countries. In Britain this struggle was cricly sabotaged, despite verbal support, by the TGWU bureaucracy. Nevertheless individual dock leaders managed to get the blacking enforced.
IMMIGRANTS
While all these oxamples of international solidarity are important, by themselves they are insuflictent to stimulate a more general process which meets up to the needs of thie situation. There are, however, other important developments in Europe at present which tend to speed up the rate at which such international lessons are drawn One of the most important of these routes of developing the international struggle is provided by the generalising of experiences by immigrant workers at Lippstadt in Germany (whw make car tant examples of this. For example when Hella workers at Lippstadt in German (who make car headlampsi won a struggle in 1973 this was largely due to the advanced farms of strugele they adopted-notably the formation of a real rank and file strike committee.
This development, Tar ahead of normal struggles in West Germany, took place largely because of the experience of this form of struggle in the countries Italy and Spain- from which many of the workers enguged in the struggle came. Similarly, when the first strike for decades broke out in various Geneva engineering tao tories, this was largely due to the role played by Spanish workers in this struggle.
The second process in generalising working class struggles is the big impact of some of the most advanced workers struggles in Europe.
Undouhtedly the most important example of this has been Lip. This French watch factory in Besancon was oocupied by workers for several months. They not merely conlinued production, selling the watches to raise money, but also seized a vast quantity of watches as a war-chest. They produced solidarity newspapers, called solidarity demonstrations, and organised a massive campaign not merely in France but also internationally These types of tactics have been taken up in a whole series of struggles. For example, when workers at Ampex in Belgium seized a massive stock of magnetic tape cassettes as security in their strike they were directly inspired by the example of Lip.
Finally, there is no doubt that in certain countries the class strugele has reached the point where a real possibility exists for workers to go beyond the linuted initiatives of the bureaucrats. The most obvious case of this is the relationship which developed between the workers of the Fist plants in Turin in Italy and the workers of SEAT in Spain SEAT bange firm halt ownca by Fiat and half owned by the Spanish state.
The real inter-relation of struggle between Fiat and SEAT started when the strikes in committee reponsible to the base should be established.
This committee, he said, should put out regular information on the progress of struggles and the response of the bosses in the Fiat empire. Furthermore, it should ensure the organisation of solidarity strikes in the Enropean factories wheuever a struggle broke out in any part of the Fiat trust. And on thir basis he was elected.
For several reasons this project never actu ally got off the grount, But it was an important step in developing solidarity in future struggles. The high point of this solidarity came when in Turin the Fiat workers began to take strike action in solidarity with the SEAT workers strugple.
This international solidarity developed by the action of the Italian workers was then taken still further when. in order to attempt to compensate for the losses of production due to the strikes in Turin, the SBAT company attemp ted to introduce a third shitt at SEAT. This was successfully resisted by the SEAT workers who in this way concretely supported the struggle of the hiat workers.
TROTSKYISTS
But the very development of the Fiat-SEAT solidarity, and of other advanced strupeles such as Lip, shows whar is the most important force which can develop the international solidarity and struggle of the working class. While the initiative in the struggles at Fiat-SEAT first came from the bureaucrats, it was a Trotskyit militant who proposed at SEAT sending a rank and file speaker to the other plants In Fiat ilself it was Trotskyists who organised meetings in the factory workshops on the political situa tion in Spain and helped gain the support for the solidarity strikes. In the case of Lip, it was of course the tremendous struggle of the workers themselves which led to the initial wave of solidarity. But it was the Trotskyist Fourth International which helped to establish, in parlicular, the international solidarity. It is the development of a revolutionary international, with organisations in every major country, that is the decisive link in developing the united workers' response against the international capitalists