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...