I'm going to take a few days to digest what I said and the responses to it before giving any extensive response, but Michael's post makes a claim that I wish to reject at once.
It assumes no such a thing. In fact I wholly agree with most of what Michael has to say about the working class, and without agreement on all of that my post in fact would not have made much sense.
My post primarily dealt with what is almost a meta-theoretical issue: What kind of hypothetical questions make sense, and what sort don't. And I believe I did use the word "preconditions" a couple of times.
Precisely BECAUSE the working class does not, in fact, exist AS an even partially coherent political force at this time discussion of *some* reforms, I argue, is ridiculous. That any discussion of those reforms (and this is where Max becomes not just utopian but bizarrely so) MUST assume a political situation which (a) does not even remotely exist now and (b) never will exist until an at least partly unified working class, with a history of increasing unity *in practice*, has come into being.
So if we wish to discuss the Tobin Tax without being silly, we must, precisely, engage *first* in rather more sensible hypothetical questions as to how an at least partly unified class, politically unified, might come into existence.
Lou Proyect grasps the direction of my interest. His post would make a fine starting point for a debate which would have to ultimately (being rewritten with each change of conditions) mount to hundreds of thousands of pages.
If we want to be serious, we need to respond to posts *as mere e-mail posts* -- not as pretending to be a 6000 page historical analysis.
Carrol