harris, 2023 palo alto

written 20240106.

“maybe we’re more like butterflies, pinned live and wriggling onto history’s collage.”

a history of a university town as both a microcosm of, and gravitational centre for capitalist exploitation. malcolm harrisk moves through two hundred years of white colonisation in the western united states, the foundation of palo alto originally as a horse-breeding estate for railroad baron leland stanford, and its development through stanford university into a reservoir for white supremacy, eugenics, the military-industrial complex and neoliberal economics.

harris focuses on individuals connected with palo alto, but as the quote above suggests, this is not in the form of ‘great man’ history. a central theme is that capitalism is an impersonal force that makes use of the individuals available to it. if it were not leland stanford or frederick terman or bill gates or steve jobs, it suggests, capitalism would have made use of someone else who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

against these figures, the book continually unearths others, forces of resistance “who find ways to tug back, who pit themselves against the way things are and come to personify the system’s self-destructive countertendencies.” against the railroads and cartels military and corporations, the book highlights activists, revolutionaries and unionists, concluding with an account of the indigenous ohlone peoples’ fight for recognition, and a call for stanford to withdraw from its eight-thousand acres of land in palo alto.

return to reading

harris, malcolm, 2023, palo alto: a history of california, capitalism, and the world, little, brown and company.