Marxists for High-Speed Rail

American high-speed rail advocates must be thrilled that Marxist-communists, as represented by The International magazine, have endorsed high-speed trains in the United States, which they describe as “trains against capitalism.” To build high-speed rail, the article says, we must “return to the path blazed by the Soviet Union, and make use of its tools: central planning and public spending.” Because these tools worked so well there!

This steam locomotive was built in the Soviet Union in 1956, a decade after most U.S. railroads stopped buying steam locomotives. American locomotive manufacturers built better and more powerful locomotives than this in the 1930s. Soviet locomotives tended to be smaller and less powerful than American ones because most Soviet rail infrastructure was lightly built and couldn’t take the weight of more powerful locomotives. Photo by Andrey Korchagin.

The article praises the Soviet Union for building “one of the greatest systems of railways the world has ever seen.” This reminds me of a statement by University of Washington Russian Studies professor Daniel Chirot,” who once said that, by 1980, the Soviet Union had built the “finest nineteenth-century industrial economy the world has ever seen” (I’m quoting from memory but you get the idea).

The International also praises Chinese communists for building nearly 25,000 miles of high-speed rail. The magazine claims that this is “in sharp contrast to the United States’ concrete nightmare.” Apparently, the author of the article didn’t get the memo that China has built more than 100,000 miles of expressways, 50 percent more than the United States. These highways are paying for themselves out of tolls, while most of the high-speed trains are losing money.

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“Public infrastructure costs money rather than loses money, and that the cost is spent to benefit the people, not the owners of private capital,” the article concludes. Among the people who benefitted in China are the former Minister of Railways, who was convicted for taking millions of dollars in bribes and whose death sentence was commuted to 16 years in prison, where he continues making railway deals. Also among those people are the two million former employees of the Ministry of Railways, which was abolished because it was plagued by corruption. More evidence that central planning works so well! Query for China: Does calling it a “state-owned enterprise” result in less corruption than calling it a “ministry”?

According to the International, American railroads are backwards compared with China’s. Never mind that American railroads earn profits instead of losses (which I suppose to a Marxist would be bad). Never mind that American railroads move close to 40 percent of the nation’s ton-miles of freight, while in China it is less than 20 percent and highways carry twice as much as the railroads. Since carrying freight by rail saves far more energy than carrying passengers by rail, the U.S. result is better for the environment.

A hidden agenda behind a focus on passenger rail in a totalitarian nation is that it is easier to control people when the government controls the means of travel. In the United States, people can go anywhere on 4 million miles of roads anytime they want. By focusing on trains instead of roads, China and the Soviet Union were better able to monitor if not control where people went. I wonder if Marxists such as the author of the International article think that is a good thing. Whether he does or not, I can’t imagine that taking investment advice from people who praise the collapsed Soviet economy is a good idea.