If there is any hope for humanity it must come through a realisation on a mass scale that the economic foundation of society based on exploitation of wage labour has no part to play in the future. As we plunge deeper and deeper into social breakdown, its essential features involving imperialist confrontation, economic polarisation, environmental devastation and the inability of all existing mechanisms to mitigate the descent, it is essential that the perspective of a total rejection of the root cause of the crisis, capitalism, emerges as the only solution.

The capitalist holocaust is gathering pace. Save the Children is an international organisation which has recently published a document which says that every year 40 million women give birth without trained medical personnel and over one million babies die on their first day. Obviously such a figure is part of a wider problem. Poverty, inequality, and social division which sees an enormous amount of wealth in the hands of a tiny group. Latest figures from Oxfam show that;

The richest 85 people in the world control as much wealth as the bottom 50% combined.

The richest 85 share a combined wealth of £1 trillion, as much as the bottom 3.5 billion people.

The wealth of the richest 1% amounts to £60.88 trillion, 65 times more than the bottom 50%.

Since the late 1970s, tax rates for the richest have fallen in 29 out of 30 countries for which data are available

70% of the world's population live in countries where inequality has increased since the 1980s and 1% of families own 46% of global wealth - almost £70tn.

It’s not simply a case of awful conditions somewhere else. As the cynical Band Aid ‘’Feed the World” lyric went “Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you”. The problem is everywhere and charity cannot solve the catastrophe which is the inexorable social devastation of an obsolete mode of production. In a report released in October 2013 into the devastating humanitarian impact of Europe’s financial crisis, the Red Cross recorded a 75 per cent increase in the number of people relying on their food aid over the last three years. At least 43 million people across the Continent are not getting enough to eat each day.

No doubt humanity faces a crossroads. The facts on the ground mean that the status quo is trembling under the hammer blows of crisis rooted in the exhaustion of capitalism as a vehicle for social progress. The direction we travel depends on each one of us. The question will be posed with ever increasing urgency. Do we continue down the road of destruction or organise for another society? For those who decide the latter and realise unity of effort is essential, the ICT hopes to prove a itself worthy choice.

Ant