More than a month after the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black youth from Ferguson, USA, the police officer who shot him multiple times remains free and safely in hiding. Michael Brown’s killing was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” opening up a new stage in the changing consciousness of young Americans.

PODEMOS has become the focal point of Spanish politics. There is no party of the establishment that is not panicking about the dangers of ‘populism’. We publish here a recent editorial from the paper of the Spanish Marxists, Lucha de Clases, which looks at the rise of this new electoral force in Spanish politics and the task facing the masses in Spain: to kick out the rotten regime and take power into their own hands.

On Sunday 9th November, over 2.3 million Catalans mobilised to vote in a “consultation” over their future status in Spain defying Rajoy’s government which had twice banned the vote. Of those who voted, 80% or 1.8 million said they wanted Catalonia to be an independent state. For many, the vote was a way of expressing their defiance against the hated Rajoy government.