China Mountain Zhang

volunteer anything about politics. Keep your head down, don't get into trouble. Nervousness makes me a tyrant, I point at one young woman. 'Tell me what it means.'

She looks around, hoping for escape. Normally I'd feel sympathy for her but now I am only concerned with how to fill another fifteen minutes.

'Ah, it's Marx's analysis-'

Her voice is so soft I can barely hear her. 'Sweetheart,' I say, trying to put her at ease, 'you've got to talk loud enough to be heard on Mars.'

Louder she says, 'It's a Marxist diagram of historical progression.'

'Right. Now, what the diagram says is that primitive society eventually organizes into feudal society. Usually as a result of farming. That society eventually allows a few landlords-whether you call them lords or landholders or whatever-to accrue enough capital to invest in something other than farming. That capital forms the base for an industrial revolution, which paves the way for capitalist society. Capitalism exploits workers the way Feudalism exploits serfs. But capitalism is an unstable system, with it's boom and bust cycles, it's violent corrections, and eventually there is a proletariat revolution and a socialist system is established. So far so good?'

I expect them to be bored out of their minds, they've been chanting this relationship since junior middle school, but they are rigid with attention, the glaze of boredom is gone. Apparently there is some novelty in having an engineering teacher lecture them on politics.

'Okay,' I say, 'when did China move from primitive to feudal?'

'The Emperor Qin,' someone says dutifully.

'From feudal to capitalist?'

There is a moment of silence. Finally an ABC raises his hand.

'Laoshi,' he says formally, 'Teacher,' 'Mao Zedong changed the diagram. The revolution in China was a peasant revolution, not a proletariat revolution.'

'Wrong,' I say. The young man's eyes get large. 'Lenin changed the diagram. Other than that you are perfectly correct.' I sound like Comrade Wei, my calculus teacher in middle school. Marx and Lenin I hated that man.

There is a nervous laugh. I find it very exciting to have their attention. 'Can you name me an example of a country that did have a proletariat revolution?'

A young woman pops out without raising her hand, 'We did.'

'Right. In the early twentieth century the national debt and the trade deficit of the old United States precipitated the second depression. In effect, the country went bankrupt, and as a result, so did the economy of every first world nation at the time except for Japan, which managed to keep from total bankruptcy but lost most of it's markets, and for Canada and Australia, which created the Canadian-Australian alliance, a holding measure to preserve their own systems which survives until this day. The Soviet Union also went into bankruptcy because it was deeply invested in the U.S. bond market, whatever that was,' they all laugh, we've all been taught that the U.S.S.R. was deeply hurt in the economic collapse because of their involvement in the U.S. bond market, but I'll be damned if I ever met anyone who really knew what that meant. 'And what did China do?'

'Went back to a soft currency system,' someone volunteers.

'What is soft currency?' I ask.

Silence.

The boy who called me laoshi has his nerve back. 'Ah, it is an economic system which does not tie it's own currency into the world market.'

'Meaning?' I ask.

'Meaning,' he takes a breath, 'that a Chinese yuan inside the borders of China had value-that it bought things-but that outside the Chinese border it was just a piece of paper.'

'Ah,' I say. Then I tell the truth. 'You're the first person ever to explain that to me. Unless I slept through it in Middle School, which is possible.' Honest laughter this time.

I continue. 'The U.S. could no longer provide social services, keep schools open, hospitals, banks. Eventually, the Communist Party organized well enough under Christopher Brin to take over portions of New York City and attempted to provide basic social services. We will skip over the struggles of the early party, which was, as everyone knows, given a major shot in the arm by the help of the Chinese who had managed to get their economic shit together.'

Grins in the room.

'Along comes the Second Civil War, led by Brin until he was killed in Atlanta and after that by Darwin Iacomo and Zhou Xie-zhi and the United States becomes a socialist country. So there we have it, Capitalism to Proletariat revolution to Socialism. Now,' I ask, 'where is the American Feudal period?'

Actually, it was a Canadian who first asked me that, Karin, happily poking holes in my education. The class has the same answer I do, which is to say that they have no idea.

'Well,' I say, enjoying myself immensely and not giving Karin any credit, 'unless you count slavery, which was regional, there was no feudal period. And the only American primitive period was the Native Americans, and their economic history is discontinuous from ours.'

A young woman who hasn't spoken thus far raises her hand. 'Our feudalism was in Europe,' she says.

I nod. 'Okay,' I say, 'I'll give you that.'

Up until now everything I've said has been fine. I stop. I don't really have the nerve to go on. I look up, there are students in every seat, and there are two people leaning on windowsills. They are all waiting, waiting for me to make my point. 'But now, all of this so far has been very fine from a political point of view. But from a scientific point of view it is clearly a very Newtonian way of thinking.'

They all watch me. I don't know what they are thinking.

'Newtonian,' I say, 'From Newton. The guy with the apple.' Marx and Mao Zedong, I am the last person anyone would ever expect to be standing here lecturing on science and politics. Maybe I can just explain why it's Newtonian and stop there, that doesn't seem too dangerous.

'Newton thought of the Universe as like a giant clock. He said that the universe was rather like a mechanism, wound up and set in motion by God and therefore moving in grand patterns, much like planetary orbits. The nineteenth and twentieth century were mostly involved with trying to figure out Newton's patterns and describe them all.

'Marx attempted to reduce society to it's component forces. For Newton, the forces that described the universe were basically gravity, motion and inertia. Marx's major forces were economic. He thought that an analysis of economic relationships would explain the movement of history. And when he had analyzed these relationships he could extrapolate to predict the way society would move in the future.' I tap on the board. 'This is his analysis.'

Some nods. I notice the flicker of highlighters. 'I would appreciate it you didn't take this down,' I say softly. 'You will not be tested on any of this.'

The young man who calls me laoshi grins and leans back.

'Marx assumed that either things were predictable or they were random. Things are either predictable or random, aren't they?' It is a trick question, these are engineering students. Engineering tends to work with things we can solve. Things we can solve are usually predictable. 'What are the two kinds of predictable equations?' After I ask it I realize they may not know.

A young man, 'Linear or periodic.'

'Right. Linear. If I drop this book you can calculate the speed of the book as it falls. Correct? Linear or periodic?'

'Linear,' he says.

I tap the blackboard behind me. 'Linear or periodic?'

'It's not an equation,' says the woman who said our Feudal period was in Europe.

'Ah, but it looks like a graph, would the equation be linear or periodic?'

'Linear,' a couple of people say. Obviously. It's a line, from primitive to the communist utopia.

'Give me an example of periodic?'

The laoshi young man. 'The seasons.'

'Right, spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall, winter. Capitalism assumed that an economy cycles in a boom and bust cycle. Expansion, adjustment, expansion, adjustment. After all, economics is not unpredictable,