Which class holds state power?
https://orinocotribune.com/a-reply-to-greg-godels-on-chinas-road-to-socialism/When the capitalist class holds state power:
A Reply to Greg Godels on China’s Road to Socialism
By Friends of Socialist China – Jul 23, 2026
Greg Godels has published a thoughtful response in ML Today to Carlos Martinez’s recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Godels argues that the exploitation of the many by the few remains a central driving force of the Chinese economy, and questions whether China’s market reforms and its billionaire class can be squared with a socialist trajectory.
In the article below, Carlos argues that the decisive Marxist question is not simply whether wage labour and surplus value exist, but which class holds state power and in whose interest the economic surplus is directed. On that test – the class nature of the state – China’s billionaires answer to the state rather than command it; its reforms were a conscious strategy to develop the productive forces and build the material basis for a more advanced socialism; and China provably does not participate in imperialist super-exploitation.
Greg Godels has written a considered response in ML Today to my recent reply to Jacobin on China and exploitation. Unlike much of what passes for left commentary on China, Godels writes as a comrade, not a Cold Warrior. He admires the Chinese revolution, insists that China’s fate must be decided by the Chinese people, and closes by affirming that, whatever its difficulties, “it is China’s road”. On all of that we agree. Where we part company is over a question that Godels, for all his fidelity to the classics of Marxism, never quite poses: which class holds state power?
State and revolution
Godels’s central charge is that the debate over China too rarely invokes “the exploitation of the many by the few”, and that when I ask for exploitation to be “contextualised”, I am really relativising and rationalising it. He is right that exploitation belongs at the centre of any Marxist analysis. But there is a second important category that is missing from his account entirely: the class nature of the state.
For Marx and Lenin alike, the question of whether a society is advancing towards socialism was never settled simply by cataloguing the presence or absence of wage labour and surplus value at the point of production. It was settled principally by asking which class holds power, and in whose interest the state directs the economic surplus. This is the whole point of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and of Lenin’s insistence, throughout the period of the New Economic Policy, that market mechanisms within a workers’ state are something categorically different from capitalism under a bourgeois state.
Under the NEP in the Soviet state, private capital, wage labour, rich peasants and market relations all flourished. Lenin did not conclude that the October Revolution had thereby been cancelled. He concluded that the proletarian state would make use of capitalist forms, on its own terms and under its own control, in order to build the material foundations of socialism.
Godels praises the successes of the early-1950s Chinese economy – and rightly so – yet that economy included a substantial private-capitalist sector and a national bourgeoisie, all operating within the framework of New Democracy. He invokes Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR – but Stalin’s argument there is precisely that commodity production still existed in the Soviet Union nearly four decades after the revolution, and that the abolition of exploitation was a process, not an event accomplished at a stroke. If the persistence of capitalist forms disqualifies China from the socialist camp, it disqualifies Lenin’s Russia too – not to mention today’s Cuba.
Trickle down
Godels argues that rising living standards are no proof that exploitation has ceased: after all, British life expectancy has more than doubled since 1800, yet the British working class remained profoundly exploited and capital ever more concentrated. To point to China’s improving conditions, then, is supposedly to echo the capitalist promise that “a rising tide lifts all boats”.
Such an analysis ignores some important facts. In nineteenth-century Britain, rising living standards were a byproduct – wrung from a resisting ruling class through bitter class struggle, and underwritten by the plunder of empire. To the extent that the Western working classes have secured rising wages, shorter hours and welfare states, this was made possible in no small part by the super-exploitation of the colonies and neo-colonies – the imperial rent drawn from half the globe, which allowed a portion to be redistributed at home without threatening the accumulation of capital. Lenin’s account of the “labour aristocracy”, bribed with “crumbs” from imperialist super-profits, describes exactly this mechanism.
Western prosperity has always had a hidden supplier: the low-wage workers of the Global South, whose super-exploitation John Smith has shown to be the beating heart of twenty-first century imperialism. The capitalist state serves capital; whatever reaches workers does so incidentally, or as a concession extracted under duress and financed from abroad. That is what “trickle down” actually describes.
China is the opposite case. It has no empire and no colonies from which to draw imperial rent. And the rise in living standards is not a byproduct but the conscious, planned objective of state policy. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of extreme poverty by design – through targeted programmes in which three million cadres were dispatched to live in poor villages until every household was raised above the line; through directed investment; through a land system that was never privatised; and through the conscious mobilisation of the state’s resources towards common prosperity.
The distinction is between a state that is an instrument of capital and one that is not. Indeed China passes Godels’s own preferred test – that in the Soviet Union sacrifice was bearable because the wealth produced was “not systematically and methodically directed to the few” but towards a better future for all. A planned economy under Communist Party command has directed the surplus into poverty eradication, mass housing, universal education and healthcare, the world’s largest clean-energy build-out, and the climb to the technological frontier. That has nothing in common with the theories of “trickle down” economics, which call for minimal state intervention and the upward redistribution of wealth.
The difference between Shenzhen and New York
Godels points out that Shenzhen has 132 billionaires to New York’s 146, and asks, what is the social utility of a billionaire?
