California

A flailing Marxist history of California, capitalist success story

Published

2 years ago

March 3, 2023

A flailing Marxist history of California, capitalist success story

I regard my hometown of Palo Alto — as soon as a sleepy middle-class suburb, now Silicon Valley’s globally famend epicenter — with a mixture of ambivalence and affection. Malcolm Harris, the writer of the 700-plus web page tome Palo Alto: A Historical past of California, Capitalism, and the World, graduated from the town’s public highschool just a few years earlier than I did. He and I each turned writers, a relative rarity in a area constructed round science and engineering. However Harris regards Palo Alto with one thing it will be truthful to explain as fanatical hatred.

Palo Alto: A Historical past of California, Capitalism, and the World; By Malcolm Harris; Little, Brown, and Firm; 720 pp., $36.00

Within the e book’s introduction, Harris refers back to the well-publicized teenage suicides which have plagued Palo Alto for the reason that early 2000s. Town’s fee of youth suicide has been considerably larger than the nationwide common within the twenty first century. Unhappy with the (admittedly unsatisfying) investigations of the scourge by journalists and the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, Harris turns to Marxist political superstition: The suicides are revenge for Palo Alto’s capitalist sins, which have made the city “haunted.”

“Haunting connects the haunted” — that’s, Palo Altans — “to unseen lineages of historic duty,” Harris explains. There are specific “social crimes from which some endure and others revenue.” In “hauntings,” the tables are turned, and the “profiteers are made to endure.” The “violator’s descendants” could also be held accountable for his or her ancestors’ actions. In any case, most of the Palo Alto suicides have taken place on the identical railroad “that introduced the mass of capitalist white settlers to California,” a technique that Harris deems “traditionally resonant.”

Like God in Exodus smiting the Egyptians, Harris suggests, historical past is expiating his hometown for its racist and capitalist exploitation. Examples of this exploitation — from the displacement of the area’s Native People to the degradation of the atmosphere, to eugenics and the event of laptop know-how for the U.S. navy — fill the remainder of the e book, in 5 chronological elements, from 1850 to 2020.

This one-note story is made considerably extra readable, a minimum of, for being interspersed with a melange of Marxist metaphors, comparable to, “California’s agricultural capitalists pedaled the state’s nonwhite labor like a bicycle: After they pushed one group down, one other rose to switch it, and the entire contraption moved a bit of farther down the highway.” Later: “Silicon Valley leaders sat on high of this world system like a cherry on a sundae, insulated from the melting basis by a wealthy tower of cream.” Harris is a vivid pamphleteer.

However let’s stick for a second with the opening account of “historic duty” for the city’s suicides as a result of it is consultant of the entire e book’s victim-oppressor body, through which historical past is a protracted prepare of abuses by the highly effective, who might sooner or later endure their comeuppance. Who’re the victims, and who’re the oppressors? Based on a 2016 report from Public Radio Worldwide, “40% of the scholars who died by suicide in Palo Alto had been Asian American,” prompting the district to direct extra assets towards these college students. Considered one of Palo Alto’s two excessive colleges now has an Asian American plurality.

Harris’s story recounts the persecution of Asian People on the West Coast. For instance, vigilantism in opposition to California Chinese language was widespread within the nineteenth century, and an 1853 California Supreme Courtroom case, Individuals v. Corridor, established that Chinese language, like blacks and Indians, couldn’t testify in opposition to white Californians in court docket. (The legislature overturned the choice 20 years later.) Asian People couldn’t develop into naturalized U.S. residents till the mid-Twentieth century, and their means to purchase property, together with in Palo Alto, was severely restricted. Harris tells the poignant tales of Yamato Ichihashi, Stanford’s first Japanese professor, whose station couldn’t save him from an internment camp throughout World Struggle II.

Readers who can face up to, or get pleasure from, Harris’s ideological bludgeon will be taught some issues in regards to the area. As an illustration, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel that influenced Twentieth-century American perceptions of psychiatry, masculinity, and management, was impressed by Kesey’s expertise working at a veterans’ hospital close to Stanford, in a interval when the CIA was funding experiments with LSD. Harris emphasizes the profound interconnectedness between Silicon Valley analysis and the World Struggle II and Chilly Struggle national-security state. That relationship was partly forgotten within the post-Chilly Struggle period, however persons are being compelled to recollect it as technological competitors with China surges and Washington takes a larger curiosity in subsidizing and regulating microelectronics.

