Chapter 4 - The Impossibilists

Summary

Looking back from the beginning of the twentieth century, H. M. Hyndman remembered his old rival William Morris as a sort of “impossibilist”: “As to the impossibilists,” he wrote in 1903, “they are many of them at bottom anarchists, who honestly believe that all political action is harmful. They are justified in holding that opinion, if they so believe; but they are certainly out of place in a political Socialist policy.”¹ In a lighter style, G. B. Shaw wrote in 1895 to his friend, Janet Achurch – then performing in New York – that her husband, Charles Charrington, “seemed in excellent spirits, the day being pleasant. He is going to lecture – bless his heart, as you would say – at the Hackney Radical Club and at the Hammersmith Socialist Society; and this I think a good thing on the whole, as he ought to make an above-the-average public speaker, although among the Fabians he will probably be an Impossibilist of the Impossibilists.”² And, in a 1910 account of an election in Yorkshire, an American journalist reflected on the logistical pressure that “socialist impossibilism” – combined with “three cornered fights” between “Liberals, Labors, and Tories” – could put on the will of working people: “In a scrutiny of the vote, the only evidence of lack of co-operation was, on one side, 20 ballots marked ‘socialism,’ and thereby ‘spoiled,’ indicating socialist impossibilism, and a falling of the Labor candidate behind the Liberal by about 400 votes, indicating Liberal whiggism.”³ Impossibilism, in that case, not only named a critical attitude toward the very idea of elections but, in an unsettled period of tightening competition between Liberal and Labour candidates, could also emerge as a decisive factor within elections. Although the impossibilist was often imagined as impractical, utopian, or naïve, even a small handful of dreamy or distracted spoilers could make a large difference in a period of increasingly close and hard-fought elections.