perspective on TRP?, from a surprising review in The Economist about America and its Pacific power

[Mark Kohut]

The huge genocidal land grabs—from Mexico and from Indian tribes—were cloaked in self-righteousness. The new lands were handed back their virginity. Frederick Jackson Turner, admiring historian of Manifest Destiny, called them “a fair, blank page”. 
 
The emerging frontier, everyone agreed, was an Eden. But the machine quickly moved into the garden with the railway, the world-shrinking telegraph, grid-straight roads, farm boundaries and industrialised agriculture. California, grabbed from Mexico by that imperialist president, James Polk, was different from the start. This is where the West really began, when gold was found in 1848. 
 
The discovery marked the first of many chain-reaction explosions that have hurtled California forward since. Mr Cumings writes marvellously about the “herky- jerky movement” and the telescoping of change in the state. After the gold came citrus, oil, property, lettuce (“green gold”), aircraft and, most recently, Silicon Valley. With their Apple iPhones, Californians have reclaimed Eden. Joan Didion wrote that in California “things had better work out here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
 
See where the book seems to say Marx's writings CHANGED emphasis after the discovery of gold!...
  
http://www.economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15660971&fsrc=rss