The fact that the United States continues to top the list, not only the country with the highest number of people infected with COVID-19, but also with the highest incidence and mortality rate, should call our attention. It is supposed to be the "most powerful and hegemonic superpower in military, technological, economic and energy matters", at least that is what they say and repeat. A quarter of the cases registered in the world are in the United States. Cuba and Venezuela are almost last on the list.
Access to tests that allow early diagnosis to immediately activate isolation protocols and contain the spread of the disease has been a determining factor in the levels of contagion, as has the greater or lesser exposure to the virus. Having free access to diagnostic tests is not the same as having to pay for them. The result has not been the same in countries that gave priority to health over the economy and abided by strict confinement, than those countries that gave more importance to markets, such as the United States.
The possibility of being treated in a health facility and having the indicated treatment, for its part, has been a determining factor in mortality rates. It is not by chance that the US is one of the highest. Their health system is totally private: those without health insurance simply do not have access to care and treatment. Otherwise: Cuba.
It is not the same to face the pandemic for the Amazon delivery man than for his owner Bezos. The situation for the informal worker is not the same as for the formal one. Nor is it the same for the one who keeps his job as for the one who was fired. It is not the same for those who suffer from hunger and misery as it is for those who have their material needs covered and also a comfortable capacity to save.
In this world of great inequalities derived from an exploitative economic system, some are more exposed to the virus, and are more likely to get sick and die, than others. The existing inequalities and those derived from the capitalist and neoliberal system imposed by imperialism began to become more and more evident since the arrival of Covid-19.
A year after the first case of the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus was diagnosed, it turns out that inequality is no longer only the cause of the greatest infections and deaths from covid-19, but it is also a consequence.
According to the World Trade Organization, this year a 4,8% drop in world GDP is forecast. However, this fall will not affect everyone equally: while it is expected that the world will have 550 million more poor people in 2020, which would imply exceeding 4 billion inhabitants in poverty, and while, according to the World Food Program, This year, 12.000 people will die of hunger on the planet every day just as a result of the pandemic, even more than those who have died daily from COVID-19 (4.181 people), American billionaires, for example, have increased their fortune by 637 billion dollars.
The inequalities generated by the capitalist system have become evident with the coronavirus, at the same time we hear about the need to change it. It is a speech that the same big capitals, in the Davos Forum, are positioning, even before the pandemic: they speak of the need to reinvent capital to guarantee its survival. They are concerned, not with the poor, but with the high levels of inequality in which 1% of the world population appropriates 80% of total production, have implied a decrease in world consumption, therefore, in production and the accumulation of capital.
They are not proposing to change the system at all, they seek to grant a little more participation to the State to take charge of those activities that, on the one hand, add to higher productivity (health and education) and on the other, reduce inequality to re-boost consumption, production and profit, but always maintaining the essence of capitalism: exploitation in the production and distribution process through the appropriation of the value of the worker's labor power by the bourgeois.
Overcoming the capitalist system requires more than the people's awareness that it has failed. It requires a powerful workers' and peasants' movement guided by great leaders who are willing to wage true class struggle, because that is what it is all about. Decline of the US Empire/World Reordering.
However, a second phenomenon that has been observed during this pandemic year is that Covid-19 has contributed to accelerating the decline of the US empire, not only in the economic sphere, but also in the energy and technological fields. This decadence has taken decades. The Coronavirus is accelerating the process.
With an unpayable foreign debt of 28 trillion dollars; with international reserves that do not cover even 2% of its debt and that are barely equivalent to 2 months of imports; with a deficit trade balance since the 70s; a coin nosedive; oil reserves for just 6 years and a poverty of 40% internally, the US has been losing space on the world board and is facing China that is advancing with a new trade route; with reserves that cover a year and a half of imports and twice its foreign debt; with a surplus scale since the 2s; launching a digital currency that will bypass the Swift System; and with the recent signing of a trade agreement in the Pacific that even the US allies signed. At the same time, it occupies the technological space with 70G, towards 5G.
A new, multicenter commercial order is envisaged, with a new monetary system referenced to several currencies where gold seems to be the protagonist again and, with various payment compensation systems preventing the hegemony of the Swift system in the hands of the Federal Reserve, the main weapon used by the US to blackmail, threaten, dominate countries and impose its capitalist model.
Although, for now, and despite the pandemic, there is no real change in the exploitative mode of production and distribution that characterizes the world, the fact that the most genocidal empire that humanity has ever known has ended and with it the Doctrine of Containment imposed by Truman in 1947, would open the possibility so that, with less difficulty, without threats or impositions, the people can transit and consolidate a more humane economic system, alternative to the capitalist one. And although the capitals continue in their intentions to reinvent themselves, socialism, which is clearly a just and egalitarian system, could accelerate, without major obstacles, its passage.
