Jon Worth
The crux is essentially this
State owned vs. private is NOT the central question in how you organise railways
You need to ask WHAT you want to run, FOR WHOM, and AT WHAT PRICE - and answer that *politically*
WHO IS A RAILWAY FOR?
Then you work out how to organise it - with state firms, private ones, open access, competitive tendering, integrated operations etc.
pettter
@jon He says, as if the question of ownership is not political, and has no impact on all those other questions.
pettter
@jon Sure, there's always nuance and material conditions that need to be taken into account, but there are answers to "for whom" and "how" that for-profit corporations and private capital will never give willingly, and if you're going to run control infrastructure, subsidies etc. to keep them in line _anyway_ why not simply keep it all under state control and avoid at least _one_ set of misaligned incentives?
Of course, coming from Sweden I'm probably biased by local exposure.
Jon Worth
@pettter Sure, eventually the question of ownership is political. *But* before you come to that question you have to answer a different question - who is the railway for? When should it run? At what price for those buying tickets? *Then* comes the ownership question.
I flat out reject the argument that state ownership or private ownership necessarily leads to better outcomes.
pettter
@jon I could accept worker-owned non-profit entities as potentially responsible stewards, or even state-owned corporations, but extracting profit into private hands is always going to be at the expense of the public, the workers, or both.
pettter
@jon Looking briefly at Czechia, it looks to have been a recent privatization? Sweden started transitioning to private rail lines much earlier, and I think if you come back to Czechia in 15 years the situation there is going to be similarly dire.
Jon Worth
@pettter Sweden is a sodding mess. It pains me to see how damned complex the rail system has become - it was the hardest of the 27 countries I went to to navigate last year. Dire. *But* there are counter examples - like Czechia - where it's done a lot better. And places - like France - where state ownership doesn't work well either.
pettter
@jon That's going to depend a lot on the local conditions, and I'd say having widespread autonomy and initiative throughout state/regional/municipal rail organisations would absolutely make sense, making it possible for workers on the ground to give rapid and accurate feedback.
For a capitalist to come in and extract profit from public infrastructure, yeah I'm absolutely willing to put a stop to that.
Jon Worth
@pettter Again I disagree. Sorry. Obviously there are some parts of rail operations - notably ownership of the track - that clearly have to be in state hands. But then if a private firm says “hey, there's an opportunity to run a train there that the state operator isn't doing”, are you really going to say "no, sorry, not possible”?
pettter
@jon That's because Trafikverket is ideologically car-and-airplan-centric and there are important parts of the organisation that is actively working against a functioning rail infrastructure (this is somewhat of a conspiracy theory, but not as much as you might think).
Jon Worth
@pettter And also in Sweden even the state controlled part - Trafikverket - cannot get its shit organised, and inform other parts of the system when engineering works are due to happen.
pettter
@jon Merging Banverket with Vägverket was the stupidest idea imaginable under a "marketized" neoliberal NPM system.
pettter
@jon My question would be: What in this system requires capitalist profit extraction to function? Is it just to get buy-in from capital to get rail infrastructure built and operated in the semi-democratic system that is the capitalist state?
Jon Worth
@pettter No. Because Czechia learned for others' experience. There is the IDOS system - all operators have to put their data in there, also in the case of disruptions. If you need a rail replacement bus that's likewise sorted. Every station has a rule as to how long trains have to be held for connections. Oh and liberalisation has been ongoing a decade in Czechia.
Sweden DID IT WRONG. There are ways to do it better. There is no reason to say that because Sweden buggered it up others will too.
pettter
@jon But the thing is that this is question of opportunity cost, right? What are the goals? What makes it better to leak exploited profits to capital rather than just do the investments from within (at least ostensibly) democratic public organisations like municipalities and states?
Jon Worth
@pettter And please note: I agree with you that the situation in Sweden is awful. It’s much worse even than the UK that has at least partially corrected some of the errors it has made. But there are parts of Europe with liberalised or partially liberalised railways where it is better *and those railways are improving*.
The conclusion to draw from Sweden is: don't do it as Sweden did. You cannot, I think, draw the conclusion to not do it at all - because there are solid counter cases.
pettter
@jon Sure, many states have been completely gutted in terms of competence and capacity thanks to long-term strategies of capital extraction and privatization. I would still maintain that this is, in fact, a bad state of affairs that should be fixed, either through nationalizations or the simple expedient of building up state capacity from the ground up, but again, the specific method is going to depend on the particular material conditions that prevail in the place you're talking about.
Jon Worth
@pettter That assumes that such political organisations are capable of that. Which - in railways - I have concluded is not the case. It would require an immensely more enlightened approach to railways than we have seen until now. While *sometimes* (although I admit not always) some innovation that comes from entrepreneurialism does help.
pettter
@jon @douginamug Wait, you can absolutely buy tickets from other operators from at least SJ? And I've been shunted from an SJ fast train over to Öresundståg more times than I can count for the final bit from Malmö to Copenhagen.
Jon Worth
@douginamug @pettter Sure. But at least UK has the system where - in the event of a disruption - you get the right to take any train. That Network Rail coordinates rail replacement bus services. That any operator can sell any ticket for any other one. All of that is a paradise in comparison to Sweden. But yes, Germany works better than this - not least as (other than Flixtrain, and a couple of night trains) DB can sell you everything.
Doug Webb
@pettter @jon loving this debate.
Just want to add that the UK system is definitely worse than DE: very confusing that tickets can't be used for other train companies.
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