It is a fair question, of course. The issue, however, is not the existence of great private fortunes as such but their relationship to a process of national development. In the US, billionaires effectively own the state: capital sets the limits of what politics may attempt, and no administration of either party may seriously threaten its prerogatives. In China, billionaires answer to the state. They are tolerated to the degree that their activity serves the national development plan, and they are disciplined the moment it does not – through regulation, ideological guidance, anti-monopoly action, the common prosperity agenda, the anti-corruption campaigns, and, when necessary, the halting of what would have been the largest public offering in history and the humbling of the country’s then richest man. As Eric Li puts it, in China “capital does not rise above political authority”; in the US, “the interests of capital and capital itself have risen above the American nation”.
The “iron logic” of accumulation
Godels’s deepest theoretical claim is that accumulation is “Moses and the Prophets”: capital, once amassed in private hands, is driven by an iron logic to reinvest, expand and seek profit abroad, and China’s billionaires “cannot escape that logic”. The Belt and Road, on this reading, is simply the export of their accumulated capital – China following the well-travelled road to imperialism.
The trouble is that the iron logic operates under specific conditions: where the capitalist class commands the state, and where crises of overproduction and falling profitability at home drive capital outward to super-exploit cheaper labour. Far from exploiting others, China has itself been a net loser in the world economy. Its wages have risen rapidly and it has been steadily climbing the value chain, but it super-exploits no one, and the net drain of value still runs the other way. The Marxist economists Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts calculate that surplus value has been transferred out of China to the imperialist bloc at an average of 5 to 10 percent of Chinese GDP every year since the 1990s – a drain amounting to more than 60 percent of China’s annual exports to those countries. On their reckoning, China “clearly fits into the dominated bloc”.
The Belt and Road does not reverse this by super-exploiting the Global South. It carries no austerity conditionalities. Chinese investment banks lend at roughly half Western interest rates. China is supporting countries of the Global South in modernising their economies and breaking out of underdevelopment. In fact, the largest recipients of Chinese overseas investment are the United States, Britain and Australia, which are self-evidently not targets of cheap-labour super-exploitation.
Export of capital, as Lenin’s own framework makes clear, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of imperialism; around 90 percent of the world’s countries export capital to one degree or another. Imperialism is domination – and China dominates no one. It has no colonies, wages no wars of conquest. It has not built a global infrastructure of power projection. A country cannot have become imperialist without ever having fought its way to empire; that would be unprecedented in world history, and would render Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and war obsolete.
What I did not argue
Godels has me saying that “the ends justify the means” – that Chinese workers must suffer capitalist exploitation now so that gains may come later. I argued nothing of the kind. My argument was that exploitation must be measured against the real alternatives available to a relatively poor, blockaded, formerly semi-colonised country – against Bangladesh, against the other destinations of outsourced production, where wages are lower and repression harsher and no commensurate rise in living standards is on offer – and not against an imagined, frictionless socialist utopia.
The purpose of reform
Godels treats China’s post-1978 reforms as, in effect, a capitulation – capitalism admitted “through the front door”.
The reforms had a clear purpose, stated openly and consistently by their architects: to develop the productive forces so as to build the material basis for a more advanced socialism. This is not a retrospective gloss; it is orthodox historical materialism. Marx wrote in Volume III of Capital that the development of the productive forces is “capital’s historic mission and justification”, for “it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production”. The vision of the Chinese leadership was to replace “unwittingly” with “purposefully” – to use capital, within strict limits and under heavy regulation, to accomplish that development consciously, under the direction of a workers’ state, rather than leaving it to the blind operation of the market. That is precisely the logic of Lenin’s NEP, applied, extended, deepened and updated.
The reforms answered a real and urgent problem. Despite its achievements, China in 1978 remained a poor country: per capita income of around 210 dollars, some 250 million people below the poverty line, food production barely ten percent higher per head than in 1952. As Deng Xiaoping put it with characteristic bluntness, “socialism means eliminating poverty. Pauperism is not socialism, still less communism”. The superiority of socialism, Deng argued, had ultimately to be demonstrated by developing the productive forces faster than capitalism and raising living standards accordingly – otherwise the whole project would forfeit its legitimacy and ultimately fail.
This was not a betrayal of the revolution’s purpose but a restatement of it: as Deng insisted, “only the socialist system can eradicate poverty”, and only a socialist state would direct development towards that end rather than towards private accumulation.
Deng’s generation drew from the decline and fall of the Soviet Union the conclusion that what fatally destabilised it was not its experiments with the market but its long failure, from the mid-1970s, to deliver rising living standards – combined with decades of ideological degeneration – such that when socialism came under attack the masses could not be mobilised to defend it. China’s reforms were, among other things, an attempt to avoid that fate: to root socialism in the tangible, improving material life of the people. While this has generated very real contradictions, it has kept the Chinese revolution alive and advancing while the Soviet one perished. An important consideration for us Marxists.
China’s internationalism
Godels appends a separate charge: that China “fence-sits” on Gaza, Iran and Cuba, and that the foremost potential counterweight to US imperialism has simply stepped aside. This issue is dealt with at length by Danny Haiphong, but the actual record is worth setting out.
Iran has been subjected since February 2026 to a criminal US-Israeli war of aggression. China has consistently condemned that war as a flagrant violation of international law, opposed the illegal sanctions regime, and repeatedly demanded a ceasefire and an end to the bombing of Iran’s civilian and energy infrastructure. Far from standing aside, China purchases the great majority of Iran’s oil exports in open defiance of Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign, and there are credible reports that Chinese air-defence, satellite and navigation systems have materially strengthened Iran’s ability to defend itself. Coordinating with Pakistan in particular, China has also been central to efforts for a negotiated peace.
