Starving the peasants into the factories is the classic narrative of proletarianization, the creation story of the industrial working class. California didn’t have the factories of a Manchester, UK; a Lyon, France; or a Lowell, Massachusetts, but the state took on a factory orientation towards what it did have, which was gold and land. Unlike so much of the world, California did not see capitalist economics evolve step-by-step out of feudal property relations. Capital hit California like a meteor, alien tendrils surging from the crash site.
Page 20 of Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris
I first heard of this book through Sophie from Mars’ video about AI and the quotes she used from the book intrigued me. I finally got around to reading it as part of my month and change streak of reading non-fiction. I am glad I read this so thank you Sophie.
At 720 pages this book is a tad intimidating especially as someone who doesn’t read that much non-fiction and who doesn’t usually read fiction that lengthy either. If you are like me and may have been put off by the length I’ll say this: I found this book to have fully earned its length. It does indeed take 700+ pages to chronicle the numerous sins of California.
This book is a microscopic look at the history of California, capitalism and its relation to the rest of the world. The author starts the book in 1890 and ends in 2020. Harris’ writing style balances the academic nature of the research involved in such a text and the accessibility of a narrative really well. This book could have easily been an extremely dry and difficult read only academics enjoy but it isn’t.
Harris does not pull any punches either. He fully gets into the disgusting amounts of eugenics, racism, anti-Indigenous violence involved in the creation of the California and Palo Alto. In various sections, Harris emphasizes that that original capitalists of California had more in common with the imperialists and fascists of their time than anyone else.
Of course, anticommunism is a rampant problem as well. California has a history of union-busting and the general suppression of the working class. None of this came as a surprise to me but the exact details of all the various oppressive forces involved in the creation of Palo Alto were enlightening.
It is tempting upon reading much of this book to fall into a kind of doomer mode of though. After all, all the Californian anti-capitalist movements described in the book failed in one way or another. The forces of capital seem unstoppable but just before the book ends Harris stops us from falling into such despair. Instead Harris leans on radical Indigenous internationalist thought to find a thread of hope and strength.
Quoting from Kul Wicasa activist-scholar Nick Estes:
It forces some to confront their own unbelonging to the land and the river. How can settler society, which possesses no fundamental ethical relationship to the land or its original people, imagine a future premised on justice? There is no simple answer. But whatever the answer may be, Indigenous peoples must lead the way. Our history and long traditions of Indigenous resistance provide possibilities for futures premised on justice. After all, Indigenous resistance is animated by our ancestors’ refusal to be forgotten, and it is our resolute refusal to forget our ancestors and our history that animates our visions for liberation. Indigenous revolutionaries are the ancestors from the before and before and the already forthcoming.
Nick Estes
Or more simply:
For the earth to live, capitalism must die.
Nick Estes
The biggest compliment I can give this book is that I’ll never look at computers the same way. The smartphone sitting on my desk is the product of more than a hundred years of oppressive forces that continues to wreak destruction on people and the planet we all share.
All the silicon we use is drenched in the blood of the people capital seeks to exploit in the name of its never-ending desire for growth and this book catalogues just exactly how we got here. Well worth a read.