The man who bombed neutral Cambodia ‘back to the Stone Age’ and then got the Nobel Peace Prize, prompting songwriter Tom Lehrer to declare ‘satire is obsolete’, has finally died at 100, an age never reached by his tens of thousands of helpless victims. He backed Chile’s murderous Pinochet regime and was implicated in Operation Condor, a South American mass-assassination programme. His world view was ‘shaped by pessimism and a dim view of humanity’ where ‘power is the best aphrodisiac.’

Our only regret is that we can’t collectively dance on his grave. Instead we make the case for post-capitalist common ownership, where war will not exist, and power-crazed psychopaths like Kissinger will never be created.

We hadn’t either until last week. It seems to have slipped across the Atlantic like the Black Friday confest and it falls on 28 November. The charitable foundations of zillionaires such as Gates and the Heinz family are backing it to promote ‘radical generosity’.

We won’t be hanging out the bunting on the day. We say that the working class has been radically generous to capitalists for far too long, drudging away to create the wealth that funds the lives and charities of Gates and his ilk. So our response to Giving Tuesday, which also originated out west: “You can stick it where the sun don’t shine”.

It has become common recently to talk of a ‘cost-of-living crisis’ in the UK and elsewhere, as people’s incomes struggle to keep up with price increases.

A dramatic example of this is the recent Autumn Statement from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that two million households in Britain have in recent months turned off their fridge or freezer in order to save energy and money. And a quarter of low-income households have run up debts to pay for food, while a third sold belongings to raise cash.

This in the fifth richest country in the world (measured by total household wealth)! Such is capitalism, and this is why it needs to be replaced.

So refugees and asylum seekers cannot be sent to Rwanda. That’s what the Supreme Court has ruled. While that’s something those potentially affected will celebrate and socialists will welcome, we would see it as the best outcome if it raised the whole question of borders and states as a means of controlling and defining people and fuelling nationalistic and racial divisions.

While it’s true that to demand to abolish borders and states will seem to many as unthinkable as it was once to ask to abolish slavery, slavery was finally abolished. Borders and states can be too – but only as part of the abolition of money and wages and the whole of the profit system, since they are all part of the intricate jigsaw that makes up capitalism (see this review)