Impossible! – Ricardo Flores Magón (1911)

From ‘Regeneración’, English Section, April 29, 1911, edited by William C. Owen

Impossible! This is the cry of the impotents, the howl of the reactionaries, the ejaculation of the bourgeois face to face with the picture of the Society of the Future. Impossible! Impossible! Impossible!

Tell them that no one has a right to take to himself a portion of the wealth the toiler produces; tell them that the earth is the natural possession of all humanity; tell them that the police, the soldiers, the office-holders are but leeches who live without producing anything useful or contributing to life’s pleasure; tell the that thousands and thousands of human beings at present shut up in prisons are merely the victims of a bad social system; tell them all this and they call you blasphemer, evil-doer, criminal, every other name to which they can lay their tongues.

Yet, beyond all question, we are telling the truth, and, being convinced of that, we are directing all our blows at the heart of the old social system. We are not wasting our time attacking the superficial, we are going to the bottom of the question.

That which would seem to be really impossible is the fact that the workers have lived so long without understanding that they are slaves. That which would seem to be really impossible is that the workers have not acted on the proposal that they should throw off the yoke.

But the workers are not to blame, or, at least, not wholly to blame. The real culprits are the politicians, who have lulled the proletariat to sleep with the dream of a smiling future won by the simple expedient of casting a vote. Time has demonstrated that if there is one thing truly “impossible” it is the achievement of economic liberty by the ballot.

Run over the list of nations in which the people have the right to vote and investigate the conditions under which their inhabitants live. At once it will be seen that the vote has had no influence in bettering conditions.

On the contrary, year by year misery grows everywhere more acute, year by year thousands and thousands of workers are without employment, year by year the garrison populations increase at a rate truly frightful, year by year a larger percentage of women takes to prostitution, year by year the number of suicides grows, year by year the struggle for existence becomes more hard and full of tragedy, and humanity finds itself more and more unhappy, in spite of the electoral vote, in spite of representative governments, in spite of the progress claimed by what calls itself democracy.

The Mexican Liberal Party is fully convinced of the fallacy of makeshifts or political reforms. Inasmuch as our party is not composed of politicians or place-hunters but of proletarians whose sole ambition is to redeem themselves from wage slavery, it uses the opportunity now presenting itself and goes straight to its goal — the economic emancipation of the working class, accomplished by the expropriation of the soil and the machinery.

Were this not the final aim of the Mexican Liberal Party it would be a party of clowns and impostors.

Forward!

RICARDO FLORES MAGON