Yes, that’s the question. If you call the US’s bluff on nuclear war, which it has consistently shown it won’t do even while losing to nations incapable of that level of retaliation much less a nation fully capable, what do they have left other than financial leverage, which is currently in rapid decline?
Against civilian targets, in a nation that had lost its ability to project military power abroad but was dug in at home, had no idea such a weapon was in existence, and had no capability to retaliate in kind. China and is not Japan in 1945. If roused it could project military capability abroad, has reasonable defenses against such attacks, and is more than capable of retaliating in kind.
China, like Iran, has shown extraordinary restraint, in the face of undeserved provocation after undeserved provocation. You would think ignorant and arrogant Western “leaders” would take note and behave accordingly, rather than continuing to poke the patient dragon.
Their arrogance is precisely why I don’t think they’ll take note and the ignorance of their voting base is precisely why I think they’re not incentivized to do anything differently than they have done since the end of the American Civil War. There’s no personal accountability internally or externally for their behavior. When provocations lead to violence it’s not them or their tribe that pays the price. Religious fundamentalism reinforces a belief that the believer is perpetually a victim regardless of whether their faith is the dominant power because the continued existence of any belief and anyone who believes differently is an affront. Bullies don’t just give up because they grow tired of it. Your best hope for a (relative) peaceful end to American aggression abroad is to support efforts in your nation to make the US a pariah and begin dismantling their financial power within those nations. Or, if willing, accept that as the elite are beyond the reach of the average American gun owner, it’ll take an outside force (or a very well equipped internal force backed by external support) to forcibly remove them, then either work to eliminate the power of middle class Christian nationalists or stand back and allow them and the antifascists duke it out. If you want an end to American imperialism you’re going to have to get it to turn on itself. Which it kind of is, but without some outside assistance in some form I do believe it’s just going to continue to lash out as it can.
This is a very poor understanding of international relations and the balance of forces in the world today. The US hasn’t used nuclear arms in Iran for the same reason they didn’t in Vietnam or Korea, even if the country in question can’t retaliate the cascade effects would be catastrophic and “winning” these wars is not worth that risk. On the other hand in an existential struggle for survival against China that is a completely different situation where if push comes to shove the American ruling class would absolutely condemn the world in a heartbeat if it meant they had even a 1% chance of coming out on top over a 0% chance should the neoliberal world order fall.
The American neoliberals are the ones hyping anti-China rhetoric because it appeals to their uneducated and bigoted voter base who ignores that nuclear bluster and strong arm tactics have done nothing to benefit the average American yet enriches their ruling class beyond human comprehension. The same neoliberals are the ones devaluing the power of the dollar and transferring their wealth to crypto and international currencies. When China (or some sort of decentralized crypto of which China has a massive stake) becomes the monetary basis of global finance, the American elite will float by because they’ve planned for this. But then what? The oligarchs are not concerned with longevity of the system beyond their lifetime, you’re not up against the classic Dems vs Reps that had a shared vision of imperialist capitalism with slightly different flavors. You’re up against less than one percent of the population whose goal is to acquire as much as possible for themselves, in their lifetime, with zero concern for if there’s stability once they’re dead or if they’re maintaining a system where whoever comes next could achieve what they have. If you tried to take it from them by force, maybe they’d burn it on the way out. But that’s not what’s happening. They’re more than willing to sell it to enrich themselves, and once the scales tip in favor of China, the onus of what to do with that power and how to progress is on them. Pitching the underdog, David vs Goliath angle sounds great, but capitalism is dying with a whimper. Use the moment at hand as a moment to push to the next phase or limp along as capitalism masquerading as socialism with “the transition will come soon” as a perpetual goal on the horizon.
You conflate financial assets with social power. This is a major category error that obscures the material foundations of class rule. Money is not power in itself but a token of command over labour and territory, mediated by the state under the current system. When the load bearing pillar of the current order (America) falls, portfolio diversification into Swiss francs or Trump coin will do nothing to preserve elite dominance under a new order. The American ruling class does not uphold global capitalism because of sentiment or long term vision, but because its reproduction as a class is bound to the existing configuration of productive forces, military reach, and institutional hegemony. To suggest they would willingly abandon this architecture misunderstands how class interest operates structurally. It is also analytically weak to carve out neoliberals as distinct from the broader imperialist bloc. Neoliberalism has been the hegemonic ideology of American capital (and thus global hegemonic capitalism which they uphold through their military and international institutions) since Reagan, guiding both parties in the project of financialisation, deregulation, and global labour arbitrage. The factional noise does not alter the class content.
