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Instead of the mythic, individualist founding story, in which young Bobby and Huey suckled from a mother panther’s teats, we have a multifarious account. There was SNCC and the southern movement, with its successes, failures, and concluding splits between liberals and radicals, black organizers and white supporters; there were the community colleges and the OEO; there were the anticolonial struggles around the world, from China to South Africa; there were the street riots and police violence and unemployment and criminal gangs and discrimination and assassinations; there were the revolutionary black student associations, with their heterodox Marxisms and passionate guest speakers; there were the cultural nationalists, with their Swahili classes and new names. And there was the black American tradition of armed self-defense, the one they had used to free themselves once before. The BPP came to a synthesis of these influences the same way SNCC found itself with its pockets full of pistols: Once they were determined to intervene in history, it was a practical necessity. That determination was the one thing that wasn’t predetermined, the imaginative wriggling of butterflies that threatens to bring history’s glass display case to the ground in pieces. Pound for pound, no American political group had nearly as big an impact during the period, and it’s worth going through a brief but detailed history of the Oakland BPP to frame the next section, when we will return to Palo Alto proper.
We can see the tensions on the Stanford left in a documentary about the 1968 SDS occupation of the university president’s office. The viewer watches activists debate whether to frame their confrontation in deliberative or aggressive terms. Bruce Franklin clutches his head in his hands, cigarette dangling between his fingers as he argues that talking with the administration wasn’t going to do any good, no matter how solid the research they brought to the table was, something he learned from the napalm campaign. “This whole idea: talking and talking and talking and all of a sudden people will see the light and they’ll pick up The Communist Manifesto and race into the streets and join with—it’s a bunch of shit! When does talking with people become relevant? Past a certain point.”62 An immanent critique of the university—calling on the school to live up to its ostensible principles regarding learning and debate—was misleading because it meant activists had to pretend not to have already come to a conclusion about Stanford’s role in the world. They had to take down the capitalist university, not reform it; agree to a conversation, and that’s all you could win. The viewer follows Franklin as he participates in the SF State strike, taking mental notes out loud about the Third World Liberation Front tactics and rhetoric. In an interview segment he laments that ruling-class Stanford students need more help than SF State students do to understand capitalism.63
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The AEL occupation ended with the removal of classified research from campus, a real victory. But in addition to that met demand, the occupation was a step forward for the movement, a model for action. The A3M not only halted classified research at the AEL during the occupation and after, they converted the technology resources into community assets. In doing so, the members transformed themselves into Aaron Manganiello’s revolutionary technicians. Lenny Siegel, for example, was a Stanford physics major looking forward to a career in the computer industry until he got thrown out of school for plotting the trajectory of a police tear-gas canister through a second-story window at SRI. A one-page essay in the seventh issue of Declassified makes the explicit argument for popular control over technology: “The university is deeply involved in production for private profit,” the authors write. “It produces, often at public expense, skilled labor and scientific knowledge. This university isn’t a temple of the intellect or a place where disinterested scholars examine the world. It is a center for the development of knowledge and resources for human use.”xxiii 69 Who controlled that use was a matter of dispute, specifically between classes. The occupation was a powerful real-world example, and when the BPP updated its 10 Point Plan a few years later, it added “people’s community control over modern technology” to the list.
As capitalists locked down public resources through privatization, tax evasion, and austerity, the high-growth technology industry hardened its defenses, erecting literal and metaphorical walls between the people and computer power. “Such elaborate precautions may have appeared unnecessary up to now to the managers of most computer installations,” a security consultant told Computerworld in 1970. “But with the growing unrest in the country, the increasing sophistication of saboteurs, and the potential that computers offer for easily inflicted and costly damage, major precautions are necessary for data processing managers to fully protect their computers.”102 He recommended not only closing public access to the labs but also removing their locations from all maps. MIT’s famous anti-authoritarian hackers constantly thwarted administrative attempts to lock down their AI lab, proving repeatedly that there was no lock for sale that they couldn’t crack. But when Massachusetts militants planned to demonstrate at their beloved lab, the programmers didn’t object to the steel plates and Plexiglas. “Though previously some of the hackers had declared, ‘I will not work in a place that has locks,’” writes Steven Levy in his account of the lab in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, “after the demonstrations were over, and after the restricted lists were long gone, the locks remained.”103 It was the end of an era.
