By a macabre coincidence 20 November, the anniversary of the death of dictator Francisco Franco, saw his political heirs, the right-wing Partido Popular (PP), gain an absolute majority in the Spanish Congress of Deputies. Its leader Mariano Rajoy, now has a clear majority to carry out an even more savage austerity programme on Spain’s workers and peasants than that which has marked the last years of “Socialist” government. Read more...

Seventy five years ago the Spanish revolution began as the working class and Republican forces fought to defend Spain from General Franco and his fascists army. Leon Trotsky wrote this article in July 1936, published in the US Socialist Magazine Socialist Appeal, where he outlines a way forward for the revolution and warns of the dangers of counter-revolutioanry Stalinism. Read more...

La ocupación de la Puerta del Sol en Madrid, la Plaza de Cataluña en Barcelona y de otras plazas en otras ciudades de España ha durado ya casi dos semanas. Después del intento de desalojar a los manifestantes la primera noche y la decisión de la Junta Electoral Central de que debían salir de la plaza antes de las elecciones regionales y locales del 22 de mayo, las autoridades se mostraron inseguras a la hora de cumplir esta orden. Read more...

The occupation of Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square, the Plaça de Catalunya, Barcelona, and those of other cities across Spain has lasted for nearly two weeks now. Read more...

Thousands of people have begun protests across Spain in the run up to the elections, a camp modelled on Tahrir square has been set up in Madrid's city centre. So who are the protesters and what do they want? Read more...

Like Greece, Spain faces a major budget crisis, with a deficit of almost 12 per cent of GDP. Its economy has not yet emerged from recession and there is a 20 per cent unemployment rate, the highest in the Eurozone. Read more...

The Spanish revolution attracted international support as many workers and youth saw it as a crucial struggle against fascism, immortalised in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. But why did the Spanish Revolution fail? Read more...

By insisting that the Madrid bombs on 11 March this year were the work of the Basque separatist organisation, ETA, President Aznar tried to harness public outrage to his war against the militant Basque nationalist movement as a whole. The attempt to blame the ‘terrorists’ of ETA was thus not only an attempt to use the Madrid bomb to steal the election but also a continuation of the PP’s campaign of repression against the Basque revolutionary nationalist movement. David Ellis examines the roots of Basque nationalism and the evolution of the nationalist movement and explains the denial of the right of self determination as the legacy of the Spanish bourgeois revolution. Read more...

The Socialist Workers Party of Spain (PSOE) won a remarkable election victory on Sunday, thanks to the huge Spanish anti-war feeling and the blatant attempts of the Popular Party of José Maria Aznar to manipulate the mass grief and outrage over the horrific train bombings in Madrid into anti-ETA hysteria. Read more...

On 11 March at least 198 people were killed in co-ordinated bomb attacks on rush hour commuter trains at Madrid's train stations.

The League for the Fifth International unequivocally condemns this savage and indiscriminate bombing, which targeted workers on their way to work, children on their way to school. Read more...

Between 250,000 and 500,000 people took to the streets of Barcelona on Saturday 16 March to reject the Europe of the bosses, whose agents were meeting in the last day of the European Union summit. Read more...

Andrés Nin, the leader of the POUM until his murder at the hands of Stalinist agents in Spain, was expelled from the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) in 1927. He formed a Spanish section of the International Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky.

Between 1930 and February 1933 Trotsky and Nin corresponded about the tasks of the Spanish revolution, which had opened with the fall of King Alphonso and the declaration of the Second Republic in 1930. Over the next eight years the revolution went through many ebbs and flows until the final victory of the counter-revolution at the hands of Franco in March 1939. Read more...

The problem Spanish workers face is not a lack of militancy or even in some sectors, strong organisation at the base. Read more...

Five hundred years after Spain sponsored the exploration of a new world by Columbus the country is once again set to be the focus of international attention. Expo’92 has just opened in Seville and in July the Olympic Games in Barcelona will dominate the airwaves. But deep changes are occurring below this glitzy surface that will shake up Spanish capitalism and the labour movement. Sympathisers of the LRCI in Madrid sent us this report. Read more...