WASHINGTON, DC—A passerby at 8 in the morning might see a multiracial groups of students enter a public school building. But inside school, segregation dominates, as most of the Black and Latin children (and many low-income working class whites) end up in a lower ‘track’ with less access to enrichment resources. I am engaged in a struggle around bilingual education that, in its own way, is promoting segregation by race, class, and ethnicity.
Jim Crow segregation and its new forms
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in schools had to end because “separate” was inherently unequal. This reversed the previous right of governments to mandate segregated facilities, and has been hailed as an historic step away from institutional racism.
But capitalists require a divided working class to exploit us more effectively. So school systems have created new, internal forms of segregation. The most common is ‘ability tracks’ within a school. Wealthy parents (mainly white) get their kids extra tutoring and enrichment that are not available to their working-class peers. These students are then placed in “advanced” learning tracks based on spurious test scores and guidance counselor advice.
Local governments have also maintained segregation through a policy of “neighborhood schools”, which reflect the segregated housing patterns of most communities. During the 1960s and 70s, as bussing was mandated to help overcome these racist patterns, the bosses used scare tactics to inflame racist attitudes by white parents, further dividing the working class. Today, most bussing programs have ended and schools are increasingly segregated by race and ethnicity. Children from low-income families, disproportionately Black, Latin, and/or immigrant, end up with fewer resources in their schools and lower opportunities for future success.
Bilingual education wrecked by racism
Language skills and general learning is best accomplished in a dual immersion process whereby half the school day is taught in Spanish and half in English with students from both language groups.
The elementary school where I teach has a student population that is 75 percent immigrant and 65 percent Latin. The school established a ‘partial immersion’ program aimed at students whose first language is English. Spanish was used to teach math and science. Students learned these subjects and also acquired Spanish skills. The program was designed to attract mostly white, affluent students. Children whose first language is Spanish were actively denied spots in this program. Latin students were taught only in English –in spite of extensive research showing that native language literacy improves overall academic progress.
This outright racist policy of flagrantly denying Latin families access to the partial immersion program was quietly ended when a few anti-racist teachers and parents protested this as a civil rights problem. We suggested a truly bilingual program —dual immersion—but policy makers continued segregation, citing budget constraints.
Segregation also reared its ugly head in the advanced math program. At first this special program was 90 percent white in a school where less than 15 percent of the population is white. Parents and teachers pushed back, forcing the administration to enroll more Black and Latin children. This required a struggle because racist segregation is so deeply built into the DNA of capitalism.
The partial immersion program ensured segregation of children by language as early as the age of five. Children learn early on that the system is designed to serve only some. This experience contradicts the idea that the system of public schooling in the United States is designed to educate everyone. People wonder why schools are failing Black and Latin children? Why are schools denying equal educational opportunities to low-income children? Why are people stuck in poverty? The educational system reinforces these inequalities generated by capitalism.
Education departments talk out of both sides of their proverbial mouths.  They hypocritically demand that teachers “close the achievement gap” and demonstrate “cultural competency” yet policy makers mandate racist, divisive policies.
Reform comes with a bitter pill
This country is now starting a dual-immersion program, where 50 percent primary-English speakers and 50 percent primary-Spanish speakers will be placed in the same classes and receive half of their instruction in one language and the other half in the second language. This is the great way for kids to become bi-literate and academically successful. When implemented correctly, it is a win-win situation for all kids. In theory, the Latin kids will get access to literacy development in their first language and anti-racists should be excited! We’re getting the bilingual program we wanted.
However, capitalist reforms come with a bitter pill. The partial immersion program that had attracted affluent families to our school is being moved to a more affluent neighborhood where they will get the whole day in Spanish. Thus segregation prevails and resource disparities between schools will grow. The possibility that our school will become integrated by race, ethnicity, and immigrant status will once again be remote.
Revolutionary change required
Communists in the schools must fight all forms of segregation because it weakens all working class students and families in the class struggle. Teachers must constantly resist all the forces working to segregate and re-segregate our schools. We must build a multiracial base with parents, and grow these battles into a mass movement for improved education and ultimately a new system of communism. Then the possibilities for the blossoming of our children will be endless.

This past December, a rebellion began in Iran that exposed the myth of a passive working class- like the rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore. Iran, like the U.S., Russia, China and every capitalist country in the world, is a class-divided society with exploited workers and oppressed minority populations on the one hand, and exploiters who use religion to enslave on the other.
Back in 2009, there was a “Green Movement” in Iran with demonstrations numbering up to three million workers. This anti-government movement was manipulated by the U.S. and European Union to overthrow then-President Ahmadinejad. The Green Movement’s leadership was made up of politicians and local capitalists clamoring for U.S. investments.
