Reading

In 1927, Hawaiian pineapple colonist and proud Stanford dad James D. Dole sponsored a flying contest between Oakland and Honolulu.

banks loaned credit to farms based on existing prices, which were based on the current cost of labor. Improving labor conditions by picket was an attack on property valuation, which thanks to financialization made it an attack on property, full stop.

Capitalist collectivity emerges in two ways: First, there’s exploitation, wherein capitalists extract bits of value from their employees work and gather it up into lump to reinvest. Second there’s association in which investors pledge their gathered lumps to a common cause. Unlike an enveloping fascist state and associative state comes together like an interoffice softball league via the ostensibly free and involuntary association of participants.

I don’t know much about Hoover. Learning that he came to embody speculation and capitalist rationalization.¹ Also, still not over the fact that Bank of America started in the Bay Area as the Bank of Italy. I wondered why BofA had built 1455 Market (I worked in there!), this explains why they would choose the city as their west coast base of operations and data center, because it always had been the former.

I am a little sad that I started this book on the Zephyr, but not on Leland’s Railroad. I started it in Colorado (Central Pacific track starts west of Ogden, UT). Oh well, I’ll probably finish it on the Southern Pacific, so I get partial credit.

The repeated framing of history’s men not as individual actors who altered the course of history themselves, but as agents of forces is really interesting, and is something I haven’t given much thought to.

Hoover traveled around Australia inspecting rocks as an agent not just of the capitalists Bewick, Moreing but of capital itself. He rationalized the mines the way Giannini rationalized California’s farms, standardizing the books and techniques, eschewing folk wisdom in favor of science, introducing labor-saving technology, and submitting every decision to the cold knife of profit calculation. (165).

Also, everything is mining. Seeing the world through the lens of capitalist extraction explains most things. Particularly interesting was applying that lens to the chapter on imported labor and the use of the race science to supress and dispose of imported laborers after profits had been extracted.

It’s interesting to see the tensions between capital, which is self destructive, and in some ways doesn’t care about race, and the state, which had to cause short term hurt (expelling imported labor) to ensure long term profits. Seeing the supervisory force of the state used to facilitate capital against its natural (and destructive) course is fascinating, and I think can be very radicalizing (it was for me the first time I realized it). Capitalism is inherently self-destructive, and will fail without being propped up by a state. This is why capitalism being described as “socialism for the rich” isn’t far off. Capitalism behaves in two ways: as a mountain climber getting stuck as false peaks (and needing to be pushed down the mountain by the state or an “external” actor so that it can climb a new, higher peak) and in blatant self destruction, chasing profits past the point of sustainability to reward shareholders quarter by quarter, either destroying itself (boom & bust) (and often being bailed out by the state) or having guardrails imposed by the state to avoid destroying itself.¹

I’m loving this book. Harris’ writing style is just snarky enough for me, any more and it would be annoying, any less and it would be dry. Perfect.

In their genetic-determinist view, training could only reveal and realize the underlying immutable potential—a view that was good for sales.

If performance was destiny, then there could be no accidents in colt training, just early information, and early information was money saved.

The stock farm’s regimen of capitalist rationality and the exclusive focus on potential and speculative value was called the Palo Alto system and it worked.

The twin whips of science—data and control—sped money around its circuit like colts around the kindergarten track, accumulating valuable mass with every lap.

The Octopus by Frank Norris added to reading list

Anglo-American West Coast history is so brief that there is no California fortune we can’t trace back through these expropriations of land and labor. It takes work not to see it.

This first chapter is fascinating. I learned about the Gold Rush in 4th grade (as all Californians do), but to read it in the context of the development of Californian (and later global) capitalism is enlightening. I feel like as I read I’m watching the economic conditions of the California (and world) I know today take shape in front of my eyes. Harris’ writing style really works for me.

Lots of interesting sources. Added this one to my reading list

I should be very much pleased if you could find me something good (meaty) on economic conditions in California, of course at my expense. California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed. —Karl Marx, Letter to Freidrich Adolph Sorge, 5 Nov 1880

What an opener. I’d like to read more from Marx about California.

big book, starting it on a month long amtrak trip, excited to read it