Vietnam Journal VI: Post-Marxism

General Staff in Battle of Dien Bien Phu

Marx and Freud proposed the two great analyses of economics and the mind, both of which are more interesting today for their theoretical insight than their practical applications. Post-Marxism is also a bit like post-modernism in art and literature to the extent that it provides a vast palette of ideologies one having less in common with the other than the next. Communism, where it still exists, has come a long way baby and the variety of Communism that functions in a country like Vietnam has little in common with that practiced by either of its neighbors to the north, China or North Korea, though it's plain that Vietnamese post-Marxism has more in common with that practiced by the Chinese where two very separate socio-economic systems operate at the same time, free enterprise and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Vietnam, the disparity is even greater since a passing view gives the impression of a society in which the Communist Party functions like an employment agency filling political posts while a free market economy swaggers like an adolescent who's suddenly becoming aware of his own sexuality. Under the weight of classic Marxism, Vietnam in the post-war years was an impoverished society, but with the advent of free enterprise under the Doi Moi policy, which began in l986, the economy started to explode. Pyongyang’s subsistence economy might not be desirable, but materialism has its downside too. Nothing is ever enough.

Stonewalled III: Post Modernist Sexuality

Sexuality is a biological drive, but it is also a figment of the imagination. If consciousness is ever separated from the body, with our species preserved as pixels of intelligence migrating through cyberspace, then the very notion of what it means to be male and female will revert to being a fiction.  Our present culture is obsessed with pornography, which has become infinitely ubiquitous and is still looked at as a virus which distracts unwary minds from a more innocent sexuality—which they might be more prone to undertake had they not become so infected. But is there reason to believe that pornography has become the fuel for migrating consciousnesses that are increasingly separated from the mother ship? We are still men and women, made of flesh and blood and hormones, but increasingly we find our functions usurped by technology. No wonder radically fundamentalist religions are so intent on shielding their followers from the influences of modernity. Enlightenment ideals of reason and equanimity have no  place amidst the brute inequities of biology. It’s no wonder that there is so much sexual dysfunction in the battered and defeated armies of heterosexual culture.  However, there is a hope. Once mankind has totally done away with its dependence on the body—Ray Kurzweil’s idea of immortality coming in the form of organs made from microprocesssors is only one of a number of possible outcomes—then sex will take its rightful place as one of a number of cultural institutions for which tickets are purchased say like for Lincoln Center or BAM.