Amidst the current nationwide turmoil in the rail industry over contract negotiations, the October meeting of the Railroad Workers United (RWU) Steering Committee adopted a resolution endorsing “public ownership” of the railroads. The RWU is an “inter-union, cross-craft solidarity ‘caucus’ of railroad workers, and their supporters, from all crafts, all carriers, and all unions across North America”.

The RWU Steering Committee points out that “rail infrastructure the world over is held publicly” (meaning held by the State). But the conditions of workers in these State-owned rail companies is, generally speaking, no better than those in the private sector. We can see this in countries where both models – private and State ownership – exist side by side. In the United Kingdom, rail workers of Network Rail Ltd – the public body run by the UK Government’s Department of Transport – are striking to improve their wages and conditions alongside rail workers of the private train operating companies (TOCS) and freight operating companies (FOCS).

We can see other examples in various sectors in Italy. Fincantieri, a world leader in the construction of cruise ships is owned by a State financial institution (Cassa Depositi e Prestiti), ensures its supremacy with a very high level of exploitation of workers in its shipyards, based on the chain of subcontracting, whereby the vast majority of the workforce is employed in the construction of each individual vessel. Fincantieri’s direct employees enjoy somewhat better conditions but are a minority of the workers. Fincantieri is nevertheless fully responsible for the highly exploitative conditions of the workers of the contracting firms, many of whom are immigrants.

In SDA, a logistics company owned by the State-owned Italian Postal Service, porters and drivers are subjected to high levels of exploitation, as evidenced by the ongoing struggles over the years organized by grassroots unions, first SI Cobas and most recently by USB (Unione Sindacale di Base). The latter, together with other unions, organized a strike on October 5 against some of the layoffs, taking SDA drivers inside the headquarters of the Italian Postal Service in Rome, from where they were kicked out by police with batons.

The latest example is that of the former Alitalia, now ITA Airways. The privately owned airline was nationalized in October 2021. This transition, however, came with the dismissal of most of the workforce, which was reduced from 11,000 to 2,800 workers.

The RWU resolution states that publicly owned railroads are “to be operated henceforth in the public interest”. Is this the same “public interest” that the carriers and the UK Government are currently invoking (and which governments always invoke) in their efforts to prevent a national rail strike? Why does the Steering Committee refer to “the public” rather than “the railroad workers” or “the working class”?

The concept of “the public interest” is a democratic fantasy in a class-divided society, used to divide and disorientate the working class whenever it is in struggle. When false friends and opportunistic labor leaders urge workers to line up on the side of “the public”, this only traps them within the confines of the body politic of the State. The truth is it makes no difference to workers whether the boot that steps on them is public or private.

In the United States, public ownership is less common, but we only have to look at the US Postal Service to illustrate that it brings no gain. Postal workers are legally prevented from using strike action and further inhibited from doing so as a result of their division into craft unions. As a result, they face increasingly brutal attacks on their living and working conditions. There are still huge staffing shortages and severe problems with recruitment and retention of employees.

Calling on workers and unions to support public ownership perpetuates the illusion that the State as such, or under certain types of (bourgeois) government, is able or willing to liberate the working class. Communists, by contrast, have always asserted that the emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself. Support for public ownership also channels valuable energy away from what should be the real aim of the working class: the formation of the class union, created to fight over issues that directly affect workers like wages and working conditions.

Workers can only succeed by struggling for their own demands. This means directing their efforts to organizing a national rail strike to protect wages and benefits and reduce working hours. To succeed, railroad workers must unite with workers across the entire transport and logistics supply chain and, ultimately, across broad swathes of the working class, fighting as one for common goals. Communists contribute to this massive undertaking by making millions of workers aware of their common class identity and interests and the need to establish the material prerequisites for unitary and combative action.

Declaring in favor of public ownership is nothing but a distraction from this world-historic mission. The only public power currently in existence – the State – is not some neutral mediator above classes, but a machine expressly designed and always used for repressing the proletariat and enforcing capitalist order. In other words, the State is a bourgeois State.

This does not mean that the issue can be resolved by “abolishing the State” (an anarchist fantasy). The State itself exists because the very foundations of the economy rest on class division, the exploitation of one class by another. This was as true in the USSR – where virtually all enterprises were either directly in public ownership or relied on the State for finance – as it is in the USA or China of today. As we write in the introduction to A Revolution Summed Up, “Wherever wage labor, capital, and an economy based on exchange exist, we are in the presence of capitalism, its economic cycles and the falling rate of profit. This is quite simply, and has always been, the authentic Marxist position”.