An adolescent boy who has mastered the yo-yo knows how to “walk the dog”. This involves the yo-yo, string extended, dog-trotting along the ground, bumping up here and there, but continuing its forward motion across the playground. The process is determined by an interaction of spin, high frequency vibrations, and oscillating long-waves. The boy flings the yo-yo into a many-rpm spin state; high frequency vibrations in the string maintain the head-down forward motion; long-wave oscillations imparted by a jittering finger set and sustain the trot rhythm. But if the boy loses control, the yo-yo abruptly comes flying back at him or the string goes slack and the yo-yo lies dead in the dust.

Functioning of the global economy, too, is determined by long-wave oscillations, high frequency vibrations, and spin states. Economists and financial speculators have much studied the relationship between market vibrations and long-waves: business cycles, Elliot wave theory of stock market dynamics, statistical approaches to portfolio management, hedging theory relative to commodity price oscillations, and so on. Such studies have had modest success. It is the spin aspect of the system -- its “psychological” dimension -- which has remained opaque, impenetrable, characterizable by no adequate model. But this lack of understanding has not deterred the spin doctors of globalization. They believe that, if only they can keep the spin spinning, the economic dog will keep on walkin’, encountering bumps along the way, surely, but undergoing no abrupt unmanageable systemic crisis.

The spin component of dog-walkin’ globalization is the continual twist imparted to the cultural sphere, wherein the centripetal force drives inexorably toward uniformization and global monoculture. The Wall Street “masters of the universe” and their political paladins believe their finger jitters will keep the economic yo-yo on track, that the achievement of global monoculture will be obtained with minimum upheaval at manageable levels of violence. Are they right? The cultural sphere they wish to spin is enormously complex. Let us look at a specific case.

If you sit on the terrace sipping tea in late afternoon at Tran Bach Dang’s house in Ho Chi Minh City, looking out at the garden set back from Dien Bien Phu Street, you are likely to be interrupted periodically by the buzzing, not of bees, but of the cellular phone sitting on the table before him. The man is abrupt, decisive, and obviously accustomed to the exercise of authority. And well he should be! Tran Bach Dang was the Chairman of the Saigon Party Committee throughout the war with the Americans. Then, he lived and worked unnoticed under the nose of the CIA and the U.S. Army’s security services; presently, he is Vietnam’s contemporary gadfly, a Socratic figure whose critical voice appears everywhere in the country’s mass media. And he is listened to. Everyone knows that when the Prime Minister, Vo Van Kiet, appears in Ho Chi Minh City, he inevitably pays a visit to Tran Bach Dang’s terrace. But do they know why?

If you sit a few blocks away in the library of Tran Van Giau, waiting for his wife to prepare tea, staring at the overstuffed wall-to-wall bookshelves, appraising the soft-spoken elderly gentleman, trying to imagine the intellectual concerns of this man in the 1930s, visualizing his responsibilities in the 1940s as the Nam Bo Party Committee Chairman, you begin to have the uncanny sensation that the public assessment of “where Viet Nam is going” is just overwhelmingly wrong -- no less mistaken than the concensus view of “where Viet Nam has been”. Americans wrote the worldwide media book on Viet Nam in the post-World War II period, but is their conception of the history of people like Tran Van Giau to be believed? Are assessments of Vietnam’s future behavior interminably to be based on tacit acceptance of American dissimulation? The “Gang of Five” -- Nguyen Van Linh (the Prime Minister when liberalization was initiated), Vo Van Kiet, Tran Van Giau, Tran Van Tra (the illustrious Viet Cong general who commanded the troops who attacked Saigon on Tet of 1968), and Tran Bach Dang -- created doi moi. But not in the way people think, and not only for the reasons that have been publicly aired. Could the wartime history of these men, and their relationships to one another during that troubled time, have played no role in their postwar activities? Is the intellectual history of these people irrelevant to the future economic history of Viet Nam? Hardly! But the case is far, far different than the foreign experts think.

Vo Quy is a different sort of man. Semi-retired, he still officially heads up CRES, the Center for Natural Resources Management and Environmental Studies, the University of Hanoi. He is Vietnam’s leading ecologist and green spokesperson. If you want to talk quantum biochemistry, he will talk it with you. The research done in the 1970s and 80s at the Cornell University Neurobiology Labs in Ithaca, New York, on bird navigation -- earth magnetic field and infrasound signature guided homing -- is a subject he is thoroughly familiar with. In fact, the whole realm of “new biology”, of quantum approaches to the theory of biological self-organization, is an intellectual domain he is quite at home in. Vo Quy is an ornithologist, a birdman with an international scientific reputation. Why does he know so much about all this new-fangled biology? Because he received his scientific training in the Soviet Union, because he taught there, because he cut his teeth in the field of ecology in an intellectual environment dominated by Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, the man who coined the term “biosphere”, published a book by that title in 1926, and virtually created the field of ecology forty years before it became a matter of concern in the West. Is there any connection between the preoccupations of the men who created doi moi and the intellectual ambience of the ecologist, Vo Quy? You bet there is!

