High Speed

Whenever any of capitalism’s faults are exposed, the baying wolves of its media machine immediately step in to defend it, laying the blame either on natural or unforeseen events or, when all is said and done, on the workers. We determinists, on the other hand, blame the relations of production. Our view is confirmed by the derailment of the “Frecciarossa” high-speed train near Lodi in Lombardy, Italy on 6 February 2020, in which two drivers tragically lost their lives.

The press reports on the causes of the derailment are contradictory. Programmed maintenance works were being carried out on a set of the junction points (railroad switches). And having been unable to replace them during the nocturnal hours (the only time when no trains are running, from midnight to 4:30 in the morning), the workers in the maintenance team, all experts in that line of work, confirmed that they had reset them to the normal – i.e. straight – position.

They also reported they had disconnected the power supply to the faulty switch. An error showing up an hour later cannot therefore be attributed to an internal wiring problem within the switch mechanism, as is currently being hypothesized (which would shift the criminal and civil responsibility from the railway network, the Rete Ferroviaria Italiana, to the manufacturer Alstrom).

Neither is it explained why the switch fault was not picked up by the sensors and passed to the control room in Bologna, and why there was no signaling line-side, or signal sent to the drivers’ cab or to the trains automatic brake mechanism.

All this, at the moment, is unknown. But what is for sure is that there were failings both in the way maintenance procedures were carried out and the checks on the safety and signaling equipment.

In more general terms, the cause of the tragedy must be sought in the ongoing conflict within the Italian railway system between maintenance requirements and traffic flow, a conflict in which the management of the latter, which “returns a profit”, prevails over the former. There is constantly mounting pressure to speed up and simplify maintenance and repairs, made out to be of secondary importance, something that needs to be contained so as not to jeopardize traffic flow.

But the underlying cause of this disaster, and of so many others, is the constant pressure to do everything in a hurry, propelled by capital’s insane concern not to lose time: “Time is money”. And in the present phase of the crisis the need for capital to reproduce itself more and more rapidly is becoming particularly accentuated.

What is really responsible for the derailment of the Frecciarossa is admitted openly by Confindustria (the Italian employers’ federation) in its newspaper Sole 24 Ore (By taking the cuts too far they risk damaging themselves rather than saving money!)

“It seems that nobody checked the position of the switch, or if somebody did, they didn’t look very hard. If that can be demonstrated, it can be explained by lack of motivation: to cover another 500 meters in the cold, at night, at the end of a shift could be perceived as an onerous task.

“But it may have happened due to pressures arising within a system which can tolerate no setbacks or mishaps. Over the last two years the high-speed lines have reached saturation point, causing delays that they now want to avoid as much as possible so as not to compromise the image of a profitable service.

“Those additional 500 meters, and the check on the switch, could have been considered by the five technicians and their superiors as a loss of time which might have risked delaying the first train of the day, causing a chain reaction affecting all the later ones”.

The history of the construction and running of the railways has its cycles, its heroic deeds. It was a revolution which went on to shake up the economic geography of every country, one after the other, in the old world, new world, and in all the regions peripheral to them. For capitalism it was an outlet for enormous investments and a corresponding source of profits, financial speculation, and revenue from the land the railways crossed.

Following the Second World War, coinciding with the imposition of “mass motorization” and the construction of the motorways, the profitability of the rail business began its slow decline, resulting in increasing debts and the state stepping in to bail it out. As the incipient crisis loomed and the state became less and less able to put up the cash; even though it was in the interests of the national capitalist system as a whole, costs would increasingly be passed on to passengers, and a series of massive fare increases would be imposed. This, in turn, made rail travel less competitive than travelling by air in many cases. The only hope for attracting investment lay in the high-speed trains. And thus in many of the countries of both old and new capitalism massive construction projects would soon get underway to build new national networks adapted to the new high speed passenger trains.

This new infrastructure actually often ends up overcoming major delays in capitalism’s transportation network due to it being set alongside tortuous stretches of line which were designed a long time ago, like the Florence-Rome line, or when it significantly increases the capacity of lines which had become totally saturated.

But, and this is another cause of the crisis, the latter situation is produced by the anarchic, chaotic, and unplanned, effect of the competition between the various carriers: trains, planes, cars and coaches, all of which want to grab a share of the market, whereas, according to basic common sense, all of the means of transport, in a communist society, could be harmonized and inter-connected according to the benefits which each of them, due to their particular characteristics, can offer.

Thus the “customers,” previously known as “passengers,” have imposed on them not only the utility of the new line, but high speed as well. Everything must be done “at pace;” trains running at a “normal” speed, of around 160 kilometres per hour, don’t exist anymore. It is just one more false need created by capitalism.

Until a few decades ago, the capitals of the European mainland, and the major cities, were linked by night trains with sleeper cars: the ‘signori’ dined in the restaurant car and after a good nights’ sleep returned there for breakfast, arriving in good time at their destination. Proletarians would travel, and sleep less comfortably, on the same train.

Nowadays, all of us pay a ‘signori’ price tag for our ticket, and both ‘signori’ and proletarians can travel from Rome to Milan in three hours, jammed into their plane seats. So, more free time then? To do what? To work more of course; and when all’s said and done, to get more tired out, more worn out. And who’s the winner there?

It is clear by now that the railway system, along with the rest of capitalism, can only resist the tendency of the rate of profit to fall by resorting to the crazy, short-sighted expedient of speeding everything up. Not only is maintenance entrusted to reduced personnel who are deprived of adequate breaks during the day and on the weekend, but it is done in the middle of the night and under severe time pressure: no longer is it possible, as used to be the case, to move trains temporarily onto sidings, because this would result in a delay, and timetables do not take maintenance into account.

There is only one way for the working classes to oppose these massacres on the job: by returning to the class struggle to defend their health and physical integrity, and not only demanding a wage that covers their needs, but by opposing the punishing pace of work and the conflation of roles and tasks.

Tomorrow, when communism has been achieved, we will proceed at reasonable pace, and get our lives back, and get the time back in which to live it.