Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible

Joe Biden’s presidency will not be good for white Americans, much less for white advocates. As we make plans, keep in mind this warning from Friedrich Engels, in his introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggle in France, 1848 to 1850.

Rebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades, which decided the issue everywhere up to 1848, was to a considerable extent obsolete.

Let us have no illusions about it: a real victory of an insurrection over the military in street fighting, a victory as between two armies, is one of the rarest exceptions. . . . And the insurgents counted on it just as rarely. For them it was solely a question of making the troops yield to moral influences which, in a fight between the armies of two warring countries, do not come into play at all or do so to a much smaller extent. If they succeed in this, the troops fail to respond, or the commanding officers lose their heads, and the insurrection wins. . . .

Even in the classic time of street fighting, therefore, the barricade produced more of a moral than a material effect. It was a means of shaking the steadfastness of the military. If it held out until this was attained, victory was won; if not, there was defeat. This is the main point, which must be kept in view, likewise, when the chances of possible future street fighting are examined.

In 1844, Marx explained what he was doing:

[E]ach is compelled to confess to himself that he has no clear conception of what the future should be. That, however, is just the advantage of the new trend: that we do not attempt dogmatically to prefigure the future, but want to find the new world only through criticism of the old. . . . But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present — I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.

The idea that came from that “ruthless criticism” quickly spread around the world. As Joshua Muravchik wrote in Heaven on Earth:

[S]ocialism undoubtedly was the most popular political idea ever invented. Arguably, it was the most popular idea of any kind, surpassing even the great religions. Like them, socialism spread both by evangelization and by the sword, but no religion ever spread so far or so fast. Islam conquered an empire that at its height embraced 20 percent of mankind. It took 300 years before Christianity could speak for 10 percent of the world’s people, and after two millennia it can claim the adherence of about one-third of the human race. By comparison, within 150 years after the term “socialism” was coined by the followers of Robert Owen in the late 1820s, roughly 60 percent of the earth’s population found itself living under socialist rule of one kind or another.

Like leftists, we should be realistic and demand the impossible.

The slogan “Be realistic demand the impossible” was popularized by Parisian leftists in 1968.