Luke Stobart

After a dramatic general election in the Spanish state this weekend, Luke Stobart analyses the results and asks what they mean for the future of Spanish politics and anti-capitalist organising. In an era in which the far right has increasingly entered and even started leading national governments and had its policies copied by conservative parties, the general elections held in Spain this Sunday were awaited with trepidation.

There are other strengths to A People’s History. It shows how peasants’ self-activity forced an erosion of serfdom that created the incentive for the economic dynamism underpinning many developments described in the book. Like Josep Fontana’s still untranslated Formació d’una Identitat — a scholarly history of Catalan identity that Eaude’s book complements and shares similarities with — A People’s History shows how long and significant Catalonia’s institutional history has been.

On November 2, 2017 the recently deposed vice president of Catalonia Oriol Junqueras and five other ex-ministers arrived at Aranjuez prison, forty miles outside of Madrid. As they were removed from the police van, officers escorting them decided to make the prisoners stand in the yard and listen to the Spanish national anthem three times on a mobile phone.