The decision: Math or polysci

I recall the days before I had a job: Wondering whether I'd go back to school, and if so, what in. Mathematics? Political science? A hard choice.

An answer appears to present itself: A study of hotness ratings on ratemyprofessors.com has determined that political scientists are the 5th hottest, on average:



Mathematicians, by contrast, come in at #31 - below even the economists, who can at least compensate for their relative hideousness with better earning potential. (On the other hand, perhaps mathematics is so beautiful that it outshines all else in the room?)

It's decided, then: If/when I go back to school, it will be to pursue a political science degree. With my square jaw, curly hair, knapsack full of Verso editions, and assortment of second-hand suits, I may even succeed in improving the ranking of the discipline.

The terrible week

Of moving around and not having internet access. This frustrating state will continue.

I have been listening to the Pogues a lot instead, and watching cowboy movies. John Wayne is remarkable for his intonation: he places emphasis more or less randomly, and talks just slightly too loud all the time.

On Tuesday, I surprised myself by going down and running my 5k after having missed a week of running hunting for a flat. I ran a 72-second negative split and slipped into the realm of faint respectability with a 19:56.

Sunday is move-into-new-flat day. And hopefully soon is have-a-bed day.

Some punk lyrics

A song about friendship:

Our band could be your life
Real names'd be proof
Me and mike watt played for years
Punk rock changed our lives...
-"History Lesson - Part II", the Minutemen

A song about alienation:

I was sayin let me out of here before I was even born
It's such a gamble when you get a face
It's fascinating to observe what the mirror does
but when I dine it's for the wall that I set a place
-"Blank Generation", Richard Hell and the Voidoids

You should go and listen to both of them.

You say you want a revolution

I'm currently listening to the Beatles' White Album straight through, maybe for the first time. I might have had it on tape when I was a big Beatles fan as a ten-year-old kid. Then again, maybe not. A lot of it sounds new, or out of sequence. It's a great album, rambling but never too rambling.

Revolution 9 is still waiting a few tracks down the line.

Anne and I have a flat, and we're starting to think about how to populate it. I went to Ernesto's, our favorite cafe, for the first time in a while today. Just sat in there and read New Left Review and drank Ch'i and ate their thick delicious fries. It felt good to walk the city normally, new albums (obtained for a dollar apiece from the city library) unreeling in my earbuds. Just flanerie, for a change.

One of the things I appreciated the most about Argentina: Going into a cafe during lunch, or after classes, getting a drink and a pastry, reading, chatting, and just watching street-life pass by. Ernesto's is great for that: it's got great big glass windows, and they'll let you sit there for hours on a hot-lemon-honey-and-ginger.

It's going to be good to be within 15 minutes walk of the cafes on Cuba Street, rather than the present half hour or more. Add it up: At $3 a drink, it's like renting a living room with a great view and a rotating cast of characters for $21 a week.

Going back to the music for a minute, in a way that's not irrelevant to cafes and new living spaces: We're constantly wondering how to go back to our idylls. Every time I scroll past the Beatles in my music library, I want to put them on, and listen the way I did when I was ten.

I can't do it. Back then, I'd heard the Beatles, a few hastily-repelled snatches of Metallica, and my dad's records (mainly Neil Young on gray Sundays). Music was simple. Now there's a whole new range of comparisons, allusions, echoes.

How does punk relate to the Beatles? Did Wire just make music as though they'd never heard a Lennon/McCartney composition? For that matter, what about Public Enemy?

In other words, it sometimes seems as though music is filled with caesuras, breaks, ruptures. Sometimes, attempting to listen to A Hard Day's Night, I think that 22-year-old Peter and 10-year-old Peter are standing on the opposite sides of a divide. (He's facing away from me, unaware of the abyss, while I am looking towards him, no doubt failing to see further rifts behind my back.)

To make light of scientific terms, one could see my musical education as a punctuated equilibrium evolution: My past contains distinct species, marked off by rapid taste adaptations in response to abruptly changed circumstances.