The David versus Goliath framing appears in your reply, not mine. I made no appeal to underdog narratives. My point was that a conflict with China would not be a limited engagement but a struggle over the terms of global reproduction. That is why nuclear escalation cannot be dismissed as bluff; the stakes would be existential to the bourgeoisie.
Transition is not a future possibility but is ongoing in China, where public ownership remains primary and the birdcage around the secondary private economy has been systematically tightening since 2014. The disciplining of Jack Ma was a demonstration that financial capital operates only within boundaries set by the state. The purposeful deflation of the housing bubble, also reflects a prioritisation of long term productive capacity and social good over short term speculative gain. Contrast this with the capitalist core, where private ownership is primary and the retreat of public provision in healthcare, transport, energy, and water has accelerated. Financialisation of the sort Jack Ma championed (which got him disciplined) is not restrained but encouraged, while housing is treated as an asset class rather than a social good. This is not a difference of policy preference but of underlying social relations. In China, the state (answering to the people) retains the capacity to subordinate capital to social objectives; in the West, capital subordinates the state to accumulation.
Your analysis substitutes individualist psychology for systemic class forces, treating the ruling class as atomised actors free to exit the system that constitutes their power. You misread transition as a future event rather than an active process already reshaping global relations of production. And you sidestep the central question: when the material basis of imperial hegemony shifts, it is not portfolio choices but control over productive forces and state capacity that determines who rules. So again true conflict with China could absolutely go nuclear as it would be a battle for survival for the bourgeoisie where losing entails the loss of all that they value (their capital and the power it confers upon them).
>When the load bearing pillar of the current order (America) falls, portfolio diversification into Swiss francs or Trump coin will do nothing to preserve elite dominance under a new order.
If the American oligarchs convert their wealth to Chinese yuan prior to the collapse of that pillar (and it would appear that many are doing so), and China does not use the opportunity of becoming the new pillar to undermine what possessing currency means in global economics, the elite of the west remain elite even if their sphere of influence shrinks. Which I would argue is an acceptable outcome for the upper echelons of neoliberalism, they’d rather be absolute monarchs of their slice of the planet than god emperors of the planet, so long as they are acknowledged for what they are and have some ability to manipulate beyond their sphere.
>Your analysis substitutes individualist psychology for systemic class forces, treating the ruling class as atomised actors free to exit the system that constitutes their power.
I’m positing that we are in a position where this is extremely likely depending on what China decides to do as it assumes global financial dominance if the American oligarchs move their currency to the yuan before they run the American economy into the ground and China fails to take the opportunity to push for how currency is used globally to be reevaluated. As you pointed out, “The American ruling class does not uphold global capitalism because of sentiment or long term vision, but because its reproduction as a class is bound to the existing configuration of productive forces, military reach, and institutional hegemony.” The existing configuration is failing and the American elite are aware of it, which is why they are extracting as much wealth from the dying American economy before it collapses. They hype anti-China rhetoric because they still have some need to appeal to the masses but are quietly planning for how to maintain their positions when the inevitable change occurs.
>Transition is not a future possibility but is ongoing in China, where public ownership remains primary and the birdcage around the secondary private economy has been systematically tightening since 2014.
My question here is, what do you expect to see domestically and internationally once China assumes the position of the financial pillar? Do they start the process of eliminating the private economy at home? Do they use their leverage to isolate American imperialism by continuing to indulge capitalism as a necessary evil in the global economy and placate the American by allowing them to live as rulers of their own private fiefs on the other side of the world, or do they flex their new power and begin to undermine the entire capitalist system when they control the value of “money”. Money is not power in itself but a token of command over labour and territory, mediated by the state under the current system. What happens when the current system is no longer obligated to be the current system?
