Being Impossible

Across at Socialist Standard @ My Space reproduces a chapter from the book 'Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries',edited by Maximilien Rubel and John Crump , detailing the tradition of impossibilism that is best represented by the Socialist Party of Great Britain . The chapter was written by Stephen Coleman .

The full article is at the link but here is a few extracts .

The possibilists regarded socialism as a progressive social process rather than an 'all-at-once' end. Those who regarded capitalism and socialism as mutually exclusive systems and refused to budge from the revolutionary position of what has become known as 'the maximum programme' were labelled as impossibilists.The SPGB contended that the real impossibilists were the self-proclaimed realists who sought to humanise capitalism by means of legislative reform.

The SPGB has tended to refrain from extensive speculation about the precise organisation of the stateless society, pointing out that such decisions must be made by those establishing socialism, in accordance, no doubt, with ideas and plans formulated in the course of the revolutionary process. Many different kinds of bodies might be used by the inhabitants of socialist society:

"..there is intrinsically nothing wrong with institutions where delegates assemble to parley (Parliaments, congresses, diets or even so-called soviets). What is wrong with them today is that such parliaments are controlled by the capitalist class. Remove class society and the assemblies will function in the interest of the whole people..."

Advocates of soviets or council communism will note that their insistence upon how socialism would have to be organised is not ruled out by the SPGB...

...Whatever may be thought of the SPGB's case for the working class, in the course of the socialist revolution, sending mandated delegates to parliament as well as organising industrially to keep production going, it is clearly those who insist that ballot boxes and parliaments can play no part in the establishment of socialism and assert that socialism can only be established via industrial organisation alone, who are being dogmatic and historically fetishised in their thinking about revolution...

... The record of accurate prediction and sound analysis for which the SPGB can claim credit is an impressive one. Before 1906, when the Labour Party was founded, the reformist nature of that political movement was predicted. In 1914, when 'socialists' across the world succumbed to the temptation of national chauvinism and supported the imperialist war, the SPGB stood out in unqualified opposition to the war, producing at the time probably the finest anti-war manifesto ever to be published in English. In 1918, shortly after the Bolsheviks seized state power in Russia, the SPGB presented a Marxist analysis of the 'revolution' which foresaw its state capitalist outcome. In the 1920s, the SPGB was virtually the only British contender for the theory of Marxism against its Leninist distorters within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). In 1926, the SPGB predicted that syndicalism, or trade-union militancy without conscious political action, was doomed to failure. In 1939, another world capitalist war was exposed as being nothing like a 'war for democracy' and was opposed and, subsequently, the bogus socialism of Labour government nationalisation and welfare reform policies was predicted and charted. It has been, in one sense, an impressive record of predicting historical failures: national liberation, CND, environmentalism, charities - the SPGB warned them all that, even on their own terms, these possibilist movements would end up faced with frustration...