End of Bretton-Woods allows the US to just export financial capital to the rest of the world at an incredible rate, accelerating imperialism to a new stage where production inside the core is much less important.
this is the correct answer. the floating fiat currencies allowed printing to skyrocket in every country with a central bank. and the people closest to the central bank benefited the most from this practice (the US federal reserve has stated this), which allows them to acquire hard assets while the lower classes must compete over fewer resources with an inflating currency.
creating Bretton-Woods was a silver lining after the great depression and WW2, ridiculous the US broke the agreement
In the 2nd Edition Hudson says that lots of capitalists and feds read his book, and they began obfuscating economic statistics because of this book.
Show
If we’re being honest, it really is lol. If someone invents a time machine in the future, one of the missions will be to stop Hudson from publishing his book.
According to Hudson himself, the US establishment fell into panic mode when Nixon abruptly ended the Bretton Woods in 1971, and presses reported that the American century is about to be over (amidst the other crises like Vietnam War, civil rights movement, trade union movements, the international isolation of the US that would follow in the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Yom-Kippur War, the oil price shock and stagflation from 1973 onwards etc…)
If you read the Foreword from the 2nd edition onward, Hudson wrote that the State Department bought two thousand copies of the book to study how to get out of the empire’s own contradictions. Super imperialism allows the US to export its industries to the rest of the world while crushing the domestic working class movements at home, and real wages began to stagnate since.
Communist publishes book explaining capitalism, capitalists read it and learn from it while workers barely touch it
I'm beginning to see a pattern here
Show
I’m a bit confused how people actually feel about Michael Hudson. Can’t tell if he’s loved or hated. He has made undeniable contributions, though.
this is the point when the US stopped being afraid of communism. they'd decided they'd won the cold war, essentially.
Disagreed. I think this is the point where the US was the most scared, and made its very dangerous gambit as a last resort because they knew the alternative was dying out (or nuclear war). This is the time when Kissinger asks the advisors what to do about the US starting to accrue a trade deficit, noting that historically when an empire becomes a net importer it marks the start of imperial decline; they were scared as hell! But of course, one of the advisors tells him "triple the national debt and make the rest of the world pay for it" and the rest is history.
So, Jodie Foster's first feature film was produced in 1971 for 1972 release, and so it was a battleground of time travelers who either wanted to impress Jodie Foster or stop people from impressing Jodie Foster which splintered the timeline and we ended up in a bad one.
Edit: neither side are the good guys, mind you. The good guys with a time machine are creating timelines where Lenin gets a Gundam, not trying to impress/not impress a teenager
https://americandad.fandom.com/wiki/The_Best_Christmas_Story_Never
The American Dad theory of American imperialism. I like it.
Them quoting Hayek and linking to a Bitcoin white paper is the cherry on top of this. Talk abt an immaterial worldview lmao
That... doesn't really say anything. It's just a truckload of graphs showing that a lot of stuff around income and quality of life went to shit in 1971.
It does nothing to explain the why.
This website explains why https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
Does it? Because the question seems to be why there is an inflection point specifically in 1971 and not about the nature of capitalism in general.
I mean I was obviously being a bit silly. It explains why capitalism must do something like that but does not explain why capitalism in the US did it at explicitly that time
The end of any semblance of Keynesian economic ideology shifting into Milton Friedman style economic dictatorship of capital ideology. This eroded any power of that labor had achieved, hence the loss of wage growth in comparison to productivity.
Occam's razor: wages 50% rose with productivity and 50% didn't
Oil price shocks (you can see productivity stagnating for a bit too) and neoliberalism afterwards.
political-economic changes enabled by reactionary backlash against the civil rights movement that coincided with the introduction of spreadsheets as a management tool
That was my answer too! Gold itself isn't better than fiat, but it's definitely true that the end of Bretton Woods facilitates the export of finance capital because they can literally just keep printing more money, which is exactly what happened.
That was a piece of the whole pegging the entire planet to the dollar and ensuring global dollar hegemony, but it was just another effect of that and not the cause of what's seen in the graph, right? Either way the ditching the gold standard is not what conspiracy-chuds and many libertarians think it is.
A lot happened around 1970, roughly at the same time (this is a list from my memory, so dates could be off by a year or two)
- computers enter the market for the end consumer: the PC is born (1971)
- the Internet really takes off (1972)
- 1969 Hippie music festival
- end of the gold standard (1971)
- some oil crisis (1973 especially, which lead to a significant shift that Western countries approach economy on a global scale)
Show
The 1973 oil crisis is especially interesting. Before that, oil consumption grew exponentially. You can see it also very well in this picture:
Show
After the crisis, countries thought "ok, oil consumption cannot grow exponentially much further. We have to shift our economy away from increasing quantity, towards increasing quality" and that marked the shift from hard-economics (heavy industries) towards computer and software economics, which led to the IT industry between 1970 - today.
Edit: oh and i forgot a couple of important things, but i'm not sure whether they're causally connected:
- vietnam war (around 1970)
- women right's movement / women employment started around 1970.
