Engels titled it The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. I’ll call it The Origin, for short.

The Origin is like Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbuster Sapiens (2014) but written by a 19th-century socialist: a sweeping take on the dawn of property, patriarchy, monogamy and materialism. Like many of its contemporaries, it arranged societies on an evolutionary ladder from savagery to barbarism to civilisation. Although wrong in most ways, The Origin was described by a recent historian as ‘among the more important and politically applicable texts in the Marxist canon’, shaping everything from feminist ideology to the divorce policies of Maoist China.

Of the text’s legacies, the most popular is primitive communism. The idea goes like this. Once upon a time, private property was unknown. Food went to those in need. Everyone was cared for. Then agriculture arose and, with it, ownership over land, labour and wild resources. The organic community splintered under the weight of competition. The story predates Marx and Engels. The patron saint of capitalism, Adam Smith, proposed something similar, as did the 19th-century American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Even ancient Buddhist texts described a pre-state society free of property. But The Origin is the idea’s most important codification. It argued for primitive communism, circulated it widely, and welded it to Marxist principles.

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The centerpiece of shock and awe of the West’s economic response to Russia’s invasion and bombardment of Ukraine was the freezing of Russia’s central bank assets. In the March 7 edition of his Global Money Dispatch newsletter, the Credit Suisse investment strategist Zoltan Pozsar writes that the G7 seizure of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves marks a regime change in the global monetary system. Pozsar pronounces this new regime Bretton Woods III. He anticipates that Asian sovereigns, fearing that their dollar- and euro-denominated foreign reserves are at risk of expropriation in the event of future foreign policy disputes, will park their surplus funds outside of the reach of Western financial authorities. For Pozsar, this heralds the rise of “commodity-backed currencies in the East” and spells the denouement of dollar hegemony.

In a follow-up piece published on March 31, Pozsar speculates that recent developments will drive China to replace the West as the buyer of last resort of Russian oil. As a result, oil tankers will have to be rerouted from the quicker East-West route via the Suez to a longer passage (one requiring ship transfers) from Russia to China. Geopolitics will shape the reorganization of real infrastructure networks, slowing down supply chains and increasing the cost of credit. Pozsar predicts that this rearrangement of global commodity and money flows presage a new world economic order, one in which China will replace the US as the monetary hegemon. The petrodollar, he envisages, will be replaced by the petro-yuan. 

Pozsar’s analysis—as well as Adam Tooze’s response to it—appreciates the asymmetry in the world economy: between advanced economies that dominate global finance, and developing countries that produce the majority (about sixty percent) of world GDP. Asia may be the center of gravity of world manufacturing, but European and North American firms still command the bulk of the profits embedded in global supply chains. This tension in the global economy is unlikely to resolve anytime soon, but it has become increasingly fractious. The weaponization of trade policy by the previous Republican administration has only been reinforced by the current Democratic one. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s recent speech advocating “the friend-shoring of supply chains”—wherein the US strengthens trade ties with those it shares strategic interests and “core values,” while severing the rest—captures the new mood. (In her speech, Yellen also calls for revitalizing Bretton Woods based on her view that the dollar-based economic order “benefits us all.”)

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