THE PROBLEM OF imperialism has elicited some of the most inventive and far-reaching analysis on the left.(1) 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.(2) Crucially, this account insisted that imperialism must be grasped through its epoch's dominant mechanisms of accumulation. Mid-century dependency theory, from Raill 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.(3) In the 1970s, Nicos Poulantzas analysed the embedding of American priorities within allied state apparatuses.(4) 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.(5) David Harvey theorized a `new imperialism' centred on accumulation by dispossession and the articulation of territorial and capitalist logics of power.(6) Robert Cox developed a neo-Gramscian account of world hegemony grounded in transnational consent.(7 )Giovanni Arrighi situated US primacy within a sequence of systemic cycles, anticipating a financialized 'autumn' and an eventual eastwards shift.(8) 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.(9) 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.