It was China that brokered the 2023 Iran–Saudi normalisation, one fruit of which was Riyadh’s refusal to let US and Israeli jets refuel on its soil. And when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to vessels tied to the US, Israel and their allies, it pointedly exempted China – to the point that ships have taken to switching their transponders to feign Chinese ownership in order to pass safely. As Haiphong argues, the demand that China instead “do more” by confronting the US militarily would drag it into a war no one in the Axis of Resistance has asked it to fight, on behalf of others, at enormous risk – while doing nothing to help Palestine or Iran that China’s actual support is not already doing.
On Palestine the record is likewise substantive. China was among the first states to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), in 1965, and the State of Palestine, in 1988. It has used its standing at the United Nations not only to demand an immediate ceasefire but to uphold the Palestinians’ right to armed resistance. In 2024 it convened all the major Palestinian factions in Beijing and brokered the Beijing Declaration on national unity. Relations between Beijing and Tel Aviv have fallen to their lowest ebb.
One may still wish for more; but the blame for Gaza rests with the United States, which supplies the arms and the diplomatic shield, and the responsibility for stopping it rests first of all with us, in the imperialist countries, whose task is to disarm our own governments rather than to demand that a sanctioned developing country fight the empire on our behalf.
Cuba is the clearest case of all. As Washington tightens an illegal blockade that has plunged the island into daily blackouts, it is China that has stepped in – financing and building dozens of solar parks, committing to some two gigawatts of capacity by 2028, and donating tens of thousands of photovoltaic kits for rural clinics and homes, all with no conditionalities, no structural adjustment, no demand for market access. Cuba’s solar revolution is socialist solidarity in a highly concrete, life-saving, form.
While we are on the historical record, one older charge in Godels’s essay deserves correction: that Mao-era China entered a “shameful alliance with South African apartheid” in the anti-colonial wars in Portugal’s African colonies. This misrepresents what happened. In Mozambique China backed Frelimo, and in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde the PAIGC – the very movements that won those liberation wars. Angola is more complicated. China’s stated position was for the unity of the three liberation movements, as set out in the Alvor Agreement and recognised by the Organisation of African Unity; it received an MPLA delegation in Beijing as late as June 1975, and it never attacked the MPLA, or the government the MPLA went on to form, by name. But by loudly opposing the Soviet and Cuban role in the country, China effectively lined up against what proved to be the only genuine liberation movement – whose victory, secured with Cuban and Soviet support, was a triumph of proletarian internationalism. That turned out to be a genuine error, amid the poison of the Sino-Soviet split. But it was by no means an alliance with apartheid, and to describe it as such is to seriously misrepresent the historical record.
China’s road
“It is China’s road”, Godels concludes, and there he is absolutely right. Our task, as Marxists outside China looking in, is to defend China’s right to travel its own road, and to assess it as we assess all socialist construction – materially, historically, against the real alternatives, and not in comparison with an ideal held up precisely so that reality can come off second best. To do otherwise, at a moment when the imperialist camp is manufacturing consent for a New Cold War and rehearsing the arguments for a hot one, is to hand ammunition to the wrong side.
No question there are potholes on China’s road, as there are on every road out of underdevelopment and encirclement. But the road nonetheless runs unmistakably in the direction of socialism
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Michael Hudson: The U.S. Plan to Revive Geoeconomic Dominance : Transcript – Chronicles – Sovereign Global Majority
Michael Hudson: The U.S. Plan to Revive Geoeconomic Dominance
July 23, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHvpgCaCkSs&t=953s
Transcript
#Glenn Diesen
Welcome back. Professor Michael Hudson joins us today, and I would advise everyone to follow his work. I’ve left a link in the description. So yes, at least this is what I read to stay up to date. Thank you for coming back on, Michael. It’s great to see you again.
#Michael Hudson
It’s good to be here with all of this news happening. The stock market’s up. Everybody seems confident that there’s not going to be much of a disturbance in world inflation or exchange rates from all of this. It’s just amazing. Well, we’re talking about the war that’s going on, the market as if, well, it’s really not going to matter.
#Glenn Diesen
I’m wondering if they’re delusional or if it’s market manipulation, or how to explain this. Anyway, that’s some of the things we’re getting to today. Because what is happening is quite remarkable. After decades of globalization—that is, the integration of markets and also a buildup of huge, unsustainable debt—we now see that this US-centric format for globalization, that is, integrating the world organized around the United States, this model has seemingly exhausted itself. That is, it’s organized around US financial markets, the US dollar, US-controlled transportation corridors. All of this is now being dismantled by economic warfare and even war. And you probably saw in the interview with Scott Besant, where he makes the point that the wars on Iran, Venezuela, even Russia, they all have an economic function to strengthen the US dollar. So I thought it was interesting because it does beg the question: to what extent is anyone behind the wheel, or do you see a plan here of the United States?