Think of the “Gang of Five” -- in the days before doi moi shuttered off the blocks -- as a Mutt-and-Jeff routine, as a good-cop\bad-cop team, as an insider-outsider one-two punch. Two of the “old boys” stayed in the system (Nguyen Van Linh and Vo Van Kiet), while the other three bailed out, formed an association of former freedom fighters of the South, and became its critics. But all five of them were the primary survivors of the wartime leadership group in the SOUTHERN APPARAT, the political bureaucracy of the southern wing of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Their careers followed in lock-step, one behind the other, filling one position after the next, over a thirty-year period -- except for Tran Van Tra, who, being primarily a military man, followed somewhat a different career path while remaining closely tied to the other four. These men were not only intimate friends, they shared a commitment to the ethos of the Viet Cong -- which was very different from that of the bo doi, the northern communist cadres. The more-Confucian northern wing of the Party spent the whole war trying to assert its authoritarian control over the errant southerners, particularly in the Mekong delta, and were never wholly successful at reining in their erstwhile compatriots. The southern communist cadres were into decentralization and local autonomy; their decision algorithms were derived more from the “internal anarchism”of the traditional Mekong delta village, more from the bao giap, the voluntary association, than from the rigid Leninist organizational hierarchies perfected by the Chinese in application to guerrilla warfare and embraced by the northern wing of the Party from the days of the Viet Minh. These southern communists had a strong “process orientation” which expressed the organic nature-transparency of the syncretistic, Cham and Khmer-influenced, animistic peasants whose “forms of order” were the analogical models for the organizational dynamics adopted by the Viet Cong apparat. Structures were disposable; functions prerequisite to some new level of organizational coherency were the focus of attention. Quantum-biology-like parallelism and superimposition ran rampant: in chains of command, in mission statements, in realms of authority, in role attributions, in fluctuating geographical partitions, in concensus decision modes. The whole system these men created drove for dynamic evolution with an insistency unparalleled in the history of bureaucratic organization.

Where did this biological orientation, this penchant for processes of self-organizing systematics come from? Only the traditional Mekong delta village? Of course not. The first paper in quantum theory was published in 1900 by Max Planck. By the mid-20s and early-30s, Paris was thoroughly familiar with the fact that a “new physics” had come on the scene. It was in the artistic air: breathed in as post-Impressionism (still the focus of Vietnamese artists); breathed out as analytical Cubism. The First International Dada Fair, with its street theater agit-prop performances, had already taken place. Dadaism, Surrealism, and anarchism were awash in the intellectual currents of the era. And Vietnamese intellectuals were all over Paris at the time. Politically and economically, there were plain anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, Trotskyites, utopian socialists, Marxists, Leninists, Marxist-Leninists, and certainly even capitalists and democrats: the full spectrum of possibilities. People changed orientations like they changed clothes. This was the intellectual climate of the youth of a man like Tran Van Giau. And for the Vietnamese in Paris at the time, the overriding problem was to discover how to get the French colons off their backs, and after that how to modernize without sacrificing the “internal anarchism of the village” so beloved of their compatriots. But as the spiral of violence gathered force worldwide from the early-30s, the second half of this problematic was lost sight of. However, though it was no longer a conscious focus, it didn’t entirely flee the Vietnamese collective unconscious.

Exposure to avant-garde art, music, and mathematics was also the meat-and-potatoes of Vernadsky’s intellectual climb to scientific pre-eminence. Ecological modes of thought were born in the holism of post-revolutionary Suprematist fixation on the quantum vacuum: Malevich’s “White-on-White”. Vernadsky made his trip to America just like Ho Chi Minh, and at about the same time. Both had equal success there: Ho, apparently, washed dishes or cooked stir-fries; Vladimir was turned down by every university he approached. America simply wasn’t interested, not in self-determination for “backward peoples”, not in new approaches to the earth sciences. Vernadsky had his day in Paris like every other leading intellectual of the period. But even Paris didn’t want him. Nor did the footloose, polymorphous perverse world of Weimar Berlin -- that place most experimentative of psychological, social, sexual, economic and political applications of quantum mechanics. Why, several principalities even tried to institute a new form of economic exchange unit, a unit that could carry holistic information to actors in the capitalist marketplace. Only by such means as this could capitalism be made ecologically benign, could the great boggyman, the necessity for unending growth, be slayed. But they didn’t have the information processing capability to actually get it up and running. So Vernadsky returned to the Soviet Union and created a scientific revolution that was covertly anti-Stalinist -- and had enormous effect on large numbers of people: the holistic world view of the “new physics” applied to earth science and biology.

Back home in Russia, of course, the avant-garde was foundering. Creativity everywhere on the planet was coming to an end, it seemed. Nobody wanted any more of it. The species had had an overdose between the turn of the century and World War I. People like Alexandr Bogdanov, who had earlier carried quantum perspectives into the fields of medicine and sociology, faltered, back-reacted, and began to slam the avant-garde. He played a major role in promulgating Proletkult -- the movement of proletarian culture. This, naturally enough, swept aside any vestige of innovative thought. The Vietnamese followed all this with great attention, primarily by reading French journals and magazines -- and debated the same subjects in their own underground press. They were deeply attuned to all these intellectual currents, though through a lens looking for solutions to Vietnamese-formulated problems. It was not necessary for them to consciously and specifically generalize perspectives they absorbed in this cultural milieu directly into principles of political organization. That generalization transpired by psychological osmosis.

