"[SNIP] In any event on a more positivistic note, the critierian proposed by Carol for considering seriously a reform seem to be unverifiable in any serious way in the absense of a socialist revolution whose prospects at present don't seem very high."
Obviously my initial post lacked a good deal in clarity -- but I also think that some of the readings of it, including this one, have been equally sloppy.
I thought I had been clear that I was not dealing with all reforms in general or with only revolutionary reforms. My point concerned (a) a very specific class of reforms and (b) that under any conditions this particular class of reforms was absurd. Then I claimed that the proposal for the Tobin Tax fell in that category. So let's try it again.
1. The Tobin Tax CANNOT NOW be brought about or even made more likely by any practically conceivable activity of workers or progressives. Under *present* conditions it could only be brought about by decisions made among capitalists. So even discussing whether it is a good thing or not is a distraction from more important things (like, for example, saving social security or mobilizing against the latest murderous adventures of U.S. imperialism or organizing one or two more Mac restaurants).
2. Then I explored (within a fairly narrow compass) the nature of hypothetical questions, the hypothetical question up for example being, "Under what kind of actual empirical conditions would the working class have power to influence international capitalist decisions on the Tobin Tax? And my reply was, essentially, that any imaginable real conditions in which the Working Class could, hypothetically, influence such a decision would include so much (now almost unimaginable) working class power (including a high degree of political unity gained through millions of small and large struggles, mostly over reforms) that,
Under those, *hypothetical*, conditions (AND, REPEAT, ONLY UNDER THOSE CONDITIONS) it would be wrong because only the kind of working class power which would be more than sufficient for revolution would *ALSO* be sufficient to throw its weight around on an issue such as the Tobin Tax.
So, under present conditions, when Chris argues for the Tobin Tax, he is a flea approaching an elephant with intentions of rape.
Under conditions in which his opinion on the Tobin Tax might be of the slightest interest, being interested in it would constitute a more or less deliberate decision to block an impending revolution.
In either case, it is an absurd question for progressives, whether revolutionaries or structural reformists, to be arguing about.
Max, in fact, day dreams of a working class so powerful that socialist revolutin would indeed be a practical possibility or even probability, and what does he want the Working Class to do with all that power? Demand cleaner restrooms I guess, and perhaps hand out timid suggestions that perhaps white workers would, please, stop whooping it up for the legal lynching of blacks and homosexuals.
Max really does think his proposals are practical. He just can't see that there is no way the working class as he conceives it can *ever* achieve the power for his particular goals, and that a working class that *could* achieve such power would have much more useful ways to exercise it. W.H. Auden got such liberals as Max and Chris down exactly in his *For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio*. Herod is speaking:
...Would that make life any better? On the contrary it would make it far, far orse. For it could only mean this; that once having shown them how, God would. . . .I refuse to be taken in. He could not play such a horrible practical joke. Why should he dislike me so? I've worked like a slave. Ask anyone you like. I read all official dispatches without skipping. I'ave taken elocution lessons. I've hardly ever taken bribes. How dare He allow me to decide? I've tried to be good. I brush my teeth every night. I haven't had sex for a month. I object. I'm a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been born.
W.H. Auden, *The Colled Poetry of...* (New York, 1945), p. 460.
Carrol
P.S. Anyone wishing the whole of Auden's marvellous "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" must read it in this volume, not the later Collected Poems in which it is bowlderized.