Upstream

We’ve been taught to think of staggering economic inequality, the disposability of nonwhite  labor populations, hyper-exploitation, and minority rule as bugs within the capitalist system — things to be corrected by capitalist technology and innovation — but in fact, all of these things are anything but bugs — they are features of this system, baked deep into it at its very core. And, in many respects, the birthplace of modern, global capitalism, with its exclusion of racialized others, its rabid anti-labor ideology, its universalized immiseration, and its unrelenting push for hyperproductivity, is a place that might surprise you at first: California. Specifically? Silicon Valley. Even more specifically? Palo Alto.  In his book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, author Malcolm Harris traces a very bold line from early Californian history, with its brutal enslavement of Indigenous peoples, its railroad and agricultural barons, the codification of corporations as people, and the fou