"While the balance of class power remains heavily tilted in favour of capital in its homelands, the balance of international power is tilting markedly away from capitalism, driving all outside the charmed circle of the United States, Europe, Japan and the settler colonies bit by bit, with advances and reverses, steadily away from the major capitalist countries and probably, from capitalism. This process began with the Russian Revolution and, after the reverses of the 1990s, resumed in the new century as an alliance of countries seeking to assert their economic and security sovereignty—including Russia, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran—began forming with China as its economic centre. The pandemic and the war have accelerated these processes. The United States’ proxy war on Russia acts as a prism that refracts the key elements of the underlying unfolding of the geopolitical economy of capitalism and socialism. It constitutes a resumé of the state of the United states’-declining imperial project, of the balance between US capacities and the possibilities and constraints imposed by the world’s geopolitical economy."