“Affirmative Action Upheld,” read the headline on the Washington Post.

A New York Times editorial announced that “the movement to expand opportunity for blacks and other minorities has been ruled legal….”

The Carter administration hailed “a great gain for affirmative action.”

They were all talking about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Bakke case. The court struck down as illegal the minority admissions program at a University of California medical school and ordered it to admit Allan Bakke, who claimed the affirmative action plan “discriminated” against him as a white.

It was the most devastating blow the Supreme Court has dealt to civil rights in many years. The outlawing of affirmative action quotas will have repercussions not only in education but also in employment where thousands more “reverse discrimination” lawsuits are in the works to roll back job gains of Blacks and women.

Yet news commentators, lawyers, and liberal Democratic and Republican politicians are trying to disguise and downplay the real significance of the Bakke decision. They insist that the court upheld the “principle” of affirmative action because it outlawed only racial quotas. The deciding opinion by Justice Powell said race could be given “competitive consideration” as one factor in school admissions.

But discrimination remains as profitable and necessary as ever to American capitalism. Far from searching for “remedies,” employers, universities, and the government have searched for every excuse to perpetuate discrimination. Progress toward equality has come only where it is enforced. Without quotas, schools and employers are free to continue segregating minorities and women through rigged tests, biased “qualifications,” personal prejudice by interviewers, and myriad other devices.  
 
July 13, 1953
The inspiring East German uprising stands forth as one of the greatest working-class revolutionary struggles ever waged in Western Europe. In a territory of only 18 million people, more than two million workers participated directly and actively in a titanic general strike that paralyzed virtually all industry, mining, and transport. Several hundred thousands in vast fighting demonstrations in key cities attacked government buildings, disarmed police, opened jails.

While the East German rulers hastily promised concessions and reforms at the height of the struggle, the advance of the political revolution was halted primarily with measures of “blood and iron.” Scores of thousands of workers were arrested. Untold numbers were deported eastward. Hundreds were killed and wounded, possibly thousands. Many fell under the bullets of Soviet military firing squads. Martial law was enforced by a huge army of 300,000 Soviet troops, including several armored divisions, called out when the East German army and police proved unreliable and incapable of “restoring order.”

A woman strike leader, who had escaped from Zossen, where she had been working on barracks construction, reported:

“I told the Russian officers direct to their faces what our demands were. We demanded reduction of our work norms, release of arrested strikers, price reductions, and a free vote in the election of public officials. After two days of fruitless argument, during which the strikers refused to return to their jobs, the Russians suddenly began arresting the strike leaders. About fifty were arrested, but I managed to escape.”

All other available reports of this type reveal that the workers combined political demands with economic and that none of their demands or slogans disclosed the slightest sympathy for the Bonn capitalist regime of West Germany or a desire for denationalization of the industries.

These workers revealed little faith, however, in the Stalinist regime or its promises.  
 
 
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