumping US Treasuries.”

After all, with a $1 trillion current account surplus, it must be accumulating a lot of foreign assets. As such, China’s massive trade surplus still flows through the balance sheets of its core state financial institutions, and if Chinese investors are not directly buying Treasuries, they are lending money to other global investors who are.

The question is also whether there is an alternative to the USD as world money. Even though China launched strategic initiatives to internationalize the renminbi in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis to get around constraints imposed by the USD, the renminbi is far from being a real contender to the status of world money.

Nonetheless, recently, Xi Jinping publicly declared that he plans to build the renminbi into a strategic counterweight, a powerful currency that would be “widely used in international trade, investment and attain reserve currency status” based on the development of a robust financial infrastructure.45Cheng Leng and Joe Leahy, “Xi Jinping Calls for China’s Renminbi to Attain Global Reserve Currency Status,” Financial Times, February 1, 2026.

However, the renminbi still has only 1.9 percent of global reserves, a share that has barely moved in a decade and the renminbi’s share of global payments is still only about 3.1 percent.46Choyleva, “Why China’s Renminbi Push Matters.” China also has a closed capital account—restricting money from moving freely in and out of its borders—which makes the renminbi largely unviable as an alternative form of world money.

Nonetheless, China has built various forms of payment infrastructure platforms such as the Cross-border Interbank Payment System (launched in 2015) and mBridge, a crossborder central bank digital currency platform built on distributed ledger technology developed by the People’s Bank of China, which signal attempts by the Chinese state at providing alternative payment platforms.

The relative marginal nature of all these developments taken together led economist Brad Setser to argue that “amateur geopolitical strategists talking eloquently about the end of dollar dominance” should be ignored.47Setser, “China Is Not Dumping US Treasuries.” While he may be right about this, from a Marxist political economy perspective, we still need to move beyond simply following the money, as he does, if we want to understand the sustainability of the USD as world money.

Whither Dollar Hegemony?

Thus far, the debate about the sustainability of the USD as world money has focused superficially on state and individual (rational or irrational) action, rather than considering the USD as an expression of value relations that are global and uneven. If we shift our perspective back to critique of political economy, where does this take us?

First, it makes us consider all the ways in which US capital still structures global trade and finance in the world today. Even when considering the enormously complex manufacturing production that has increasingly been taking place in China since the 1990s, it must be noted that three quarters of China’s most advanced high-tech goods are owned by foreign enterprises.48Sean Kenji Starrs, “Can China Challenge the US Empire?” TNI, February 4, 2025.

Furthermore, since the global financial crisis, US ownership of foreign capital increased, including of Chinese state-owned enterprises.49Sean Starrs, “American Economic Power Hasn’t Declined—It Globalized! Summoning the Data and Taking Globalization Seriously,” International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2013): 817–30doi.org/10.1111/isqu.12053. As such, we cannot take the Chinese trade surplus or GDP size as simple indicators of a rising empire in the way that mainstream commentators have tended to do.50See my critique of Piketty and Nievas: Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, “Uneven Development Without Social Relations—The Trouble with Nievas and Piketty’s Unequal Exchange,” Institute for New Economic Thinking, August 5, 2025, https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/uneven-development-without-social-relations.

Nonetheless, Chinese privately owned enterprises have increased their share of advanced high-tech goods from virtually zero in the 1990s to 20 percent by 2022, doubling its share since the dawn of Trump’s post-2018 trade war.51Starrs, “Can China Challenge US Empire?” While this is not negligible, it is perhaps smaller than most would expect from just looking at China’s surplus.

Furthermore, Chinese companies are increasingly dominant in several key sectors, including renewables, electric cars, and lithium-ion batteries, and the Chinese economy is no doubt an emerging engine of capitalism, even if it is nowhere near having its currency used as world money. To what extent the heart of value relations will effectively shift to the East is what will determine whether the renminbi can become world money in the future—not the will or trust of various states or individual capitalists. Whether this will happen and if it will, however, remains to be seen. ×

