I came across the WSWS in 2006 when I was sixteen. I was already interested in socialism and had read a few of the easier works by Lenin and Marx. I believed in the unity of all revolutionary left forces and could not understand why there were so many divisions. At that time I disliked what I believed were sectarian articles criticising the role of other left forces.

With the eruption of the crisis in late 2007 I started reading more articles, specifically those on economy by Nick Beams and Barry Grey. I also read those on the Spanish Civil War. For me it was especially enlightening to learn that a revolution had taken place in Spain in 1936. My grandparents, who were too young to fight but vividly remembered the civil war, never spoke of the tragic events they lived through. Francoist repression meted out against workers had been so ruthless that even years after the general’s death, workers like my grandparents did not want to talk about politics, blocking future generations from their experiences.

At 18, I joined the Communist Party (PCE). I had clearly not learnt the lesson of the Spanish Revolution! Even then, I never fully believed in the PCE’s programme and perspective and its coalition with eco-socialists and separatist parties in the United Left (IU). I also felt disgusted by the portrayal of the defeat of the Left Opposition as a personality contest between Trotsky and Stalin.

I left in early 2009 coinciding with the party’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and attempts to convince me it was socialist. It was then that I bought my first bundle of socialist books from Mehring Books, and began discussions with members of the International Committee of the Fourth International, who patiently answered all my questions which I had accumulated over the years. I was recommended to read Felix Morrow’s Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain, which contained a devastating exposure of the Popular Front, Stalinism, anarchism and the centrist leadership of the POUM whose roles opened the door to fascism.

I bought a ticket to Manchester for a conference on the European elections organised by the Socialist Equality Party (UK). Right away I saw the difference with other parties in the analysis of the economic crisis. David North spoke and warned that the crisis was not invented, episodic or just a financial crisis as many analysts where saying. He said there would be a sudden and very unexpected intervention of the masses.

Shortly after I returned to Spain I decided to join the ICFI.

A couple of years later, I bumped into a former PCE member and we started to discuss politics. This person, who had confused me politically when I first joined the PCE, was now incapable of convincing me with his pseudo-leftist jargon and contradictory arguments which had nothing to do with Marxism. It was then that I realised that the theoretical struggle waged by the ICFI against revisionism, opportunism and bourgeois nationalism was the heritage with which the youth will have to be trained in order to construct the World Revolutionary Party, the necessary instrument through which the working class will overthrow capitalism.

In Spain and internationally, the working class is being thrust into a political struggle against the entire capitalist order. The agenda of the ruling classes is leading to mass pauperisation, which has provoked thousands of militant protests and strikes. In each instance, the unions in collaboration with pseudo-left groups have intervened to divide, isolate and finally, defeat each strike. And in each instance, the WSWS has repeatedly warned that the only alternative was for workers to mobilise independently of the unions and reject the “no-politics” ideology promoted by the indignados and Occupy movements.

Above all the ICFI and the WSWS are the only ones who pose before the working class the urgent task of building a new political party and a new leadership.