In the next two weeks, the National Union of Railwaymen are meeting in conference at Southport. High on the agenda Defend the nationalized industries

by our industrial correspondent Labour's Minister of Transport, Fraser, gave the go-ahead to the British Railways Board to introduce 'liner-trains' -an express freight system to serve the whole country.

The idea for this service was mooted by the Tories several years ago, and was nurtured by Dr. Beeching, chairman of the Board until he returned recently to his job with Imperial Chemical Industries.

But in the past 18 months, since the scheme has been under discussion, railwaymen throughout the country have made clear their opposition to the terms under which they would have to work the trains. They see their fight, and continue it, on the basis of how it will affect railwaymen, but the scheme has much wider implications.

Almost two years ago, Beeching announced a special freight service to run exclusively between the Ford motor car factories at Halewood, Liverpool, and Dagenham, London. Beeching provided special wagons, painted in the Ford livery of blue and white. Each wagon cost about €5,000 and is 38 feet long (twice the usual length of rail wagons) and carries about 22 tons.

No cost There are now 750 such trains running each week throughout Britain for 50 firms.

A 'Daily Telegraph' correspondent reported at the time of the deal with Ford: "The company, I was assured, has borne none of the cost of this new rolling stock, upon which the true liner-train equipment will be based.' Quite clearly, then, the real purpose of the scheme is to use yet another nationalized industry to work for private enterprise.

Under the proposed scheme, which is expected to come into operation by the end of this year, 55 liner-trains will operate between specially constructed depots or terminals in all the major cities.

It is reported that timetrials are already under waya "fully loaded liner-train is running between Derby and Carlisle at an average speed of 70 to 80 m.p.h., and work has begun on the depots (our reporter saw ground levelled in preparation for a terminal near to the Manchester Picadilly station).

These depots will have large American cranes installed to lift the 20-ton containers onto the liner-train wagons, which 'are permanently coupled to cut out time-wasting shunting.

Seen in line with the developments on the docks and airports, and improvements like the motorways, linertrains are an important step forward towards a future integrated and automated transport system.

But seen also, in line with present rationalisation and subsequent redundancies suffered in all these industries, such a system will become, in the hands of the capitalists and their agents in the Labour government, yet another attack on the living conditions of the working class.

'Pruning'

Even since the advent of hauliers by threatening a stopBeeching as chairman of the page. Board, one railman claimed, Now, railway drivers have most departments had been formed a pool system, which 'pruned' by at least one-third any station can draw on when Beeching had introduced his it is short of lorries. 'method-men' to carry out time British Railways is almost and motion studies and there the largest haulage company in had been a reduction, not in the country, and the majority efficiency, but in labour costs. of the drivers belong to the He gave the example of a National Union of Railway'length gang' of 10 men who men. examine a séction of track each Both Fraser and George day. Three or four men had Brown, the Minister for The special treight service arranged between Beeching and the Ford Motor Company, which became the forerunner of liner-trains. left the gang and had never been replaced, and later the depleted gang had been merged with another.

In negotiations with the National Union of Railwaymen, the Railways Board has attempted to carry this 'pruning' even further by demanding that there is no guard on a liner-train.

The union has remained firm on this question and the Board has now conceded that guards must ride in a brake van at the rear of the linertrains. Even when the prototype train left a London engineering works for Derby, the union insisted on an ordinary goods brake van being operated.

But it is on the major issue of entry of private hauliers into the liner-train terminals— the real attack on the concept of a nationalized industrythat the executive committee of the union has been weakening.

Opposed

In a recent editorial in the union's weekly 'Railway Review' ', Transport Minister, Fraser, was attacked for 'the admission of a Tory concept of Transport co-ordination' but almost in the same breath the writer spoke of 'opportunities for road hauliers to participate' if the service 'became greater than could be dealt with by the railway's own collection and delivery services.

The rank and file are bitterly opposed to any idea of 'open terminals, which could lead eventually to 18,000 redundancies. They are suggesting that only themselves and British Road Services drivers be allowed into the denots.

They are also asking that they be granted commercial driving licences to enable them to drive the long hauls from, nationalization.

for instance, the north of Scotland to the nearest depot which will probably be in Glasgow.

Their determination was shown recently when private hauliers began creeping into an existing goods depot in Manchester, allegedly because there was a shortage of British Railways' lorries. These hauliers were being paid, or demanded, excessive rates.

