I WAS amazed to read your First Word' article on the road haulage industry (11 January). In it you describe the way in which the fragmentation of the industry by private ownership leads to the inefficient use of vehicles.
You conclude: "All such waste could be done away with if there was one road haulage company that was planned on a rational, efficient, coordinated basis. If, in other industry was nationalised. claimed that 'then conditions would improve remarkably' In fact, "nationalisation' would simply be the prelude to massive redundancies: that is capitalist understands 'efficiency'. The very inefficiency that you describe is one reason that capital as a whole would not be at all opposed to the nationalisation that you are arguing for.
Nationalisation could rationalise the industry and thus lower its prices to its capitalist customers. And cuts in the labour force could be more easily made by a "democratic" state in the interests of a 'socialist" nationalised industry than by capitalIst bosses The fact that surplus value would be lost to haulage capital is irrelevant, since it would simply be transferred to the capitalist customers by a further lowering of prices, as has happened in all other nationalised industries. Because naulage is sucn a basic industry this would be of benefit (and therefore approved of by most of the capitalist class. Only the ideological question, and the problem of where will it stop?', prejudice capital against such a nationalisation.
We should be demanding not nationalisation but nationalisation under workers control. This could ensure that more efficient use of vehicles and drivers' time resulted in a shorter working week with no loss of pay. It could prevent the value created in the industry being given to capitalist customers as low prices. It could begin to deal with environmental effects of goods venicies.
In fact, it could be a start towards an industry 'rational, ordinated' for the working class. JAMIE GOUGH (London)
BY words, the the English translation by Books.
capitalist London SW1.
THINK TEL THE NEWS AND HEAR HOW THE STRIKE has been awarded to Rudolf Bahro for his book The Alternative in Eastern Europe, recently published in an by New Left TheIsaac Deutscher Memorial Prize for 1979, to the value of £100, will be awarded in the autumn of 1979 and a Jury drawn from among the sponsors will be glad to consider work published or in typescript. Any such work should be submitted by 1 May 1979 to The Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, c/o Lloyds Bank, 68 Warwick Sq., the ISC as simply an undesirable phenomenon, publicly ignore them, and hope they'll go away. In practice Socialist Challenge this scrupulously ignoring the mobilisation and march, thereby denying them any legitimacy. sectanan response SEVEREISI like this is not going to IT!
THE SOCIALISTary change.
The editorial board choose to echo simplistic but by about inequality.
ISC transitional programme?
FRED LEPLAT, MIKE TAIT (Camden)
further solidarity healthy sentiments Who needs forget and the British The basis Death, Hua Guofeng, or the history of the Tudeh Party, the Iranian revolution is the strangest excuse for dropping this key notion from your The weakness reformist obstacles in Iran does not abolish reformism Europe except in your editorial vocabulary Nor is Europe 'stagnant' unless you