Harris’s explanations of scientific advances are detailed and punchy (cf. “These pulses then bought the following rhumbatron dancing as they transferred bursts of vitality into the second cavity, like a wheel of fists in opposition to a dangling velocity bag.”) But it surely doesn’t precisely construct belief in science writing when the writer pronounces forward of time that his most well-liked clarification for a suicide cluster is residual “religious ache” inflicted by deceased capitalists.

Considered one of Harris’s rhetorical instruments is to explain social or ethical issues and declare them to be “options, not bugs” of capitalism. “Competitors and domination, exploitation and exclusion, minority rule and sophistication hate: These aren’t issues capitalist know-how will remedy,” he explains. “That’s what it’s for.” Earlier: “For Amazon, accidents are environment friendly.” “Palo Alto has been unable to repair the issue of youth suicides as a result of these youth suicides are already a part of an answer.”

Meaning the exploitation and violence will solely intensify till the entire system is overthrown, beginning with the return of Stanford to the descendants of displaced Native People, to treatment Palo Alto’s unique sin. “The return and important refashioning of Stanford’s land is one thing just like the minimal required motion to protect the potential of a comparatively peaceable transition to a sustainable world system,” Harris argues. And if that doesn’t occur? He gestures at Plan B by dedicating his e book “to the planet Earth, its individuals, and its preservation by any means needed.”

The flattening of historical past, the pining for revolution, and the erasure of the person in favor of group classes: Maybe these aren’t incidental to Marxism. They’re options, not bugs — the outcomes it intends to attain.

Jason Willick is an opinion columnist for the Washington Submit.

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California

2 dead, 3 injured in shooting in Louisville’s California neighborhood

Published

7 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Press Room

2 dead, 3 injured in shooting in Louisville’s California neighborhood

Two men are dead and three others injured in a mass shooting in the California neighborhood Saturday night, Louisville Metro Police said.

Second Division officers initially found four men with gunshot wounds in the 2200 block of Garland Avenue when they arrived at 7:30 p.m., LMPD spokesperson John Bradley said in a statement.

Two men were pronounced dead at the scene, while the other two were taken to the University of Louisville Hospital for treatment. As of Sunday, one man was in “critical but stable condition,” while the other was in stable condition, Bradley said.

A fifth man was later found in the area, Bradley said Sunday. He was also taken to UofL Hospital, but his condition was unknown.

Police had not located a suspect Saturday night. LMPD’s homicide unit is investigating, Bradley said. Anyone with information about the shooting could call LMPD’s anonymous tip line at 502-574-5673.

The two men who died have not yet been identified.

Reach reporter Leo Bertucci at lbertucci@gannett.com or @leober2chee on X, formerly known as Twitter

This story has been updated to add video.

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California

California man beheaded his 1-year-old son with a knife, authorities say

Published

15 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Press Room

California man beheaded his 1-year-old son with a knife, authorities say

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A man has been arrested on suspicion of beheading his 1-year-old son, Northern California authorities said.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Friday that deputies responding to an early morning family disturbance call found a woman outside a home who told deputies that her husband Andrey Demskiy, 28, assaulted her and her mother.

Deputies forced their way into the house in northern Sacramento County when they learned Demskiy was inside with the boy. As they took him into custody, they found a “severed child’s head” in the bedroom where Demskiy was detained.

Detectives said Demskiy used a knife to behead his son after his wife and mother-in-law left the house, according to the statement. He was in custody and ineligible for bail, and was scheduled to appear in court Tuesday.

The sheriff’s department and the county public defenders office did not respond to emails seeking information on whether Demskiy had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.

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California

Protests Swept California Campuses Last Year. Schools Are Now Blocking Them | KQED

Published

22 hours ago

December 21, 2024

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Protests Swept California Campuses Last Year. Schools Are Now Blocking Them | KQED

At UC Santa Cruz, police arrested one student who was using a megaphone during a demonstration on Oct. 7, according to an eyewitness who spoke to LookOut Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office public arrest reports show one person was arrested on the Santa Cruz campus for obstruction of a public officer and battery without injury that day.

While no arrests were made, Pomona College has suspended 12 students for the remainder of the 2024–25 academic year following an Oct. 7 demonstration in which they entered, damaged and vandalized a restricted building, according to the student newspaper. The college also banned dozens of students from the four other campuses of the Claremont Colleges, a consortium that includes Pomona.

