Re: Castro: Tobin Tax Could Finance Reparations

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Very pleasing for those of us who over the years have supported radical
reform of global governance, and been criticised or marginalised from the
left on the grounds that this is necessarily reformist.


At 03/09/01 20:36 -0500, you quoted Castro

> Needless to mention the data on the social and economic situation of
> Africa where entire countries and even whole regions of Sub-Saharan Africa
> are in risk of extinction the result of an extremely complex combination
> of economic backwardness, excruciating poverty and grave diseases, both
> old and new, that have become a true scourge. And the situation is no less
> dramatic in numerous Asian countries. On top of all this, there are the
> huge and unpayable debts, the disparate terms of trade, the ruinous prices
> of basic commodities, the demographic explosion, the neoliberal
> globalization and the climate changes that produce long droughts
> alternating with increasingly intensive rains and floods. It can be
> mathematically proven that such a predicament is unsustainable.

.....

> May the tax suggested by Nobel Prize Laureate James Tobin be imposed in a
> reasonable and effective way on the current speculative operations
> accounting for trillions of US dollars every 24 hours, then the United
> Nations, which cannot go on depending on meager, inadequate, and belated
> donations and charities, will have one trillion US dollars annually to
> save and develop the world. Given the seriousness and urgency of the
> existing problems, which have become a real hazard for the very survival
> of our specie on the planet, that is what would actually be needed before
> it is too late.


 Valuable too, to hear of how frankly social democratic governments are
now taking this up, and to read informed left wing critiques of the Tobin
tax, which of course is quite insufficient on its own. Indeed it does not
really threaten global capitalism at all. But it is also important to see
it is a step on the road to more accountable global governance of economic
affairs.

We need therefore to understand the coded way that the bourgeois
politicians skirmish over such questions.

Koch-Weser, speaking to Financial Times Deutschland, said the idea of a
so-called 'Tobin tax' on foreign exchange transactions 'has charm but will
never fly'.

This is a typical dismissive counterblow from the worldy wise circles of
international finance: a suggestion that any advocate of such a proposal
lacks credibility as a serious commentator on, let alone a custodian of,
the sacred bones of world capital. His only mistake is to appear
sufficiently on the defensive  to have to make such a comment on public
record, rather than over an expensive small dinner party.

It is interesting that Castro and Jospin will not have made the statements
they did without serious economic analysis behind them. It is interesting
that the German nominee, Koch-Weser, has now had his credibility swiftly
undermined by an accommodation that Schroeder has clearly made with Jospin
about how to discuss these matters.

The leading bourgeois politicians of the European Union have much creative
experience about how to discuss things over which they initially differ.
This is almost routine for them. The technique is to manage the agendas and
the themes.

What is clear now is that the Tobin tax or something like it not only has
to be on the agenda of the G7-sponsored 'Financial Stability Forum', a
group of regulators headed by Bank for International Settlements chief
Andrew Crockett. It also, since Castro's speech, has to be on the agenda of
the more progressive capitalist states who wish to find a source of funds
to do something about reparations, and the overall state of the global
human and ecological economy.

For campaigning terms it will probably be important for left wing radical
global reformers to battle under the name of the Tobin tax. But the final
name does not matter. What matters is the process of pushing the
capitalists and their advocates repeatedly onto the defensive on issues of
global governance, and the Tobin tax touches on several areas.

I now await denunciation as a follower of Bernstein that the process is
everything and the end nothing,  but I would affirm I am in overwhelming
sympathy with the other points made in Castro's speech too. The only gap I
can see in it is that he does not advance the argument that the global
economy has a finite total amount of exchange value in it and that is the
materialist reason, along side the moral reasons, why it must be treated as
a total unit.
:

"The sum of the values in circulation can clearly not be augmented by any
change in their distribution"

--- Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Chapter V, "Contradictions in the General
Formula of Capital", p 163, International Publishers, NY.

*Nevertheless* the achievement of a global tax somewhat regulating
international monetary transactions and generating central income for
expenditure in a globally accountable way, will be an enormous advance in
the regulation of social production by social foresight, for, and by, the
working people of the world.

Chris Burford

London