Michael Hudson has written some great stuff. This interview did not show him at his best, in my opinion. Hudson often writes as if the debt crisis of capitalist-imperialism leads to inevitable disaster. I generally agree with him. But I think his weakness is he sometimes seems to think this will happen spontaneously and inevitably, that U.S. capitalism thus dooms itself without any external force needed, that the crisis can be more or less purely economic, and that capitalism can’t recover from such crisis. I exaggerate here a bit.
The truth is that criticisms of imperialism and/or capitalism do go back a long way, but since reality keeps changing, explanations must evolve. Hudson has emphasized that today financial “rentier” capitalism is the Achilles’ tendon of the U.S. empire. I’m not saying he’s wrong. If and when the dollar loses its primacy, our empire goes kaput, because then the U.S. must start living within its real means. This eventuality may (or may not) occur. It is at least conceivable (very unlikely in my opinion) that the U.S. empire can triumph in the whole world, overcoming and subordinating all competitors, just as it has more or less managed to subordinate and integrate Western Europe and Japan.
Personally, I think the U.S. empire is in decline and has proven itself a danger to the world and to its own people. If it succeeds I think it will only do so as a horrific dystopia over the bones of most of the world’s people, abandoning its own ideals, destroying traditional American freedoms in the process.
