Left I on the News

It's a popular chant at antiwar marches, along with "money for health care, not for war," "money for housing, not for war," "money for education, not for war," and other variants. Which brings us to this from an article on the latest use of "government" (i.e., the people's) money from today's New York Times:

Voters might well wonder why perhaps a half-trillion dollars — about the same amount spent so far in Iraq — is suddenly available to help Wall Street when promises to address issues like health care insurance have gone largely unkept for years.

Well, some might wonder. There's a very harsh-sounding (to many ears) phrase used by the Marxist movement to describe governments in transition to communism: "Dictatorship of the Proletariat." But the fact that the government will spend hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars, at almost the drop of a hat, either for war, or to prop up Wall Street, while letting the needs of the masses of people go unmet, makes very clear that we're already living under a dictatorship - the Dictatorship of Capital (or, if you prefer, the "Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie").

Some of us (millions around the world, actually) were right about the invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan and the assault on Yugoslavia and countless other acts of imperialist aggression, but let's hold those thought for the moment), and it only took a few years and a million deaths for that viewpoint to be proven correct and embraced by the majority of people. Some of us are also right about the absolute necessity of socialism, and the ultimate truth of the phrase, "Socialism or barbarism." Unfortunately it is taking much longer, and the deaths worldwide of many more than a million people, for the majority to recognize the validity of that world view.