Iranian leaders have blamed the December protests on the U.S. CIA, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and even ISIS. While some combination of U.S.-Saudi involvement may be true, despite Donald Trump and U.S. bosses’ cheers at the revolt, workers and students can function outside the limits of U.S. control.
Economic underpinning of protests
Like the 2015 uprising in Baltimore against racist police terror, many battles preceded the surge of December 2017.
Workers have engaged in years of strikes, labor actions, and protests. Nurses, bus drivers, truck drivers, Teheran tire workers, sugar cane workers, petrochemical workers, bakers in Sanandaj (Kurdistan), and tractor-manufacturing workers in Tabriz have struggled as the economy deteriorated. Unions are illegal, and workers are generally on “temporary contracts” rather than “secure” jobs, allowing instant dismissal.
Since 1988, International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans to Iran required the slashing of workers’ benefits. Government subsidies for petroleum, water, electricity, and bread accounted for 27 percent of the GDP in 2007, but they were changed to direct cash transfers, allowing the “free market” to set (rising) commodity prices. In 2014, even the cash transfers were cut back. This part of the budget declined to 3.4 percent in 2014, and current Iranian President Rouhani’s December budget entailed even greater cuts.
Now, half the population is impoverished, with 10-12 million workers in extreme poverty. Overall, workers makes 15 percent less than they did 10 years ago. The government estimates that $1,000 per year is needed for a family of three to survive, but it set the minimum wage at a third of this. Youth unemployment is 30 percent, and inflation is 15 percent per year, with prices of basics like chicken and eggs increasing 30-40 percent per year. Meanwhile, mullahs (religious leaders) get richer and flaunt their wealth, similar to the U.S.
A rift between President Rouhani and the hardline mullahs led to the initial December 28 demonstration, in Mashhad. Rouhani had exposed the billions in the annual budget intended for Islamic institutions, including the military’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the proposed termination of subsidies for millions of workers ($5.3 billion), 50 percent higher fuel prices, privatized schools, and infrastructure cuts of $3.1 billion. The nuclear deal with the U.S. and EU was expected to end sanctions and improve the standard of living, but the budget did the opposite.
Hardline mullahs organized the rally, but the workers and students grew to tens of thousands, in scores of cities, and attacked the entire capitalist regime, chanting, “People beg while Mullahs rule like gods!” and “Death to the Dictator” (Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei). Police killed 22 protesters and arrested 2,000 (90 percent 25 years old or younger). Social media was virtually shut down.
The Iranian communist movement
The Tudeh party, formed shortly after the Russian Revolution of 1917, built trade unions. By the end of World War II, it earned a significant base among workers, as in many countries, based on the Soviet Union’s defeat of the Nazis. However, the two-stage theory of revolution (socialism before communism) led to Tudeh’s support of a liberal capitalist named Mohammad Mossadegh to head the overthrow of the Shah, the puppet ruler of the British imperialists. Mossadegh quickly turned on Tudeh at the behest of US rulers, and he was in turn overthrown by the CIA in 1953, who reinstalled the Shah. Tudeh retained working-class support, but within four years, Khomeini executed masses of pro-communist workers, using CIA lists.
Many left and formed new communist organizations, however, and some of these workers have been in contact with the Progressive Labor Party.
Implications of the current uprising
Building the revolutionary communist PLP is the key task and only solution for workers from Ferguson to Teheran. As with many recent uprisings—from the 2012 “Arab Spring” revolts to the rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore—the December protests may result in lower gas prices, but will bring no permanent solution to the workers’ chronic misery under this religious fascist state.
The uprisings world-over show that workers everywhere face the same exploitation, racism, and segregation that impedes the class war. Lenin argued that communist revolution required three things: that workers couldn’t live the same old way; bosses couldn’t rule the same old way; and a communist party fighting for armed revolution with deep roots in the working class. In Iran, as is the case globally, the first two are near fulfillment, but a mass PLP is still missing there—all the more reason to continue to organize!

Hitler would have been proud of how U.S. rulers conducted a series of human radiation experiments on thousands of U.S. citizens during and after World War II. Author Eileen Welsome’s book The Plutonium Files takes its name from one experiment involving the injection of plutonium on 18 patients from 1945 to 1947. Almost all were given 5 micrograms  (two with 94 micrograms) when the “tolerance dose” of plutonium was listed as 1 microgram. (All quotes  are from Welsome’s book.)
