Faced with the avalanche of attacks now raining down on the working class - unemployment, cuts in services, police repression - we are seeing the beginnings of a very widespread response from those under attack.

We want to welcome and express our solidarity with the struggle that the metal workers of Vigo in NW Spain have been waging since 3 May. The official media, union websites and those of so-called ‘radical’ groups maintain almost total silence about this strike. It is important that we discuss this experience, draw its lessons with a critical spirit, and put them into practice, since all workers are affected by the same problems: precarious working, increasingly unbearable working conditions, sky high prices, lay-offs, the announcement of yet more cuts in pensions…

On 23 December, in the SEAT car factory in Barcelona, the workers on the morning and afternoon shifts spontaneously went on strike, in solidarity with 660 comrades who the day before had received dismissal letters from management. It was the beginning of a response to a criminal attack on their living conditions...

Two hundred dead and more than 1500 hundred wounded, four trains destroyed, human bodies so horribly torn apart that they could only be recognised by their DNA - this is the terrifying balance sheet of the terrorist attack on the so-called 'Train of Death' which violently shook the morning of 11 March in Madrid.

The article by Josep Rebull on “The May Days of 1937”, which we are publishing here, is a contribution to reflection about the war in Spain. In particular, it contains important elements of clarification about the political attitude of the anarchists and the POUM during these tragic events.

The 1937 May Days were a new and dramatic experience for the working class. They provided the opportunity for the Stalinists and “official” anarchists to carry out an anti-working class policy and showed that they had become ardent defenders of the interests of capitalism.