#Michael Hudson
Well, there has been a long plan, and it’s very easy to dismiss Trump and say, well, Trump’s losing the war with Iran. The whole memorandum of understanding was, in effect, a capitulation to Iran. And you can see that it seems futile for Trump to try to get in deeper and deeper. So the assumption is, since he’s getting the U.S. in deeper and deeper, he must not have a plan because it’s not working. But there is a plan, and not only Trump, but especially his colleague, Secretary of the Treasury Besant, has been very openly expressing what this is. And Trump himself was outlining the plan already in his first administration, way back in 2018. He said that the number one aim was that he saw America’s military spending abroad, in an attempt to enforce a U.S.-centered world order— dollarization, U.S. financial markets—had been, since 1950, the main balance of payments drain on the United States. And it was foreign military spending that forced the United States off gold in 1971. Well, from 1971 until very recently, what took the place of gold? The U.S. spent money into foreign markets, and foreign markets were recycling this to the United States. At first, local recipients of dollars—companies, economies, governments—would turn over the dollars to the central bank. And what would the central bank do? Well, as we’ve discussed before, and as I discussed in my book *Superimperialism*, foreign central banks bought U.S. Treasury IOUs— Treasury bonds, securities, notes, short-term. And then, in the last few years, instead of this intergovernmental central bank recycling, you had foreign private investors buying U.S. stocks and U. S. bonds. All of this money was recycled into the U.S. stock market, which was mainly being driven up by debt. Well, all of this means of somehow maintaining America’s domination is now called into question. What Trump had said is, well, the first thing we want to do is stop all of this military spending we’re doing abroad. He’d talked about withdrawing his troops from NATO already in his first administration, and he’d singled out OPEC. He said, we’re spending a lot of money defending the Middle East, West Asia, and they really have to somehow end up paying us. Well, of course, that was the whole idea of the petrodollar agreement of 1974–1975, that OPEC could charge whatever it wanted for its oil, and it would reinvest its oil earnings in the U.S. financial markets, stocks, and bonds. Well, all of that was working. But still, the United States, in the interim since the 1970s, has lost its industrial power. It’s lost its creditor power, turning into a debtor country. It needed a new strategy. And last year, at the end of 2025, the U.S. spelled out the strategy. And it was, well, we can’t support our control of the world economy anymore by industry or even by our financial markets. We have to establish a series of monopolies to make America a rentier economy. And the three sectors that the United States wanted to control have been, number one, the longstanding sector of oil. We’ve discussed that before. America wants to control the oil trade so that its allies cannot deal with other producers of oil that would interfere with the U.S. monopoly. So while almost all the attention of the shows that you’ve been doing and that have been in the media has been focused on the fighting against Iran and isolating Iranian oil, especially Iranian oil exports to China, there’s been a similar U.S. attack bombing Russian oil refineries and gas refineries through Ukraine. The United States has been providing Ukraine with guidance and missiles to show just exactly where to bomb so that Russia will not be the beneficiary of this imminent rise in oil prices that’s going to result from the closing of the Strait of Hormuz for 20% of the world’s oil trade, and now another 5% of the world’s oil trade as the Yemenis have cut back Saudi Arabia’s West Coast export facilities. So the world is facing a very sharp rise in oil prices.
And essentially, the United States wants to be the beneficiary of this, especially through the exportation of natural gas, liquefied natural gas. So it wants to make sure that it will be the beneficiary of this rise in oil prices as a result of the war in West Asia, not Russia, and still wants to be able to isolate China from receiving this. Well, what Trump has done, early this year he said what he really wants to do, repeatedly, is make the Arab OPEC countries pay for America’s military costs there. Well, suddenly, Trump was inspired by the fact that Iran now wants to impose tolls on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz that Iran has estimated will yield it about $40 billion a year. Well, Trump finally has found a way to charge the OPEC countries for the costs of the military. He calls it defense, or a guardian angel, defending these countries from Iran and any other attacker. And he said, well, there will be—he said a few days ago—there are going to be tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. Forget international law about no tolls being allowed to be imposed on international waters. There are going to be tolls. We will get them, not Iran. Well, immediately Secretary of State Rubio said, wait a minute, if you’re saying that America will get the tolls instead of Iran, then that justifies Iran’s claim that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is dead. The UN rules that international waters cannot have tolls unless they’ve been grandfathered in by signatories to the UN agreement, such as Turkey with access to the Black Sea, Egypt with its canal, and the Panama Canal. Unless they’ve grandfathered these in, international waters can’t have tolls. Well, Rubio said, you can’t say this. We don’t want to give up anything on international law that we can still use to try to prevent Iran from getting the tolls. So Trump then backpedaled, and the next day, a few days ago, gave a press conference saying, all right, we’ve made a new agreement with the OPEC Arab countries. They are going to pay us for the cost of our defending them as their guardian angel, but not through tolls. They’re going to invest in the United States, just as way back after 1975, Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries invested their oil export earnings here. They’re going to invest in U.S. industry as partners. And already this has begun to take form. Amazon, for instance, has made a huge investment in Bahrain in artificial intelligence, these huge fields of computers that are using energy. And that is the second element of what the U.S. wants to monopolize. In addition to controlling the oil trade and essentially obtaining all of the recycled oil export revenues for its own economy, the U.S. wants to control a monopoly in information technology and associated computerization and the Internet. And this is why what has been stabilizing the U.S. balance of payments has been huge private foreign investment and government investment, including the United Arab Emirates, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, into the U.S. golden seven stocks of information technology, computer chips, and Amazon and Google and all of the Internet and public discussions, X, etc., Facebook, all of these. Well, the problem is now that these stocks are going down because analysts have found out, well, in order for these companies to make this vast increase in earnings, in monopoly rents that they’ve expected as a result of building huge information technology centers, we can’t do that in the United States because we don’t have the electricity and we don’t