Recent activity

Sorry for radio silence, been blogging over at Vaux Populi. Herein my list of recent posts:

Change you can't believe in
Greenwash
Surveying the field
Candidate admits error
Putting the case
Caring
Presenting our candidates

So, see, I have been blogging, and like a fiend!

Some people are right on t'internet

Pinched from Stroppybird, who pinched it from Darren who pinched it from Marx and Coca-Cola blog.

Housekeeping

Well, running a blog is a time consuming business. Currently, our LMS is fubarred, so I've got time to shake things out a little. Firstly, let me say, I think at most this will only ever be a weekly blog - perhaps there is a space in the blogger ecosphere for weeklies - as Billmon might sugest as well as Norm.

Speaking of Norm, he replied. I've already said I won't come back on him - my dead of e-dog-fighting are over, I have learnt to resist. His reply is suggestive, though, and I may come back to some of the themes he raises. I'll also keep an eye out for his second installment. As I said to him, I found his reply surprising, I didn't expect his emphasis to vary so wildly from what I felt was a killer point. You decide, but for me, it illustrates the simple joy and complexity of human communication, the radical uncertainty of meaning that makes discourse such a useful use of time, as to make me want to keep up by blog, in whatever shoddy way I can manage.

Next, I will post that much promised discussion on the similarities between the Iraq war and the American civil war. I'm sure you've all been drooling with anticipation.

I'll let you know when I've worked it out, when I might well do my regular blogging, possibly weekends, as Norm suggests, its the quiet time.

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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