>That is why nuclear escalation cannot be dismissed as bluff; the stakes would be existential to the bourgeoisie.
True, but the threat can be minimalized by should China take the reins of global finance and allow billionaires on the side of the planet to maintain their fiefdoms and domestic prestige. But if they chose to do so, where is the line between common sense (they have nukes and will burn it if they can’t have it) and using the power at hand to pressure the economy forward towards socialism? Do you wait for the oligarchs to die out, having pulled the ladders behind them and inadvertently prevented their successors from being able to attain their level of influence? Is it either and die approach, or would you rather see pressure applied, because once the transition occurs the leverage is in China’s hands and they could exercise that power or they could allow their current system to run in their favor indefinitely.
“If the American oligarchs convert their wealth to Chinese yuan prior to the collapse of that pillar… the elite of the west remain elite…”
This still treats currency as if it were social power in itself. Under the Chinese system, currency buys exactly zero political command. It buys no control over the Party, the PLA, the police, intelligence, courts, planning organs, SOEs, land policy, capital controls, or the strategic direction of the state. At most, money can still purchase limited command over labour inside the private sector, but even that is precisely the sphere being narrowed by the tightening of the birdcage since 2014.
You also vastly underestimate how difficult it is to simply “move into yuan.” China has strict capital controls for a reason. The RMB is not a frictionless liberal reserve currency designed to let foreign billionaires freely enter, exit, speculate, and dominate. The whole point of China’s financial architecture is that money remains subordinate to state policy. A Western oligarch holding yuan is not transformed into a Chinese power-holder. He is merely holding a claim inside a system whose commanding heights he does not control.
“The existing configuration is failing and the American elite are aware of it… they hype anti-China rhetoric because they still have some need to appeal to the masses but are quietly planning…”
This is not analysis it’s a fantasy. The Western bourgeoisie is not pushing anti-China propaganda as some cynical cover before peacefully jumping into China’s orbit. They are doing it because China is an objective threat to the material basis of their global rule: dollar hegemony, military encirclement, technological monopoly, sanctions power, control over supply chains, and the ideological monopoly of liberal capitalism.
Anti-China propaganda functions much like earlier fascistic scapegoating campaigns: it manufactures an external and racialised enemy while the bourgeoisie brings the teeth of imperialism home. As crisis deepens, the ruling class does not simply retire into yuan-denominated comfort. It intensifies repression, attacks labour, expands surveillance, militarises society, disciplines dissent, and moves toward fascistic consolidation. That is already visible in crackdowns on labour, protest, migrants, communists, anti-war forces, and dissenting media across the imperial core.
The idea that these people are preparing to “become Chinese” is not analysis. It is vibes. They are not trying to join China’s system, because China’s system would not give them command. They are trying to preserve their own system by escalating against the force that most clearly exposes its decline.
“What do you expect to see domestically and internationally once China assumes the position of the financial pillar?”
First, there is no single coronation moment where China becomes “the financial pillar” and then chooses whether to abolish capitalism globally. Transitions in world systems are uneven, conflictual, and determined by the balance of forces. The more likely path is continued de-dollarisation, expansion of alternative settlement systems, greater South-South development, and the erosion of imperial coercive capacity.
Domestically, I would expect a continuation of tightening the birdcage: disciplining private capital, strengthening planning capacity, prioritising productive over speculative development, expanding state and collective capacity, and preventing finance from becoming sovereign. That does not mean abolishing all private economic activity overnight. It means progressively subordinating it to social and national development as has been happening.
Internationally, much depends on the trajectory of the Euro-Amerikan empire. At present, it appears to be moving toward fascism, remilitarisation, labour repression, and intensified imperial aggression. As US dominance weakens, China will likely continue supporting national development and anti-imperial sovereignty across the Global South, with greater room to back progressive and national-liberation forces as the constraints of encirclement lessen.
“Do they flex their new power and begin to undermine the entire capitalist system when they control the value of ‘money’?”
This is idealist nonsense. No one “controls the value of money” in abstraction. Money is not the motor of history. It is a social relation resting on production, state power, military force, trade structures, class rule, and institutional trust. You keep treating currency as the master lever, when it is actually a concentrated expression of deeper material relations.