have the water to cool the electricity, the chips that make all this intelligence. So just as the United States has offshored its industry, its manufacturing industry, it’s now offshoring its artificial intelligence monopoly. Where is it going to offshore it to? Well, to the OPEC countries, especially to the Arab OPEC countries. That’s why, as I said, Amazon and Bahrain. And in the last two days, the United States has made a deal with the Arab Emirates saying, well, you know, you can be partners with us in huge U.S. investments in building these industries together, this information technology where you are. You will provide the… You won’t have to export your energy at all. You’ll provide your energy domestically to power this huge American investment in information technology. Well, a few days ago, Iran focused its bombing on Amazon’s investment in information technology in Bahrain. Iran’s position is, well, what’s our strategy? Number one, we want to drive the United States out of the whole West Asian region. The first thing we’ve got to do is drive out the military bases. It’s done that with all the military bases except Israel. It’s bombed them, and the United States Army, the military, is in complete agreement: okay, we’re going to withdraw our military bases there. We can’t afford them anymore, mainly because we can’t protect them from the Iranian missiles that have shown they can penetrate our defenses at will. And Iran has just finished, in the last three days, bombing what’s left of the American military bases. But Iran then says, if we are going to drive the United States out of West Asia, it can’t just be the military bases. We have to end the whole economic and financial symbiosis between the United States and these local monarchies there. And under this symbiosis of investing their oil export proceeds in American stocks and bonds and partnerships with the American AI industry, their hearts are going to follow where the money is. We’ve got to prevent this economic symbiosis. So there’s not going to be any linkage at all between the U.S. economy and these economies, so that we can then essentially free the region from the United States. Well, that means that its bombing is going to prevent all of this. This is really what the war is all about, and it’s been depicted as an existential war on Iran’s part because the United States wanted to do to Iran just what it did to Mexico. It wanted to have a very quick war, as it had in Venezuela. You kidnap the president, you have a regime change that agrees to turn over its oil to the United States. All of Venezuela’s oil export revenues are put into a U.S. bank account that’s run by the U.S. Treasury. Well, a few months ago, the Secretary of the Treasury, Besant, said, we’re going to do the same thing in Iran once we defeat it. And just before the June 17th Memorandum of Understanding was signed, Hegseth came out and said, well, what we’re going to do is we’re going to conquer Iran, and we’re going to have a regime change that will put all of Iran’s oil revenues in a Treasury account, and this account will have to be spent in the United States to buy U.S. exports and U.S. goods. Well, then the negotiators worked out this memorandum of agreement, and it looks like Iran has just withdrawn from that agreement a few days ago because it became apparent that the United States never had any intention at all of actually meeting the terms of the agreement. For one thing, the whole agreement was to be put in motion by this payment of at least a token sum of $12 billion of the $100 billion of Iranian savings that the United States has told its allies, especially in the Emirates and the Arab OPEC countries, to confiscate. Well, Hegseth said he’s worked with the Emirates to say, don’t give them a penny. And so the Emirates and Bahrain and other countries have said, we’re not going to return any of this $12 billion, much less $100 billion.
To Iran, we’re going to say, Iran, you’ve attacked us. When we attack you, you fought back. Your fighting back is an attack on us. We want reparations for the cost that we’ve had to suffer from your defending yourself against the U.S., Israeli, and our own military attacks on you. And Hegseth had spelled all this out just before, actually on July 11th, when the negotiators drafted the agreement that was signed on the 17th. Well, it’s obvious this wasn’t going to be enacted. And regarding letting Iran administer trade in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States never had any intention at all of letting Iran charge any tolls or even administrative fees for registering the ships, for coordinating the ships—anything that the administration of a strait would do. The U.S. Navy came in and protected ships to try to break Iranian control by turning off their transponders and sailing close to the Omani shore, saying, well, you know, even though the Memorandum of Understanding said Iran will govern all shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, this doesn’t apply to Iran’s own territorial waters. So there are going to be two routes through the Strait of Hormuz. There’s going to be the Iranian shore route that’s not international waters, and it’s not under Iranian waters. And as for the in between international waters, that doesn’t apply because the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS, prevents any country from charging tolls that isn’t already grandfathered into the clause. And Iran said, well, we never signed that agreement. Iran may have, but it hasn’t us. And Iran is in a state of war with us. And anyway, this law of the sea saying you can’t charge tolls does not preclude us and other countries from defending ourselves in a state of war. Oman is in a state of war with us because Oman is hosting U.S. military bases from which missiles and bombs are being sent into our territory. So, of course, we have control over the strait. Well, this is what Trump is all about. So Iran is claiming the right to claim it when the 60-day ceasefire period was to have been over. Iran had planned to impose these tolls. Trump said, no, you’re not going to impose the tolls. We’re going to impose the tolls to reimburse ourselves for all of the costs. And we’re going to get 20% of the oil export proceeds of the Arab countries who export this oil—20% of the value of this is all going to be paid to us as a toll. Well, that’s what immediately the legal fight is about. There goes the international law of the sea. There goes the memorandum of understanding. So you see that when this is the aim of Trump, you could say that he’s attacking Iran not simply because he’s deluded by his belief that somehow we can destroy Iran’s military, we can destroy their defenses, we can destroy their missiles, we can hit the civilians and the hospitals and the schools and demoralize the population so much that they will want to put a U.S. regime in so we’ll stop making them so unhappy. This is all an illusion. But for the U.S., this fight against Iran is extraordinary—existential for the United States’ plan of how to control the world economy, as it is for Iran to defend its own sovereignty and its own existence against the United States’ attempt to invade it, break it up by trying to get the invasions from Balochistan, from the Kurds, and others. So this is really what the fight is all about and why it’s going to go on and on. And in the process of going on and on, it will block the oil trade, leading to a stoppage of oil, leading to the world production crisis and financial crisis that we’ve discussed in our earlier shows.
