Month: October 2020
Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible
In the previous article describing the World Socialist Party of the United States reference was made to Impossibilism. Students of America’s left history will recognize it as an outlook represented by the now defunct Socialist Labor Party, (1), extinct Proletarian Party (2) and the still going Socialist Party of Canada (3) which Larry Gambone describes in a brief history of the SPC. (4) Also…
The Return of the World Socialist Party
A socialist party that some say is a relic from the past and which has been clinging to life-support, is hoping its message can still resonate with an audience, and it is yet again attempting to sow its ideas on more favorable soil, now that American political life is showing promising signs of a revival. However,…
Money Must Go
Another depiction of how socialist society could be organised and this time an extract from a1940s book.Money Must Go was the title of a short book published in 1943. Written by two sympathisers of the Socialist Party who used the name “Philoren” (from their names Philips and Renson), it was an attempt to expound the case…
Socialism and uneven world development
It might be thought that the present uneven development of productive resources throughout the world could be brought into greater balance within capitalism itself. It might be said that as modern productive techniques have been brought into use in one place, there should be no great difficulty in setting these up in other places where…
Impossibilism 2
Anglo-Marxism The SPGB The Socialist Party of Great Britain, more popularly known as the SPGB even though, despite Militant, it now prefers Socialist Party is it by far the longest surviving political party in Britain calling itself socialist. If the SPGB has survived for this length of time it must have been because it filled…
Impossibilism 1
Impossibilismby Stephen ColemanLike other terms of political abuse which have been absorbed into our political vocabulary, the term ‘impossibilism’ tells us as much or more about the labellers as it does about the idea being described. After the French legislative election of 1881, in which the Fédération du Parti des Travailleurs Socialistes de France won only 60,000 of the 7 million votes cast, a group based around Paul Brousse and Benoît Malon began…
The Socialist Ecotopia
The problems of food safety are well-known. In China the baby formula scandal of 2008 hundreds of infants died or fell seriously ill. There have been several seizures of fake meat by police, the most notorious of which, in September 2013, involved the discovery of more than 20,000 kg of chemically treated pork which had…
We’re A’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns*
A nation is not a natural community that existed before the state, but that it’s the other way round: the state existed first and then proceeded to impose on those it ruled over the idea that they formed a “nation”. States pre-existed and in a very real sense created nations. Nations are groups of people ruled…
Internationalism of the Labour Movement
“Whatever national differences divide Poles, Russians, Prussians, Hungarians, and Italians, these national differences have not prevented the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian despots uniting together to maintain their tyranny; why, then, cannot countries unite for obtainment of their liberty? The cause of the people in all countries is the same—the cause of Labour, enslaved, and plundered…In…
Keeping It In The Human Family
The most common rebuttal of socialist society is that it is impossible to achieve because “you can’t change human nature.” Some people think that socialism sounds great but will never work in practice. They say it would only work in a world of perfect people. What socialists set out to prove is that not only…