Or not. To paraphrase one of the 19th-century scientists, speaking of evolution, we cannot comprehend any organism (or indeed any social form) without comprehending its highest level of development. The homo sapiens sapiens contains the key to understanding the chimpanzee, etc. My Xiu Xiu-listening, Gogol Bordello-rocking, Black Sabbath-fondly-remembering, Кино-playing-on-a-Saturday-morning ass is still the outgrowth of that kid who walked around always with a Beatles tape in his Walkman. It's all buried in the same pile, the same cultural agglomeration.

I am not just talking about music, or about myself.

Leaving this to the more eloquent...

The incomparable Anne, who's not really political at all. She reads Coetzee and where I say "apartheid!" she says "narrativity!" (Although she's certainly not wrong to do so.)

Nevertheless, there is this feeling of being carried away:

Ive been glued to the tv for hours at this point, wanting more, crying when Perlman plays with Yo Yo Ma, crying when Obama says the right thing. It's something beyond words. There's no way to overstate it. The solmenity, the relief, the sense of something immense, and a feeling I haven't had about this before. This being the US government, Our government. Our country.

During the interminable presidential campaign, probably after her husband won the Democratic nomination, Michelle Obama said that it was the first time she had been really, truly proud of her country. She was, of course, pilloried for saying such a thing, but I think a lot of us were thinking it.

For example, the race relations front. Obama is, of course, the son of a Kenyan father, and thus not directly tied in to the sordid history of slavery on the continent. But I know, as a first-generation American myself, how that legacy can weigh upon even those who had no personal involvement. And to see the old Jim Crow rules finally shattered...

For those of us who've grown up during the last war, it's been hard to think of America without feeling similarly weighed-down by the weight of the bombs and commonplace atrocities. Today? It's a promise of liberation from all that. For me - and, I suspect, many people my age, it's the first time as adults that we can truly feel buoyed up by America, elevated by the promise of the place.

No guarantees, no promises. He won't necessarily do the right thing unless we raise our voices. But Obama has our measure, and will listen to us.

Good-bye Bush

It's been eight years of almost continuous disaster, and if there is any justice left in the halls of Washington DC, the major players in the Bush administration will be seen again. On trial for war crimes.

Nevertheless, there are less than a dozen hours to go before Bush is gone. President-elect Obama is next, of course, and we can feel good about that. The terrible thing about growing up in the shadow of Bush's wars and his administration's general callousness and disrespect for civil liberties, equality of opportunity, and human life is that I have come to expect nothing more from the US government. Politics has collapsed into a terrible singularity: "Oh, what's the news this morning? Another suicide bombing in Baghdad, more revelations of torture in Guantanamo, Katrina victims living in poisoned trailers. Haven't I seen this newspaper already?"

It has been like growing up during the Vietnam War - except that nobody seemed to care. I have grown up with the tragic sense that my country was on the wrong path, heading grimly towards militarism and hollow (at best) prosperity, but without the Vietnam-era dynamism of protest and turmoil. Bush has polarized America, but in terms of public expression his opponents seem to resemble Nixon's "silent majority" more than the SDS or other left groups. The facade of order and consensus has tended to prevail over any expressions of dissent or anger. (Media consolidation has probably played some role here.)

I'm looking forward to Obama not necessarily because I know what his policies will be and approve of them, but precisely because I don't know what he will do. It's possible that he will be a Clinton-style appeaser of the right, currying favor with fragments of the left while moving towards the center. It's also possible that he could govern as the redistributory socialist his opponents painted him as. It's too early to tell.

And that is the bizarre luxury that will dawn on us on the 20th of January: We don't know what will happen. Exuberant crowds are gathering all over America (and I wish I could be part of them). From my vantage point halfway around the world, there seems to be tremendous excitement. People love Obama himself. But I suspect that, for most of us in the new silent majority, the wonder of the moment is the prospect that we will pick up the newspaper and read that something different has happened today. The prospect, in short, that the monotonous brutality of the Bush years will be replaced by a few new colors.

Stress

Life is stressful right now. Anne is getting back soon, and due to some sudden fuckery with the duration of this lease, I am being forced to find a new place in a week. And the entire rest of the city of Wellington seems to be doing the same. I am aggravated and can't sleep properly (let alone find a flat).