#Glenn Diesen
Well, I’m thinking if I was in Washington advising Trump on how to restore U.S. geoeconomic dominance, I would probably advise what they’re doing now to a large extent. That is, for the U.S. to revive its technological dominance, for it to control international transportation corridors—that is, the maritime corridors, etc.—restore, yeah, third, restore America’s financial dominance with its currency. You know, you want to keep rivals of the United States weakened, you want to keep the rivals divided, prevent them from integrating, and also keep the vassals dependent. If you do want to find a new formula for American dominance, that seems to be a good pathway now. As you say, they do very often make comments that support this logic, though. That is, the idea that all international waterways must remain under U.S. control, even through piracy. We see now part of the way they measured success in Venezuela was, that they will now have to sell their oil in dollars. Their proceeds will have to be invested into the United States. Trump himself bragged about how much money they’ve been able to extract from Venezuela. We see the same with Russia, how much there are comments about torching Russian oil refineries through their Ukrainian proxy. Besant made the comment that after the war, the Russians will probably be forced to start selling their oil and gas in dollars again. And, um, yeah, Iran, as Lindsey Gray made the point, that yes, Iran is oil-rich, and this will now fall under U.S. control when it’s over. We had all these American leaders at some point making the same chant, that is, you know, this short-term pain for long-term gain—we’re going to get it under our control. Not just American control, but the oil would have to be sold—well, the part of the deal the Americans wanted, which they were quite open about, was that whatever the Iranians make from oil, which should be sold in dollars, should be used to give the U.S. exclusive rights to sell agricultural products to Iran. So again, selling in dollars, used to buy U.S. products. And at the same time, when the Americans are punishing Iran, they’re torching all the bridges and things that are used to connect the Eurasian landmass that is part of the Belt and Road Initiative, which connects Iran to Russia, China, and so forth. We see that the allies or vassals of the United States in the Middle East and Europe are now asked to increase their dependence on the U.S., and the U.S. will also monetize this. That is, they now have to pay for, quote-unquote, protection. We see the same with all these wars on Iran, for example, that China should be cut off from a key supplier of oil. It should also, of course, have its tech development scaled back to restore U.S. tech dominance. So I see what they’re going for, and if we throw all the morals out the window, global hegemony is the key objective. All of this makes perfect sense. The fact that they’re saying it out loud as well is quite interesting. But I guess my question is, what is the likelihood of the U.S. succeeding in these objectives, and what could go wrong? Because the U.S. wanted to break Chinese tech dominance, it proved that that wasn’t really feasible. They also see that Russia is willing to go all the way. Essentially, Iran isn’t being defeated. They’re not giving up. They see what the Americans are doing. The Iranians, as you said, are willing to destroy data centers of the United States in the Middle East. They’re willing to knock out—I think they took out the desalination plant in Kuwait—which means they can actually make this country cease to exist. They’re willing to go up that escalation ladder because it’s all or nothing for them. So I guess my question is, to what extent do you see the U.S. being able to control the economic consequences of these conflicts, that is, these wars, be they economic or actual wars against China, Russia, Iran? Because a lot of things can go wrong, and at the same time, the U.S. economy isn’t doing that well either. I mean, yes, the stock markets are up, and if that was the only indicator of economic health, wonderful—America would be back. But, you know, many things can go wrong here.
