Unlike what happened in 2008, three months after the stock market explosion on March 9, the United States has not been able to articulate an international plan to face this crisis that the pandemic exacerbated, even more serious than the preceding one.

On the contrary, the pandemic and then the police rampage that ended George Floyd´s life completed the irrationality of the system and showed the strategic paralysis of the White House. The world is currently waking up to the geopolitical reality in which the decline of the largest world power prevents it from having a governing power. World capitalism has lost its axis.

Nothing more eloquent than Donald Trump´s reckless attempt to hold a meeting of the G-7, hitherto hegemonized by Washington. He first sought to hold a videoconference meeting scheduled for June 10-12. Then, by tweeting, he demanded a face-to-face meeting of the seven leaders at Camp David, by the end of June. Faced with the rejection of his partners, the harassed president wielded another letter: to invite India and three other countries to join the G-7 and hold the meeting in September. Before the proposal, he made it known that he wanted Russia back in that area. With a G-10, or G-11 from which China is excluded, the objective of the State Department is to place its main rival in front of any joint agreement to get out of the crisis. The risks of such a tactic could not be overstated.

There is still no answer to this last call, but the essential is already in sight: in 2008 the United States did not have the slightest setback to join the G-20 countries like Argentina, Brazil and Mexico (the first two with supposedly progressive governments), to face the economic collapse and the certain threat of a revolutionary dynamic in Latin America. Today, it discards these and other minor partners, tries to swell the desolate G-7 and seeks a head-on collision with China. Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, with different realities, share the condition of orphans on a deranged world map.

The United States embarks on the collision course from controversial positions. There is an unprecedented mass rebellion these days, although without an alternative project. Power is unraveling: three former presidents (James Carter, George W. Bush and Barack Obama) spoke out against the current occupant of the White House. They were joined by former Secretary of State Colin Powell -an African-American- and leading senators like Willard Romney, all of which poses an electoral risk for Trump and his partners in the military-industrial-financial complex. Regardless of the outcome of this game of realignments, the most important thing is Defense Minister Mark Esper´s rejection of Trump´s demand for military troops to intervene against the mass uprising caused by the murder of Floyd. The fracture and weakening of the central power in the United States are signs of another pandemic, which will soon become visible to the entire world.

It is worth underlining the obvious: it was not the mobilization of the masses, nor the devastating effect of the plague, which has claimed 227,000 lives in the United States to date, that unbalanced the system and exceeded its parameters. The force that broke the balance was the structural crisis of the capitalist economy, the uncontrolled rise of the inter-bourgeois struggle, the fall in the rate of profit. The reverse happened: this unstoppable force produced the mass uprising within the United States and began to spread its effects to Europe.

In the statement is the conclusion: there is an inordinate inequality between the crisis of the system and the capacity of its victims –that is, the conscience and organization- to face it. At the same time, the irreversibility of the crisis demolishes another assumption, until recently thought of as a moment of transition and currently impossible: the harmony of a multipolar world. The accelerated confrontation between the United States and China is only the most strident of the international conflicts that are multiplying on the planet.

In this way, the hypotheses that have dominated for many years on both sides of the ideological spectrum are reconsidered. On the right and left, political theory is out of focus and cannot even sketch an answer. The crisis, meanwhile, advances. The bourgeois reformist leaderships do not manage to stammer economic proposals in the face of this heralded and underestimated combination of capitalist world collapse.

If it weren´t pathetic, a recent text by Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong could cause smiles: "Troubled relations between the United States and China raise profound questions about the future of Asia and the profile of the future international order. Asian countries do not they want to be forced to choose between the United States or China." According to this interpretation, Southeast Asian countries had the best of both worlds, building economic relations with China while maintaining strong ties with the United States and other developed countries.

"If the United States chose instead to try to contain Chinese growth, it would run the risk of provoking a backlash that could put the two countries on a decades-long path of confrontation." Lee Hsien Loong understands that both powers "are not necessarily embarked on a confrontational course, but confrontation cannot be ruled out." (The Endangered Asian Century, Foreign Policy, June 4, 2020).

If the heads of the executive branch in Brasilia and Buenos Aires had the habit of thinking about world politics and writing about it, they would say the same thing as Lee Hsien Loong, transferred to the region: "Latin American countries do not want to be forced to choose between China and United States". Fortunately for their supporters, Jair Bolsonaro and Alberto Fernández stay away from these troublesome problems. Yet stumbling, without even the merit of outlining a long-range thought, they walk the same path. Unguarded, blind, ignorant of a reality that is alien to them, in any case they will be fed to the local and regional effects of the international disaster.

As never in the history of capitalism, the world suffers from a strategic world power vacuum. This does not imply that the laws of the production system based on private ownership of the means of production are no longer being observed. On the contrary, the exceptional conjuncture the planet is experiencing accelerates the development of two of these fundamental laws: centralization (commonly and erroneously called "concentration") of capitals and increased relative and absolute exploitation of human labor. With the pandemic as an argument and confinement as an excuse, a fierce process of absorption of wealth is taking place in fewer and fewer hands, while more and more fringes of those who are considered middle classes are being proletarianized and are now locked up while their businesses and professions change their place in the social organization chart, to be under the rule of capital of greater magnitude.

Thus, through centralization the system circumstantially resolves the inter-bourgeois conflict and, at the same time, thanks to the paralysis of the working class, unable to defend the price of labor power, the rate of profit increases. In the end, these apparent solutions turn into the reverse: increased unemployment, decreased global demand, worsening of the inter-capitalist confrontation, radicalization of the class struggle.

Not only the scientific theory that studies capital says so. It is not a forecast. It is in view of all. A single example suffices: in the United States, from March to the end of April, 40 million workers lost their jobs. One in four employees. Another 2.1 million joined in May, a month in which bewildered eulogists celebrated the incorporation of more than 2 million employees. However, the figure of 42 million newly unemployed may be far less than reality ("Still Catching Up": Jobless Numbers May Not Tell Full Story; The New York Times, Patricia Cohen, May 28). Days later sharp economists announced that the United States is formally in recession. Won´t there be some of this in the spontaneous rebellion of millions against the murder of Floyd? A good part of the established power, in the United States and the rest of the world, bears the blame for this cataclysm on the extravagant president of that country. Nobody so far attributes it to the debauchery of the intrinsic irrationality of the mode of production.

That and no other is the cause of the spectacle of a great power in a state of disarray, ruled by an apparently out of control individual. But the one who is advancing on the path of fascism and threatening the entire planet is not Trump: it is an exhausted, dying system that does not admit reforms.