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There are two attitudes that can be assumed to the devastating crisis of the capitalist mode of production.  One consists in look backwards, in having – as it has been put – “your eyes in the back of your neck”.  This means considering the present state of affairs eternal and untouchable, the institutions that sustain it as the only points of reference, the practices that have for decades been dominating (and castrating) the workers’ movement as the only ones possible.  And so we put ourselves in the hands of the official trade unions (active protagonists of the most disgusting betrayals to damage the proletarian class for the whole of the second post-war war period), delegating to them every strategy, all the action thatconcerns us; we entrust any decisions regarding our living and working conditions to the “negotiating tables”; we lean on one party or one parliamentary group or the other in the hope that (pausing for a moment in their sole activity: the decade-long sharing out of the cake) “they take up the cause” of our needs; we regard the government and the State (the direct expressions of the ruling class and its political, military and ideological tools) as so many impartial bodies that we can turn to, so that they do us the favour of stepping in to moderate the ruthlessness of one insensitive (or perhaps “foreign”) boss or the other; and more often than not we end up becoming the more or less unwitting pawns in far wider-reaching strategies played out at the expense of others (commercial wars, sectorial competition, the buying and selling of more or less seriously lossmaking companies, applications for European funding, etc. etc.). “Eyes in the back of your neck” are worse than complete blindness.  “Looking backwards” delivers proletarians, bound hand and foot, to the superior interests of domestic and international capital: it shuts them into the pen allotted to animals for slaughter.

Only a few months ago, in a speech he made in Washington on 4 November 2011, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, William J. Burns, stated that during the next few decades, the Pacific will become the most dynamic part of the world and the most important for American interests.  In this area, he added, more than half of the world population, key allies and emerging powers and some of the main economic markets are already concentrated.  In the same month the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, wrote an article for the review Foreign Policy with an eloquent title: “The Century of the Pacific for America”.