“Racial segregation in housing … was a nationwide project of the federal government … designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders … racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live ….The policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endure to the present time.” These quotes are from the preface to The Color of Law, a new book by Richard Rothstein. The general ignorance of the history of de jure (by law) segregation is so profound that Chief Justice John Roberts could get away with saying that since residential segregation “is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications.” Rothstein also shows how racist housing laws contributed to segregated education, income differentials, the large differences in wealth between Blacks and whites, and stymied working class unity.
The diehard racist Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1912. He oversaw total segregation in every area of work, from bathrooms to cafeterias. The first federal housing was built for defense workers during World War I, exclusively for white families. Black workers were forced into segregated slums often far from their jobs.
Local municipalities began to develop zoning laws that required homes with lots that would make them unaffordable to most Black workers. President Hoover’s advisor, Frederick Olmsted, stated, “ in any housing developments which are to succeed…racial divisions…have to be taken into account”.
Zoning laws, could not completely exclude middle or higher income Blacks. This was tackled by exclusionary lending practices. Since the Russian Revolution, Washington was terrified of the attraction that communism might hold and sought to encourage single home ownerships as a way to give white families a stake in capitalism. In 1933, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) began easing terms for mortgages. To exclude Blacks, HOLC drew color-coded maps of every urban area to define areas of “risk”, which were colored red and included all Black areas. This is the origin of the term redlining. President Roosevelt’s New Deal housing programs were all segregated by race or excluded Blacks altogether.
The New Deal’s Public Works Administration (PWA) strove to increase housing for middle and working class, but its housing was required to follow “neighborhood composition,” thereby maintaining patterns of separation. In 1937, the U.S. Housing Authority, which continued the same policies, replaced the PWA; in 1940 The Lanham Act created defense-worker housing only for whites.
The Federal Housing Authority (FHA), created in 1934, required absolute racial segregation. The FHA also discouraged loans in urban neighborhoods and encouraged them in newly built suburbs. Blacks could only get private home loans, with higher interest rates.
Post WW II the FHA permitted local authorities to continue building segregated public housing. Veterans Administration (VA) loan appraisers were financing most housing by 1948, all in segregated developments. Only 2 percent of purchasers were Black GIs. In 1954 the Eisenhower administration declared that the invalidation of “separate but equal” in education did not apply to housing. As late as 1984, 10 million federally funded housing tenants in 47 metropolitan areas were almost all segregated by race and every predominantly white project had superior facilities, amenities, and services. In 1973, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the “housing industry, aided and abetted by government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing.”
The author also discusses how Black neighborhoods were nearer to industrial and polluted areas, and had inferior schools and transportation. Rothstein decries the long-term segregation and inequality that has been created, seeing it both as a moral evil and a loss for the society as a whole. He proposes some solutions, but acknowledges they are unlikely to be enacted.
What the author fails to consider is that the American capitalist system depends on racism for survival. The wage differentials alone between Black workers and White workers add up to about half of total corporate profits. Not only do lower wages and services save huge amounts of money, but segregation insures that Blacks and whites will live and be educated apart, keeping racism alive. Racism divides working people from each other. When Black workers earn lower wages and have higher unemployment, wages and working conditions for all suffer. When imperialist wars are to be fought racism is needed to brand the enemy as fearsome and inferior. When increased rebellion looms as conditions worsen, fascist repression relies on racism and nationalism.
We in the Progressive Labor Party see fighting racism, nationalism and identity politics as essential to building a movement that can wipe the scourge of capitalism from the earth and build an international communist movement. Living together would help us fight together for an egalitarian communist world.

LOS ANGELES—Base building and long-term struggle have laid the groundwork for big things to come at one high school in California. From the first day I started teaching at the school, I have put my politics in the forefront and built relationships with teachers and students that are centered on openly discussing the world situation.
During lunch, teachers chat about everything from conditions for students at the school to imperialism all over the globe. Teachers and students have waged struggles against scanning and large class sizes, as well as attended large rallies around issues of immigration, police murder, and women’s rights. There is an understanding amongst both teachers and students that we must be active in the world around us in order to change it.
The administration at this school does not understand this foundation that has been laid. So when they tried to start off our school year explaining how teachers would be docked an hour’s pay for being even a minute late to work and that we would be docked pay if we left campus at any time throughout the day, even during our lunch, they assumed we would just roll over and say ok.
At the initial meeting where this attack was laid out, one teacher spoke passionately about how she worked at a school before where this policy was enforced and how it impacted both staff and students. That was enough to get the ball rolling. Staff held planning meetings to discuss how to fight back against this attack.
