OK I take your point. I assumed that your letter was addressed to the list as a whole and that someone else would answer it, which they did.
I wanted to contribute in a totally different register on this question. I wanted to make the loudest call I could in protest at the implication in the title of Hank Sims' original post about the timidity with which we approach this subject.
Hank appears himself to think that the question should be taken further but it is a fact that marxists and leftists are not taking it up.
We now learn that Jessie Helms has coordinated the hegemonic interests of US imperialism to stifle even technical discussion of any move towards global governance which might tax capital. What are we waiting for?
(On other questions I appreciate your individual responses. I agree with the clarity of your observations for example about the working class and the reform-revolution contradiction. But these lists are more than just the development of a policy gradually between a relatively small number of individuals. That would be the logic of a small tightly disciplined would-be revolutionary group. But our boundaries are diffuse. This is about networking. There may be many connections in and out of LBO talk, the more the better.
Hence the register I adopted on this occasion. But I do not want to divert this thread title into a discussion of networks and democratic centralist organisations.)
Can I ask if anyone knows of any progressive organisation challenging Helms on the Tobin and other global taxes.
I have just been having a discussion with a friend of mine involved in share-holder action against imperialist companies, about Zeneca (the company created by ICI's demerger and the 4th largest chemical company in the world) that he has been doing through the local group of the British ECCR.
The ECCR is the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility, and it is based on church people taking on capitalism. It is based in Britain and it has a more powerful equivalent in the US with a similar name, which I have forgotten. Does anyone know it?
Now he was arguing that at the last AGM they had tried to embarrass Zeneca for doing too little to meet the health needs of people in Africa, and the reasonable reply from the board was that it costs very large amounts of capital to develop and test drugs, then pilot them and the African market is not rich enough for them to do more than so much.
My friend has therefore drafted a paper proposing that they attend the next AGM criticising the company for its subservience to short term financial funding (the short-termism critique of Thatcherite neo-liberalism) and say that the replies on Africa illustrate this.
Unfortunately that IMHO would be a reformist response although it is indeed partially relevant. The fundamental contradiction is between the private ownership of the means of production and the limited purchasing power of the masses, and the appalling needs of people in Africa in an imperialist dominated world merely illustrates the sharp end of this.
But if a global tax started to raise a development fund of even a few billion into which for ethical reasons a company like Zeneca or Shell would hypocritically be only too delighted to offer a cooperative partnership for specific purposes, then such campaigns could move beyond the horizon of merely limited badgering of boards of companies once a year at AGMS.
So does anyone know whether the US equivalent of the ECCR (I think I recall it was ICCR) or any other progressive, well meaning, religious or humanitarian organisation is doing anything on Tobin or other global taxation, even though proper marxists think that Jessie Helms should be left with a clear run? Or appear to do so by their inactivity.
Chris Burford
London.