> Isn't every capitalist venture predictably short term, etc.?
Steam engines, telegraph and telephone, electric power generation and power lines, railroads, automobiles, assembly lines, broadcasting, now the Internet -- some of these have lasted quite a while. (The first wave of dot.coms yielded lots of busts, but so did most of these other past capitalist investment waves; after the first shakeout, they produced the General Electrics and General Motors.)
> I also know from experience that social and money expenditures are
> required for any yield in left political activity, and often the yield
> is in the form of that vague thing called attitude change, with future
> social-political impact. Who knows how the briefly intense Labor
> Party activity at the end of the 20th Century, to which tens of
> thousands were exposed, with significant expenditure, will affect
> developments in the next period? Expanding this somewhat, surely
> anti-slavery, womens' rights, 8-hour day, civil rights, etc. movements
> started with very shaky and limited expenditures that looked at the
> time as Disneyland ventures. But they had to start somewhere with
> what they had.
The problem (and the difference between capitalist investments and "anti-capitalist investments") is that, given a functioning capitalist system, there will always be a long-term (where "long-term" means "into the indefinite future") return from basic investments on new production technologies, etc., given the mechanism of capital accumulation. But anti-capitalist social movements are always trying to swim against the stream of the existing system, and therefore are constantly chipped away at and worn down by the sheer strength of the system.
To take your examples: anti-slavery was in the interest of capital (in the U.S., anyway), so it was locked into the constitution. Women's rights? The vote was also constitutionalized, but we're still battling for true equality between the sexes. Eight-hour-day? Whenever relative surplus value begins to get shaky, capital goes back to chipping away at absolute S.V. -- look at the current effort in Congress to monkey with overtime. Civil rights? Is that struggle over? The extreme right wing, currently basically in control of all three branches of the Federal government, is busy chipping away on that front too -- and if Bush is re-elected, they will have another four years at it. (If Kerry is elected, which I don't expect at this point, the rate of the chipping away will be slightly moderated.)
Wojtek has his finger on the basic point with his reference to the prisoners' dilemma: achieving a feeling of solidarity is the only way to combat this steady erosion and rotting away of anti-capitalist movements, and it's damned hard to do, because the system constantly rewards selling out. Marx unfortunately didn't understand the prisoners' dilemma game, and thought solidarity would grow monotonically, while capitalist accumulation would run into increasing difficulties and eventually grind to a halt. The reality seems to be the opposite.
I frankly don't know what to do about this problem; I hope some one else does.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. -- Attr. to Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile