The row about ‘reparatory justice’ for colonial slavery has rolled round again. Estimates of potential costs for using that expensive word ‘sorry’ vary from billions to tens of trillions. Up to 20% of UK wealth is slavery-related, but today’s rich beneficiaries certainly won’t be giving up their landed estates. Instead they insist that any reparations come out of ‘public money’.

Since ‘public money’ ultimately comes from capitalist profits, this amounts to a plan by the slaveholder descendants to spread the reparation cost across the entire owning class – like sharing a restaurant bill among 10 people, when only two of them ate.

Don’t feel sorry for the capitalists though. They all get rich through our wage slavery. Socialists don’t want reparations for that. We want revolution.

According to a recent World Bank report, global poverty reduction has more or less come to a standstill, with 2020–30 ‘set to be a lost decade’. One person in twelve in the world is in extreme poverty (living on less than $2.15 per day).

Two-thirds of the extreme poor live in sub-Saharan Africa, where in addition nearly everyone who is exposed to an extreme weather event will struggle to recover from it.

If current developments continue, it will take decades to eradicate extreme poverty. This in a world that wastes massive resources on wars and all the paraphernalia of the money system, where producing enough for all is achievable now.

With less than 3 weeks to go, the American presidential election is neck and neck. Trump is favoured by workers from poorer backgrounds with lower levels of education and employment prospects. Harris is supported by workers whose social and educational background enables them to expect better paid wage slavery.

Trump is seen as an unspeakable, bigoted monster by Harris supporters. Harris is seen as a ‘soft touch’ for America’s ‘enemies’ by Trump supporters. Whichever wins will take over the running of the capitalist system that operates, in the US as elsewhere, in the profit-making interests of a tiny minority. The direct opposite of the no-profit, production-for-need society that socialists aim to see established on a world scale.

The capitalist media are featuring glowing comments about Alex Salmond who died over lunch at a conference abroad. What a ‘monumental figure’ (Starmer) who ‘inspired a generation’ (Swinney)!

Socialists have a different view. Salmond was the purveyor of a poisonous flag-waving nationalism which should have no place anywhere in the world, and helped to perpetuate the myth that workers have common cause with the owners of the country in which they happen to be born. His ‘legacy’ is as a contributor to the erection at Holyrood of yet one more greasy pole to test the climbing skill of the politicians who run things on behalf of those owners.