(I guess what's keeping me sane is the thought that you're coming back to me. More than ever, I know that you're the one I want, because I know that if you were here you'd calm me down, which is a fairly tall order.)

I have been delving into nerdery lately. A viewing of the latest Hellboy movie led me to download and start reading that comic book series (wonderful Lovecraftian tones; characters are a bit sparse). I finally read the whole of Preacher, which a friend discovered on study abroad in Argentina and lent me an issue or two of. A whole world of nerdy things. (Didn't I stop reading X-Men in seventh grade?) And since the flat-madness, I have read almost all the way through the archives of Questionable Content.

Anne started reading QC as well - I think after I showed here this comic, in which two of the protagonists lapse into marr-speak. It's funny as Anne started speaking in marrs a while back, and now we can hold a conversation entirely in nonsense words.

She has told me that she'd view it as a personal affront if the writer ever got those two characters to break up.

Dust

...dust settled even on the revolutions.
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project [D1a,1]

Last night, I watched the first half of Goodbye Lenin, a movie about the fall of communism in East Germany. To summarize: When Alex's socialism-devoted mother sees him arrested in a protest march, she falls into a coma and does not wake up until after the wall has fallen. To preserve her health, Alex maintains the fiction that socialism is still thriving. To do so, he must repress the onset of Western-style consumerism.

His mother's first request is for a jar of good old socialist state-manufactured pickles. When Alex arrives at the corner shop, all the old pickles are gone, replaced by a dizzying array of imported food. A consumer wonderland. (To quote Gang of Four, it's "paradise... if you can earn it.") Alex spends a lot of time transferring the new food into recycled socialist containers before serving it to his mother.

The tension operating in the film isn't between totalitarianism and democracy, but between the dull, socially- (if not politically-) secure closed communist world and the risky consumer lifestyle beyond the wall. When Alex marches in protest, he is not calling for Coca-Cola but demanding a free press. Instead, he loses his job repairing televisions and goes to work selling imported satellite dishes, and his sister quits university to work in a Burger King. They can finally consume freely - but when socialism returns as a simulacrum within their apartment, Alex displays a clear nostalgia for the old days of boredom.

I've often wished, as a consumer rather than a citizen, that I lived in some Soviet Russia-like state where there was exactly one make and model of everything, so that when you needed new shoes, say, you'd just go to the store, ask for a size 10, and that was it, you'd be done, you'd have your goddamn shoes, instead of having to choose between forty different brands of shoes that are like a very complex and uninteresting game of "Can You Spot the Differences?"
-Tim Kreider

By the 1980s, dust had settled over the 1917 revolution. Politically, the Soviet state had always been a ghastly nightmare, but in the 1950s and 1960s it could claim economic dynamism. This was the context of Nikita Khrushchev's famous claim that "we will bury you!" He was referring not to the inevitable forward march of the Red Army but to the industrial growth the communist nations had spawned.

However, as Paul Krugman discusses in a lengthy, triumphal digression in his Return of Depression Economics, the Soviet productivity miracle relied not on technological advances and better-trained workers but on reinvesting large percentages of their output and pushing more and more peasants and housewives into factories. This strategy hit its limits by the 1970s, and past that point communist output growth stalled.

Unlike Tim Kreider's consumer paradise, in which old goods are swiftly replaced by new, promiscuously multiplying varieties, the communist economy stood still. Dust settled over the socialist economy. In Goodbye Lenin, Alex and his sister are attempting to get their mother's old GDR banknotes to convert into Deutschmarks; she is suspicious. To convince her, they lie, and say that their Trabant (a small, crappy fiberglass car) is ready.

"After only three years!" she exclaims, pleasantly surprised.

So that was the communist economy. As Slavoj Žižek explained, discussing the way in which the Communist regimes enabled an attempt to escape from both communism and capitalism:

This externality to capitalism also compelled dissidents to question the incessant drive towards productivity shared by capitalism and State socialism. The obverse of this drive is the growing piles of useless waste, mountains of used cars, computers, etc. (like the famous airplanes' 'resting place' in the Mojave desert); in these ever-growing piles of inert, dysfunctional 'stuff', which cannot but impress us with their useless, bare presence, one can, as it were, perceive the capitalist drive at rest...