If China gains greater financial centrality, that does not mean it can press a button and abolish capitalism. What it can do is weaken the mechanisms through which imperialism disciplines the world: dollar sanctions, debt traps, unequal exchange, technological dependency, military blackmail, and control over development finance. That is how the ground is prepared for further transition. Not through monetary voluntarism.
“The threat can be minimized should China take the reins of global finance and allow billionaires… to maintain their fiefdoms…”
This misunderstands the nuclear danger. The threat is not primarily that individual billionaires fear losing their personal bank balances (again substitutingbindividualism for systemic analysis). The threat is that the American imperial state may face irreversible systemic displacement. A declining hegemon does not need to be literally expropriated before it becomes dangerous. It only needs to perceive that its command over the world system is ending.
American power is not just wealth. It is bases, fleets, sanctions, intelligence networks, finance, media, treaties, comprador elites, technology chokepoints, and ideological dominance. If that architecture breaks, the bourgeoisie loses far more than “influence.” It loses the world-historical conditions of its reproduction as a ruling class. That is why nuclear escalation cannot be dismissed as bluff.
Your error is that you reduce class rule to portfolio management. You imagine oligarchs can preserve themselves by swapping dollars for yuan, while ignoring that their power depends on states, armies, laws, property regimes, labour discipline, and imperial hierarchy. They cannot simply exit the system that constitutes them. And China cannot simply inherit global finance and decree socialism by currency policy. The actual struggle is over productive forces, state capacity, class power, and the dismantling of imperial coercion. I don’t know what it is about systemic analysis that you’re so afraid of.
I’m just indulging curiosity. My comments have sparked a lot of responses from a lot of different commenters. I have no idea whether the respondents are in China, the US, or elsewhere, and while you all share some similar ideas, there’s a wide range of attitudes and ideas about what the current status is, what the goals should be, and how/time frame it might transpire. Your responses are just another one on the list and shape how I contemplate my own world views and then push me to construct a clearer goal of how to engage with different personalities and opinions in the future. I’m probably never going to meet any of you in real life nor will any of our personal actions amount to much on the global scale, but I do and will encounter real humans on the local level I operate on and have an influence in, so bantering philosophically with randos on the internet is practice for legitimate social engagement. It’s a place where the stakes are low and the points don’t matter but you have access to a wide variety of human opinions.
Yes, that’s the question. If you call the US’s bluff on nuclear war, which it has consistently shown it won’t do even while losing to nations incapable of that level of retaliation much less a nation fully capable, what do they have left other than financial leverage, which is currently in rapid decline?
The United States is the only state to have dropped the bomb. Twice. Unnecessarily.
Against civilian targets, in a nation that had lost its ability to project military power abroad but was dug in at home, had no idea such a weapon was in existence, and had no capability to retaliate in kind. China and is not Japan in 1945. If roused it could project military capability abroad, has reasonable defenses against such attacks, and is more than capable of retaliating in kind.
China, like Iran, has shown extraordinary restraint, in the face of undeserved provocation after undeserved provocation. You would think ignorant and arrogant Western “leaders” would take note and behave accordingly, rather than continuing to poke the patient dragon.
Their arrogance is precisely why I don’t think they’ll take note and the ignorance of their voting base is precisely why I think they’re not incentivized to do anything differently than they have done since the end of the American Civil War. There’s no personal accountability internally or externally for their behavior. When provocations lead to violence it’s not them or their tribe that pays the price. Religious fundamentalism reinforces a belief that the believer is perpetually a victim regardless of whether their faith is the dominant power because the continued existence of any belief and anyone who believes differently is an affront. Bullies don’t just give up because they grow tired of it. Your best hope for a (relative) peaceful end to American aggression abroad is to support efforts in your nation to make the US a pariah and begin dismantling their financial power within those nations. Or, if willing, accept that as the elite are beyond the reach of the average American gun owner, it’ll take an outside force (or a very well equipped internal force backed by external support) to forcibly remove them, then either work to eliminate the power of middle class Christian nationalists or stand back and allow them and the antifascists duke it out. If you want an end to American imperialism you’re going to have to get it to turn on itself. Which it kind of is, but without some outside assistance in some form I do believe it’s just going to continue to lash out as it can.
