EEC, Tony Benn discussed the issue with Martin Thomas of Socialist Organiser. We also print excerpts article by Leon Trotsky during World War 1

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What we should be doing is recognising the reality of the European integration of capitalism, and devising socialist policies on an European scale to deal with that. What's your reaction? TB: The arguments that led us to say that we would have to break with the Treaty of Rome are unVIVE with a view to getting back to full employment, and intervened massively in basic industries, it would be illegal under British law. Any British company that suffered as a result of those measures could take the Government to a British court and get it ruled illegal. Some new Lord Denning and all over is like saying that capitalism is here to stay, let's drop our opposition to it and live within it.

If you say, on the contrary, that our objection is not to European unity, not to cooperating with the working class movements in Europe, not to moving to a European nuclear free zone . then I agree with you. But the Treaty of Rome is the only constitution in the world that legally commits the countries that you were wrong wrong now. answer is not to take it back to the small, nationally-based firms... TB: This is a weak analysis. We're talking about a constitution. You appear to be saying that it is right that the British electorate should lose the right by their vote to determine their economic and industrial policy. You're not reversing the entry to the Common Market, you're reversing the Chartists and the suffragettes.

That argument is an attack on the whole democratic tradition of the Labour Party:

Then if you ask how you fight multinational capitalism - that's been there for ages. After all, in a sense the old trading companies like the British Virginia Company and the East India Company were multinationals. The whole history of the working class movement has been to get some control over now we respond to this.

It isn't that anybody believes that by leaving the Common Market capitalism would go back to corner shops and middle-sized businesses. It's a question of how you fight multinational capitalism.

When I dealt with the oil companies, at one stage i rather thought the same thing, must confess: that because big business had gone international, we should go international, and the Common Market was an example of it. But 1 very quickly realised as Energy Minister that what we were able to do to the oil companies here - which was to bring them into partial public ownership and get half the oil. -was completely dismantled as soon as you went into the EEC.

The oil companies were passionately pro-EEC. Every multinational in the world is in favour of the Common Market, because they see what I see, namely that through the Common Market you can dismantle the domestic democracies of the member states. So be very careful that you don't accidentally line yourselves up with Ford and IBM and. Westinghouse and Exxon.

MT: Would you be in favour of the EEC Parliament acquiring the powers to remake the Treaty of Rome, to decree such measures as a 35 hour week throughout the EEC, or to take multinationals into public ownership on an EEC level?

TB: No, I would not. That is a very faulty socialist analysis, because no socialist believes that these things are done by parliaments anyway. I don't believe that: I've always believed that pressure for social change begins at the bottom, and the last place to get the message is the House of Commons.

The idea that you can just leave it to a few Euro-MPs, who are really nothing more than a public relations cover for the exercise of bureaucratic power, to take over capitalism, is really very naive.

MT: Why are measures of public ownership, or other reforms, carried out by an EEC Parliament, less valid than those carried out by a British Parliament?

TB: Nationalisation is quite permitted in the Common Market -subject to one condition, that the nationalised firms have to operate exactly like private corporations. The idea of public ownership on a European scale, operating under the Treaty of Rome, would mean Euro state capitalism, nothing to do with socialism at all. The Common Market will not permit interference with market forces.

I'm not in favour of a federal Europe anyway. I think if anything the problem at the moment is that power is far too remote from most people.

A lot of people now are withpe