speaking in tounges
In mixed political spaces, anarchists often find themselves talking past Marxists. Marxists, for their part, have long assumed that theirs is the only genuine or “scientific” socialism, the sole framework capable of explaining capitalism and charting the path beyond it. That conviction, while historically grounded, can easily harden into dogmatism, closing off the possibility of dialogue and leaving the wider socialist tradition fragmented.
Yet part of the confusion stems from how the terms themselves evolved.
Anarchists generally define socialism as any system in which the means of production are collectively owned and managed by the workers, with private property in those means abolished. From that definition, there can be anarchist and non-anarchist socialism, communist and non-communist socialism. Socialism, in this view, is not necessarily a stage on the way to communism, but any social form that abolishes capitalist exploitation and replaces it with workers’ control.
Anarchists define communism as a classless, stateless, moneyless society. One can be a communist without being an anarchist, and vice versa. For anarchists, any attempt to centralise power, especially through a state, is not a necessary step but a betrayal of that end goal. Their strategy is one of decentralisation, dispersing authority and decision-making to those most dispossessed under capitalism.
This libertarian socialism rests on a deep suspicion of hierarchy, a suspicion not without justification. However, it also risks mistaking the form of power for its content. For anarchists, any form of centralisation looks like domination, whereas for Marxists, what matters is who holds that power and for what purpose.
The Marxian conception of socialism differs sharply. For Marx and Engels, socialism, or as they originally used interchangeably, communism, was not a patchwork of localised communes or voluntary federations, but a global transformation of the entire mode of production. The aim was not to replace private bosses with local committees, but to abolish the wages system altogether through common ownership and democratic control by the whole working class.
The so-called “state socialist” model, which imagines socialism as a centralised command economy run by bureaucrats, was a distortion of Marx’s ideas. It substituted state capitalism for socialism, replacing the private capitalist with the state official while leaving the worker still a wage labourer. Far from being revolutionary, such arrangements reproduce the liberal logic of management, rule by a minority “for” the people, rather than by the people themselves.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain (S.P.G.B.), since its foundation in 1904, has consistently rejected both these deviations, the anarchist faith in spontaneous decentralisation and the authoritarian pretence of state socialism. The S.P.G.B. stands instead on the ground of impossibilism, the position that socialism cannot be achieved through reforms, palliatives, or transitional states, but only through the conscious political action of a socialist majority taking control of the means of production and distribution.
Impossibilism was not named for pessimism but for clarity. It held that the capitalist system cannot be transformed piecemeal into socialism. Attempts to humanise capitalism through social reform, whether by Labour politicians or syndicalist co-operatives, merely prolong the system they claim to oppose. Only the abolition of the wages system, class ownership, and production for profit can end exploitation.
In that light, both anarchism and state socialism appear as two sides of the same liberal coin. The former retreats into local self-management and moral purity, mistaking small-scale autonomy for social power. The latter embraces bureaucratic centralisation, mistaking administrative control for working-class rule. Both fail to grasp that socialism is not a question of management, of who runs production, but of ownership, whether production is organised for profit or for use, under class control or common control.
Anarchists are right to reject the authoritarian state, but they misfire when they reject political organisation altogether. The S.P.G.B.’s impossibilist position insists that the working class must use the political means, not to capture a capitalist state and run it, but to abolish it. A socialist majority must consciously and democratically dispossess the capitalist class of its control over production. That requires political organisation, not abstention from it.
Similarly, those who call themselves “Marxist-Leninists” or “state socialists” do not transcend capitalism, but reproduce it under new management. Their centralised command economies retain wage labour, money, and markets, features utterly foreign to socialism as Marx conceived it. In practice, such systems amount to state capitalism, where the state becomes the collective capitalist. The working class remains exploited, alienated, and powerless, only now in the name of “the people”.
The S.P.G.B.’s socialism recognises no halfway house between capitalism and communism. There is no transition period in which a state manages production on behalf of the workers. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, in Marx’s original sense, was the self-rule of the working class as a whole, not the dictatorship of a party or committee. Once class rule ends, so too does the state as a coercive institution.
In that sense, the impossibilist tradition shares a certain kinship with anarchism’s final goal, a stateless, classless, moneyless world. Where it diverges is in method. Anarchists reject the use of the political weapon, while impossibilists insist it is essential to dispossess the capitalist class. Without the conscious political act of abolishing capitalism, decentralised experiments remain islands in a capitalist sea, always at risk of co-option or collapse.
The S.P.G.B.’s message remains what it has always been. Socialism is not something to be built piecemeal, administered from above, or improvised from below. It must be established consciously and democratically by a socialist majority, organised globally and acting politically to take, not beg for, control. Anything less, whether anarchist localism or bureaucratic planning, remains trapped within the logic of liberal reform.
Socialism cannot be granted by decree, nor grown in a corner of capitalism. It must be won by knowledge, by class organisation, and by the clear recognition that no amount of reform, leadership, or central planning can substitute for the conscious action of a free and politically organised working class.
That is the impossibilist position, clear, uncompromising, and, despite the name, the only truly possible road to socialism.
addendum
The first famous instance of the term “Impossibilist” was its use by Paul Brousse’s Possibilist faction in France around 1882, mocking the Marxist Guesdists as utopians who demanded the “impossible.”The most famous English-language use came later, in 1903–1904, when H. M. Hyndman of the SDF dismissed anti-reformist Marxists as “impossibilists” — a label proudly embraced by the founders of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.