The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) supervised a “vast network of national laboratories, universities and hospitals that would investigate every imaginable effect of radiation.” The government succeeded in keeping its role secret from the public as well as from the patients themselves. Hundreds of scientists  and technicians who developed the atomic bomb were exposed to radioactive substances; some like plutonium were new and had unknown health effects. After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, murdering a quarter of a million civilians, U.S. officials went to Japan to observe the effects on survivors.
In 1947 at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the prosecutors advanced the code that conducting such experiments without informing the subjects of their nature and hazards constituted a war crime. Yet “Thousands of human radiation experiments, many…without therapeutic benefit, were funded by the AEC” during 30 years of the Cold War. This included a proposal in 1949 to expose prisoners serving life sentences to 150 roentgens units of radiation to help determine how much radiation an air crew could tolerate while piloting an aircraft propelled by nuclear energy. Experiments continued for years:
Eight hundred and twenty-nine pregnant women at the Vanderbilt University Hospital Prenatal Clinic were given radioactive iron “cocktails” and told they “contained something nutritious that would benefit their babies”;
From 1946 to 1973, 74 boys at the Ferndale State School in Waltham, Mass., were given amounts of radioactive iron or calcium in their oatmeal by MIT scientists with the AEC’s support;
Between 2,000 to 3,000 enlisted men participated in experiments during the U.S. aboveground nuclear testing program in Nevada. Soldiers were moved as close as two miles from ground zero, a few within a mile;
From 1963 to 1971, over 100 prisoners in Oregon and Washington states “volunteered” to have their testicles exposed to as much as 600 rads of radiation;
“Operation Sunshine” sought to discover the hazards from fallout by collecting and analyzing “the body parts of more than 15,000 humans” often without permission from next of kin;
Between 1960 and 1973, the Defense Atomic Support Agency contracted with the Cincinnati General Hospital to expose over 90 cancer patients to total body irradiation.
Target Black and Poor White Women and Youth
In the Cincinnati study, the majority of patients were Black, at Vanderbilt poor white women and at Ferndale and Oregon working-class youth and prisoners. Some studies like the total body irradiation experiments “caused intense suffering and premature deaths in some patients.”
The AEC was primarily concerned that revealing the experiments might adversely affect domestic public opinion. President Eisenhower advised the AEC “to keep the public ‘confused’ about different types of radiation hazards.” (Paul Boyer, The Bombs Earl Light) A primary reason soldiers were sent into Nevada’s nuclear test zone was to show their parents back home there was nothing to fear from radioactive fallout. According to the chair of the Pentagon’s Medical Policy Council, the soldiers themselves were terrified of entering the area that had been subject to nuclear radiation. The exercise sought to “dispel a fear that is…entirely groundless” and thus mobilize the soldiers to march into a nuclear strike zone to fight a battle against an equally irradiated enemy.” (Moreno, “Undue Risks: Secret State Experiments on Humans, p. 164)
People outside the test zones got “equal treatment”: “Even though scientists were aware that fallout from the tests could pose serious hazards to nearby communities, they chose not to evacuate residents because they apparently feared such a move would harm public relations and jeopardize the test site.” A House Committee released a report on 31 human radiation experiments involving 700 people showing that they were conducted without informed consent and had been covered up for decades.
The fact that the U.S. ruling-class has conducted these barbarous fascistic experiments should leave no doubt that it will be ready to kill millions in nuclear war in order to preserve its profit system. All the more reason for a communist-led international working class to organize a revolution to wipe out capitalism forever.

U.S. bosses’ hypocrisy has been front and center since the February 14 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in which a student murdered 17 of his former classmates and staff members with an assault weapon. This open act of terrorism has further identified splits within the ruling class, as Democrats and Republicans make a show of battling over gun control on a national stage.
Neither demands for gun control—nor, on the other side, for proposals to arm teachers—will save working-class lives. The liberal bosses’ calls for perceived safety and control (read: trust the capitalist state, consent to fascism) will never protect the working class—only we can break our own chains. Progressive Labor Party counts on you to join us and build a mass movement against the capitalist rulers’ imperialism, by far the biggest killer of working class lives.  
Violent system begets violence
The United States was built on systematic murder. It grew out of genocide for indigenous peoples and enslavement and Jim Crow for Black workers. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the ruling class supported gun ownership, freely arming members of the KKK and killer cops who continue to murder workers to this day.
Internationally, the U.S. unequivocally supports the murder of workers to maintain control of resources, people, and land. During both World Wars, the U.S. killed indiscriminately, from the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo to the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the U.S. became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons in combat. From Syria to Yemen to Afghanistan, U.S. bosses continue to murder workers to protect their control over Middle Eastern oil.