The ultimate irony is that an author from the Communist East displayed the greatest sensitivity for this obverse of the drive to produce-and-consume. Perhaps, however, this irony displays a deeper necessity which hinges on what Heiner Müller called the 'waiting-room mentality' of Communist Eastern Europe:

There would be an announcement: The train will arrive at 18:15 and depart at 18:20 - and it never did arrive at 18:15. Then came the next announcement: The train will arrive at 20:10. And so on. You went on sitting there in the waiting room, thinking, it's bound to come at 20:15. That was the situation. Basically, it's a state of Messianic anticipation. There are constant announcements of the Messiah's impending arrival, and you know perfectly well that he won't be coming. And yet, somehow, it's good to hear him announced all over again.

The point of this Messianic attitude was not that hope was maintained, but that, because the Messiah did not arrive, people began to look around and take note of the inert materiality of their surroundings, in contrast to the West, where people, engaged in permanent frenetic activity, fail properly to notice what goes on around them. Because of the lack of acceleration, people could enjoy greater contact with the earth on which the waiting room was built; caught in this delay, they deeply experienced the idiosyncrasies of their world, all of its topographical and historical details...

[From "Heiner Müller out of joint", The Universal Exception.]

So that was the situation that Alex recreates within his apartment, just as life is speeding up outside. A lack of economic "progress" opens up a space of boredom, which has its own appeal. The social security - which is to say, the layers of dust - of the socialist nations did not seem to be the problem. Protesters were calling for the beginning of democracy, not the end of socialism.

However, demands for free elections and free presses were taken in a perpendicular direction by a too-easy equivalence of democracy and capitalism. In many cases, democracy never fully arrived, but the "free market" did. (Witness Russia: Ruled in authoritarian fashion first by oligarchs and then by Putin.)

As for me, I agree with Kreider, and the perpetually lost look in Alex's eyes. Consumerism tends to resemble an unstoppable treadmill rather than a liberation. We're here for democracy, and the right to say and think and write what we want. It's okay if a bit of dust settles on the rest of it. (While Alex's sister throws out and replaces her old furniture, and sneers when confronted again with her former vestments, I don't mind shopping second-hand and wearing the clothes of dead men.)

Last week, I had a talk with my dad. Problem: Almost all of our economic activity is based on exploitation of natural resources, many of which are not used in a sustainable fashion. Within our lifetime, maybe, we will run out of oil to burn and rainforests to mill into timber and fish to eat. Even if that happens, sustainable resource use will imply limits to the amounts we can use. (Water will be constrained, as there is a limited amount in circulation, and replanted forests and farms and all the rest will be limited by the area of arable land. Even if a high percent of metal and plastics are recycled, there is still a limited amount of all that in landfills.) We will, at some point, face the dilemma of the Soviet economy - no more growth in output. (Or destroy ourselves - it's not yet clear which.)

Dust will settle on the world economy. My dad responded to this grim prognosis, arguing that GDP could still grow as a result of intellectual production - writing software, e-books, etc. (I am a skeptic - even the "dematerialized" Internet economy has a material substratum.)

Recall the other day's post about David Harvey, EO Wilson and the six basic human drives that motivate our activity ("competition, adaptation, cooperation, environmental transformation, spatial and temporal ordering"). If or when we enter a world without growth of industrial output, these must be reconfigured. We don't particularly need growth, and the specific competitive incentives that sustain it. But we do need some variety of competition.

To return one last time to communism and the dissidents' demands for democratic freedom: I wonder if we can envision democracy arriving yet not sweeping away the dust over the economy. In other words, keep the socialist pickles, and get political freedom instead. Perhaps this is the repressed kernel of my dad's dream of a dematerialized information economy in which we all produce software or websites or whatever (which strikes me as the economic reflection of a political desire - free speech commodified). A world in which we wait years for our Trabants and can use the time to speak freely about what we have observed while waiting.

