A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #6-26 - Spain: Train Derailment. A Capitalist Tragedy (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

It's difficult to write or speak honestly about what happened when death 
is so close to home and there hasn't been enough time to calm tempers 
and clarify the facts. After several weeks, the media hype, generated to 
capitalize on the accident on the one hand and morbidly increase its 
audience on the other, is beginning to subside. The theory that a crack 
in the welded rail caused the derailment of the Iryo train (a company 
majority-owned by Trenitalia) seems to have been accepted as true. The 
consequence of this derailment, which occurred on Sunday, January 18, in 
Adamuz, in the province of Córdoba, was the occupation of the adjacent 
track by several of its rear carriages, which collided with a Renfe 
train traveling in the opposite direction. This accident caused 46 
deaths and over a hundred injuries. Two days later, a train driver died 
on a local line in the province of Barcelona after hitting a wall that 
had fallen onto the tracks due to heavy rain, leaving him without time 
to react. What's happening, and how did we get to this point?
In Spain, the railways have had a history that perfectly exemplifies the 
role of the state in the capitalist system. At the beginning of the 20th 
century, several private companies built a series of railway lines 
across the country. MZA (Madrid-Zaragoza-Alicante) or Ferrocarriles del 
Norte, for example, viewed the railways as just another profitable 
venture. But with the destruction of infrastructure and rolling stock 
caused by Franco's fascist coup and the ensuing carnage, in 1941 the 
state was forced to take charge of rebuilding the railways, and thus the 
public company RENFE (National Spanish Railways) was born. By bringing 
together all the activities that contributed to the company's operation, 
from train drivers to foresters who cut down trees to make sleepers, 
Renfe came to employ approximately 120,000 people.

With the country's adaptation to international neoliberal standards and 
Spain's accession to the European Union, the entry of private capital 
into the rail transport sector became apparent. All services that could 
easily be outsourced to other companies, such as cleaning, security, and 
train maintenance and repair shops, were gradually privatized. The 
workers laid off from Enatcar after its privatization (a bus company 
owned by Renfe that guaranteed road trips in the event of train 
breakdowns) fought a significant struggle until they managed to be 
reinstated in the public company.
In the midst of this process, the Madrid-Seville high-speed line was 
opened in Spain in 1992, operating for the first time at speeds between 
250 and 300 km/h, the section where this latest tragedy occurred. In the 
years that followed, every effort was made to increase the construction 
of high-speed lines, absorbing the majority of the public budget 
allocated to railways, to the detriment of slower conventional lines 
that nevertheless served many villages and small towns. Entrepreneurs 
saw it as advantageous for their businesses to quickly connect the major 
capitals by train, to the point of competing with air travel, 
unconcerned about leaving vast swathes of the country's interior 
depopulated, thus abandoning the countryside and the infrastructure that 
enabled communication, including the train itself. New high-speed lines 
were subsequently designed and built towards Barcelona, Galicia, and the 
Basque Country. Between 2004 and 2005, a key event occurred that shaped 
the current structure of the railway sector. Renfe was dissolved, and 
two new companies were created, along with all its employees: Renfe 
Operadora and Adif (Administrador de Infraestructuras). The former was 
established as an additional "railway operator," although at the time it 
was the only existing one. Adif would be the public company responsible 
for the infrastructure on which the "operators" would operate. Shortly 
thereafter, trains operated by private companies began to operate, 
albeit only in the freight sector. Passenger trains entered the market 
15 years later with Ouigo, owned by the French public railway company 
(SNCF), and Iryo, a brand of Intermodalidad de Levante S.A., a company 
with an Italian majority but also owned by pension funds from three 
countries and a private Spanish company (Globalvia).
Throughout this transformation from a single public service company to a 
corporate entity operating a few public trains, accidents due to safety 
issues have occurred, but without serious injuries. But when there have 
been victims, they have been among maintenance workers, infrastructure 
construction workers, or train drivers. These accidents have received 
little coverage in the national media and none in the international 
press. From memory, in recent years, a train driver had his leg 
amputated near Barcelona after hitting a tree, a female train driver 
died instantly after a head-on collision with another train, and another 
worker died after being electrocuted during the construction of a 
rolling stock maintenance facility in Madrid. These are just "minor" 
examples, as there have been other accidents, and one in particular that 
chilled our blood. In 2013, 80 people died and nearly 150 were injured 
on a train to Santiago de Compostela (Galicia) due to human error on a 
section of the route where Adif had decided to remove an available 
safety system that would have prevented the accident. The conviction of 
the train driver and the acquittal of Adif's safety manager who gave the 
order have just been upheld.

While it is true that, in parallel with the changes, the most serious 
accidents were studied and subsequently developed and implemented safety 
systems that infinitely reduce the likelihood of re-experiencing past 
tragic situations, it is equally true that the push towards a frenetic 
lifestyle far from our emotional core (work, hometown, family, friends), 
combined with the uncontrolled impulse of tourism, has led to a dramatic 
increase in rail use in less than five years. Business logic has 
prevailed, increasing the frequency of trains until the rolling stock 
has virtually run out. Madrid's Chamartín station clarifies any doubts 
on this matter: in 2000, 20 million passengers passed through, in 2020 
that number rose to 28 million, in 2023 it reached 36 million, and in 
2024 it increased to 44.4 million. The railway reality is completely 
different, and so accidents are to be expected.
But what are workers' organizations doing? In the former Renfe and also 
in the current Renfe Operadora and Adif, there are numerous unions of 
all kinds with a certain tradition of struggle. This has certainly made 
working conditions significantly better than normal, but when they have 
had to bow to state planning and company management, they have done so 
to shameful extents. Despite the increasing claims these days that there 
is a problem with subcontracting services and that tasks performed by 
private companies should be returned to workers employed directly by 
public companies, the majority unions UGT and CCOO, as well as the 
corporatist train drivers' union (SEMAF), have been allowing and 
justifying this process for years without doing anything. Although 
everyone knows that improving workers' conditions (especially rest 
periods) improves their safety and reduces the risk of errors, no action 
has ever been taken in this direction, and companies have been allowed 
to increase their profit margins at the expense of greater exploitation 
of their staff. Ultimately, a faulty weld, possibly performed under 
pressure, caused the deaths of 46 people-including the train driver-on 
one of the trains involved in the Adamuz tragedy.
Time is money, goes a saying that seems to have been specifically 
conceived for capitalism. And we all know that reducing workers' 
training time or the tasks they perform, reducing travel times by 
increasing speed, or reducing the time between two trains bound for the 
same destination, inevitably leads to a decrease in safety, increasing 
the likelihood of error or the occurrence of even greater tragedies, as 
happened this time in Adamuz. But for SEMAF, the material conditions of 
other workers who are not train drivers have never been a concern, let 
alone any other issue that impacts our work, such as uncontrolled 
tourism or real estate speculation. The betrayal of some and the 
structural shortsightedness of others, immersed in an absolutely 
hierarchical system, are also part of the problem.
Given all of the above, if we want these tragedies to never happen 
again, it's essential to prioritize human life and reduce the risks that 
could threaten it. It's not about curbing all technological development, 
but rather analyzing the product of the lifestyle we're forced to lead, 
its ecological cost, and fighting to make this world and this life more 
enjoyable, which inevitably means fighting capitalist logic and the 
state that manages it.

Julio Reyero

https://umanitanova.org/spagna-deragliamento-ferroviario-una-tragedia-capitalista/
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