50 Years Ago: Railway Nationalisation

The railways will be taken over. In the place of many railway systems and many competing companies with many staffs of workers, there will be the State railway run, and one efficient staff and worked in every way to yield the greatest amount of profit. The system may well be extended in certain other directions, where competition, overlapping and other forms of waste can be eliminated, and workers consequently displaced, pitched neck and crop into the flooded labour market, to beat wages lower.

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Fellow workers, Capitalism and Socialism are as far as the poles asunder. Evolve it ever so long and through ever so many forms and stages, the former can never evolve into the latter. State Capitalism, as other forms of Capitalism, has its root in private property; Socialism must be rooted in common ownership. The change of the property condition from private to common is the one essential for the betterment of the workers.

From the SOCIALIST STANDARD, April 1910

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