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Nation struggle launched on the unclear thenry for underdeveloned muntrias tr It would as necessary repudiate the Ireaty of kome and appeal over the 41. - 7 -heads of the rulers to the workers. But that would be a means to an end, not the goal: Ior Benn, as for the broad Left generally, breaking the EEC links is a goal, and a goal that now, in the proposal for a national liberation movement, must displace the goal of creating a radical socialist alternative to Thatcher.

The socialist goal must be the maximum link-up with the workers of the world, and first of all of Europe.

'National liberation' means 'national Interest' Benn does not propose the sort of rad. ical measures to expropriate capitalism that a socialist workers' government would take. As far as I know, he emphatically rejects such measures for the 'next stage ahead'. . What is possible for giving the working class maximum control over its. own destiny within the overall situation defined by Britain's economic weakness, Benn rejects.

Given Benn's quite tame proposed reforms, and despite his call for the British labour movement to take the lead in the national liberation struggle, what the focus on hberating colonial Britain inevitably means is that something else is being put forward instead of an immediate struggle for a socialist answer to the collapse of British capitalism and to Thatcherism: The only possible practical conclusion is of Labour's subordination to the national interest.

To leave capitalism intact and try to command it - as Benn proposes - is to be a Canute trying to command the waves and the tides. Subordination to the national interest will be subordination to the capitalist interest - whatever Tony Benn wants.

The policy of national liberation means explicitly that the labour movement ties itself to the 'national interest' collaborating with "patriotic capitalists to regenerate British industry. This - whatever Benn might think or want - is no moré than a continuation of mainstream Labour government policies from the past. National liberation is Harold Wilson's white heat of technological revolution' adapted to a far more decredit capitalism Michael Meacher in tne New, Statesman has filled in one version of the 'alternative Economic Strategy' that Benn supports -wage controls for two years, and two million still unemploved at the end of five years.

Benn's speech at the TUC conveyed the idea that he opposes incomes policy. Realities will prove stronger than wishes. Under a Labour government 'liberating' Britain as Benn proposes, Michael Meacher would prove to be the true prophet. Such a government would have to use incómes policy to cut living standards, with or without working-class agreement.

something insubstantial • probably an attempt to find a media image to help us reverse the steady post-1951 erosion of Labour Party support and to recreate a broad 'national coalition' Labour Party capable of gaining a 1945-size majority.

Necessarily chauvinist, it sets restoration of an independent Britain as the goal o1 British socialism, when the goal must be the integration of Britain with Europe and collaboration with the workers of Europe to make it a workers' Europe. • The core of Benn's policy to liberate Britain' can only be an attempt to build up British industry behind tariff walls. Now even if, for example, tariffs on steel might make a difference, lessening the destruction of working class communities in Britain, in the final analysis high tariff walls could not protect the entire range of British industry and allow it to develop.

Ability to compete would still determine the possibilities open to the economy, even behind tariff walls: international competition would set strict limits to what one country could achieve in the way of job creation. Should the major capitalist powers all go for protection, there would be general economic catastrophe worse than apything we have now.

Behind high general tariff walls British industry would probably stifle. Unless it could become competitive it would continue to decline, relative to the EEC and perhaps absolutely.

This is not prediction, but history.

From 1959 to 1972, Britain was the ‹ entre of a looser trading bloc, EFTA, set up to counterbalance the BEC. But the members of EFTA found that, despite the arrangements consciously entered into at government level. they developed stronger. trading links with the countries of the EEC than with their EFTA partners. Economic strength and power, not government arrangements, were the determinant. That was a Britain still in possession of trading arrangements with the Commonwealth severed or altered a decade ago, and a Britain tar more powerful than it is today or would be immediately on leaving the EEC.

Benn's reformist limits and the national liberation struggle' under capitalism offer no way out of this situation. EEC withdrawal would almost certainly lead to an increase ot real dependence. Only the replacement of the EEC by the Socialist United States of Europe can radically change things for the better for the working class of Europe, including Britain.

Here a delicate, out essential, point ha; to be made.

On the basis of leaving capitalism intact, the Labour Left cannot - barr"ing some science fiction style miracle -determination or its real basis, Britain's restore Britain's previous level of selfworld pre-eminence. We can't do it on the basis of building a working-class socialist raised' the call for a United States of Europe. After World Was 2, which destroyed ope. Alter World War 2, which destroyed one third of the productive capacity of one third of the productive capacity of Europe and killed 17 million outside of п.. ..:11: - ..

the USSR, the European capitalists themselves sought ways of breaking down national barriers.

30 years ago they created the Iron and Steel Community. Eventually they set up the EEC. Whatever their foreign policy concerns were, the EEC is not a conspiracy by either the European or the British ruling class. It develops organically out of the fact the productive forces of the major states had outgrown their national base, and this had led within 30 years to two which brough even the trop san victors the second of close to ruin.

It is the development of a European capitalist market, superseding the limitations of the previous national boundaries within which economies had stifled and world wars germinated Reversing the bosses' limited attempts at European integration?

