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.

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.