What is really involved as the capitalists employ "labor-saving" machines and technologies is that the value of the commodities they produce decreases. Each commodity embodies a smaller percentage of living labor, which is where surplus value (profit) comes from.

The first capitalist to invest in such automation can offset this decline in the rate of profit by grabbing more market share and increasing his mass of profit. Until other capitalists follow suit, he will also be able to charge a price higher than the actual value of the commodity and still undersell his competitors.

But as automation is generalized throughout a branch of industry, the price will be dragged downward towards the new (lower) value of the commodity.

The lower rate of profit will also be generalized throughout the branch of industry. The process begins anew.

Unless the market expands fast enough to absorb the expanding capacity to produce, a crisis of overproduction or overcapacity will ensue.

Perhaps the Militant could run an article explaining in more than a paragraph or two the causes of these crises.

David Rosenfeld
Chicago, Illinois  
 
Australian government and Jewish refugees in '30s
Thanks for running "U.S. closed doors on Jews during Nazi terror," the excerpt from Peter Seidman's Socialists and the Fight against Anti-Semitism: An Answer to the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, in the November 6, 2000, issue.

There are striking parallels to 1930s Australia, when governments, conservative and Labor, refused to open the doors to any meaningful degree to Jewish refugees; and Jewish leaders, both Zionist and non-Zionist, actively blocked efforts to save refugees from fascist repression.

On the other hand, despite some reservations and a decades-long history of support for immigration restrictions to keep Australia "racially homogeneous," significant political backing was won within the labor movement and in other arenas for providing a haven as ordinary people reacted to the news of the fascist terror.

T.W. White, an Australian government minister who attended the July 1938 Evian, France, international conference on refugees, told the meeting, "As we have no real racial problem we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration."

In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, the Australian High Commission in London was receiving 600 visa applications a week from refugees, most of them Jewish. But Canberra flatly rejected a call by its high commissioner to London, Stanley Bruce, to double its three-year quota for refugees to 30,000.

Xenophobia and anti-Semitism were promoted by politicians and by sections of the big-business media. For example, the Dec. 30, 1939, issue of the Melbourne mass-circulation newspaper Truth condemned "refujews" as a "race that supports no one else but its own with the definite objective of eliminating the Australian shopkeeper."

Many Australian Jewish leaders, both Zionist and non-Zionist, publicly condemned the campaigns for mass immigration. In mid-1939, Isaac Boas, then president of the Victorian Jewish Advisory Board, Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian-born governor-general, and other Jewish leaders refused to attend a conference urging the government to ease its restrictive refugee policy. Australian Jewish Welfare Society president Sir Samuel Cohen was outspoken in efforts to stop ships laden with refugees leaving Germany for Australia.

The parallels to U.S. history are not accidental. They reconfirm that politics has a class, not a geographic or national, basis. Whenever the "democratic" and "humane" pretensions of Australia's imperialist government and rulers are trumpeted, this history needs to be told.

Doug Cooper
Sydney, Australia

The letters column is an open forum for all viewpoints on subjects of interest to working people.

Please keep your letters brief. Where necessary they will be abridged. Please indicate if you prefer that your initials be used rather than your full name.  
 
 
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