For the capitalists of Europe, the Iron and Steel Community and the EEC have been the continuation of World War 1 and 2 by other means. Today the econamy of the EBC is as integrated an economic unit as the USA.

It was the defeat of the workers' revolution and socialism in Europe after World War 1 and then 2 that led to this task, proclaimed for their own by the revolutionaries two-thirds of a century ago, being partly carried out by the ruling class. They have organised Europe, of course, in their own capitalist way. The EEC is riddled with the irrationalities, the inhumanities, the crying stupidities, the waste and destruction and the squandering of human potential that is inseparable from capitalism and its mainspring, the search for profit as the supreme good.

The EÉC's irrationalities are history's revenge for the belatedness of the workers' revolution: but it is not a capitalist conspiracy against the working class. And the working class needs more to answer this concentration of capitalist political and economic power than a shallow conspiracy theory and the foredoomed and reactionry project of trying to rebuild an isolated caditalist Britain.

Britain's independence was irredeemably undermined and its 'surrender' to the EEC was prepared by the combination of the knitting together of the European economy in one market and Britain's decline outside it. Not even a radical socialist revolution can restore Britain to its former greatness' or real independence. What socialism has to offer is the reorganisation of the economy on a different mainspring, which means planned international economic integration to eliminate the vicious stupidity of competition between South Wales and Ruhr steelworkers. This integration would have to be slogans and ideas of Benn will (if not now, then at the second stage) inevitably degenerate into a merely nationalist campaign. Nationalism has its own power and logic, which is very different from the higminded purposes Benn has in mind for it.

It will very easily turn hostile to the labour movement, as something 'sectional' and inimical to the national interest. Even in the comparatively benign form of Wilson's government in the '60s, serving the national interest led to an attempt to shackle the trade unions. And British politics — as Benn has reason to know -becoming less and less benign.

There is evidence in 'Britain as a Colony' of a hankering for the days when Britain was strong enough to steer a relatively independent course because it dominated large areas of the world. It is coupled with a more or less developed theory of conspiracy and treachery in high places as the explanation for Britain's loss of independence.

Benn implies without stating it the myth that Britain can stage a recovery by returning to old legalities and forms -ignoring and denying as mere ruline-class propaganda the caruinal ract tral ccunomic decline is at the root of what he calls the 'surrender' of independence.

All this is not the stuff from which the labour movement can be prepared to attempt the socialist reconstruction of society. It fits much better into a rightwing populist view of the world British nationalism is 100% reactionary Existing nationalisms fall into roughly three categories. For subjugated and oppressed peoples, forcibly deprived of sell-determination or identity, nationalism is the demand for elementary democratic rights - not voluntary exclusiveness or chauvinism.

In formerly subjugated and oppressed countries which have partly achieved their democratic national rights, the tendency is for the nationalism to lose its democratic rationale and grow rancid and chauvinist.

The third category is that of imperialist countries, oppressors or former oppressors of other nations. Here nationalsm las, no uemocratic cuntent. It suDsIsted on trampling on the democratic rights of other peoples, and gloried in the deeds of imperialist conquest, plunder, and For centuries British nationalism was self-defined against the 'inferior people' of the Empire and against the competitor empires. Today it is naturally allied with the rancid chauvinism of the NF. It lends itself to racialism now.

The labour movement will inherit and develop the great achievements of British civilisation, cleansed of the integument of capitalism and the crimes of British imperjalism. British nationalism however is in its "some of the most advanced societies on TAr Carmina madam ananIn 17 earth!

A blind alley for the renovation of the labour movement Benn does not need to go to the Stalin ists directly for this policy: it is the logical summing up of the nationalism that is certainly the predominant strain in the whole mainstream labour movement Left.

Socialism, workers and, immediately, government which will begin to break the power of the military, the civi service, the banks and the capitalists, is on the agenda. It is the only answer for the British labour movement. It is the only way to begin to break out of the festering limitations of British society and to hope to inspire the turopcan workers to join us in creating thi United States of Eurone Benn is helping rebuild the Left and even the labour movement itself. Neither for the bourgeoisie nor the working class are his ideas the decisive thing now.

Yet in the end ideas, and the programme of the re-born labour movement, Will prove decisive to determine whether we will be able to remake British society.

fony benn is right to talk avoul refounding the Labour Representation Committee - but it must be on a new political basis that will not end in a reformist or nationalist blind alley. or simply drives deeper into the one we are now milling about in.

The labour movement has the choice of fighting for a workers' government or for a Labour government essentially of the old sort, with the banner of 'national liberation' instead of the old one of 'national interest.

Michael Meacher's New Statesman article should be a warning to class-conscious worer mane woo has not rushed o endorse it. There f a distinct danger that the lapse into populist nationalism will divert the organisational and political renewal of the labour movement into a cul-de-sac, and towards derailment and wreckage.

Much will depend on whether or not the Marxists can convince the labour movement of this, and convince it to turn its face away from British nationalism and towards international socialisne.

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that the labour movement must politically subordinate itself to that task, and shape and mould itself to it. It is a new version

Benn's proposals can't restore Britain's power

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