David Harvey on EO Wilson

I came across this intriguing bit from an interview with David Harvey - the Marxist geographer is asked about his theoretical engagement with biologist EO Wilson:

In your most recent writing, you turn a number of times to the theme of evolution, engaging with E. O. Wilson’s work in a sympathetic if critical spirit, very unlike most responses to his writing on the Left... [I]t is Wilson’s emphasis on the genetic dispositions of every species that offers the occasion for a remarkable set of reflexions on human evolution, which you suggest has left the species a ‘repertoire’ of capacities and powers — competition, adaptation, cooperation, environmental transformation, spatial and temporal ordering — out of which every society articulates a particular combination. Capitalism, you argue, requires all of these—not least its own forms of cooperation—yet gives primacy to a particular mode of competition. But if competition itself could never be eliminated, as an innate propensity of humanity, its relations with the other powers are in no way unalterable. Socialism is thus best conceived as a reconfiguration of the basic human repertoire, in which its constituent elements find another and better balance. This is a striking response to the claims of sociobiology on its own terrain. But a committed champion of the existing system would reply: yes, but just as in nature the survival of the fittest is the rule whatever the ecological niche, so in society the reason why capitalism has won out is its competitive superiority. It is competition that is the absolute centre of the system, lending it an innovative dynamic that no alternative which relativized or demoted the competitive drive into another combination could hope to withstand. You might try to mobilize competition for socialism, but you would want to subordinate it as a principle within a more complex framework, whereas we don’t subordinate it—that is our unbeatable strength. What would be your reply to this kind of objection?

My answer is—oh, but you do: you do subordinate competition in all kinds of areas. Actually, the whole history of capitalism is unthinkable without the setting up of a regulatory framework to control, direct and limit competition. Without state power to enforce property and contract law, not to speak of transport and communications, modern markets could not begin to function. Next time you’re flying into London or New York, imagine all those pilots suddenly operating on the competitive principle: they all try to hit the ground first, and get the best gate. Would any capitalist relish that idea? Absolutely not. When you look closely at the way a modern economy works, the areas in which competition genuinely rules turn out be quite circumscribed. If you think of all the talk of flexible accumulation, a lot of it revolves around diversification of lines and niche markets. What would the history of capitalism be without diversification? But actually the dynamic behind diversification is a flight from competition—the quest for specialized markets is, much of the time, a way of evading its pressures. In fact, it would be very interesting to write a history of capitalism exploring its utilization of each of the six elements of the basic repertoire I outline, tracing the changing ways it has brought them together and put them to work, in different epochs. Knee-jerk hostility to Wilson isn’t confined to the Left, but it is not productive. Advances in biology are teaching us a great deal about our make-up, including the physical wiring of our minds, and will tell us much more in the future. I don’t see how one can be a materialist and not take all this very seriously. So in the case of sociobiology, I go back to my belief in the value of rubbing different conceptual blocks together—putting E. O. Wilson in dialogue with Marx. There are obviously major differences, but also some surprising commonalities—so let’s collide the two thinkers against each other. I’m not going to claim I’ve done it right, but this is a discussion we need.

We need this discussion now. Our world-system - which, as Harvey notes, is primarily structured around particular types of competition - is beginning to nudge up against limits, both ecological and man-made. The current financial crisis, for example, must not be thought of as an aberration but as a contingent event: that is to say, it has emerged from within the peculiar logic of competition within financial markets. (Were I to be Hegelian about it, I might say that it represented the apotheosis/implosion, the highest development and collapse of, the economic order of recent decades.)

Of course, we're in an unfortunate cognitive bind: Capitalism, or the postmodern version of it, seems to be eternal. Even a serious crisis seems to have provoked little or no flagellation and gnashing of teeth among economists. When fixes are proposed, they are generally cosmetic, or worse, designed with the goal of reviving the imbalanced pre-crisis economy. We need a way out.

(And if you don't believe me that we're not on the right path, come back in 50 years when the world has heated up and small island nations have disappeared.)

I've started to play around with Harvey's point, above. Assuming that Wilson is right and we have six basic human drives - "competition, adaptation, cooperation, environmental transformation, spatial and temporal ordering" - how might we change?