#Michael Hudson
Well, you’re right to have mentioned transportation. And to answer your question, in order to impose U.S. control of the world oil trade to get its income for itself, and the artificial intelligence computer technology trade, the U.S. does need to control shipping and international transportation as well. Because how can you export your oil without doing it by ships or by overland means such as pipelines? Well, the very first fight that Trump picked with Europe and most of America’s main—I won’t say enemy, but its main opponent—is, of course, Europe, its allies, Europe, Japan, and its other allies. Before it fights its real enemies—Russia, China, and Iran—and the global majority, it wants to tighten its control over Europe and make sure that Europe is locked into dependence on America’s liquefied natural gas and transportation. And so this required two things: number one, the blowing up of the North Sea pipeline, as we’ve discussed; and number two, what you’re seeing now—the constant bombing of Russian shipping through the Baltic. For a long time, Russia exported its oil through the Latvian east coast vents, that went through the Baltic. Russia is now still exporting oil through the Baltic, and you have Estonia and Latvia, permitting NATO to basically stop Russian oil exports through the Baltic. Well, all of that violates the UN Law of the Sea. That’s not free trade. The United States’ objective now is saying, in 1945, we supported free trade because we were the beneficiaries. When England promoted free trade in the 19th century, that was called free trade imperialism. Well, that’s what America did after 1945. But now we’re not for free trade anymore, because if we can’t have free trade of other countries trading among themselves and being independent of the United States—if we can’t control foreign oil as a rival—we will destroy that oil. We will destroy Russia’s ability to refine its oil. We will destroy Russia’s ability to transport its oil to other countries. We will destroy its pipelines. And the same with Iran. We will destroy Iranian ports and Iranian shipping, as we’ve been doing, so that it can’t export either to China or to India or anywhere else. So the control of oil and control of transportation go together. Well, that’s why the first fight Trump had with Europe was over Greenland. We’ve got to take control of Greenland because then, if we can have a link from Greenland to Iceland to Britain, we can block access from the North Atlantic Ocean into the Arctic. And if we can block that access, then Europe and West Asia won’t have access to the Arctic trade to avoid conflict, having to go around through South Africa or having to go around the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal. We’ve been able to block the oil trade and any other trade from there. Well, I’m a little surprised. Russia has been trying to arrange with China the Power of Siberia pipeline to say, well, look, the United States is trying to—in violation of the Law of the Sea, in violation of all of the free trade rules—it’s preventing us from shipping our oil. So the only way to get around it is through a pipeline. And that’s, of course, what China has been trying to do through its Belt and Road Initiative, essentially to integrate Eurasia, the whole Asian continent, so that it doesn’t need to have the Mackinder strategy of controlling the periphery. But China and Russia have argued over what’s going to be the price for the oil. Well, Russia quite correctly says, well, we can see that the price of oil is going to go up because it looks now like the United States is goading Iran and the Arab countries to destroy each other’s oil production, while NATO is fighting against Russia to destroy its oil export capacity. And without OPEC oil, there’s going to be a huge oil shortage. And the United States will supply this basically through shipping gas to countries that need this energy. This is why Trump has fought against alternatives to oil in the form of wind energy and solar energy, which China has dominated in. So that’s the link between transport. And now for your question, how can this succeed? Well, it can only succeed by—let’s start with the American fight against Europe to subordinate its allies, Europe and Japan, to the United States. The whole assumption, the materialist approach to history, is that countries are going to act in their economic self-interest. Well, Europe isn’t acting in its economic self-interest. That would be to get inexpensive energy to power its industry and avoid the deindustrialization that you’re seeing in Germany and other NATO countries. It can’t afford the higher prices of oil, and its chemical industry can’t afford to operate at a profit when there is an interruption of the derivatives of the oil trade— sulfur to make sulfuric acid for mining, and fertilizer made out of natural gas. Not to mention helium—one of the first production sites that Iran hit was Qatar’s helium production, which was itself 20% of the world’s helium trade—totally destroyed. It cost, I think, $5 billion to install originally and took a number of years to complete. All of this is unavailable for the next few years, causing a helium shortage. China and the United States are major producers of helium. China has stopped its helium exports, and the United States is now using its helium monopoly as a lever of international control. So the United States retains a lot of levers and control. And the ultimate, the fourth monopoly that we didn’t discuss, is the U.S. dollarization— the financial system monopoly. This is what we’ve been discussing for the last few shows that you’ve had me on. The United States tried to exclude its rivals from the SWIFT bank clearing system. China set up an alternative to that. Everything the United States has done by imposing financial sanctions on other countries is to try to say, well, we can cut off your financial payments. But how can there be an oil trade? How can there be a trade in industrial products if you can’t process the payment for it? You not only need to transport this trade, you need to transfer the monetary payments. We’re controlling that system too. The whole American strategy is no longer a win-win strategy between it and the rest of the world. It’s about what choke points we can use to control the world economy—whether they can get oil and energy to power their factories, light their homes, and supply their chemical and fertilizer industry, information technology, and grain. Well, to answer your question, the American strategy can only succeed as long as the United States can impose choke points on the entire world—either by imposing sanctions that other countries will not have an alternative means of becoming independent from, with their own alternatives to the sanctions, their own payment systems such as China has been developing, their oil production like Russia and Iran, their transportation like the Arctic route of transport, and the Russian ability to fight NATO military attacks on Russian shipping through the Baltic and other areas, and U.S. attacks on shipping through the Indian Ocean that it’s been doing. The answer to whether the U.S. can maintain its control and its new, almost neocolonial imperialism depends on its ability to make a win-lose situation—trade on the world, saying, if you want oil, you’ll have to pay our monopoly oil prices, and the profits that the oil producers make will all be invested in the United States or spent on U.S. exports. To ship, you’ll have to submit to U.S. permission to use U.S.-controlled ports or routes that we’re closing off if you’re not subordinate to us for information technology, where we’ve imposed sanctions. Well, just yesterday, the United States lifted sanctions on exporting the most advanced computer chips to the Emirates. And it’s done that so that the Emirates can invest with the United States. This is tens of billions of dollars to create these new computer chip transfer centers, like the Amazon Cloud Investment Center in Bahrain was supposed to have done. All of the ideas that somehow they’ve convinced the Emirates to throw in their lot with the United States. And the United States gave the Emirates this permission in exchange for its agreement to help the United States bomb Iran. Well, all of this, the success of this U.S. policy, depends on how long the Arab Middle East can be ruled by these rotten semi-feudal monarchies. How long can the Emirates survive? How long can Jordan survive? Bahrain, Saudi Arabia itself, survived when most of the population is either Palestinian or Indian, where you have a very unequal society, by emirates who basically control the economies and have thrown in their lot with the United States. Almost every war, the backwash of a war, has been settled by huge political upheavals. World War I saw the end of many European monarchies and the transition to some sort of constitutional monarchy or quasi democracy. The Ottoman Empire was broken up and made into colonies of Britain and France, and basically that redrew the map, carved up the Ottoman Empire. Well, the question is, now that this war is over, is there going to be a similar political revolution going throughout West Asia, establishing economies that actually use their oil, not to recycle their economic surpluses to the United States leader, not to fall into the position that countries like Germany or Britain are in as just being satellites of the United States, and certainly not Japan, that America is trying to get rearmed to serve the United States? Are they going to go down the same route as Japan, Britain, and Germany? Or somehow is there going to be a social revolution there, like America feared would be the case after World War II? Are we finally going to see the carve-up that occurred after World War I with the Sykes plan to redraw the lines and put in British- and French-installed local monarchies? Are we finally going to see them brought into the modern progressive era? That’s going to be part of the question — whether the United States plan can stop progress. Can the United States stop the rest of the world from acting in its own economic self-interest to promote its own development instead of being subservient to promote the U.S. economy, which will not use this income for its own development, but really just to increase its monopoly, control, and military threat to other countries? That’s really the question.
