Small surplus

France, now has the initiative inside the EEC.

But bitter and prolonged struggles in Brussels and moves to carry. economic integration beyond the customs union stage mean even sharper struggles in the next few years.

Lengthy negotiations over agricultural policy provide the most expressive example.

The logic of integration means a common currency, co-ordinated banking policy and, indeed, a single economic policy.

Anachronism But such sweeping changes are incompatible with the national state and require political unification.

Capitalism will be unable to realize such a goal.

Nor would the American ruling class be likely to accept the threat which a politically unified Europe would represent.

Unable to contain the forces released by modern technology, the bourgeoisie seeks, in its own way, to rid itself of an anachronism-the national state.

In a deformed and pitifully inadequate manner a section of the European bourgeoisie has shouldered a task which properly belongs to a socialist Europe in which the working class has taken power.

Economic gains through the EEC have meant increasing contradictions: bitter rivalries within the Community; the attempt by the Us to dominate Europe and the resistance of Europe to this domination; the tension between Britain and the Six on the one hand and her relationship with the US on the other.

So the British application is being made at a crucial point in EEC's development, where it has gonę about as far as it can without making inroads into ' economic political sovereignty.

It is made when the British and European ruling class are bent upon settling accounts with the working class.

As the Tory conference showed, the changed attitude to the Common Market expresses the steady decline in British capitalism which has taken place since Macmillan's day., Despite the heavy additional burden which entry will impose on the is now being balance of payseriously considered as a possible way out of the stagnation which grips British capitalism.

Re-shuffle

PRIME Minister Heath today announces his plans for dismantling • some government departments and reorganizing others.

Details will be contained in a White Paper out this afternoon. A ministerial reshufile is also expected.

SHOPS DEMONSTRATION A Paris shopworkers' demonstration in the Rue de Rivoli.

MORE THAN 3,000 employees of the expensive shops on Paris' exclusive Rue de Rivoli struck and demonstrated on Tuesday in the latest move in support of their claim for improved pay and conditions and a lower retirement age. LAST July's dock strike continued to affect Britain's import-export trade figures last month and the Board of Trade yesterday announced a September visible trade surplus of £5 million.

But this figure follows the huge August deficit of £228 million, itself preceded by a run of deficit figures broken only by the July 'freak' surplus of £134 million, again caused by the effects of the dock strike. - The employers have asked the Ministry of Labour to