– on civilian populations
This is a very poor understanding of international relations and the balance of forces in the world today. The US hasn’t used nuclear arms in Iran for the same reason they didn’t in Vietnam or Korea, even if the country in question can’t retaliate the cascade effects would be catastrophic and “winning” these wars is not worth that risk. On the other hand in an existential struggle for survival against China that is a completely different situation where if push comes to shove the American ruling class would absolutely condemn the world in a heartbeat if it meant they had even a 1% chance of coming out on top over a 0% chance should the neoliberal world order fall.
The American neoliberals are the ones hyping anti-China rhetoric because it appeals to their uneducated and bigoted voter base who ignores that nuclear bluster and strong arm tactics have done nothing to benefit the average American yet enriches their ruling class beyond human comprehension. The same neoliberals are the ones devaluing the power of the dollar and transferring their wealth to crypto and international currencies. When China (or some sort of decentralized crypto of which China has a massive stake) becomes the monetary basis of global finance, the American elite will float by because they’ve planned for this. But then what? The oligarchs are not concerned with longevity of the system beyond their lifetime, you’re not up against the classic Dems vs Reps that had a shared vision of imperialist capitalism with slightly different flavors. You’re up against less than one percent of the population whose goal is to acquire as much as possible for themselves, in their lifetime, with zero concern for if there’s stability once they’re dead or if they’re maintaining a system where whoever comes next could achieve what they have. If you tried to take it from them by force, maybe they’d burn it on the way out. But that’s not what’s happening. They’re more than willing to sell it to enrich themselves, and once the scales tip in favor of China, the onus of what to do with that power and how to progress is on them. Pitching the underdog, David vs Goliath angle sounds great, but capitalism is dying with a whimper. Use the moment at hand as a moment to push to the next phase or limp along as capitalism masquerading as socialism with “the transition will come soon” as a perpetual goal on the horizon.
You conflate financial assets with social power. This is a major category error that obscures the material foundations of class rule. Money is not power in itself but a token of command over labour and territory, mediated by the state under the current system. When the load bearing pillar of the current order (America) falls, portfolio diversification into Swiss francs or Trump coin will do nothing to preserve elite dominance under a new order. The American ruling class does not uphold global capitalism because of sentiment or long term vision, but because its reproduction as a class is bound to the existing configuration of productive forces, military reach, and institutional hegemony. To suggest they would willingly abandon this architecture misunderstands how class interest operates structurally. It is also analytically weak to carve out neoliberals as distinct from the broader imperialist bloc. Neoliberalism has been the hegemonic ideology of American capital (and thus global hegemonic capitalism which they uphold through their military and international institutions) since Reagan, guiding both parties in the project of financialisation, deregulation, and global labour arbitrage. The factional noise does not alter the class content.
The David versus Goliath framing appears in your reply, not mine. I made no appeal to underdog narratives. My point was that a conflict with China would not be a limited engagement but a struggle over the terms of global reproduction. That is why nuclear escalation cannot be dismissed as bluff; the stakes would be existential to the bourgeoisie.
Transition is not a future possibility but is ongoing in China, where public ownership remains primary and the birdcage around the secondary private economy has been systematically tightening since 2014. The disciplining of Jack Ma was a demonstration that financial capital operates only within boundaries set by the state. The purposeful deflation of the housing bubble, also reflects a prioritisation of long term productive capacity and social good over short term speculative gain. Contrast this with the capitalist core, where private ownership is primary and the retreat of public provision in healthcare, transport, energy, and water has accelerated. Financialisation of the sort Jack Ma championed (which got him disciplined) is not restrained but encouraged, while housing is treated as an asset class rather than a social good. This is not a difference of policy preference but of underlying social relations. In China, the state (answering to the people) retains the capacity to subordinate capital to social objectives; in the West, capital subordinates the state to accumulation.
Your analysis substitutes individualist psychology for systemic class forces, treating the ruling class as atomised actors free to exit the system that constitutes their power. You misread transition as a future event rather than an active process already reshaping global relations of production. And you sidestep the central question: when the material basis of imperial hegemony shifts, it is not portfolio choices but control over productive forces and state capacity that determines who rules. So again true conflict with China could absolutely go nuclear as it would be a battle for survival for the bourgeoisie where losing entails the loss of all that they value (their capital and the power it confers upon them).
