Someone, I forget who, said “we’re all Marxists now,” and, while that might have been truer during the antifascist 1930s than at any other time in history, it is not true now. Marxism probably has as many if not more fierce foes today around the world, and from Hungary to Brazil, as it had during the height of McCarthyism and the apex of the Cold War. In his speeches, Donald Trump has sworn to prevent Marxists and communists from infiltrating American society and taking over the government and brainwashing citizens. But he probably doesn’t know what it means to be a Marxist or a communist and he surely doesn’t know that all Marxists are not communists, though some are both and proudly so.
Marx himself apparently said, “I’m not a Marxist.” It was enough to be Marx, the founder with Frederick Engels, of a philosophy and a political school of thought and action, which morphed into Leninism and Maoism and Fidel Castro’s version of the ideology that inspired anti-imperialist revolutionaries in Latin America. A recent post by Bruce Anderson, the editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, prompted me to jump start some of my thinking and review some of my own ideas about Marx and Marxism. Anderson recommended a dozen or so books about war and revolution, Stalin, and the Spanish Civil War, plus William J. Blake’s An American Looks at Karl Marx published in 1939 and long since out of print.
The contemporary book that has prompted me to rethink Marxism and its relevance now is Malcolm Harris 700+ page, Palo Alto, subtitled “A History of California, Capitalism, and the World,” which has 
been widely read ever since it first appeared in print in 2023. An American born in 1988 and who took part in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, Harris doesn’t look at Marxism per se, but he uses Marxist as a lens to look at the world. I heard him speak in a San Francisco bookstore where he called himself a communist. No one in the audience blinked. He didn’t call himself a Marxist, though he might have. He features a quotation from Marx at the very front of his encyclopedic volume.
In 1880, three years before he died at the age of 64, Marx wrote to Frederick Adolph Sorge, a German communist who emigrated to the US and helped to found the Socialist Labor Party of America, which emphasized organizing workers into unions. “California is very important for me now,” Marx noted, “because nowhere else has the upheaval more shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.” Marx asked Sorge to recommend “something good (meaty) on economic conditions in California,” and he offered to pay for any material that Sorge sent to him.
In Palo Alto, Harris adopts a neo-Marxist approach to his study of Silicon Valley, Stanford University, the computer and aerospace industries as well as American opposition to capitalism, exploitation and class privilege. No book is more sanguine about the organizing efforts of communists than Harris’. In a chapter titled “Hooverville,” he writes, “Communists had inordinate success organizing California agricultural workers in the 1930, more success than other labor groups and more success than the Party had elsewhere.” He adds, “The Soviet affiliated American subversives found themselves the right people in the right place and at the right time, a rare confluence in United States history.”
There’s not a drop of anti-communism in Palo Alto, and no snide comments about Reds, the Soviet Union and Communist Party organizers like Sam Darcy and Caroline Decker, both of them Ukrainian-born Jews who joined organizations such as the Young Communist League and reanimated the work of the Industrial Workers of the World. Darcy and Decker were joined by Frank Samora, Francisco Medina, Fred Martinez and others, who came to California from Mexico where they had garnered “revolutionary military experience.” Harris adds that “the global Marxist current was at least as strong in Mexico as it was in California.” That’s good to know since radicals with white skins often receive more accolades than radicals with brown skins.
In the introduction to Palo Alto, Harris acknowledges the work of sociologist, C. Wright Mills, who coined the term the “sociological imagination” and described it as a tool to understand “the intersections of biography and history within society.” Some Marxist purists might fault Harris for leaning heavily on Mills, but Harris tells his story very effectively by divagating back and forth between biography and history, and weaving together into an epic narrative the riveting stories of men like Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan and H. Bruce Franklin, as well as lesser known figures such as David Packard and Frederick Terman. The biographical approach serves Harris well.
He also has a keen sense of humor, a passionate engagement with people and places like Palo Alto, and a willingness to step back and ask questions like, “How do you kill a place, a system?,” and “How does the Palo Alto System end without taking the rest of the transformed world down with it?” Harris doesn’t pretend to have all the answers and he doesn’t aim to browbeat readers into accepting his C. Wright Mills/ Karl Marx’s approach. He shows that Marxism is flexible and resilient, and that by telling stories he can allow others to make up their own minds. I’m sure that Marx himself would cheer for Harris. He’d likely say that Palo Alto is the book about California he had been looking for because it shows the rapid and violent upheavals caused by capitalist centralization. Workers of the world might read Harris’ work and figure out how to translate some of his insights into a revolutionary practice.