The U.S. ruling class is not for gun control; they will arm people when it suits them. They are for profit control. But while these big terrorists will kill millions without a blink to keep their profits flowing, they also understand that domestic terrorism is bad for their global brand.
Domestic terrorism hurts global credibility
Historically, demands for or against gun control in the U.S. have fallen along party lines. Republicans continue to get re-elected and line their pockets with favorable advertising and funding from the National Rifle Association (NRA). In 2016 alone, this fascist organization spent nearly $140 million on “legislative programs and public affairs,” including $30 million on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and at least $20 million on Republican Senate races (huffingtonpost.com, 11/16/17).
Meanwhile, the Democrats are seizing an opportunity to win allegiance from workers and control a growing mass movement within the limits of electoral politics. Democratic politicians are leading rally cries to slap down the NRA and pass stronger laws to restrict the sales of firearms:
Democrats have scrambled to dust off a raft of gun-control legislation that’s sat on the shelf for years: expanding background checks, allowing police and family members to ask judges to disarm gun owners who show signs of violence or instability, prohibiting gun sales to people deemed too unstable to handle their own finances, raising taxes on guns and ammo, changing the gun-buying age from 18 to 21 (Rolling Stone 3/1).
The rulers’ main wing, representing finance capital, is now calling for gun control so as to not to lose more ground to its imperialist arch-rivals, Russia and China. China’s Global Times recently shamed the U.S. in an editorial titled, “China can offer lessons to U.S. in protecting human rights” (2/22). It reads:
Washington has been pointing an accusing finger at other countries over human rights issue[s]. However, more [people in the U.S.] have been killed by gunfire in the country than [U.S.] soldiers being killed in all U.S. wars. It’s inhumane for the U.S., which boasts about its human rights record, to turn a blind eye to gun violence, [to] snub increasing calls for gun control and risk more innocent lives….The US should learn from China and genuinely protect human rights.
The U.S. ruling class has not controlled violence domestically because it does not want to. In Australia, a capitalist country where more than 17 percent of children live in poverty, the government created stricter gun laws after one mass shooting in 1996. Since then, not a single mass shooting has occurred (BBC, 10/4/17). Gun control or lack-there-of is not a mystery, it’s a conscious political decision. Infringing upon workers’ rights, in particular their right to live, is the capitalist way.
The rulers’ main wing, however, understands these flawed optics and is now striving to control—not stop—national murders in an effort to save face as an international super power and regain the trust of workers within the U.S. As the mostly white students from Parkland call for revised gun legislation, main wing Democrats are seizing an opportunity to get disaffected workers to vote in the coming midterm elections in 2018.
Reform vs. revolution, rifle edition
Gun violence in the U.S. has disproportionately affected Black and Latin workers. They are the ones brutalized most egregiously at the hands of murderous police, yet no one is calling for legislation to disarm hyper-militarized police forces.
Black youth have been calling for gun control for years. No action was taken in 2012, after racist vigilante George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin in Florida. In 2014, after the murder of Michael Brown, Black working-class leaders in Ferguson organized a militant fightback, which Mass Murderer in Chief Barack Obama dismissed by saying he had “no sympathy at all for [people] destroying [their] own communities” (CNN 11/26/14).
But on February 22, to the students of Parkland, Obama tweeted: “…Marching and organizing to remake the world as it should be. We’ve been waiting for you. And we’ve got your backs.”
When Black and Latin workers fight to remove guns from their neighborhoods, they are rejected and reprimanded. But when white students call for reform and appeal for the assistance of opportunistic lawmakers, they are applauded.
Under capitalism, gun control is about controlling the working class, containing their protests, and attempting to lead them like sheep to trust a system that will ultimately orchestrate their own deaths. In recent months, we have seen the bosses mobilize in the Alabama election against Klansman and gun nut Roy Moore. We have seen it throughout the #MeToo movement, and now we are seeing it clearly in the chorus of calls for gun control.
But the fact remains that Black workers are the key to communist revolution, and that none of the bosses’ guns—or gun control—can stop a conscious working class.
Freedom from mass shootings is revolution
The U.S. has been built on mass murder of the working class. Conversations about arming teachers and intensified background checks are not about protection; they are about normalizing fascism in schools.  
The only freedom workers can have from mass violence and killings is to unite as a class—to form an international, multiracial, revolutionary front against the bosses.
In the hands of the masses, armed with communist class-consciousness and led by the Progressive Labor Party, organized violence can be revolutionary. One day, the international working class will bury these mass slaughterers with the very weapons we have built.