  1. See J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev, Against Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2026) for more on how economists (mainstream and heterodox) approach money.
  2. Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine, From Poltical Economy to Economics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Modern Theory (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2008).
  3. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore and James Membrez (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); Mahmoud Al Ishtikiraki, “The Measure of Everything: David McNally’s Materialist History of Money,” Left Voice, August 25, 2020.
  4. Suzanne De Brunhoff, Marx on Money (New York: Verso, 2015).
  5. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), 76.
  6. Ramaa Vasudevan, “From the Gold Standard to the Floating Dollar Standard: An Appraisal in Light of Marx’s Theory of Money,” Review of Radical Political Economics 41, no. 4 (December 2009): 473–91, doi.org/10.1177/0486613409341369.
  7. Beverley Best, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital (New York: Verso, 2024).
  8. Vasudevan, “From the Gold Standard.”
  9. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 535.
  10. David McNally, “The Blood of the Commonwealth: War, the State, and the Making of World Money,” Historical Materialism 22, no. 2 (2014): 3–32, doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-12341359.
  11. Adam Hanieh, “World Money and Oil: Theoretical and Historical Considerations,” Science and Society 87, no. 1 (2023): 50–75, doi.org/10.1521/siso.2023.87.1.50.
  12. De Brunhoff, Marx on Money; Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), doi.org/10.7312/patn17978.
  13. Matt Hampton, “Hegemony, Class Struggle and the Radical Historiography of Global Monetary Standards,” Capital and Class 30, no. 2 (2006): 131–64, doi.org/10.1177/030981680608900106.
  14. Hanieh, “World Money and Oil.”
  15. Carla Coburger, “World Money and the Making of Currency Hierarchies: Evidence from Nigeria,” Review of International Political Economy 33, no. 1 (2025): 98–130, doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2025.2542204.
  16. Vasudevan, “From the Gold Standard.”
  17. François Chesnais, Finance Capital Today: Corporations and Banks in the Lasting Global Slump (Leiden: Brill, 2016), doi.org/10.1163/9789004255487.
  18. McNally, “The Blood of the Commonwealth.”
  19. Ramaa Vasudevan, “The Gold Exchancge Standard in Colonial India: Foreshadowing the Monetary Hierarchy of the International State-Credit Standard,” Review of International Political Economy 31, no. 5 (2024): 1496–1519, doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2024.2330430.
  20. Tony Norfield, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance (New York: Verso, 2017).
  21. Gastón Nievas and Thomas Piketty, “Unequal Exchange and North–South Relations: Evidence from Global Trade Flows and the World Balance of Payments, 1800–2025,” (working paper, World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics, Paris, 2025), https://tinyurl.com/64h7svh8.
  22. Maria Ivanova, “The Dollar as World Money,” Science and Society 77, no. 1 (2013): 44–71, doi.org/10.1521/siso.2013.77.1.
  23. Steffen Murau and Tobias Pforr, Finance and Society 6, no.1 (2023): 56–66, doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.v6i1.4409/.
  24. Ivanova, “The Dollar as World Money.”
  25. Vasudevan, “From the Gold Standard.”
  26. Hanieh, “World Money and Oil.”
  27. Chesnais, Finance Capital Today.
  28. Mona Ali, “Global Imbalances and Assymetric Returns to US Foreign Asssets: Fitting the Missing Pieces into the US Balancre of Payments Puzzle,” International Review of Applied Economics 30, no. 2 (2016): 167–87, doi.org/10.1080/02692171.2015.1085002.
  29. Hanieh, “World Money and Oil.”
  30. Hanieh, “World Money and Oil.”
  31. Steffen Murau, Joe Rini, and Armin Haas, “The Evolution of the US Offshore Dollar System: Past, Present, and Four Possible Futures,” Journal of Institutional Economics 16, no. 6 (2020): 767–83, doi.org/10.1017/S1744137420000168.
  32. Steffen Murau, “Trump’s Dollar,” Phenomenal World, February 6, 2026.
  33. Markus K. Brunnermeier and Sebastian Merkel, “Preserving the Global Safe Asset Status of US Treasuries and the US Dollar Is in Everyone’s Interest,” Peterson Institute for International Economics, April 18, 2025, https://tinyurl.com/2eszn9aj.
  34. Tobias Pforr, Fabian Pape, and Johannes Petry, “Dollar Diminished: The Unmasking of US Dollar Hegemony Under Trump,” International Organization 79, no. 51 (2025): S117–33, doi.org/10.1017/S0020818325101033.
  35. For example: Yong Wook Lee and Kyuteg Lim, “Status Quo Crisis Again?: RMB Challenges and Dollar Hegemony,” New Political Economy 29, no. 5 (2024): 709–32, doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2024.2332348; Monique Taylor, “Challenging Dollar Dominance? The Geopolitical Dimensions of Renminbi Internationalisation,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 54, no.3 (2025): 430–47, doi.org/10.1177/18681026251342258; “America’s Aggressive Use of Sanctions Endangers the Dollar’s Reign,” Economist, January 18, 2020.
  36. Taylor, “Chhallenging Dollar Dominance?”
  37. John Plender, “The Haven Asset Status of US Treasuries is Eroding,” Financial Times, February 20, 2026.
  38. Paul Blustein, “Don’t Bet on Dollar Dethronement,” Financial Times, January 29, 2026.
  39. Blustein, “Don’t Bet on Dollar Dethronement.”
  40. Diana Choyleva, “Why China’s Renminbi Push Matters Even if it Never Rivals the Dollar,” Financial Times, March 12, 2026.
  41. Carol Bertaut, Bastian von Beschwitz, and Stephanie Curcuru, “The International Role of the US Dollar – 2025,” Board of Governers of the Federal Reserve System, July 18, 2025, doi.org/10.17016/2380-7172.3856; Choyleva, “Why China’s Renminbi Push Matters.”
  42. Murrau, “Trump’s Dollar.”
  43. Brad Setser, “China Is Not Dumping US Treasuries,” Financial Times, February 23, 2026.
  44. Setser, “China Is Not Dumping US Treasuries.”
  45. Cheng Leng and Joe Leahy, “Xi Jinping Calls for China’s Renminbi to Attain Global Reserve Currency Status,” Financial Times, February 1, 2026.
  46. Choyleva, “Why China’s Renminbi Push Matters.”
  47. Setser, “China Is Not Dumping US Treasuries.”
  48. Sean Kenji Starrs, “Can China Challenge the US Empire?” TNI, February 4, 2025.
  49. Sean Starrs, “American Economic Power Hasn’t Declined—It Globalized! Summoning the Data and Taking Globalization Seriously,” International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2013): 817–30doi.org/10.1111/isqu.12053.
  50. See my critique of Piketty and Nievas: Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, “Uneven Development Without Social Relations—The Trouble with Nievas and Piketty’s Unequal Exchange,” Institute for New Economic Thinking, August 5, 2025, https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/uneven-development-without-social-relations.
  51. Starrs, “Can China Challenge US Empire?”
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