>When the load bearing pillar of the current order (America) falls, portfolio diversification into Swiss francs or Trump coin will do nothing to preserve elite dominance under a new order.
If the American oligarchs convert their wealth to Chinese yuan prior to the collapse of that pillar (and it would appear that many are doing so), and China does not use the opportunity of becoming the new pillar to undermine what possessing currency means in global economics, the elite of the west remain elite even if their sphere of influence shrinks. Which I would argue is an acceptable outcome for the upper echelons of neoliberalism, they’d rather be absolute monarchs of their slice of the planet than god emperors of the planet, so long as they are acknowledged for what they are and have some ability to manipulate beyond their sphere.
>Your analysis substitutes individualist psychology for systemic class forces, treating the ruling class as atomised actors free to exit the system that constitutes their power.
I’m positing that we are in a position where this is extremely likely depending on what China decides to do as it assumes global financial dominance if the American oligarchs move their currency to the yuan before they run the American economy into the ground and China fails to take the opportunity to push for how currency is used globally to be reevaluated. As you pointed out, “The American ruling class does not uphold global capitalism because of sentiment or long term vision, but because its reproduction as a class is bound to the existing configuration of productive forces, military reach, and institutional hegemony.” The existing configuration is failing and the American elite are aware of it, which is why they are extracting as much wealth from the dying American economy before it collapses. They hype anti-China rhetoric because they still have some need to appeal to the masses but are quietly planning for how to maintain their positions when the inevitable change occurs.
>Transition is not a future possibility but is ongoing in China, where public ownership remains primary and the birdcage around the secondary private economy has been systematically tightening since 2014.
My question here is, what do you expect to see domestically and internationally once China assumes the position of the financial pillar? Do they start the process of eliminating the private economy at home? Do they use their leverage to isolate American imperialism by continuing to indulge capitalism as a necessary evil in the global economy and placate the American by allowing them to live as rulers of their own private fiefs on the other side of the world, or do they flex their new power and begin to undermine the entire capitalist system when they control the value of “money”. Money is not power in itself but a token of command over labour and territory, mediated by the state under the current system. What happens when the current system is no longer obligated to be the current system?
>That is why nuclear escalation cannot be dismissed as bluff; the stakes would be existential to the bourgeoisie.
True, but the threat can be minimalized by should China take the reins of global finance and allow billionaires on the side of the planet to maintain their fiefdoms and domestic prestige. But if they chose to do so, where is the line between common sense (they have nukes and will burn it if they can’t have it) and using the power at hand to pressure the economy forward towards socialism? Do you wait for the oligarchs to die out, having pulled the ladders behind them and inadvertently prevented their successors from being able to attain their level of influence? Is it either and die approach, or would you rather see pressure applied, because once the transition occurs the leverage is in China’s hands and they could exercise that power or they could allow their current system to run in their favor indefinitely.
This still treats currency as if it were social power in itself. Under the Chinese system, currency buys exactly zero political command. It buys no control over the Party, the PLA, the police, intelligence, courts, planning organs, SOEs, land policy, capital controls, or the strategic direction of the state. At most, money can still purchase limited command over labour inside the private sector, but even that is precisely the sphere being narrowed by the tightening of the birdcage since 2014.
You also vastly underestimate how difficult it is to simply “move into yuan.” China has strict capital controls for a reason. The RMB is not a frictionless liberal reserve currency designed to let foreign billionaires freely enter, exit, speculate, and dominate. The whole point of China’s financial architecture is that money remains subordinate to state policy. A Western oligarch holding yuan is not transformed into a Chinese power-holder. He is merely holding a claim inside a system whose commanding heights he does not control.
This is not analysis it’s a fantasy. The Western bourgeoisie is not pushing anti-China propaganda as some cynical cover before peacefully jumping into China’s orbit. They are doing it because China is an objective threat to the material basis of their global rule: dollar hegemony, military encirclement, technological monopoly, sanctions power, control over supply chains, and the ideological monopoly of liberal capitalism.