Our transformation of the environment does not need to be primarily extractive, exploitative, or destructive. The building of the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary, for example, was a way of transforming Wellington's environment. We should do more things like that. Likewise, competition should neither be stigmatized nor raised to a blind dogma; it can be productive and non-destructive when in proper relationship to our cooperative and adaptive instincts. (And where does inquisitiveness fit in? I am convinced that most of history is the result of curiosity.) The trick is trying to envision what all of this would look like.

On the subject of competition, my running experiment has gone to week two. Week Two Peter crushes Week One Peter by 40 seconds - 20:08 for 5k, although the wind wasn't as strong. Once again, I was passed by nobody and even ran down two people in the last two hundred meters.

New Year

In 2008, I got drunk, got a great girlfriend, graduated, drove across the country, moved to New Zealand, went left, and worked for the guvmint. (Also sent out a lot of postcards to people. Nobody has written back, which makes me very sad.) Also, the world economy melted down and Barack "Sir Change-A-Lot" Obama was elected president. (In 2009 - January 20 to be precise - I resolve to celebrate the end of the twisted and evil Bush years by drinking a lot and hugging strangers.)

It's kinda hard to top a year like that, but I'm sure that something will come up. The US government will default on its outstanding loans, or China will have another go at revolution, or something. I'll be trying my best to live a tranquil life in the southern hemisphere, going out every Sunday with Anne to buy vegetables at the Farmer's Market and sit in Ernesto's for three hours playing chess and reading.

So I suppose there's no better time to dredge up the old "choose life" monologue from Trainspotting:

Choose life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments, choose a starter home, choose your friends. Choose leisure-wear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite and higher purchase and a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you've spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future, choose life.

Spindle, fold, mutilate

Adventures in language and biology with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

A kitten, it is generally accepted, is a juvenile feline - in short, a mammal. Air-breathing, furry mammal. Fish are clearly not mammals. However, PETA has decided that the best way to prevent people from eating fish is to rename them sea kittens.

Unfortunately, this is not a joke:

Whoever was in charge of creating a positive image for fish needs to go right back to working on the Britney Spears account and leave our scaly little friends alone. You've done enough damage, buddy. We've got it from here. And we're going to start by retiring the old name for good. When your name can also be used as a verb that means driving a hook through your head, it's time for a serious image makeover.

[...]

Please take just a few moments to send an e-mail to H. Dale Hall, the director of the FWS, asking him to stop promoting the hunting of sea kittens (otherwise known as "fishing").

As heart-rendingly stupid as this is, there is one silver lining to this biological and linguistic travesty. PETA wrote a little series of "sea kitten" stories. They're morbidly hilarious:

Tony the Trout is the smartest sea kitten in his school. Already litter-trained at 2 months old, Tony went on to double-major in neuroscience and environmental studies at Clamson University, eventually graduating with honors.

When Tony is caught and fed to a precocious young child who, having eaten one sea kitten too many, falls to the bottom of his class, the irony is not lost on him.

This story is a wonderfully morbid little piece; nevertheless, it serves to underscore the essential derangement of PETA, and the way in which their peculiar mission can only be sustained by a lack of genuine will to understand animals on their own terms. It begins by deciding that it's not enough to mammalianize fish, and then anthropomorphizes the hell out of them. The argument is, in short: If you gave fish the chance, they'd go to university, just like us, and so we shouldn't eat them.

PETA works through an intellectual short-circuit: Its first principle is the venerable old zombie movie commonplace that "they are us." In that sense, it is the final instance of civilization's ideological conquest of nature: that which is not like us cannot be imagined to be any different.

Mike Davis, commenting on the intersection of wildlife and Los Angeles, notes that mountain lions - which are large predators - are compared to gangbangers in an attempt to criminalize their presence in LA's expanding suburbs. While those making the cougars/gangbangers comparison want to exterminate the big cats, the basic impetus is the same. Animals species, which are quite distinct in instinct and thought process, are understood as humans, or not at all.

