POUM

Workers' Party of Marxist Unification Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista

Catalan name	Partit Obrer d'Unificació Marxista
Leader	Joaquín Maurín (1935–36) Andreu Nin (1936–37) Julián Gorkin (1937–39) Wilebaldo Solano (1947–80)
Founded	1935
Dissolved	1980
Membership (1936)	30,000
Ideology	Marxism Communism Impossiblism Anti-Stalinism Trotskyism
Political position	Far-Left
National affiliation	Popular Front
Politics of Spain Political parties Elections

The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (Spanish: Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, POUM; Catalan: Partit Obrer d'Unificació Marxista) was a Spanish communist political party formed during the Second Republic and mainly active around the Spanish Civil War. It was formed by the fusion of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain (Izquierda Comunista de España, ICE) and the Workers and Peasants' Bloc (BOC, affiliated with the Right Opposition) against the will of Leon Trotsky, with whom the former broke. The writer George Orwell served with the party's militia and witnessed the Stalinist repression of the movement, which would help form his anti-authoritarian ideas in later life.

In 1935, POUM was formed as a communist opposition to the form of communism promoted by the Soviet Union, by the revolutionaries Andreu Nin and Joaquín Maurín. The two were heavily influenced by the thinking of Leon Trotsky, particularly his Permanent Revolution thesis. It resulted from the merging of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain and the Workers and Peasants' Bloc against the wishes of Trotsky, with whom the former broke.