It’s just typical impression for a guy who grew up in a household listening to actual Trotskyites (the people who were actually close to Trotsky) complaining about Stalin all the time, then Khrushchev’s announcing to the whole world that Stalin is a murderous piece of shit, historians having little access to the USSR archives throughout the Cold War, etc.

A lot of rehabilitation about Stalin is actually quite recent, outside of people who lived in the USSR while he was still alive.

To be fair, it cannot be overstated how important Super Imperialism was to the post-1971 US dominance of the entire world. It was entirely an accident. Pure dumb luck. The US empire could very well have imploded after the Nixon Shock if it weren’t for Hudson’s thesis that came out in time:

From The Dumb Luck of Dollar Hegemony

K: So talking that super imperialist type perspective, when you wrote the book, did you ever think that it will continue for as long as it has? When you wrote Super Imperialism, did you ever think that this dollar imperialism would last for as long as it has?

M:I didn’t even think how long it would last. I was concentrating solely on how it worked. And I, it looked like there wasn’t any opposition to it. If you can imagine I was a left winger and I’d published in Ramparts magazine and Catholic left wing magazines. But when I began to write it, and especially after Herman Kahn immediately hired me for the Hudson Institute to explain to the defense department and state department how imperialism worked. I soon realized that only the United States was interested in how imperialism works, but they wanted ‘a how to do it’ book.

The last thing I thought I was writing was a ’how to do it’ book. I thought I was writing what people had to do to get rid of it. And instead people use the book, ‘here’s how to make sure it lasts forever’. So all I could do was watch and realize that there really wasn’t a left wing anymore that talked about economic factors.

K: But surely, you, you gave that insight to the Pentagon, you know, and to many insiders in Washington, but was it dumb luck? Or did you have a feeling of who actually was behind the whole systemic change and the process that accompanied that? I mean, surely it wasn’t dumb luck.

M: No, but that, what, what, what wasn’t dumb luck? My being hired? The establishment of the dollar, dollar hegemony. You mean dollar hegemony wasn’t dumb luck? Well, yes, it was. Yes, it was. They absolutely did not understand it. In fact, in one of the newspapers in August of 1971, everyone thought America has dominated the world economy ever since 1950, when it had three quarters of all of the world’s monetary gold.

It was the America’s holding of gold that enabled it to put England on rations, to enable it to dictate economic policies to other countries, because if they didn’t have gold, they didn’t have the backing for their domestic money in order to back the credit, to create capital investment and develop themselves. They were still tied to gold as a commodity basis of their money instead of modern monetary theory or realizing that money could just be created by greenbacks like the United States did in the civil war.

So it was, nobody had anticipated how it would work. And since I was a balance of payments economist, I was able to say, well, what is the balance of payments going to look like and where are countries going to put all of these dollars that are being pumped into their economy? What will France do? Now that France and Germany can no longer cash in the dollars for gold, what will they do? And it was pretty obvious that they were going to buy U.S. treasury securities. And that’s exactly what happened.

Of course, someone else could have discovered the same principles, but it remains a fact that the timely publication of Super Imperialism in 1972 enabled the US empire to transition rapidly into the form of imperialism that we are still suffering from today. Hudson’s very unique experience from working with balance of payments (which wasn’t taught at the time) and working with bank accounting enabled him to come to the conclusion earlier than anyone else.

There is a twist to this story though. As much as Hudson seems to hate on Stalin, we now have historical evidence that Stalin was perhaps one of the first head of states who understood this principle earlier than anyone else, 40 years before the US itself abandoned the gold standard. It allowed the USSR to drive fiscal expansion like never before, despite just coming out of a bloody civil war, paving the way towards rapid industrialization, until Khrushchev declared the USSR to be default in 1957, claiming that “government debt is too high and they can no longer repay the bond interests” that ended the fast paced growth of the Soviet economy and ultimately led to its stagnation and downfall.