#Glenn Diesen
Yeah, well, that’s a good point. That is, the ability of the U.S. to restore its dominance doesn’t only depend on the ability of its rivals to fight back, which they are, but indeed on its allies accepting very destructive vassalage, as you see in the Middle East. I mean, they’re paying a high price for their partnership with the U.S. now. And it’s quite different, the relationship with the United States than in the past, because after World War II, the U.S. free trade empire — I mean, yeah, for example, the Europeans were completely subordinated to the U.S. However, at least it was beneficial to some extent. The U.S. was considered a benign hegemon. That is, we made sure that its frontline states were prosperous. That is, that the West Germans were more prosperous than East Germans, the South Koreans were more prosperous than North Koreans, and the Taiwanese Chinese were more prosperous than mainland Chinese. So, you know, the frontline states were thriving. But now, as the U.S. can’t afford this format for its dominance anymore, it begins to cannibalize its rivals, demand excessive vassalage. And as you said, I think the core is how do you make states not act in their own interest. This is important because if you look at the European case study now, I mean, they’re not acting in their own interest. Their economies are getting weaker. They’re politically getting weaker. They’re having a legitimacy crisis because, you know, in a redivided Europe, it’s not in Europe’s interest anymore. It creates conflicts and war with the Russians, which enhances the dependence on the U.S., makes them economically weak. And if you see the leadership across Europe, I mean, it’s like a competition — how unpopular can you possibly get? And in this legitimacy crisis, you will inevitably see new political alternatives emerge. A good example is Germany with the AfD, growing out of nothing to becoming the most popular party. Well, what are they saying? They’re saying we should act in our own interest. And what is that? We’ll have to diversify energy supplies, have to make peace with Russia. And other interests will be in diversified technology, work with China as well, diversify transportation corridors, diversify finance. In other words, don’t tie yourself only to the United States. And I think it’s going to be hard for the United States to continue this position because as long as vassals can’t act in their own interest, the whole thing becomes very, very shaky. And at some point, yeah, something cracks. Anyway, Michael, thank you so much for taking the time.
#Michael Hudson
We still have a little bit of time. You mentioned war with Russia. That’s really the key — how long will Russia, and Putin essentially, prevent the military in Russia from responding to the missile and drone attacks on its territory that are hitting its refineries and now hitting civilian targets, hitting Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the attempt by NATO to put more weapons in Finland and other Baltic countries? How long will Russia refrain from responding by doing what Putin had threatened to do — respond by bombing the factories that make the missiles that are bombing them, the factories in Germany or France or Britain that are providing the missiles? At some point, Russia is now realizing it’s not fighting against Ukraine. Ukraine is the arena for this fighting. The fight is with NATO. Ukraine just doesn’t matter. The Russian troops are moving westward in Ukraine. They’re moving toward taking over Odessa. They’re blocking Ukrainian access to Odessa and to export their own grain, sunflower oil, and other materials. But this doesn’t prevent the NATO countries from sending missiles from Ukraine into Russia. And the enemy isn’t really Ukraine any longer. It’s Germany, France, and Britain that are acting as U.S. satellites in attacking Russia and letting the United States’ plans — I think it’s in Wiesbaden and other cities — guide the missiles that are hitting Russia. Well, I think the fact that they’re doing that is one reason that Russia is in a tit-for-tat response, saying, all right, we’re going to help provide Iran, if it needs it, with satellite guidance for its bombs to fight you. So that’s the escalation that’s occurring. And this escalation is, if it really is existential on both sides, then it’s going to continue to be very destructive. And the collateral damage will be the world economy, the Asian economy, Africa, and the Global South that are not going to get the fertilizer, which is going to reduce their crops, their ability to feed themselves, and will essentially subject them to famine. This year, 2026, is going to be a world-historical year for the showdown, when the dynamics that we’ve been discussing all come together.
#Glenn Diesen
Yeah, I was going to say, interesting times. Well, even if all these wars ended now, it’s hard to see it not being a food crisis this autumn. Well, anyway, as I was going to say, I always feel a bit wiser talking to you, so thank you so much for your time.
#Michael Hudson
Well, thank you for having me on.
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