US Hegemony Is Used To Subordinate The Rest of the World To US Led Capitalism

As the global confluence of struggles undermined the capitalist and imperialist capacities of discipline, the economic order that had dominated the globe for almost thirty years, the Golden Age of U.S. hegemony and capitalist growth, began to unravel. The form and substance of the capitalist management of international development for the postwar period were dictated at the conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944.[8] The Bretton Woods system was based on three fundamental elements. Its first characteristic was the comprehensive economic hegemony of the United States over all the nonsocialist countries. This hegemony was secured through the strategic choice of a liberal development based on relatively free trade and moreover by maintaining gold (of which the United States possessed about one third of the world total) as the guarantee of the power of the dollar. The dollar was "as good as gold." Second, the system demanded the agreement for monetary stabilization between the United States and the other dominant capitalist countries (first Europe then Japan) over the traditional territories of European imperialisms, which had been dominated previously by the British pound and the French franc. Reform in the dominant capitalist countries could thus be financed by a surplus of exports to the United States and guaranteed by the monetary system of the dollar. Finally, Bretton Woods dictated the establishment of a quasi-imperialist relationship of the United States over all the subordinate nonsocialist countries. Economic development within the United States and stabilization and reform in Europe and Japan were all guaranteed by the United States insofar as it accumulated imperialist superprofits through its relationship to the subordinate countries. The system of U.S. monetary hegemony was a fundamentally new arrangement because, whereas the control of previous international monetary systems (notably the British) had been firmly in the hands of private bankers and financiers, Bretton Woods gave control to a series of governmental and regulatory organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and ultimately the U.S. Federal Reserve.[9] Bretton Woods might thus be understood as the monetary and financial face of the hegemony of the New Deal model over the global capitalist economy. The Keynesian and pseudo-imperialist mechanisms of Bretton Woods eventually went into crisis when the continuity of the workers' struggles in the United States, Europe, and Japan raised the costs of stabilization and reformism, and when anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles in subordinate countries began to undermine the extraction of superprofits.[10]