From the 1920s up through the onset of World War II, the northern wing of the Vietnamese Communist movement was tied into that aspect of the Soviet Union which Vernadsky was inherently opposed to and which was ultimately subverted by the scientific perspectives he produced -- perspectives of biospheric whole-system function, of ecological superintegration expressive of quantum notions of identity which simply had nothing in common with command-oriented, Stalinist, planometric economies. During the same period, the southern wing of the Vietnamese Communist movement was engaged with the Soviet Union only indirectly, via the French Communist Party. And the French Party scene was deeply contaminated with all sorts of non-Bolshevik, non-Stalinist influences: utopian, Trotskyite, anarchist, and so on. The unique and powerfully determinative circumstance was: these contamination-perspectives jived quite naturally with the traditional imperatives of the “internal anarchism of the village” so dear to the Southerner’s heart. Not only did the Emperor’s mandate stop at the village gate, but the Council of Elders braced itself in front of that gate to insure that hierarchical influences did not subvert the system of voluntarism and commune-ality (e.g. the communal lands) insuring the presence of a social-security safety-net for all. Of course, appearance of the French in Indochina (and subsequently induction into the international economy) had put an end to all that. But though there was some in-fighting, some purging, some killing amongst the far left in Cochinchina and Annam during the 30s, the drift of the thing was clear, and men like Tran Van Giau could not let it go. Could not let it go, that is, a perspective on “forms of order” that would have warmed Vernadsky’s ecologically-oriented heart. All of this, of course, was not really explicit, not fully conscious on the part of any particular actor. It was tacit, osmotic, in the Zeitgeist, conveyed subliminally, absorbed through the skin. It was not arrived at by theorizing; it did not emerge in analysis of their own system dynamics. Indeed, its principles clearly were not consciously held. But does that mean it is not at this very moment governing spontaneous impulse, making people decide on this rather than that, without quite knowing why?

In 1992, at East-West Center on the University of Hawaii campus, a small conference was held on Vietnamese-Japanese trade relations. The discussion was lively. The Japanese government is incapable of making a decision! -- in absence of gaiatsu, foreign pressure. This combative proclamation drew an unexpected rejoiner. Japanese governance challenges the notion that politics need be a decision science. Ha! Ha! Ha! guffawed the crowd. A good joke. No, I’m serious. General confusion. Looks of perplexity and a collective “What?” The decision-need in a political corpus is a function of inherent conflict. Japanese identity constructs postulate low levels of inherent conflict and therefore entertain small decision-needs. A moment of silence. But that’s ridiculous! Decisions need be made, regardless. The response was immediate. Wrong! Biological systems exhibiting quantum properties are decision-free systems. At critical states, the correlation-length between apparently distinct entities goes to infinity and order arises spontaneously. No decisions are required: alterations of the correlation-length reflect the changing identity state operative in the system. More confusion. But what does that have to do with economics, with allocative decisions? Resource allocation can transpire only through decisions. Again the rejoiner. Not so! Coherent modes in quantum biochemical processes are deeply involved in organizing metabolic pathway behavior. Which is resource allocation in biological systems. Gathering anger and a sense of being personally attacked in the voice of the respondent. I haven’t the slightest idea what you are talking about! How could this have anything to do with how the market functions to distribute scarce labor and natural resources? The response came calmly, this time. The capitalist market has a low level of self-organizational competency compared to quantum systems, because the economic exchange unit does not carry holistic information comparable to that carried by an electron. The only way to overcome this limitation is to start using a multivalued exchange unit in market-mediated economic processes. General lack of comprehension. Whatever that might be!

Well, the moderator broke off the discussion because it had begun to grate on the audience. In the hallways afterward, however, words flew about like crows in witness to a traffic accident. But was this sort of discussion really anything new? Hadn’t it all occurred before? Hadn’t the same words been said in Berlin during the Weimar period? Hadn’t words to the same effect been uttered in Taisho Japan? Hadn’t all this been implied by the multivalued quantum superposition realized by Braque and Picasso in the pre-World War One analytical cubist image? And hadn’t all this somehow been deeply embedded in the Vietnamese psyche which instantly, upon coming into contact with such ideas in 1920s’ Paris, experienced a deja vu sensation? Haven’t I been here before? The “internal anarchism of the village”?

So, here we have one specific case which globalization’s spin doctors have tried to spin. Will all of these interconnections, all of these hidden factors, all of these subliminal predispositions remain in abeyance? Will cultural thematics connecting many-thousand-year-old animism with hundred-year-old quantum physics, Cubism with ecology, bird navigation with trade relations, Russia with Japan with Vietnam with Germany be successfully redlined in the headlong dog-walkin’ march to global monoculture? Or will such factors impart their own impulses to the yo-yo’s string, causing it to abruptly fly back at the adolescents so haplessly trying to control it?

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