Part of the plan involved contacting the union for support. We found out quickly that the union president had already given the administration the thumbs up on the plan without even discussing it with our staff. In the course of just one week of work, our staff has now learned the important lesson of the role played by union misleaders.
Even though the top leadership of the union sold us out, our union reps demanded a meeting with the administration to discuss this attack. The administration framed this to the staff as a collaborative meeting and had the goal of getting the staff to set the terms of the attack in order to fool us into more willingly accepting it. We met beforehand as a staff and decided that we would make no concessions to the administration, that we would demand these policies not be enforced and we would be involved in setting the parameters for how they can abuse us.
The meeting went as you would expect. The administration occupied 15 minutes of a 45 minute “collaborative meeting” to talk about how hurt they are that the staff is making such a big deal out of this and destroying our “family” environment at the school. Two of the three administrators even cried.
Their tears did not fool us or deter us. As I said, the groundwork for bold fight back had already been laid. The staff stood united and strong. We said NO! The final outcome of this has yet to be seen, but at this point it appears that we have won the battle.
In the future, we will need to do a better job of connecting attacks like these to students and their families. We know that any attack on the working conditions of teachers is really an attack on the learning conditions of students. This has to be made clearer to the whole staff though so that our organizing strategy embodies that understanding. Overall though, a little fight back has gone a long way in bringing us closer together as a staff and shifting everyone slightly to the left. I look forward to a long history of fight back and struggle with everyone!

The U.S. ruling class reviles Joseph Stalin, one of the first communist leaders of the Soviet Union (USSR), and so they lie about him.  But they lie about so many things, why would they tell the truth about Stalin? Yet the capitalist slander campaign against Stalin led many authors, university researchers and even ordinary people to dislike Stalin. Why so much capitalist hatred against Joseph Stalin?
First, some facts. After the Russian Revolution, 12 European countries (including the United States  and Japan) invaded the Soviet Union to kill this new socialist society in its cradle. Nevertheless they were defeated. Instead Stalin led the socialist Soviet Union from being “the poor man of Europe” to a world power that challenged the worldwide empire of the capitalist U.S.The capitalist,with their tails between their legs, have vowed to keep this part of history buried from workers.
Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union became powerful enough to defeat Hitler’s Nazis in World War II. Of the 250 Nazi divisions that fought in World War II, 200 of them fought to conquer the Soviet Union...and were defeated. Eighty five percent of German casualties were at the hands of the USSR. It was only after the Soviets began pushing the Nazis back, that the Allies invaded Normandy, and entered World War II.
The Soviet workers and their Red Army suffered huge casualties (20 million dead) and destruction. Nevertheless it was their valour and incredible sacrifice that defeated the Nazis . Despite the toll they were still able to provide education to all of  its  citizens, this included college and trade schools. They provided universal health care and employment. Workers had four weeks of paid vacation and received a pension at age 60, women at age 55. They had paid maternity leave and free childcare and they eliminated the centuries-old famines that had racked the Ukraine.
Some charge that Stalin was a dictator, yet he struggled mightily for a new constitution with secret elections so that the entrenched bureaucracy would be challenged. Local Party Secretaries defeated him in this effort.It is helpful to see the sources of the criticisms of Stalin. The sources of the forced starvation stories in the Ukraine are anti-communist, pro-Nazi sympathizers who left the Ukraine and headed to the Western countries.
In 1956 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his achievements in a secret speech. Khrushchev wanted to take the USSR in a more capitalist direction. Professor Grover Furr documents that of the 61 charges Khrushchev levels against Stalin, 60 can be proven to be false. Needless to say that speech is the source of many of the attacks on Stalin. 
Another source of attacks was the writing and organizing of LeonTrotsky. He was a charismatic individual with the emphasis on individual. Trotsky belonged to a different party than Stalin and Lenin. He joined the Bolsheviks when the Russian Revolution was imminent. When Lenin died, Trotsky thought that he should be the next leader.
He organized for his ideas. They were publicized widely in the party, but when it came to a vote, his position lost 724,000 to 4,000. The Bolsheviks and Lenin chose Stalin. However, he continued to organize against Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership and was finally kicked out of the party. He secretly continued his anti-Stalin organizing and propaganda. He appealed, not to the workers, but to the capitalists all over the world for support. Capitalists loved his stories because it gave them more ammunition against Stalin. But Furr speaks and reads Russian and English and has had access to Trotsky’s archives as well as the archives of the former Soviet Union. He has written and self-published several books on the period. For those who want to learn what really took place under Stalin’s leadership, please go to his website: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/
The fact is that college professors who try to write a balanced or a favorable view of Stalin are ostracized by the system. They can’t get published. Those that promote anti-Stalinism get published, paid and praised. The reason the capitalists hate Stalin is because he helped lead a revolution that threw them out of power.
