Palo Alto, Marxian nightmare

Harris seems to acknowledge that some developments that have taken place under capitalism, such as FDR's New Deal, are actually better than others

Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto starts with a grim reality: A spate of youth suicides in the titular small city where he spent much of his childhood. Many of the young people who killed themselves stepped in front of the CalTrain, a railroad formerly owned by the Southern Pacific, the once all-powerful monopoly co-owned by Leland Stanford, the founder of Palo Alto and Stanford University.
 

This sprawling book is his account of those crimes, and of the larger “system of domination and production” that the so-called “Palo Alto System” epitomises: Capitalism. Since “California has a privileged place” in the capitalist story,