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As a productive part of the American capitalist economy, Stanford faced some of the same limitations that capitalism did as a system. It was, as an institution, invested in profit and existing property relations. As I’ll note in the rest of this section, in the electronics industry and way beyond, profit incentives determined Stanford’s real shape. Not the school’s own profit—nonexistent, of course—but profit in general. This was the role of universities in the Giannini cartel model: to take on research and development on behalf of the capitalist class rather than any individual firm. As Jordan designed it, Stanford’s capabilities met America’s pressing modern needs—“an adequate supply of suitably qualified technical personnel and a satisfactory number of first-rate scientists.”62 The fruits of this work, therefore, don’t just “happen” to be bombs, ads, canned food, and Hollywood’s “moronizing entertainment,” Baran writes; for the capitalist system, all that is “the very basis of its existence and viability.”63 We’ve seen this dynamic play out with regard to the modern food system: The state demands canned food for war; firms invest in food processing; then, already halfway down the processed-food path, firms keep going, investing in advertising, shipping, mechanization, and additives research. What we’re left with is a very profitable food system that’s objectively harmful to people and to the rest of the earth. This same dynamic undergirded Provost Terman’s Stanford and the wider “postwar” Palo Alto community.
That production chief was named Charlie Sporck, and at Fairchild, and subsequently at the spin-off National Semiconductor, he played an important role in directing the future of Silicon Valley and the American economy at large. In the early 1960s, only around five years after the company started, Fairchild opened its first overseas assembly plant, in Hong Kong. The move—suggested by Bob Noyce—surprised the rest of the industry, but with the low start-up costs for assembly lines, it was a textbook case of labor arbitrage. According to Wilf Corrigan, who was promoted to oversee Fairchild’s overseas manufacturing in the mid-1960s, the going rate for “semiskilled” assembly work was $2.50 an hour in the Bay Area (more than $20 in 2022 money) but only 10 cents in Hong Kong, a 96 percent reduction.50 Fairchild was the innovator in what Corrigan called “jet-age automation” and what we have come to call offshoring.51 At around $1 a day, Fairchild found a way to match the nominal cost of Chinese railroad workers a full century after they built the Central Pacific. Paying so little sounds dangerous, especially so close to Red China, but America’s military bases provided sufficient security. The country’s global anticommunist mandate (self-awarded) ensured capitalist governance, and that made offshoring a more promising investment than automation. Sporck replayed the same layoffs-first strategy at National Semi, and the rest of the industry followed suit.
Offshoring is an inexact term, considering that firms were perfectly willing to seek deals on work in North America, too, by building plants in Mexico. In 1965, Fairchild opened a factory on the Navajo reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico, taking advantage of high unemployment with a low-wage “trainee” program and $700,000 in loans from the Navajo Nation.52 Scholar Cedric Robinson calls sites like Shiprock “production enclaves,” places where corporations “could be guaranteed special privileges and higher rates of exploitation.”53 Whatever you call it, Silicon Valley reoriented around this labor arbitrage strategy, bifurcating high-cost engineering and design from low-cost assembly work—the Shiprock site quickly became New Mexico’s largest industrial employer.54 As we’ll see, the strategy culminated in “fabless” (as in, without fabrication lines) manufacturing in the following period, divorcing design and production at the firm level. The First World’s Cold War arsenal created the production enclaves where capital could count on low wages, freeing semiconductor firms and ultimately U.S. industry in general from domestic wage-price inflation. Besides, putting production in East and Southeast Asia kept electronics firms near their biggest customer: the U.S. military.
From the perspective of East Asia’s indigenous anticolonial movements, the Cold War reoriented but did not recast decades-long conflicts. For the region’s peasants, economic democracy was about avoiding or managing proletarianization, about land reform and the national ownership of national resources in the true national interest. Like most of the agricultural strikers in California, the “communists” in East Asia were more often working people struggling to reduce their level of exploitation via collective action in the face of modern capitalists who were always finding ways to get more for less, new ways to grind their laborers down. The Huk Rebellion in the Philippines was left-wing, but it wasn’t led from Moscow.ii The same was true in Jeju Island, off the Korean peninsula, where autonomous local popular committees governed until the Americans landed in 1945. Capitalist proxy governments had no choice but to treat these forces as capital-C Communists, both because that’s how the American handlers saw them and because if these economic democrats were to take power they would encounter strong incentives to align with the Soviets (as Mao did) or at the very least stake out neutral ground. In the late 1940s, Rhee’s RoK authorities responded to protests in Jeju with a counterinsurgency operation. They killed tens of thousands of suspected leftists while American military occupiers watched.