Private colleges have implemented their own policy changes. Pomona College now requires students and faculty to swipe their ID cards to enter academic buildings. Since last semester, students and visitors entering USC are also required to show a school or photo ID.

Some students are still facing charges from last year’s protests

Few charges have been filed after UCLA’s encampment made headlines in April when counterprotesters led an attack on encampment protesters while law enforcement did not intervene for several hours. The following day, 254 people were arrested on charges related to the protest encampment. In October, two additional people were also arrested for participating in the counter-protester violence.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office is pursuing three felony cases against individuals arrested at UCLA in relation to violence during last spring’s protests.

Meanwhile, the city attorney’s office is reviewing 93 misdemeanor cases from USC and 210 from UCLA, according to information it provided to CalMatters last month.

Lilyan Zwirzina, a junior at Cal Poly Humboldt, was among the students arrested in the early morning of April 30 following protesters occupying a campus building and ignoring orders to disperse from the university. Law enforcement took her to Humboldt County Correctional Facility, where she faced four misdemeanor charges, including resisting arrest. Zwirzina thought she’d have to cancel her study abroad semester, which conflicted with the court date she was given.

“I was pretty frustrated and kind of freaked out,” Zwirzina said. Authorities dropped the charges against her in July.

Pro-Palestinian protesters demand police officers go home during a protest outside of Siemens Hall at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata on April 22, 2024. (Mark McKenna/CalMatters)

The Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office didn’t pursue charges against 27 of the 39 people arrested, citing insufficient evidence. The 12 remaining cases were referred to the Cal Poly Humboldt Police Department for investigation. Those cases remain under investigation, according to the university.

For 13 people, including students, arrested at Stanford University in June, the Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen has not pressed charges as of Nov. 20, according to information his office provided CalMatters.

Elsewhere across the state, some district attorneys are pursuing misdemeanor and felony charges against student protesters. Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer is pursuing misdemeanor charges against 50 people, including two UCI professors, a teaching assistant, and 26 students, stemming from a protest at UC Irvine on Oct. 22, 2023. Charges include failure to disperse, resisting arrest and vandalism.

At Pomona College, 19 students were arrested on April 5 on charges of trespassing after some protesters entered and refused to leave an administrative building. Students arrested either had their cases dismissed or have accepted community service in lieu of further legal action. James Gutierrez, the attorney representing the arrested students, said he asked that the college drop charges against its students, citing their right to protest the use of paid tuition dollars.

“They are righteously demanding that their colleges, the ones they pay tuition to and housing fees and pour a lot of money into, that that university or college stop investing in companies that are directly supporting this genocide and indirectly supporting it,” he said.

Students fight back against campus protest policies

As administrators face the challenge of applying protest policies more uniformly and swiftly, the truer test of California public higher education institutions’ protest rules will be playing out in court.

In one already resolved case, UC leadership agreed in August to comply with a court order requiring the campus to end programs or events that exclude Jewish students. A federal judge ruled some Jewish students in support of Israel who were blocked from entering the encampment had their religious liberties violated — though some Jewish students did participate in UCLA’s protest encampment.

Now, students have filed at least two lawsuits against their campuses and the UC system for violating their rights while ending student encampments last spring. In September, ACLU NorCal filed suits against the UC and UC Santa Cruz for not providing students due process when they immediately barred arrested students from returning to campus.

“Those students should have gotten a hearing, an opportunity to defend themselves or to explain themselves, and the school would have shown evidence of why they created a risk of disturbance on campus,” Chessie Thacher, senior staff attorney at ACLU of Northern California, said.

UC Santa Cruz spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason said the university “appreciates the court’s careful deliberation” and that the university “is committed to upholding the right to free expression while also protecting the safety of its campus community.”

In October, ACLU SoCal filed lawsuits on behalf of two students and two faculty members against the UC and UCLA, alleging the actions the university took to break down the encampment violated their free speech rights.

UCLA spokesperson Ricardo Vazquez told CalMatters via email that the university would respond in court and that UCLA “fully supports community members expressing their First Amendment rights in ways that do not violate the law, our policies, jeopardize community safety, or disrupt the functioning of the university.”

“The encampment that arose on campus this spring became a focal point for violence, a disruption to campus, and was in violation of the law,” Vazquez said in the email statement. “These conditions necessitated its removal.”

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