Impossibilism

Impossibilism holds that reforms to capitalism are irrelevant or outright counter-productive to the goal of achieving socialism and should not be a major focus of socialist politics.

At the Paris Congress of the Second International in 1900, those who favored entry into government with all the implied compromises called themselves "Possibilists" while those who opposed them (those around Jules Guesde) characterized them as political "Opportunists".

[2] While not usually described as an impossibilist, Rosa Luxemburg opposed both reformism and vanguardism, taking the more classical Marxist perspective that revolution would be a spontaneous reaction to underlying material changes in the productive forces of society.

[5][6] Karl Marx famously critiqued reformism and immediatist/possibilist goals advocated by modern social democrats in his Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850).

Specifically, he argued that measures designed to increase wages, improve working conditions and provide welfare payments would be used to dissuade the working class away from socialism and the revolutionary consciousness he believed was necessary to achieve a socialist economy and would thus be a threat to genuine structural changes to society by making the conditions of workers in capitalism more tolerable through reform and welfare schemes.