But what is one to make of Claus seeing us when we are awake and asleep? Is this the “all seeing eye”, seen on the back of a U.S. dollar bill, the fetishism of money as the equivalent of all commodities that invades our consciousness whether we are awake or asleep, that value recognized by Marx in Capital, Volume I described as the “fetishism of commodities”.

In May of 1871 some 25,000 workers – men, women, children – were slaughtered in the streets of Paris, France by the forces of “law and order” and big capitalist interests. Thirty thousand more were to be jailed, deported and executed in the coming months. Their crime? Proclaiming the world’s first working class-led government known as the Paris Commune.

Windsor’s Labour Day march, 1957, and I was three years old. Marchers carried flags of Canada, England, the United States. I rambunctiously blurted out the question above as my parents tried to hush me up. I had no idea there was a Cold War. In my child’s mind, Russia helped win the war against the bad Nazis. “We were Russian! Weren’t we the good guys, too? Wasn’t the flag with the hammer and sickle a good flag?”