Resisting ‘rationalisation’ on the railways
The
‘rationalisation’ that accompanied the capitalist crisis of the 1930s –
described by Harry Pollitt as “the means whereby the capitalist can lower wages,
intensify exploitation … [and] force speeding up in disregard of human
life and safety” – is back with a vengeance at the top of the capitalist
agenda, with the return of open, acute and prolonged economic crisis.
The new ‘rationalisation’
Everywhere,
workers are confronted with the task of resisting the new ‘rationalisation’,
under which assets are stripped and jobs destroyed in the course of the
cut-throat struggle between competing capitalist giants to dominate the market.
This
is nowhere more evident than in the international rail industry. Right now, for
example, over 500 jobs are under threat at the freight company formerly trading
as EWS. Now it has been taken over by the German state-owned Deutsche Bahn (DB)
and has been renamed DB-Schenken. It is being assimilated into an international
freight operation spanning 130 countries and employing over 88,000 workers.
This
network is being constructed by stealth. For example, DB bought up a company
called Transfesa in order to crack open the Spanish rail freight market. And by
its takeover of EWS – which itself owns subsidiaries in Spain and France – DB at a stroke gets a stake in three different national rail industries.
None
of this behaviour is any different from that of the publicly owned SNCF in France (busy making inroads in the German market) or First Group in Britain (likewise dipping into
the German market to swallow up bus companies and publicly owned federal
railways).
All
this wheeling and dealing serves the same imperative: the concentration of
monopoly capital into ever fewer hands and the wanton destruction of freight
capacity rendered ‘surplus’ by the crisis of overproduction that is overtaking
every hole and corner of capitalist commodity production.
Each
would-be victor in this cut-throat battle to dominate the international market
holds out the progressive-seeming promise of an integrated freight operation.
According to DB’s version, this would stretch from Hamburg to Beijing and from Bucharest to Istanbul. In one sense, such moves do contain the germ of progressive
development. After all, this profit-hungry drive to international consolidation
cannot help but prepare the ground for the rail-freight network of the future,
owned by the working class and standing on the healthy foundation of planned
socialism.
However,
the revolutionary expropriation of the present owners alone will secure this
happy outcome. Meanwhile, the only expropriation that is going on is that
executed by big capitalist fish upon small capitalist fish, and by all the
exploiters in common upon the means of subsistence of the working class – ie,
through cuts in jobs, and through cuts in pay or intensification of work or
both for those still employed.
Right
now, the battle is on between the titans of the rail world, the German DB and
the French SNCF. As the problems of narrowing investment opportunities and
declining rates of profit are exacerbated by the escalating recession, the
survival of a dwindling band of monopolists depends upon the complete
annihilation of all lesser rivals. The logic of capitalism in crisis dictates
that DB and SNCF must seek to expropriate all other competitors – including
each other.
Under
such conditions, plans to integrate rail freight across national borders are
calculated with scant regard for the actual transport requirements of society.
Quite the reverse; these plans are designed solely with a view to extracting
the maximum amount of profits from investment. Even on its own home territory,
DB has wiped out a lot of rural services and cut off the rail lifeline to many
German factories. It would be folly to suppose they intend to be any less
anti-social abroad than they have been at home.
The
fact that currently the two biggest players in the battle over the rail freight
market remain under state capitalist ownership ought to warn us against seeing
the fight against privatisation itself as an issue that can be fought in
isolation from the fight to bury imperialism. On paper at least, both SNCF and
DB remain publicly owned companies. Whilst the clear bourgeois preference is
for privatisation in both cases, there is more than one way to skin a cat.
What
remains constant in the equation is the imperative to concentrate capital in
ever fewer hands and destroy surplus capital (in effect, slashing capacity and
jobs). But whether this is effected in the first instance by (a) the conversion
of state capitalist assets into milch-cows for the extraction of private
capitalist profits; or (b) the promotion of ‘national champions’ that can
dominate the international market with the help of backhanders from the state;
or (c) a combination of the two, is a matter of small concern to the furies of
private interest. Whichever route is taken, the destruction of jobs and
productive capacity will certainly be the outcome.
Resisting ‘rationalisation’
As
the embattled workers at EWS are discovering, in concert with fellow workers
all over the world, it is the working class who are expected to pay for the
crisis, by wage cuts, job losses and erosion of pension rights – and,
increasingly, by loss of civil rights and the spread of war.
Faced
with this international onslaught upon the conditions of existence of the
proletariat – somehow ‘excused’ precisely on the plea that it is international,
and therefore not the responsibility of any one capitalist nation – it has
never been more crucial to insist upon the unity of the working class in
fighting back.
And
rail workers have been conspicuous in their efforts to mount an international
show of solidarity, notably in the form of a huge demonstration in Paris last November targeting the EU rail directives that grease the wheels for all these
mergers and acquisitions.
But
this crisis has also cruelly exposed the ideological vulnerability of workers
for so long left stranded behind the class-collaborating politics of social
democracy. An article by Hans-Gerd Öfinger in the January edition of RMT News
explains how DB, still nationalised, tries to scare its workers into accepting
creeping privatisation by warning that otherwise Germany will find itself
overrun by French TGV trains. Meanwhile, on the other side of the border,
French workers are regaled with similar tales of conquest – in the hope of
overcoming the unions’ resistance to privatising SNCF!
It
seems that this climate of chauvinist scare-mongering has not been without
effect. According to Öfinger, “This idea has even been swallowed by union
leaders … Madame Idrac, then SNCF CEO, convened a meeting of French rail union
leaders in summer, 2007, and told them: ‘Sirs, the situation is very serious,
Deutsche Bahn (through EWS) has begun to conquer French territory and there is
only room for two or three big players. Let us stand together to make sure that
alongside DB, SNCF will be the other one.’ Following the meeting, French train
drivers’ union FGAAC leader Bruno Duchemin stated that he now realised the need
for the SNCF to go for an IPO [Initial Public Offering of stocks and shares
to the public to raise capital – ie, the need for creeping privatisation].”
The
chauvinist defeatism of such pronouncements is stark and shameful. But what
answer should workers give to such clear treachery? So long as the abiding
perspective is that the welfare of workers is indissolubly tied to the welfare
of the capitalist for whom they toil, then the logic of ‘my company, right or
wrong’ remains unassailable.
Social
democracy, which advises trade unionists not to aim for the abolition of wage
slavery itself, but to concentrate only upon securing the best terms of sale
for their members’ labour power under the prevailing market conditions, lives
and breathes class collaboration. When the prevailing labour market conditions
are characterised by rocketing unemployment and a large industrial reserve army
of unemployed, then ‘British jobs for British workers’ is the inevitable racist
default position on offer, however prettily it is disguised in ‘politically
correct’ clothing.
Workers
are a thousand times right to resist privatisation, just as they are right to
resist attacks upon their conditions of existence from wherever they originate,
whether Whitehall or Brussels. But in all these struggles, it is more than ever
imperative that it is the crisis of the imperialist system as a whole that is
kept to the fore in workers’ minds.
Only
then will workers learn to resist the siren songs warbled by social democracy,
inviting them to blame anybody and anything for the miseries inflicted upon
them other than the true author of those miseries, capitalism itself.