This is of course very unreasonable; any environmentalism worth a damn is founded upon a recognition that animals (and plants, insects, etc) are not us, and therein lies their value. Word to Edward Abbey; the hell with this PETA stuff. It's just Dr Moreau without the vivisection.

A modest radical proposal

Enterprising wise men look to the horizon
Thinking more capitalism is the wisdom
-Deltron 3030

We need a Communist Party.

Not for the reasons you might think - after all, they tried communism in the Soviet Union and it didn't work out so well. So it's not the case that we want communism again - although capitalism doesn't seem to be delivering very well either. (Witness the 100 to 200 million people cast into poverty this last summer due to rising food prices. The rising food prices were caused by the dismantling of Third World food subsidies and import restrictions; when those were lifted millions became dependent upon international commodity markets for their daily bread. And when developed nations decided to subsidize biofuels on a large-scale basis, grain prices rose with catastrophic results for the Third World. Or, for that matter, witness the recent financial cataclysm, which promises to send unemployment rates in the US to 10%.)

What would be nice is a return to the post New-Deal mixed economy model. You know: Tight and effective regulation of finance companies, public spending on infrastructure and public goods like health care, unemployment insurance, education, pensions, etc, and a strong social compact that includes unions. This time, it would be better if more were included in the social compact - i.e. not excluding the African-American part of the country - but the basic plan seems sound.

How did we arrive at that social contract? In the 1930s, capitalism was facing a global crisis. Most people weren't sure whether it would survive, and there was a serious debate over what might replace it. And, after 1932, the US had a pragmatic leader who was willing to experiment with different policies for ending the Depression.

FDR faced a debate with two sides. On the one side, there were the free-marketeers, like Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who saw periods of boom and bust as "creative destruction" and advised politicians not to leave "part of the work of depression undone", or Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary (and banker) Andrew Mellon, whose sage advice was to

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate ... It will purge the rottenness out of the system.

These "enterprising wise men" who call for more capitalism to fix the excesses of capitalism are still around, and have a firm grip over one of the major political parties and tendrils extending into the other. The advocates of further breaking through the limits to capital are still powerful.

Of course, in the 1930s the organized left was powerful. Bourgeois nations faced a serious ideological threat from the Soviet Union, from Communist Parties in every major nation except the fascist states, and social-democratic dissent from growing trade unions. There were powerful voices calling for an end to the experiment of capitalism. They spoke for the working class, which had been dramatically downsized as a first response to the crisis, and for underprivileged and underrepresented groups in general. (The US Communist Party, for example, was the only white-majority organization in the country that accepted African-Americans as full members and was willing to struggle for their rights.)

The New Deal ended up being the outcome of class struggle between the Mellonite bourgeoisie and the Left-affiliated working classes. As the latter was more electorally significant, and the threat of the Soviet Union was close to mind, FDR strategically incorporated policies from the Left to gain their support. If he couldn't satisfy the needs of the masses, then they may turn to the Communists.

Now, we may be in a similar situation. We are about to have a pragmatic, capable president who (apparently) hopes to avoid economic catastrophe within the bounds of what is possible given political power lines. We have a looming economic disaster. We have a Mellonite right that is committed to expanding the power of capital. (Senate Republicans held up a necessary bailout of the major car companies, risking up to 1 million jobs, in hopes of destroying organized labor. A memo circulated among Senate Republicans noted, "Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.")

However, the organized Left is completely absent. There is no Communist Party to intimidate either of the major parties into working on behalf of the working class. The "far-left" here is represented by relatively orthodox new-Keynesian economists such as Paul Krugman, who call for a return to New Deal programs. And if the Obama administration must mediate between people who call for "liquidation", less regulation, and tax cuts, and people who call for relatively modest progressive changes to make capitalism slightly more functional, where do you think the final equilibrium will lie?

The fate of Obama's $700-billion-ish stimulus package should provide an early indication. He is now indicating that 40% of that will be tax cuts, much of which will be tax cuts for businesses rather than working Americans. Paul Krugman and others have argued that this is likely to be ineffective, as well as blatantly skewed towards capital. Meanwhile, the US social safety net is badly torn. Extending unemployment benefits and increasing food stamps would provide a much more effective and equitable short-term stimulus - but at the moment, there is no political cost to screwing the working class. We need a Communist Party to make it dangerous to do so.

