Reasons to be Impossible

Lunchbreak already - time to start on the new blog. I suppose, I need to define a few terms. Firstly, why Impossiblist?

Well, its the political tradition I belong to, the Socialist Party of Great Britain one of the oldest socialist parties in the world. Impossiblism does not denote that we object per se to the laws of physics and are demanding impossible feats, but to the split that emerged in the early socialist movement between the "possiblists" who believed that socialists should aim for easily attainable reforms as stepping stones to the ultimate goal of socialism, and the revolutionaries who demanded socialism as a first premise.

It is a divide that has been seen in other movements, Scottish Nationalism, German Greens, etc. where the group puts getting into office under present conditions before the central premises of their Party's existence. Hence they get into office, to find that they have been elected to manage, say, a Scotland under the Union by people who do not want indpendence at all.

Impossiblist socialists say if you want socialism, you have to stand for socialism and nothing but: no claims to be able to magae capitalism better than the capitalist parties, no cockamaymee reforms trying to change capitalism without abolishing it - only the clear and constant call for the abolition of the wages system itself.

It is reasonable, only to demand the impossible. More next time.

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Labels: Blogs, Impossibilism, SPGB