THE statement attributed to Mao: “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent” appears nowhere in his writings. And like many apocryphal aphorisms it only illuminates a small part of reality. Nevertheless it has been pressed into service to describe the turmoil arising from the split in the ruling class in the United States.

It is maybe too early to weigh up the relative political weight of the contending factions and the picture is clouded not just by Trump’s erratic policy unmaking but by his political need to align at least some of his actual policies with the expectations of his political base in a US working class and the declassed underbelly of what is increasingly seen as a failed state.

Working Americans are highly resistant to any more foreign wars, want a revival of manufacturing jobs and are suspicious of both state and government. Trump deploys an ambiguous political rhetoric but this is proving insufficient to resolve the various problems he is encountering.

No-one confidently predicts where US domestic, economic or foreign policy will eventually finish up. But it is clear that US finance capital is not happy with the actual effect of Trump’s policies.

The stiff beating the bond markets gave his administration was a powerful demonstration of the class power wielded by finance capital. His muscular “liberation day” measures, swiftly transmuted into a three-month pause, caused upset in the markets, has undermined confidence and forced all kinds of actors to worry about the reliability of US financial institutions and the status of US treasuries as the go-to destination for capital looking for a safe haven.

It has also created in European financial circles a measure of independent thinking and, at both the level of the EU and among financiers, a sense that European capital has interests that cannot always be aligned with what happens on the other side of the Atlantic.

China, of course, has skin in the global capitalist game and its muscular response to Trump’s discriminatory weaponising of tariffs has not been simply to respond with tariffs of its own against US products. It has strengthened its relations with markets closer to home, with Malaysia immediately, with Vietnam and other south-east Asian states.

Trump’s swift move to excuse Apple products from the tariff regime is a sure sign that US domestic markets would not easily forgive the soaring prices, and evidence of the back channels that surely exist between the two economic giants despite Trump’s megaphone alternative to normal trade negotiations.

But China, like the EU and even Britain, is looking to diversify trade relations to offset the problems that Trump’s behaviour has brought. Hence the signs of increased commercial activity between Britain and China with discreet government support.

The EU foreign policy and military-intelligence axis, with an aspirant Keir Starmer spectacularly unsuccessful as an intermediary between the US and the EU, is very slowly coming to understand that its policy of fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian is not an easy fit with the changed global geometry and the hint, by a Trumpian flunkey, that a straight economic partnership between the US and Russia might transform the political situation may have even penetrated the skull of David Lammy.

Such is the interpenetration of US and British finance capital and our respective ruling classes that a Starmer government cannot pursue an independent policy that might serve any separate interests of British capitalism, let alone those of the working class.

The prognosis for capitalism is not excellent. The alternative of working-class political power and socialism is the most sensible solution. Is not our task to assemble the forces to achieve it?