Imperialism Reading Group - Super Imperialism, by Michael Hudson - Week 5 - March 17th to March 23th, 2025

This is a weekly thread in which we read through books on and related to imperialism and geopolitics. Last week's thread is here.

Welcome to the fifth week of Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of US World Dominance! I'm reading the Third Edition.

We are reading one chapter per week, meaning we will finish in June. Obviously, you are totally free to read faster than this pace and look at my/our commentary once we've caught up to you.

Every week, I will write a summary of the chapter(s) read, for those who have already read the book and don't wish to reread, can't follow along for various reasons, or for those joining later who want to dive right in to the next book without needing to pick this one up too. I will post all my chapter summaries in this final thread, for access in one convenient location. Please comment or message me directly if you wish to be pinged for this group.

This week, we will be reading Chapter 4: America's New Deal Puts Its Own Economy First, 1933-1940, which is approximately 22 pages.

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- Apologies for the lack of summaries and engagement from me in chapter 2 and 3; I've only really had time to read over the chapters once as I've had a busy and tiring two weeks. I'll likely post comments and things in the previous threads once I've finished writing up my notes.
- Hell yeah let's go
  I definitely need to reread. I've read everything but definitely am afraid I'm missing major stuff, because what exactly forces certain moves/makes certain reactions seem necessary/like it's the only sensible thing keep surprising me. Like, behind this entire story until now is just the ability of the US army to invade if countries don't go along right? Or, at least, they see the US as still the more profitable path than fighting the US (or maybe just safest bet besides the Bolsheviks who would have the ruling class destroyed)?

I was disappointed to finally read the claim that the US debt regime and the impossibility of Germany to pay debts was the main cause of WW2. I think it's a perfect example where the abstraction away from commodities into monetary policy results in a mistake. WW2, as an extension of the imperialist wars of the period before, was a fight over control of the world resources and labor brought directly to the method of war to capture them. This book is amazingly in depth to describe one mechanism of imperialism, but I think it mistakes its own analysis of a tactic as the strategy or goal itself. It's a sort of category error, I think.
For the rest it was a good chapter. Felt like a lot of the same mechanism continuously occurring with differences in exactly how to best leverage a debt regime having different results. It's a good analysis that can be used for a lot.
- It's the problem that almost every academic has, no matter how well researched. A historian of war is going to boil every answer down to war. A historian of race is going to boil every problem down to race. Hudson is a scholar on finance and so he's gonna find finance as the answer to all his questions.
  In addition to your complaint, I found the lack of discussion on the USSR during the inter-war period was a major gap. Of course it makes sense, the USSR was not part of the financial apparatus that Western Europe and the US were fumbling so it didn't focus. However, Hudson mentions that Europe provided no alternatives to US creditor power which is where he could have fit in a small section discussing the WW1 nation that was exercising an alternative. Additionally, the USSR being the boogieman to Western Europe as a cause of WW2 can't be understated.
  Overall this does not diminish the value of the book or Hudson as a scholar, but instead emphasizes the need to be a critical reader at all times.

Alright friends, time to decipher this ancient text. When Hudson says FDR's dollar devaluation was an anti-creditor stance, I think he means that owners of debt would like the relative value of the dollar to be higher. So devaluing is anti-creditor, even though it negatively affects countries that are indebted to the US, like France and Britain. France and Britain dislike the devalued dollar because it makes American goods cheaper, which makes them harder to compete with selling their own goods.
And the US can afford to do this because their economy at the time was largely self contained, with foreign trade making a very small percentage of total goods exchanged. Any clarity from the crowd is always appreciated.
- I'm smol finance brain but I just read the section and I think this is pretty much right; FDR was thinking one step ahead and was more concerned with getting the US economy recovered and understood that things would work out in their favor in the international stage with time anyway.
  
  I explained in another comment that this thinking was hard to wrap my head around because I've only lived in a globalized economy, but up until this point the US had only had success with protectionism with no real reason to turn away from it.

Finally caught up! As other comrades have noted, I am unconvinced by Hudson's claims of financial relations being the primary cause of World War II. I certainly believe it played a role, but not nearly as important a role as Hudson claims it to have played.
That being said, the sheer depth of understanding of this lever of Imperialism makes this book incredibly valuable for my understanding of US foreign policy, and how the Empire functions today. It's great that we read/reread Lenin first though, as this is a very critical read that can be easy to overblow without firm grounding in Marxist theory, in my opinion.

Another interesting chapter on the US stumbling its way into empire. I think it's hard to wrap my head around how economically independent the US was from the rest of the world because I've grown up in 30 years of globalization. Not to fall into "American exceptionalism", but it did make the US materially different than the rest of the capitalist great powers. "Imperialism in one country", to parody another thinker. I would love to read a Marxist tome on the subject of pre-world war American capitalism.
This all makes understanding FDR's motives difficult at times, but in many ways he was "doing what's right" for the American people. ("what's right" meaning from a capitalist perspective). Sure he could have taken a proactive role in taking the US to the next level of global hegemony, but he was instead focused on domestic stability. It also seems there was a punitive aspect to it, that the Great War was Europe's fault so they must be punished. This is very different from the normal way WW1 is taught in the US, that America was a reluctant, yet eventually fully committed, member of the Allies. As much Hudson looks back from hindsight on what the US could have done to make the world econ stable, I think it's perfectly logical for the US to experiment in ways to adapt to the global stage. After all, what in American history up to that point suggested they should stray from the protectionist path? Is that not what insulated it from the economic damage of the Great War?
I think I would also like to read more about the "Gold bloc" that formed after the UK and US set their own currencies afloat. Hudson explains the mechanics of how it lead to Super-Imperialism: that free floating dollars made the US currency more competitive while undercutting Europe's ability to repay US loans. However it would be interesting to examine the economics of the countries within the Gold bloc more, their rationale and experience. He also explains, briefly but adequately, how US's strategy earned them half the world's gold supply. The US not only had a trade surplus to exchange with gold, but the relative safety of the US made it more attractive for European investors than Europe or Asia what with heightening tensions. The explanation of how the US Federal Reserve and Treasury double booked incoming gold surpluses without expanding it's monetary supply was brief, but I imagine Hudson will expand on this much more in a later chapter.
I have one major question after this chapter: what exactly was keeping the US relatively powerful during the Inter-War period? Hudson repeatedly points to the great powers of Europe believing in "virtue of credit," that they repaid debts because it was the proper thing to do. This alone seems inefficient, I wonder if there is a more materialist explanation there. Essentially, why didn't everyone unanimously refuse to pay the debts to the US when it was clear they would provide no legal path to reprieve? Especially when America's economy was so isolated, they could have withstood it.

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