Anti-China propaganda functions much like earlier fascistic scapegoating campaigns: it manufactures an external and racialised enemy while the bourgeoisie brings the teeth of imperialism home. As crisis deepens, the ruling class does not simply retire into yuan-denominated comfort. It intensifies repression, attacks labour, expands surveillance, militarises society, disciplines dissent, and moves toward fascistic consolidation. That is already visible in crackdowns on labour, protest, migrants, communists, anti-war forces, and dissenting media across the imperial core.
The idea that these people are preparing to “become Chinese” is not analysis. It is vibes. They are not trying to join China’s system, because China’s system would not give them command. They are trying to preserve their own system by escalating against the force that most clearly exposes its decline.
First, there is no single coronation moment where China becomes “the financial pillar” and then chooses whether to abolish capitalism globally. Transitions in world systems are uneven, conflictual, and determined by the balance of forces. The more likely path is continued de-dollarisation, expansion of alternative settlement systems, greater South-South development, and the erosion of imperial coercive capacity.
Domestically, I would expect a continuation of tightening the birdcage: disciplining private capital, strengthening planning capacity, prioritising productive over speculative development, expanding state and collective capacity, and preventing finance from becoming sovereign. That does not mean abolishing all private economic activity overnight. It means progressively subordinating it to social and national development as has been happening.
Internationally, much depends on the trajectory of the Euro-Amerikan empire. At present, it appears to be moving toward fascism, remilitarisation, labour repression, and intensified imperial aggression. As US dominance weakens, China will likely continue supporting national development and anti-imperial sovereignty across the Global South, with greater room to back progressive and national-liberation forces as the constraints of encirclement lessen.
This is idealist nonsense. No one “controls the value of money” in abstraction. Money is not the motor of history. It is a social relation resting on production, state power, military force, trade structures, class rule, and institutional trust. You keep treating currency as the master lever, when it is actually a concentrated expression of deeper material relations.
If China gains greater financial centrality, that does not mean it can press a button and abolish capitalism. What it can do is weaken the mechanisms through which imperialism disciplines the world: dollar sanctions, debt traps, unequal exchange, technological dependency, military blackmail, and control over development finance. That is how the ground is prepared for further transition. Not through monetary voluntarism.
This misunderstands the nuclear danger. The threat is not primarily that individual billionaires fear losing their personal bank balances (again substitutingbindividualism for systemic analysis). The threat is that the American imperial state may face irreversible systemic displacement. A declining hegemon does not need to be literally expropriated before it becomes dangerous. It only needs to perceive that its command over the world system is ending.
American power is not just wealth. It is bases, fleets, sanctions, intelligence networks, finance, media, treaties, comprador elites, technology chokepoints, and ideological dominance. If that architecture breaks, the bourgeoisie loses far more than “influence.” It loses the world-historical conditions of its reproduction as a ruling class. That is why nuclear escalation cannot be dismissed as bluff.
Your error is that you reduce class rule to portfolio management. You imagine oligarchs can preserve themselves by swapping dollars for yuan, while ignoring that their power depends on states, armies, laws, property regimes, labour discipline, and imperial hierarchy. They cannot simply exit the system that constitutes them. And China cannot simply inherit global finance and decree socialism by currency policy. The actual struggle is over productive forces, state capacity, class power, and the dismantling of imperial coercion. I don’t know what it is about systemic analysis that you’re so afraid of.
I’m just indulging curiosity. My comments have sparked a lot of responses from a lot of different commenters. I have no idea whether the respondents are in China, the US, or elsewhere, and while you all share some similar ideas, there’s a wide range of attitudes and ideas about what the current status is, what the goals should be, and how/time frame it might transpire. Your responses are just another one on the list and shape how I contemplate my own world views and then push me to construct a clearer goal of how to engage with different personalities and opinions in the future. I’m probably never going to meet any of you in real life nor will any of our personal actions amount to much on the global scale, but I do and will encounter real humans on the local level I operate on and have an influence in, so bantering philosophically with randos on the internet is practice for legitimate social engagement. It’s a place where the stakes are low and the points don’t matter but you have access to a wide variety of human opinions.