Communist Revolution Will End the Genocidal Rule of Money
June 9, 2024— The Saudi rulers have refused to renew their fifty-year-old agreement with the US to sell oil only in US dollars. This marks the death of the petrodollar and the beginning of the end of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
It accelerates the decline of US imperialism as the world’s dominant imperialist power. It paves the way for the rise of imperialist China as the main contender to replace it. It brings World War III closer.
The Birth of the Petrodollar Consolidated the US dollar as the World’s Primary Reserve Currency
The US rulers wasted most of their vast gold-reserves in the Vietnam War. This forced the US dollar off the gold standard. Its value began to plummet. In early 1974, the US signed the agreement with Saudi Arabia – then the biggest oil producer and exporter of oil – to sell Saudi oil only in US dollars. Saudi capitalists would invest their oil surplus funds in US treasury bills, real estate, and military equipment in exchange for US military protection.
All oil producers followed suit, pricing their oil only in dollars. Countries needing to buy oil had to keep dollars in reserve. As petrodollars were recycled back into the US economy, the US could accumulate huge yearly trade deficits and become the world’s biggest debtor nation.
It also funded US military might and all its genocidal wars to guarantee Middle Eastern oil was sold only in dollars.
Petrodollar’s demise makes BRICS’ de-dollarization campaign a bigger existential threat to US imperialism.
Even before the petrodollar agreement expired, China-Russia-Iran had started an aggressive campaign to de-dollarize the world. Russia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, and other oil-producing countries stopped selling their oil in US dollars. In 2023 only 80 percent of global oil was sold in dollars.
The BRICS + 5, an economic cooperation bloc controlled by China-Russia, now trade in their local currencies. This will accelerate the de-dollarization in global trade. World trade in US dollars dropped from 71% in 1999 to 58% in 2022. This trend will accelerate as BRICS membership expands. Over fifty-nine nations want to join it.
The next BRICS October summit meeting in Russia will discuss the creation of a single currency within the group. This would significantly intensify the de-dollarization process.
Another big step in this direction was Russia’s 2024 St. Petersburg Economic Forum. With over 17,000 participants from over130 countries, BRICS launched its own payment system to securely and quickly send and receive international money and security transfers.
The BRICS promises that its financial system will enhance the voice of developing nations and improve their access to international finance. As an alternative to the US SWIFT payment system, it promises to make these nations immune from US sanctions while encouraging the use of local currencies.
The dollar will decline in value relative to other currencies. US workers will pay more for food and everything else. Eventually, hyperinflation will ravage the world’s masses, as it is already doing in Ghana and Argentina. This will create further worldwide objective conditions for revolution.
The petrodollar is dead, but not US or Western imperialism. To squash revolutionary potential from developing and to cling on to their world hegemony, these imperialists are frantically preparing for global war against the China-Russia-Iran imperialist axis.
Fascism and World War III, or Communist Revolution
Since the 16th century, six successive imperialist countries and their currencies have dominated world trade. Every transition – from one dominant power and its currency to another – required genocidal wars. It took the two world wars for the US dollar to displace the British pound as the world’s primary reserve currency and the US to replace England as the world’s dominant imperialist power.
The US-China transition will not be peaceful. It will take World War III. That is why war games are expanding worldwide—from the US-led RIMPAC in Hawaii to the Russia-Egypt maritime exercise in the Mediterranean. NATO is hellbent on crossing every Russian redline. Germany prepares for war by 2029. The US House Armed Services Committee is calling for automatic registration for “selective service” of every US male between 18 and 26 – to make it easier to conscript them when the draft is imposed.
The International Communist Workers’ Party is mobilizing to turn the coming wars and World War into revolutions for communism worldwide. The imperialists must depend on their future gravediggers to fight for them! With communist ideas, they will turn their guns on the warmakers and join the fight for communism.
Reaching out to youth, soldiers, sailors and workers now with Red Flag is the way forward. Only communist revolution – not reform or peace-promising politicians – will put an end to money and capitalist competition for maximum profits that make World Wars inevitable.