There is no single line that connects California to the world anticolonial struggle; they are embedded in the same history, as I contended in the first section. It was colonial exploitation that linked these conflicts in the first place, not the spread of doctrines or encounters between individuals. We know this is the case because when large-scale street violence and conflict kicked off in California in the 1960s, it wasn’t thanks to an armed insurrectionary party. Riots that went beyond organizational politics—the organic black-led uprising of the urban exploited, what King called “the language of the unheard”—erupted across Johnson’s America. Police abuse incited rebellions in California’s black ghettos: in Watts (Los Angeles) in 1965 and in Hunter’s Point (San Francisco) the following year, and on a smaller scale in East Palo Alto in 1967, which fit the category by then. The only outside agitators required to start military-scale conflict in America’s streets were the police commuting from their white neighborhoods. That said, there’s value in identifying some particular individual connections between the Bay and the rest of the colonized world. In this period, Californians took conscious political action to join the Third World struggle, even when that meant declaring war on their own government. After all: Isn’t that what colonized people did?
However, the whole point of Shockley’s man-month analysis and the American postwar military strategy was to fight efficiently, without the overhead cost structure involved in the World War II effort. Per destructive unit, nuclear bombs were way cheaper to make than ships. Better to pay one aeronautical engineer than 12 welders—plus, the engineers weren’t unionized. When the white GIs returned from Europe and the Pacific, they edged out their black temporary replacements (as well as white women who performed the same function and a small number of black women who were recruited near the war’s close), a move immortalized in the phrase “Last hired, first fired.” It was among the earliest in the series of American postwar betrayals. Though the jobs that lured them to California were gone, black migrants of this period were not looking to return “home” but rather were determined to make new homes. The result is that black Californians were among the first groups of American workers to face the blunt thump upside the head of deindustrialization, knocked out of the high-wage manufacturing car onto the low-wage service asphalt, left dazed while national prosperity sped away. The California suburbs mostly absorbed black labor the way they had for years, in domestic and janitorial work, both of which they had an increased demand for given the arrival of the space settlers.
One well-known image exemplifies the way Cold War competition pushed California colleges and their black students onto the world stage. Relying on black people while exploiting and mistreating them has been one of the keys to America’s success since the beginning, and that is a risky proposition. The Cold War contest extended beyond science and technology; the Soviets dominated international athletics, and some American colleges systematically recruited black athletes to try to improve their positions. San Jose State University was one of those schools, and the year after the master plan was announced, the school nabbed a runner named Harry Edwards, who used the opportunity to study sociology. After some graduate work at Cornell (where he, too, got to see Malcolm X in the minister’s last year), Edwards returned to SJSU to teach in 1966. He was only a few years older than his youngest students, and as one of only two black professors for 72 black students (out of 24,000), 60 of whom were athletes, as he’d been, he attracted a following.
Edwards helped organize his students so they could improve their treatment at the school, and they forced the cancellation of a football game—the ultimate act of university sabotage. Governor Reagan wanted to send in the National Guard to police the field; the RAM milieu offered Edwards its own guerrillas if need be. But the school had to face a hard truth: It couldn’t operate without the participation of black students. The game was not played. The “revolt of the black athlete,” to quote the title of one of Edwards’s books, that began in San Jose and spread across the country attracted international attention and embarrassed the American government, which from the state’s perspective defeated the whole point of international sport. But despite the drama, SJSU had a very strong program, especially in track and field. One of Edwards’s protégés was a national champion sprinter, and the school recruited a second from Texas. Only after Olympic organizers agreed to exclude South Africa from the 1968 games in Mexico City did the SJSU sprinters agree to represent the United States. When the teammates took gold and bronze in the men’s 200-meter, there must have been a moment when Team USA’s white leaders patted themselves on the back. Then Tommie Smith and John Carlos mounted the podium in stocking feet, bowed their heads, and raised their fists, one black glove each. The gesture humiliated America on the global stage, turning a national triumph into a searing Black Power tableau, an indelible salute of international solidarity. The last will be first, and then: Look out!
hell yeah
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.