Bust of Pablo Iglesias Posse in his pantheon, work of Emilio Barral. Founder of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, PSOE (El Ferrol, La Coruña, 1850 - Madrid, 1925). Orphaned and from a poor family, Pablo Iglesias Posse learned the job of typographer in the Madrid hospice, which he would carry out all his life. After the Bourbon Restoration, condemning the labor movement to the underground, he founded a political party in Madrid -the PSOE- along with a small group of fellow Marxists, most of them typographers; he tried to endow the new party with a great ideological and moral purity, which helped to keep the number of its members very small. At that time Pablo Iglesias began to suffer employer reprisals for his protest activity, being excluded from working in newspapers until he founded his own, El Socialista, in 1886. In 1888 he completed the institutional framework of Spanish socialism by creating the Unión Unión General of Workers (UGT)
Comments