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U.S. chip manufacturers kept pace with Japan by recruiting a global workforce of women. Firms offshored the vast majority of fabrication work to Mexico, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand while filling local manufacturing roles with Vietnamese and Filipina women. Domestically, employers relied on the pseudoscience of racial difference: They believed Asian women were less likely to organize for higher wages than Chicanas, whom they feared were susceptible to the era’s revolutionary rhetoric. “Small, foreign, and female” is how one manager described the qualifications for semiconductor production jobs.3 Immigrant women in the Bay Area from Mexico and increasingly from Central America weren’t the right kind of “foreign,” and they found themselves relegated to domestic service work, an area in which they had fewer rights. Just as it served growers during the interwar period, formal and informal labor segregation by race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and immigration status boosted Silicon Valley’s profitability and kept the Bay Area growing while the nation’s other regional economies fell into recession.4
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A bet on Silicon Valley was a bet on the future, and the future after the solution of the ’70s meant driving down labor costs. The number of union members as a percentage of American employed workers began falling dramatically in the early 1970s, and Palo Alto was leading the trend. While big industrial cities battled legacy unions, this labor-hostile suburb kept its production wages low by locking organized labor out of its factories. For reasons that recall the agricultural struggles of the 1930s, large unions were not particularly aggressive about organizing the chip industry’s low-wage, polyglot workforce of immigrant women, while professional employees were mostly too well rewarded and pretentious about their work to be interested.9 What organizing there was had to come from the rank and file—it wasn’t worth anyone else’s time. Or, rather, almost anyone else’s. Stanford graduate Amy Newell came by her labor politics honestly, as they say, meaning she inherited them. In the 1940s, her father, Charles Newell, was the business manager for the United Electrical Workers (UE) at the Pittsburgh Westinghouse plant, where he helped lead the left wing of the left-wing union, and her mother, Ruth, organized for the UE at a Sylvania plant.10 After, in 1953, Charles was named as a member of the Communist Party by notorious FBI spy Matthew Cvetic at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into “subversive influence” in the UE, the family moved to Watsonville, California.11 Amy graduated from Stanford in 1969, having witnessed the militant turn in the campus antiwar movement, after which she enrolled in a doctoral program at SUNY Buffalo. On a visit to her parents in 1972, she saw the semiconductor workforce shaping up and thought she could help them organize. Newell persuaded her boyfriend to drop out of graduate school with her, and the two of them moved to the South Bay to start as “salts”—workers who get jobs with the ulterior motive of unionizing their coworkers. A couple of decades after the UE got run out of Sunnyvale, after Taft-Hartley purged avowed communists from the official labor movement, the Reds were back. Newell agitated from the line at her job with Siliconix, and with other rank-and-file semiconductor workers, she started organizing at the shop level at firms such as National Semiconductor, Siltec, Fairchild, and Semi-Metals.iv
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Perhaps the greatest challenge was well-organized employers, who shared information about union efforts among themselves and, under the auspices of the Packard-founded American Electronics Association (AeA, or the Western Electronic Manufacturers Association, before 1977), split the costs of anti-union campaigns, just as the Associated Farmers before them did. The competitors were able to come together after getting spooked by a 1968 strike of 5,000 Bay Area electronics workers across three firms (including Ampex), which lasted a week—the kind of interruption the fast-moving semiconductor industry couldn’t afford.14 Offshoring and the threat of unemployment was a good issue to rally workers around, but it was also the boss’s trump card. It’s a card the video-game manufacturer Atari played in 1983 after the Glaziers’ union neared its goal of an election involving several shops. Rather than face its workers across a collective bargaining table, the company laid off 1,700 people and closed two of its three Silicon Valley factories, moving production to Hong Kong and Taiwan.15 Unsurprisingly, the Glaziers found it too difficult to organize Atari workers at the remaining domestic line. Despite the efforts of Newell and other rank-and-file workers, the UE’s organizing attempts failed repeatedly, as did limited campaigns by other national unions—notably, the Teamsters at Intel. In 1994, scholar AnnaLee Saxenian described the results of the previous couple of decades in her comparative study of Silicon Valley and the Massachusetts tech industry: “There are approximately 200,000 union members in the four-county [Bay Area] region, but virtually none work in high technology industries. No high technology firm has been organized by a labor union in Silicon Valley during the past twenty years, and there have been fewer than a dozen serious attempts.”16 It was a brutal period for workers and a correspondingly excellent one for the men who employed them.
The solution of the ’70s wouldn’t have been possible in California without a few carrots in the pile of sticks, at least for white settlers. Asset ownership in the form of appreciating houses and stocks was an alternative path to wealth, and coming to own land is what settlers are good at. White working-class homeowners began to identify as white and homeowners more than as members of the working class, and not without reason. If their human capital was depreciating rapidly, their home values jumped. In Santa Clara County, the house price index doubled two and a half times between 1975 and 1990.33 With home ownership also came guaranteed places in the California public school system, where the professional workers of the future (with their in-the-car wages) were trained. America’s society kept bifurcating, and without a powerful labor movement to push back, people were left trying to navigate their own families to the correct side. In that environment, the continued assimilation of migrant groups presented a pressing threat to white homeowners. They feared that nonwhites would undermine home values by moving nearby and that their children would take advantage of public programs funded by white tax dollars and end up competing with white children for future advantages. Equalizing opportunity sounds nice in theory, but in practice the attack on wages meant there was less of them to go around. For white settlers, equality was a step down.
With its high profits and bifurcated labor force, California modeled capitalist discipline for the nation. Investment capital fled west, rewarding the state’s owners. Between 1979 and 1986, total manufacturing as a share of gross national product stayed nearly flat, but the sector’s composition changed a lot.1 Computers and machinery, electronic and electric equipment, instruments, and aircraft increased their percentage share by double digits, while all other manufacturing categories declined. Primary industries such as metal, oil, coal, and lumber took the biggest hit, along with the offshored cars and textiles.2 This wasn’t deindustrialization; it was Californication.
They could not do it alone, however. How would they sell individualism to the unemployed? Promising to whip inflation helped, but elements of the working class had to be persuaded to accept a cure that, for them, was probably worse than the disease. California, where liberals experienced serious setbacks as wealth flowed into the state, suggested a plan. By reducing the size of the social surplus available to the working class and poor, they could deepen fissures within the broad category of wage earners. Cutting taxes, especially for the rich, thinned the budgetary air for everyone else. Spending lots of money on defense, particularly the Silicon Valley high-tech kind, redirected tax revenue back into ownership pockets and expanded its non-union bifurcated labor forces. Whereas Nixon cut defense in order to provide social services, Reagan increased defense spending to justify a cut in social services. Like conservatives in California, the Reagan administration expected a significant portion of white people to abandon the liberal consensus in favor of a new vibrant conservative individualism.