Vijay Prashad: The Long Goodbye to the US Dollar

There are moments in history when a system appears so complete that it becomes difficult to imagine its end. When Britannia “ruled the waves,” it was thought in large parts of the world that sterling was not merely a currency but the natural language of commerce itself. 

Since the mid-twentieth century, the United States has spoken of the U.S. dollar in much the same way. Writing in 1980, amid the crisis of the post-Bretton Woods order, the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch observed that “in the United States the illusion of the almighty dollar held sway.” By then, however, this was not only a U.S. illusion. The dollar had already become the world’s principal reserve currency and the dominant currency of international trade.

Now that illusion has begun, slowly and unevenly, to fray.

Tricontinental‘s latest dossier, “The Architecture of Power: The Dollar, Financialisation, and the Struggle for Sovereignty,” shows that the dollar is not merely money but an institution of imperialist power. The dollar system organises trade, determines access to credit, disciplines governments, finances war and reproduces a hierarchy between the Global North and the Global South. 

The debate over the dollar is therefore not a matter of preferring one currency to another — the dollar over the renminbi (RMB) or the euro — but whether humanity can construct an international monetary order that serves development rather than domination. [MORE]