I need to get better at this

It's been approximately sixteen weeks or something since I've written anything. Ye gods.

An eventful fine, though. Went tramping with Dave Rogo from the old Williams XC on the Rees-Dart track near Queenstown; it was a fine alpine trek. We went up the Rees river, crossed the Rees saddle, and then down the Dart River, with detours up to the Dart Glacier/Cascade Saddle and a fruitless expedition in search of the Whitbourne Glacier. A lot of varied terrain and great vistas. We were eaten alive by vicious sand-flies.

The only serious disagreement was in provisioning: Dave wanted to get food; I wanted to get wine. My philosophy: tramping trips should make you tired, cold, wet, and hungry. But alcohol enhances any experience. Instead, we ended up well-fed and sober.

On the first day, I picked up a few scraps of fencing wire, and proceeded to use them for everything I could. I cut them up to make impromptu coat-hangers, used them to wire together pack components into a day-pack for a side trip, etc. Evidently it's a very Kiwi thing to do everything with No 8 fencing wire. It must be genetics or something, because Dave didn't pick up that wire.

On the final day, Dave remarked to me that he now knew why it was called tramping instead of hiking in NZ: "Tramping" is a much soggier word, and tramping in New Zealand would make you very wet. The previous day, we had forded 25 streams in the face of flood warnings.

That day, I reflected: I remembered being 11 or 12 years old, one winter in NZ, when my dad got it into his head that we would hike down the Pararaha Gorge in the Waitakeres. I've done it since - it's become a bit of a family outing in subsequent years - and it's really not that strenuous or life-threatening. But everything looks big when you're a preteen.

Of course, we also drank pure water from glacier-fed cascades, so there were compensations.

I remember, distinctly, wanting to put on long pants that day, and being refused. It was shorts or nothing, and my new wooly checked bush jacket on top. We hiked down a river, up the side of the gorge, back into the river, and finally onto a gray and rainy beach. It was a wet day, and I was cold all the way down. The valley walls seemed to be precarious in the extreme - at times I felt that I was clinging on to shrubs and flax on a vertical face. (it wasn't that bad the next time.) And, to add insult to injury, Dad's idea of provisions was highly inadequate - probably an apple and a sandwich apiece.

When we finally exited the hellish gorge, and walked the estimated 26 miles back to the car, we went to go get meat pies at a since-defunct chain. They were the best pies I've ever had.

The point of this anecdote, I think, is that all of these things seemed utterly insane to me at the time. Rain, tramping down rivers, wearing shorts on a chilly winter day, scarce food. But these days I realize: I would do the same in my dad's place. In fact, throughout most of the trip, I did do those sorts of things.

Now I'm back at work in Wellington. I am conducting two experiments at the moment. First, I'm making a lot of muffins, partly because I love muffins, and partly because I want to get better at making them. Mmmm. Muffins.

Second, I'm running again. Here's my logic: I haven't run regularly in about a year. I'm about as out of training as I've ever been. (And, hopefully, ever will be.) It's a chance to see how fast I can get fit.

Two of the local running clubs here run a weekly 5k down on the waterfront. I'm going to go down and run that every week, and see how it goes. This week, after one day of running, I ran slightly negative splits into a strong headwind on the way back - 20:49. Goes to show that I still know how to pace myself properly.

My family all mocked me for the slowness. I have no regrets, though, as I was never passed. In the last mile, I passed a group of guys going into the wind. A minute or so I looked back and all four were strung out in a line behind me, drafting. I didn't mind, though. I took their souls in the end.

I would give up this running thing except for a love of competition. It was a slow race and slim competition. The stakes cannot get smaller. But I've hardly felt happier recently than in that last mile, wondering what it was going to be like at the finish line. Would they all barge past me after sitting out of the wind, or would I get home first? I spent minutes wondering if I was making a mistake by leading, and deciding - hang it, I would run. It's that tension, caught between the exhilaration of gliding legs and the fear of defeat, that I miss when I'm not racing.