Ross McCormack notes, most socialist parties prided themselves on teaching the "pure Marxist creed," but "What made the Canadian party highly unusual in the North American movement was its impossibilism" (54).
As McCormack puts it, "the party's practical policy on current issues was not always consistent with its impossibilism" (64).
Other highlights of the book include the discussion and rebuttal of some incompatibilist arguments, including the consequence argument and (Pereboom's version of) the manipulation argument, as well as some arguments for
impossibilism (the thesis that free will and responsibility are impossible), including fatalist arguments.
However, regarding the latter she seems to think that it is the same as free will
impossibilism: "a hard incompatibilist ...
Irvine's thought suggests the limitations of simply dismissing first-wave socialism for its supposed "vulgarity," "
impossibilism," or "reformism," terms which are not so much erroneous as beside the point.
Although he makes a careful distinction between primitive millenarianisms and modern revolutionisms, Hobsbawm nevertheless emphasizes their elective relationship (or affinity): `Even the least millenarian modern revolutionaries have in them a streak of "
impossibilism" which makes them cousins to the Taborites and Anabaptists, a kinship which they have never denied.'(17)
There is too much of the perfectionism and
impossibilism of an earlier left to some of the newer movements that have come along, too much of the utopian faith in moving mountains, too little adherence to the values of pluralism, tolerance and mutual respect.
Or to put the point cruelly,
impossibilism is itself impossible.
The Socialist Party of Canada's official position, termed "
impossibilism," did not support suffrage.
This coincided with the formulation of various theoretical and practical reactions to postmodernity's
impossibilism within critical criminology, one of which was the social-democratic pragmatism of left realism.
Andrew divides said politics into four, you should pardon the expression, camps--conservative, radical, moderate and liberal--each of which lacks a workable "solution to the problem of gay-straight relations." Conservatives (by which he means reactionaries, I think, but he is very polite) and radicals both profess an absolutist politics of "
impossibilism," which alienates them from "the mainstream." Moderates (by which he means conservatives) practice an ostrich-politics of denial, increasingly superseded by the growing visibility of gay men and lesbians.