 The capitalists who exploit workers, who bring death and destruction, who promote racism and sexism, hate Stalin. They benefit from our ignorance that it is possible to have a system where the capitalists do not exist. But a better world is possible. It’s communism where the workers of the world rule and the capitalists end up in the trash heap of history.
         

This summer audiences had the opportunity to contrast two films by Black directors addressing the role of the police. One, Sorry to Bother You, by first-time director Boots Riley, who proudly calls himself a communist, accurately depicts the cops attacking striking workers trying to keep out scabs. The police are friends of the company, not the workers. This social satire addresses alienation and wage slavery, collective versus individual advancement, the need for militant strikes and multi-racial unity, and the role of the state (especially the police) in protecting the owners’ profits. This is communist art, one that helps us understand and fight capitalist exploitation.
The other film, BlacKkKlansman, is by veteran director Spike Lee, who was recently paid $219,000 by the New York Police Department(NYPD) to help develop a program to build closer ties between the NYPD and Black and Latino residents, who will never forget “New York’s finest” many racist killings: Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, Ramarley Graham, Patrick Dorismond, Sean Bell, Eleanor Bumpurs, Shantel Davis, Kimani Gray, Saheed Vassell and many others. Lee’s art distorts reality and offers a mythical view of the police as people who risk their lives infiltrating and disrupting white supremacist groups.
KKKop investigated PLP
Lee’s film is supposedly based on a memoir by Ron Stallworth, a former Colorado Springs detective who spent years infiltrating Black radical and communist groups, including Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Stallworth said in a recent interview:
“And I was actually running two investigations at once: the Klan investigation and an undercover investigation of the Progressive Labor Party. I’d bounce back and forth from one investigation to another” (Time, 8/9).Stallworth was part of the FBI Counter Intelligence Program (Cointelpro). Boots Riley has written a three-page critique of BlacKkKlansman, in which he accurately reports:
“Cointelpro’s objectives were to destroy radical organizations, especially Black radical organizations. Cointelpro papers also show us that when white supremacist organizations were infiltrated by the FBI and cops, it was not to disrupt them. It was to use them to threaten and/or physically attack radical organizations. … In some cases, it was the undercover cops who came up with plans and literally pulled the trigger on assassinations. . . That is what Ron Stallworth was helping to do.”
A few more lies:
Riley details how BlacKkKlansman is filled with distortions, including made-up scenes:
Stallworth and the Colorado Springs police never prevented a KKK bombing.
This was added to create suspense and make the police seem heroic.The scene in which a drunk white cop with a history of racist abuse is secretly recorded, and was then later arrested was entirely fabricated. Lee wants us to believe that most police care about racism. But in the real world, police embrace a “blue wall of silence” that protects cops who regularly brutalize Black, Latin and white workers.
Stallworth could speak on the phone with KKK leaders, but as a Black man, he obviously couldn’t show up at Klan meetings. A white cop (played by Adam Driver) went in his place. In the film, the partner is Jewish and is almost discovered by a suspicious Klan member, who would have reacted violently. In real life, the cop was not Jewish.Once again, Lee made this up to exaggerate the risks to the police.
The film also creates the character of Patrice, the leader of the Black Student Union at Colorado College. She is initially appalled when she learns that Stallworth is an undercover cop. Yet in one of the final scenes, Patrice and Ron walk down the hall together, guns drawn, to confront a burning cross.
The message is clear: cops and anti-racist activists should be allies in the fight against racism.  
Do the right thing? Art serves the ruling Class agenda
Riley correctly points out that Lee devoted his storytelling talent to altering the facts into a piece of art that defends the racist capitalist state, making the cops look like heroes and anti-racist allies of the working class. Riley describes Lee’s lionization of the cops as “really disappointing, to put it mildly.” Spike Lee depicted police violence negatively in 1989’s Do The Right Thing, honoring the names of police-murder victims such as Eleanor Bumpers. Some workers may have seen him as a rebel. But the film industry serves to build up capitalism, not make meaningful criticism of it.
 Lee has been part of that industry for a long time now and his payday from the NYPD makes it even more inevitable that he will produce narratives that prop up the status quo and seek to win more youth and Black workers to support the state apparatus, specifically the police. We must see this film as part of the conditioning the state imposes on us to see the police as our saviors, starting when Officer Friendly visited our kindergarten. As communists it is our duty to rip the hood off films that attempt to use identity and fake progressive politics, to feed us the bosses crappy anti-comunist, and anti-workers culture.