Possibilists (France)
가능파 (프랑스)
The reformist faction of the late nineteenth-century French socialist movement led by Paul Brousse, also called Broussists. It took its name from its call to direct everyday political activity towards whatever goals were concretely possible at the time. Winning a majority in the Federation of the Socialist Workers' Party of France founded at the Marseille congress of 1879, it drove the Marxists of Guesde and Lafargue out in 1882, then led the Federation of the Socialist Workers of France (FTSF) until it joined the French Socialist Party in 1902.
In depth
After the defeat of the Paris Commune French socialism, its leaders dead or exiled, split into several currents: the Marxist Guesdists of Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, the Possibilists of Paul Brousse and Jean Allemane, the Blanquists, anarchists close to Bakunin, and co-operators who followed Proudhon and Louis Blanc. At the third socialist workers' congress in Marseille at the end of October 1879 workers' associations founded the Federation of the Socialist Workers' Party of France, and the Le Havre congress of 1880 adopted a collectivist programme written by Marx, Guesde and Lafargue, whereupon the co-operators, who opposed it, left. The Possibilists were collectivists like the Guesdists but took a more gradual view of the road to power and the transformation of society.
When the Federation won only about 60,000 votes in the elections of 1881, the rift deepened between the Guesdist leadership and the majority who wanted concrete socialist reforms. Brousse wrote that realistic politics required a broad class party acting by all means, weapons and votes, grouping all workers around their class interests and their little daily instincts and leading them as quickly as possible to the ideal of anarchist communism. When the Possibilists won the majority in 1882, Guesde and Lafargue left to found the French Workers' Party; the remaining federation was renamed the Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party and then commonly called the Federation of the Socialist Workers of France (FTSF).
In the 1880s the Possibilists won seats on a number of municipal councils. Jean Allemane and others who criticised the focus on elections broke away in 1890 to found the Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party, which advocated the revolutionary general strike. When the Second International was founded in 1889 the Possibilists held a rival congress in Paris on the same day, attracting 567 delegates from 14 countries, but they soon lost ground to the Second International. In 1902 the FTSF merged with the Allemanists and Jaurès's followers into the French Socialist Party, which in 1905 joined the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO).
In his 1891 introduction to The Civil War in France Engels wrote that the Proudhon school had vanished from French working-class circles, where now Marx's theory ruled unchallenged among the Possibilists no less than among the "Marxists".