Union members forced the Board to withdraw these BOOK REVIEW at appearance in English - for the first time of the almost legendary book by Preobrazhensky, "The New Economics, in a readable translation by Brian Pearce, is to be welcomed.

It will dispel some myths which have collected around what he calls the 'law of primitive socialist accumulation', as well as show the quality of the thought of the leading economist of the Left Opposition of the 1920s.

The work begins with an important discussion of the Marxist method in political economy which sets the stage for the main analytical sections. Typically, this chapter is dismissed by the editor, A. Nove, as being 'heavily spiced with jargon', perhaps because he could not understand it.

He seems principally concerned with showing that what he calls 'the Trotsky-Preobrazhensky attitude' was contradictory and utopian because it put forward a programme for rapid industrialisation without forcible collectivisation and expropriation.

Preobrazhensky was, in fact, trying to work out a consistently Marxist approach to the problems of socialist planning, under the specific conditions of backward Russia, as part of a general political programme. Essentially his argument is simple.

Under the New Economic Policy, while the workers' state controlled manufacturing industry and had a monopoly of foreign trade, most agriculture, artisan industry and part of distribution remained in Economic Affairs, have joined in the general attack on the union. When they met a union delegation recently, Brown was, apparently, very adamant about the scheme. He could not see why the union should not bend on the matter.

It is also reported that he said the matter was very delicate and that five to six million pounds had already been spent on the scheme (which Will eventually cost £100 million, all borrowed at high interest rates, no doubt).

Desperate

The talk with the Ministers encouraged Beeching, at a similar meeting a week later, to throw down the gauntlet and say that with, or without union agreement, the Board would go ahead with the scheme.

There have been some guarantees from the Board about redundancies, but the attitudes of the Ministers and Beeching reveal how desperate they are to carry through the scheme for their employer and Tory friends.

The guarantee of 'no redu ncy' will probably mean th man will be offered a j‹ private hands. The task of the state was to funnel resources from the private sector into industrial accumulation.

Two contradictory principles operated in the Soviet economy at this time. The law of value, operating in the private sector, tended to perpetuate and extend capitalist relations in association with the pressures flowing in from the capitalist world market.

The carrying forward of

Preobrazhensky's

New Economics socialist industrialisation was substantially identical with the operation of a different regulatory principle which Preobrazhensky called the law of primitive socialist accumulation.

Just as capitalist accumulation at the expense of wage labour had been preceded by a period of prior accumulation at the expense of petty commodity producers and pre-capitalist forms, so state industry would have to make use of resources drawn from the peasant, commodity-producing and capitalist sectors.

Capitalism came into the world dripping with blood, as Marx had put it. By its very nature the workers' state could not accumulate either at the expense of the health and welfare of the working class or through the forcible expropriation of the peasants or the use of methods of plunder and exploitation characteristic of early capitalism.

What Preobrazhensky adThe vocated had nothing in common with the heavy-handed, brutal and panic-stricken measures actually used by Stalin after 1928.

Of course, opposition to the law of value meant the use of non-economic as well as economic means: the actual choice of means and their combination could _ vary. They included price policy in the nationalized sector and in foreign trade, taxation, control of money and credit.

The object was to transfer part of the social surplus created in the private sector Marxist transitional period. It can be said that this represented a genuine Marxist discovery generalised from the early experiences of the Soviet regime, but with obvious much wider application.

A tribe of official economists, headed by Preobrazhensky's former close friend, Bukharin, then in alliance with Stalin, was set to work to demolish and discredit his work.

Some of his counterpolemic, which has dated rather badly, is included in this volume.

It represented the workedout view of the Left Oppositionists that rejection of Stalin's policy of 'socialism in one country' did not at all prevent a start being made with industrialisation.

There was an alternative to Stalinism and this book demonstrated, in advance, that the methods of Stalin could not lead to socialism. A careful reading of this book makes it very clear how different 'primitive socialist accumulation', as advocated by Preobrazhensky and Trotsky, was from the methods actually used after 1928.

The analogy with capitalist primitive accumulation was limited by the fact that socialism could not be built by methods incompatible with its nature.

'The New Economics' by E. Preobrazhensky. Translated from the Russian by Brian Pearce. With an Introduction by Nove. Oxford University Press. Price 55/-.

Jul ' HE recent military the revisionist subordination to