The Brandt Report: A programme for survival

Abstract

The aim of this article is to develop a critique of the Brandt Report. It explores the way in which the recommendations of the Report are related to the assumptions and concepts from which the Report begins; and examines why these assumptions and concepts seem plausible to many socialists. The conclusion reached is that the Brandt Report conflates the danger to human survival with the danger to the survival of capitalism, and produces a strategy which is adequate to neither. Rather than campaigning for its implementation, British socialists should be concerned to develop an alternative strategy for changing relations between people in the North and people in the South. This should not be geared to attempts to increase financial flows from governments in the North to governments in the South, nor towards negotiations for a New International Economic Order. Its guiding perspective should be that of organising a New International Division of Labour, and it should be built upon the grass-roots initiatives already existing for such structures as combine committees and workers' plans.

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