“For All Mankind”: Address to the 1978 Socialist International Congress
As modern socialists we accept with pride and determination our historic and continuing struggle for liberty and equality, not simply for ourselves but for all mankind.
Luke Savage is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Jacobin, the New Statesman, the Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Literary Review of Canada. His first book, The Dead Center, was published in 2022.
As modern socialists we accept with pride and determination our historic and continuing struggle for liberty and equality, not simply for ourselves but for all mankind.
“Our socialist challenge is to tackle what I have called the economic question. This fundamental question is about economic power, and who will wield it. It is about our national priorities, and who will decide them.”
In 1967, responding to an open letter calling for an alliance of socialists and liberals to address growing American encroachment in Canada , Ed Broadbent argued forcefully that the two ideologies were committed to ends so radically different that cooperation on the basis of shared nationalism was both incoherent and impossible.
Ed Broadbent’s rich vision of democratic equality can and should continue to be our compass in this era of uncertainty and crisis. A barren technocratic liberalism may be ill-equipped to carry this out — but democratic socialism can.
Ed Broadbent and his co-authors spoke at the Toronto Reference Library to launch their new book on Canadian social democracy.
To be humane, societies must be democratic — and, to be democratic, every person must be afforded the economic and social rights necessary for their individual flourishing.